WDD LIVE 039: Live From Sarasota (BFCM Deals / R3 Recap / Q&A)

0:00:00 Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, what’s up everybody? It is time for WDD Live.

Oh man, Stratos is here, Darwin’s here, Sarah’s here. Hey, let me know if the audio is okay. We’re on the B team setup right now.

So it’s going to sound different, it’s going to look different. We are streaming live from the Geary. co Sarasota compounds now it’s just a humble little townhouse here down in Sarasota what’s up Marius what’s up Steve are we looking good looking good looking good sounding good hey Kevin Gary greetings from Alpharetta this time Manny Manny you up in Alpharetta right now are you always in Alpharetta you normally where are you normally Manny?

All right, everybody says audio is fine. Good to go Good to see you Steve Lewis ripple Sophie Rob Tobias Tobias got a lot of Tobias’s Larry Stratos is here. Welcome.

Welcome. Welcome. Okay, everybody have an alien face in your ceiling I do I don’t see I don’t see where that is I don’t see it I don’t see it by the way guys it is I gotta tell you it is I had to edit a few well I had to get the Black Friday thing going right you know so I had to edit the ACSS side the brick site I don’t know how y’all work on on laptops okay I got this is a what it’s like a MacBook Pro it’s got a 15 inch screen or something on it I can’t do it I absolutely cannot do it yeah it’s it’s atrocious absolutely like going from dual 32 inch screens to a 15 inch I can’t do it I don’t know if you if you guys work on a laptop like all the time I don’t know how you do it I would highly recommend you upgrade and not do that anymore.

It’s an absolutely terrible experience. All right. Let’s see, MacBook Pro plus external monitor.

Yeah, if you have an external monitor, that’s an absolute must. I’m going to spend Thanksgiving in Georgia this year and I have a 10K run. 0:02:20

Got it. 0:02:21 Where are you normally, Manny?

That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Where are you normally? And why would you come to Atlanta when I’m not in Atlanta?

That would be my follow-up question. Because you know, if you’re in Atlanta, you’ve got to reach out. You’ve got to say hi.

I’m known to meet up sometimes. That’s right, Miami. Manny from Miami.

That should be very, very easy to remember. Okay, here’s our agenda today. We’re going to do a little R3 Conference Recap.

I want to talk about the importance of conferences. I want to obviously go over our Black Friday Cyber Monday deals and then we’ll do as much Q&A slash AMA as we can possibly fit in. The fam has headed out to the beach and we’ve got some friends over as well.

So yeah, the compound is very quiet right now. I don’t expect them to be back anytime soon, so we should be good to go. I just bought ACSS frames and joined the inner circle.

You did not do Black Friday, you said. Well, here’s the thing. As you’re going to see in just a second, where can I put this?

Can you guys see me dragging this thing around? I don’t know where to put it. Let’s put it right there.

Okay. You didn’t miss anything, Sophie. You didn’t miss anything.

It’s okay. The way that I structured these, let’s just do the Black Friday, because they’re already up on the screen. I’ll just talk about these first, and then we’ll move on to talking about R3.

So the way that I, Andrea says turn on the Sonos. He bought me a Sonos for the townhouse down here, which is fantastic. Let’s see, let’s see, let’s see.

Alexa, shuffle songs by Nick D. 0:04:08 Here’s some music by Nick D.

0:04:09 Let’s see how the Sonos sounds. 0:04:11

How do I make this thing go off the screen? Do I have to close it? 0:04:15

I guess. 0:04:15 Alexa, pause.

0:04:17 Okay, see, the sound is back there. Thank you.

Thank you for that, Andreas. Andrea, my mind is like all over the place right now. I’ve got new, I’ve got, I’m trying to figure the laptop situation out.

I don’t have my other screens to look at. I’m going to flip back and forth 8,000 times between tabs. 0:04:43

Okay. 0:04:44 Oh, did I set yours off?

I apologize. I set off dozens of Alexas. Alexa is having a field day right now.

Okay, anyway, I was. . .

0:04:53 Something went wrong. 0:04:54

She’s trying to talk to me still. Okay, we don’t need you anymore, Alexa. Thank you.

BFCM. . .

Dude. 0:05:02 Kindness really gives me a charge.

Happy Wednesday. 0:05:06 She’s talking mad shit back there.

Like, I don’t know what she’s talking about. Okay, she needs to calm down. All right, BFCM deals.

The way I structure these is to not, it shouldn’t impact you. Like if you’ve already purchased, things can only really get better, and you’ve already locked in the best rates. The way that I do things is like, I want people to know at all times that they already got the best deal.

So, you know, it’s like automatic CSS, for example. What are we doing for the deal? So you can get a two-year license with 200 sites.

Let me, I think I can, I think I set up this to screen share. Yeah, that was for that. Let’s go to the ACSS pricing page.

Okay, so the agency pro plan is normally $149 per year. That’s the normal price. The way we’ve set it up for Black Friday is you can go 240, okay?

That gets you two years. So you’re getting 20% off per year. And you’re also doubling your active licenses or how many sites you can activate ACSS on.

Normally it’s 100 sites. You can upgrade it to 200 sites. And that should give most of you, like the vast majority of people, you know, are you going to need more than that?

Most likely not, right? Not for the foreseeable future. After the two years is up, this is going to auto renew at 149 per year, the normal rate, okay?

But you lock in the 200 sites forever. And I really hope you guys can see my screen right now. Like I told it to screen share.

Let me go, let me just check on the chat. If you guys can see the screen, just let me know. Let me know.

I have PTSD from not sharing screens. So if you guys can see the screen, let me know. Just that’ll give me some confidence in the Ecamm laptop setup here.

So this is a, but here’s the thing. Like there’s people that maybe signed up yesterday or maybe signed up last week or whatever. It’s like, what about them, you know?

Well, it’s okay because you can go in your account. This is for existing or new customers. So if you’re an existing customer, you can go in your account right now.

There’s an upgrade path on your license. You can just hit upgrade and it’s going to prorate it. So whatever you paid last week, it’s going to take it off of this deal and just upgrade you to the deal.

It’s no big deal, right? So you’re not out. I don’t want people to feel like they’re out of luck because they signed up at the wrong time or something you know things in our ecosystem typically only they only get more expensive okay with less licenses that’s like you know you’re always getting the best deal when you sign up now so that’s that’s the idea there let’s go back to okay let’s do okay yes everybody’s saying screen sharing nice okay good you should have your mobile next to you in mute open with video feed from YouTube to check that’s a good idea it’s a good idea Stratos see you know we need we need you know people like you around let’s let’s go ahead and I don’t think I need to do it now because everybody confirmed but I will do that for next time okay so that is the ACSS deal it’s pretty straightforward, pretty straightforward.

It’s nothing insane, but it is a really good deal. It’s a really good deal. And, you know, we don’t know what’s going to happen with ACSS pricing.

It’s already gone up a few times. Obviously, the LTD. This is, it just goes to like, what I kind of want to communicate very clearly, as clearly as possible, is when you have a deal in front of you for ACSS or Frames or Inner Circle or whatever, you’ve got to pull the trigger.

It only gets worse going forwards. It only gets worse. It never gets better.

It’s never going to be better in the future, right? I got 10 messages a week for people who want Frames for Figma. They’re like, I should have bought it when you first did the launch.

Please, please. They’re just like begging me. I’m like, I’m sorry, but like we gave the window.

Things only get worse. You have to, you have to get it when it’s in front of you. I don’t, like a lot of companies out there, you know, you buy an LTD this year and then the LTD is back next year and it’s even cheaper than it was the year before.

Or there’s even more license. It only gets worse in this ecosystem. It does not get, we don’t do that kind of game.

So you can purchase knowing that the thing you are purchasing right now is the best that is ever going to be. It’s not going to get any better in the future. 0:09:55

And people don’t believe me. 0:09:56 I say it over and over again.

For some reason they don’t believe me. And then they start begging me, you know a year later when they realize oh, yeah, he was right. It didn’t it doesn’t get any better And so now they’re in a worse position Okay, so that’s ACSS.

Let’s hop over to France. So frames You guys should probably recognize this deal if you bought frames last week, for example This is the actual deal that you bought what we’re doing is on Tuesday, really yeah, Tuesday morning, so you have till Monday like at midnight for these deals. So frames on Tuesday morning, and this actually is the this is the best-case scenario.

It actually might be worse than this. My team already was like messaging me like I think we should get rid of the LTD now. It’s like frames is mature enough, let’s just get rid of the LTD.

So I’ve got people chirping in my ear that this LTD needs to go away. So what you’re looking at right here in terms of what the price is going to increase to, I’ll tell you there’s two reasons this is like best case scenario. It could, on Tuesday morning, look even worse than this.

So you’ll see $379 is crossed out. That’s the perhaps price that it’s going to on Tuesday morning. Again, best case scenario, it could go to $449 on Tuesday.

Okay, I’m not, I’m not just throwing a random big number out there to be like, oh, the discount you get on Black Friday. I’m showing you the best case scenario. It could actually be worse than this on Tuesday morning.

$449 would be, you know, $149 times three, right? A lot of people do, or $447. A lot of people do like a 3X for the LTD.

I actually like to trend more towards a 4X for LTDs, right, which would be 596. And the reason I’m doing times 149 is because we would do the same thing as we’re doing with automatic CSS, which is introducing an plan and that would be the 149 a year Very similar to the price of ACSS. So you take that 149 times three or four That’s the more realistic scenario and that’s but that’s if we stick with an LTD another part of that You know bad scenario is the LTD is just not even there on Tuesday Got to go back and talk to the team and have more conversations But what I’m showing you right here is, you know, on Tuesday, this would be the best case scenario that this goes to $379 and it would go to a hundred licenses limited, right?

So right now you have the chance to still get it at $299, which is an absolute steal because remember, this is not just the layout side of things. This is the components library as well. The most, like you can get rid of bricks extras more or less if you’ve been using that or eyeballing a Bricks Extras license.

You don’t need that once you have frames. We’re about to release a Mega Menu Builder, right? Well, I shouldn’t say we’re about to release it.

We are working on it, planning for it, and our goal, because we’re not a big fan, if you don’t know, we’re not a big fan of the Bricks Mega Menu Builder, the native one, right? I think that it can be dramatically improved, dramatically improved. So we’re gonna build our own, and it’s gonna be available inside of Frames.

That’s not a small thing, and that’s not an invaluable thing. Like that is a very, very valuable component once it’s available, to go along with all of the other very valuable components, the carousels, the accordions, all the stuff that we’re doing, right? And that library is going to continue to grow.

So this price is an absolute steal $2. 99, gets you the LTD, it’s unlimited licenses, so you don’t have to worry about any sort of limits and this will be gone on Tuesday morning. I don’t know exactly what’s going to replace it on Tuesday morning, but you’re looking at a best-case scenario here and it could actually be worse than that.

So that’s what’s going on with frames. Lastly, and then I’ll come back to the chat in just a second and I will I will answer any questions. So lastly is the inner circle.

Lots of people joining the inner circle lately which is fantastic. I’m gonna come down here and you’re just gonna see the little note that is above here. So I opened the inner circle at $20 a month or $96 for six months.

And it is, I have, I actually said when I launched the Inner Circle, when we reach 100 members, okay, 100 members, I’m going to increase the price. And then I said, we’re gonna increase the price at pretty much every tier, like 500 members, 1,000 members, 1,500 members, and so on. I have not done that.

I didn’t do any of those things, right? I just wanted as many people as possible to be able to access it if they want to. Now, it’s continued to get more and more and more valuable since those days.

And obviously the larger it gets, the more valuable it gets. Got some really like agency shifting, freelancer, business shifting trainings in there, stuff that literally will generate tens of thousands of dollars for you if you follow them and implement them. The value to price ratio is absolutely stupid.

So we’re doing a little bit of an increase. It’s going to go to $25 a month or $125 semi-annually. It’s not a big increase at all.

I mean, this could be a $50 a month thing. It could be a $60 a month thing, a $99 a month thing. It could be a lot of things, okay?

It’s absolutely, like I said, the pricing is absolutely stupid. So we got to increase it a little bit, 25 a month or 125 semi-annually, that’ll happen on Tuesday, so this is your chance, like, if you’re not in the inner circle, to just lock in, by the way, you’re grandfathered in, right? So you’re locking in this rate.

So when the price increases on Tuesday, it’s not going to affect anybody that’s on a current plan, even if you’re on a month-to-month plan. So you’re always grandfathered in. This is your chance to, and again, sometimes people don’t believe me.

They’re like, ah, I just think I’ll keep waiting on it. And then when they decide, I really need that inner circle thing, they come crawling back, like begging, right? For the old, it is what it is.

Like, it’s gone. That ship has sailed. So when it’s in front of you, that is the time to get it.

It does not get any better All right. Let me go back to Ecamm here. All right.

I think we go. No. No, that’s just changing tabs That does not get Oh shift tab.

That’s what we want to do. Okay, and we can go back to here All right. I need to check out the chat.

I Just do an inner circle. I’m rebuilding my business climbing out of chump land the trainings are awesome all right that is fantastic to hear how long you’ve been doing this Sophie so you’re saying you read you’re rebuilding your business how long have you been doing it and you know what kind of success have you found so far what triggered you to join and to try to rebuild the agency scratchable says I was late is Figma for Frames out yet? Oh, good, good, good, good question.

Good, good question. Frames for Figma will be re-released in January. We just did a major, major update.

I thought these things go away on their own. I’m just gonna have to make them go away on their own. We just released a major update.

Tommy’s done a phenomenal job with it. People are loving the new update. But we’re not quite ready to publicly release it again yet.

We are going to just to kind of give you the roadmap here. It now has all frames available. It has like I can’t even go like we’ll be here forever if I talk.

I’m going to do some videos on some of the key parts of it so don’t worry, right. But we are going to overhaul the frame site. We are going to we obviously have to get a landing page up for the frames for Figma side of things and that’s along with the UI overhaul that we’re going to do.

Those two things alone are going to take till till January. Plus we want to make sure that all of the new stuff that is in frames for Figma is just working really seamlessly and everybody really likes it and there’s no bugs to iron out. And so just between now and January that’s what we’re going to be kind of doing and then we’ll relaunch frames for Figma in January.

What we’re also going to start doing I’ve talked to Tommy about once a month I will basically show the entire workflow. So I think this is going to be really really awesome from an educational standpoint. Even if you’re not a frames for Figma user it’s just it’s going to be awesome from a educational standpoint.

So what that would look like is this. We have like a sample project okay and I go into Figma and I do the wire framing for it. Using frames for Figma I do the wire framing and then what I’m going to do and I’m going to record that.

If you you know refer to the Zendesk. com homepage series that I did. A lot of people love that.

People are just asking more more more more more of that. Well it’s actually going to get even better than that. So we’re gonna go from scratch.

Okay, we’re gonna say here’s our here’s our example project I’m gonna wireframe it out using frames for Figma Then I’m gonna pass it over to Tommy Tommy is gonna record the process of styling that of doing the UI design okay in Figma and You’re gonna you’re gonna be able to get to see that right every every step of that process and how he thinks about things and how he approaches UI design and how he manages that in Figma and starts from a frames wireframe perspective. Then he’s gonna pass the UI back to me and I’m gonna build it in bricks. So you literally get to see the wireframing portion, then you get to see the UI portion, and then you’ll get to see the dev portion.

And we’ll try to do that once every month. So once every month, and this is kind of gonna be a home page. We don’t have to do like an entire site.

Now maybe instead of home pages all the time, we end up doing a you know some sort of specific other inner page that might be super cool to see. Like a detailed service page or a team member page or like something right something different. Something a little bit more unique.

But you guys are gonna get to see that entire process. And so that’s going to be not in real time, not in real. .

. It’s not going to be like live or anything, but they’ll be recorded just like the Zendesk. com series.

But it’s going to be really, really, really good. So that’ll help you see the product in action. It’ll also help you see the workflow in action.

But even if you don’t own the product, I mean, there’s going to be a ton of stuff that you can, you know, get out of that series for yourself. OK, let’s see. Yes, Andrea says it’s time for another work with me session.

I will, you know, as soon as I get back to Atlanta we will do another work with me session inside the inner circle. That’s another thing that you get inside the inner circle that I’ve started doing a couple months ago that people really like. It’s called a co-working with Kevin session and literally what I do for the most part is I just turn on music and I work, like I actually just work on real work, but I’m screen sharing, I’m live streaming inside the inner circle the entire time.

And then I take breaks and people can ask questions, but it’s not a teaching thing, it’s just a, some people just like to watch other people work, like other people, what’s the process look like? What’s real work look like versus teaching work? So you get to do that, you get to watch that, and you get to interact and ask questions and because I got to take breaks from time to time, so I jump in the chat and talk to everybody.

Plus, you can talk to other people in the chat and sometimes, you know, people like to work alongside me. So instead of just sitting there watching me work, they can watch me here and there, but they also do work alongside me. And if they run into any sticking points, they can ask in the chat.

And sometimes I jump in and show them a thing or two to help them out. Like, it’s kind of a free-for-all, honestly, but it’s a different kind of experience and people really like it. Okay, so we did Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

Let’s move into talking about the R3 Conference and then we will move into Q&A and AMA. So, the reason I’m down here in Sarasota right now is I was just over in Orlando and I was speaking at the R3 recurring revenue retreat. I’m actually gonna pull this up on the page right here.

So it’s R3. live is the website. I think next year they’re talking about doing this.

They’ve always done it in Orlando but I think next year they’re talking about doing this in Arizona which would be fantastic because if you guys know anything about me, I was born in Mesa, Arizona, and a lot of my family is in Phoenix. And so every opportunity that I can get, every excuse that I can get to fly out to Arizona, I take it. And so if they do this in Arizona next year, I will absolutely be there.

But I was here as a speaker, and this is my first time at the recurring revenue retreats been going on. I don’t know how many years they’ve been doing it now but you know it does have a very dedicated group of attendees and it was just a fantastic experience. You know I went to WordCamp in DC and it’s a WordCamp is a big I mean it’s not like some conferences are gigantic right but in terms of like the WordPress community or what we do, you know, WordCamp US is fairly big.

And you know, I got on a live stream with Jonathan and we did a recap of WordCamp and I didn’t, the best part of WordCamp was all the networking that I was able to do. All the people I was able to meet and talk to in person and strategize with and like, you know, basically WordCamp US, the value was at the bar at 11 p. m.

you’re not getting a lot of value at a WordCamp. Okay you go to the talks you know I wasn’t super impressed with the talks at WordCamp we talked about that. I what I you know the schedule at WordCamp is tough there’s a bunch of talks going on at the exact same time so if there’s two talks that you want to go to which at WordCamp US you know they weren’t great so you weren’t missing a ton.

But if they were really good, you wouldn’t even be able to see some of them, because there’s like four talks going on at the exact same time in different rooms, you got to pick and choose which talk you want to go to. And if they were all really good talks, you would be very, very, very torn using that model. It felt like you needed tracks almost, like pick a topic and go through all the talks on that track.

It’s just, it’s too much. There’s too many people. So the other thing about it is like, there’s so many people that even if you’re doing the networking, you feel like you have to be out till 1 a.

m. , 2 a. m.

Because there’s always another person to talk to. There’s always the next person to network with. Like, there’s so many people there, there’s just always the next thing.

And then you end up like completely drained and I ended up getting COVID after it because probably because I was you know drinking staying up till like 2 a. m. in the morning waking up at like 6 a.

m. day after day after day you know it’s like four days in a row of this stuff and so it’s really really draining and then it took me like three four or five days to recover after I got back the reason I’m telling you all of this is because the r3 retreat is completely different okay so if a big conference like that kind of scares you a little bit r3 is like the perfect thing for you it’s a much smaller conference it’s much more manageable there’s no overlapping talks so literally you can see every single talk you you feel like you can do some networking and then go to bed, like at a reasonable hour. You’re like, okay, like we’re all gonna head up at 11 p.

m. and actually get some sleep at this conference. It’s just, it’s very well managed.

You know, the food that they served was absolutely fantastic, like really great lunches, really great dinners. They had an event on the two key nights, they had a speakers slash sponsors event that I went to, it’s a private dinner. And then the last night of the conference, they do a whole bowling thing, they rent out a bunch of lanes upstairs, this great place, it was at Disney Springs, and fantastic food catered to it, and we just all had a blast bowling.

Ya boy won, okay, I mean it wasn’t even like come on you didn’t think you didn’t think that you were gonna bowl with me and and come out With the W right you didn’t think that okay, so just had to throw that out there But yeah, we had we had an amazing time right so our our three like if you’re looking for a small intimate conference That’s manageable That’s not gonna kill you that you can actually do some good and it’s almost all agency owners and freelancers. That’s probably an important part that I should say, right? Whereas WordCamp, I mean, you’ve got everybody and their mom is there.

And a lot, like I met a lot of people at WordCamp that were just sent there by the agency they work with. So it’s just, oh, I’m just a random marketer or I’m just a random WordPress user. At the R3 conference, everybody’s an agency owner or a freelancer, probably mostly agency owners because it’s also, it’s not super cheap, okay?

So most of the people I met there that are agency owners are very successful agency owners. Not beginners, more or less, right? So if you’re there and you’re networking with people, you’re gonna learn a lot.

If you are a beginner, you’re gonna learn a ton. If you’re an advanced kind of, you know, have a larger agency or a more successful agency kind of situation, you’re still gonna learn a lot, you’re gonna get a lot of value. And here’s the thing, OK?

So the first half of the day, remember I said there’s no overlapping talks, which is good. The first half of the day is talks. The second half of the day is mastermind sessions, what they call magic minds.

But it’s more or less just a mastermind session in person. So for two hours, you go into a room with a small group. So they break everybody out into small groups and there’s a facilitator in every single group and basically everybody in the group gets an opportunity to say, here’s what I’m struggling with in my agency right now.

Here’s what I need help with, here’s what I need a decision on, whatever. And then everybody in the room grills you. You know, they ask you a series of questions trying to drill down into, you know, what’s causing this problem, how did this problem arise, whatever, and then everybody gets an opportunity to go through and you know basically say here’s what I’ve done that that has helped in this situation or here’s what I recommend you do or here’s what you can think about doing, yada yada yada, and this is a really really you know powerful opportunity for you that you don’t get in a normal conference.

So it’s not all just listening to talks and taking notes and then trying to go back and implement stuff. It’s half of the day is that, the other half of the day is literally like, here’s the problem I’m having and can you solve it for me? And you got a bunch of people and like I said, they’re not, they’re, you know, they’ve, a lot of them maybe have had a lot more success than you.

And so you’re hearing from people who are further along than you or at a higher level than you, giving you really, really, really valuable advice. So r3. live is the conference.

The other thing that I would say about the importance of conferences, we all work, and I’ve been to two conferences in the last two months now, okay, talking to a lot of people, and they all say the same thing. It is imperative that you get out from behind the computer and just go interact with people in real life who can relate to what you do. It’s not like you know you’re talking to your spouse, you’re talking to a friend, whatever.

They don’t know the situation you’re in. They don’t know anything about running an agency. They don’t know anything about hustling on online, staring at a computer all day with nobody else around you for the most part, right?

Doing everything virtual. Most of the clients you meet with probably, it’s on Zoom, it’s on Google Meet, you’re writing emails, you’re chatting, right? You’re in DMs.

It’s not face-to-face stuff. Face-to-face stuff is so valuable. You will come away from these conferences feeling really inspired and recharged and, well, not WordCamp.

WordCamp, you will come away with WordCamp with COVID, feeling very tired and feeling like the talks weren’t that great. But a great conference, like the R3 conference, you will come away feeling recharged and motivated and inspired with really valuable steps that you need to take in your business to move things along and get to the next level. And just from a human to human standpoint, it’s going to recharge your batteries.

And you’re gonna meet a lot of great people. And it’s people that you can continue a relationship with back to the internet, you know for probably years to come and then you’ll see them again at the next retreat And then it’s just it’s a really good way to build valuable relationships Okay, so if you are the kind of person who has not participated in any conferences yet if you’re like, you know I’m just gonna do my work. I’m just gonna keep my head down like I don’t need a conference I don’t need this or or or or I know a lot of you are like, ah, it’s too expensive, I got the airfare, I got the ticket, I gotta pay for a hotel there, and I don’t know if I can, I can, I don’t know if I can cut it, you know?

Those expenses are a little too much. It’s well worth the investment. Scrape the money together, it is well worth the investment.

0:31:57 Okay? 0:31:59

All right, so that’s my, that’s my talk about conferences. 2024 is coming up. Identify some conferences like this.

There’s Cabo Press in Cabo, Mexico. I’ll probably be, I’m gonna make a very, very strong attempt to be at Cabo Press. So, and if you don’t know anything about Cabo Press, I’ve never been to Cabo Press before, all right?

But I wanna scroll down here. So Chris Lima was at this conference and he runs Cabo Press, right? And so, you know, I did a lot of you know talking with Chris at this conference and at 2024, 2023, you know, this was the years where I said because I’ve been like you look I’m an introvert, right?

By well, I’m I’ve said this before I’m more of an ambivert, right? So I can I can Be more extroverted in certain situations, but by nature, I’m an introvert. And so at these conferences, I want to go back to my room a lot of times, I’ve got to recharge.

I’m like, I can’t be around people all the time. I do have to recharge. My wife, completely the opposite.

My wife is like, no, there’s no alone time to be had. She needs to be around people always and often. I’m the opposite, right?

I got to recharge from around people for too long. But in social situations, I can bring out an extroverted side if I want to. And so I guess they call that an ambivert, right?

So anyway, talking to Chris, and in 2023, 2024, I said, I’ve got to go out to more conferences. And obviously, I want to start speaking at as many conferences as possible. But 2024 is coming up.

This is an opportunity for you to get out of your shell a little bit if that’s you, or for you to finally say, you know what, I’m not going to worry about the money. I’m going to scrape it together. I’m going to make it happen.

And I’m going to get to, you know, at least one, maybe two conferences in 2024 and see how valuable they might be to me. And I bet you’re going to find that they are very, very, very valuable. While we’re here and just talking good about people and relationships, I mean, Marcus was fantastic.

Christina is one of the directors of R3. She is fantastic. Nathan, got to talk to him a lot.

Lindsey, I mean, all just fantastic people, right? You know, Tiago right here, he stood out to me. Deardesigner.

com. This is Tiago owns Dear Designer and I heard about it briefly right so for those of you who are you don’t really have a UI guy you know you’re not a UI guy and you don’t really have a UI guy okay let’s talk about I’m not an affiliate of Dear Designer they don’t have an affiliate program what I got to see though from Tiago and I’ll just be honest with you I would not sign up for a service like this typically I just have it’s like there’s a bad connotation almost and like all right it’s like you know you pay a monthly fee basically and you get unlimited you like unlimited design for whatever you need. It could be like business cards, it could be logos, it could be a website, it could be whatever you need.

You can see on their pricing right here. I mean it’s not like dirt cheap or anything right $8. 99 a month for the agency plan, $6.

99 a month for the business plan, here’s all the stuff you get. I would typically shy away from doing something like this. But I went to this conference and I was able to talk to Tiago and I was able to hear his story and I was able to hear straight from him, like how he thinks about quality, maintaining quality, and how they deliver things, and how he treats his staff, and how he fires clients when clients mistreat his staff.

He has very high standards for things. And it’s just like hearing him talk about his journey and his process of building Dear Designer and the processes he’s put in place and the way he manages it and the way he thinks about it. I was just really, really, really impressed.

And so, you know, for a service I normally wouldn’t sign up for, like, I was like, man, not only am I probably going to sign up for this myself, I’m going to recommend it to people. And it is a situation where an R3, you know, the R3 conference, they actually use Deer Designer for everything that they do, apparently. That’s the vibe I got anyway.

So if you’re in a situation where you know you’re not a UI designer, and we’ve talked about that before, if you know you’re not a UI designer, stop doing UI design. Let’s leave that to the UI designers. But you don’t necessarily like.

. . You haven’t.

. . I don’t want to go recruit a UI designer and then do I have enough work to give them consistently?

Are they going to stick with me? Or are they going to get distracted, go off doing all this other stuff so they can pay their bills and then they’re not available when I need them and that whole situation. If that’s you, then you may want to give Dear Designer a look.

And so you just sign up. Let’s say you’re paying $6. 99 a month.

By the way guys, let’s say if you’re using this for UI design for websites, you should be charging, I mean, it could be like low end, low end, maybe like super low end, like poverty end, okay, $100 per screen, per screen for UI, right, which is like homepage, and then about page is another hundred, and you just add it up like that. High end, I mean, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, a thousand, right, per screen. So if you think about how much you could be charging for just, and this is just for web design, we’re not even talking about like all the other stuff that they do that you can bill for this should be a like You’re getting way way way more than this in ROI if you’re playing your cards, right?

And you’ve got your pricing set up, right? This is more or less a drop in the bucket for UI design the only question left is are you getting good quality output from Dear Designer. And everybody I talked to and the vibe I got, it is.

It is. You can trust it. You can count on it.

From what I can tell and what Tiago said, you basically kind of get a dedicated team. Like once a design team is assigned to you, it’s the same people over and over and over again. So you’re not like submitting a request and it’s going to a completely different person that doesn’t know anything about your business or what you’ve got going on, it’s the same people that you’re interacting with all the time.

So give it a shot. That’s all I can say. Give it a shot.

It’s a month to month thing. You don’t have to sign a contract or anything like that. But if you’re in a situation where you need a designer, I just wanted to say I was super impressed with Tiago and what he’s got going on here.

And I will almost certainly be signing up myself for a lot of various reasons. Okay. We can get out of here.

We don’t even need to be in here. Let’s get back to, I need to get back to the chat. It’s been a while since I’ve been in the chat.

Okay. I have heard WordCamp US 2023 was not the best, but things ebb and flow. I’ve attended and or organized a few fantastic WordCamps.

Let’s not hate on WordCamps too much. No, I’m not hating on WordCamps in general. From what I’ve heard, the local WordCamps are really, really awesome.

So if there’s local WordCamps to you, absolutely go. I’ll be going to local WordCamps near me and trying to speak at local WordCamps as well. It was just the WordCamp US that I wasn’t impressed with.

And it’s not that, I got the vibe that like, somebody, somebody in that organization is heavily curating talks. And it’s almost like, I told Jonathan, I mean, we all kind of agreed, it was like, I want to see the talks that were rejected. Like, if these were the ones that were, I get the feeling that some of the spicier talks, some of the more meaningful, more valuable talks, but maybe that aren’t in a thousand percent alignment with Mr.

Matt’s vision or whatever. I mean, let’s be honest, like he’s, he doesn’t like page builders, okay? I’ll tell you that right now.

He, I think he wishes all page builders would die tomorrow, okay? And so if there’s any talks related to specific page builders or page building that doesn’t involve Gutenberg, I don’t really think he’s interested in it. And I think somebody’s got a hand in basically not allowing talks on certain subjects and topics.

So I just think it was the curation of the talks, whatever’s happening behind the scenes, that killed the value in WordCamp US. If that’s like, you know, that’s a conspiracy theory, I’ll throw out there. That’s just the vibe I got.

And it’s not a great vibe. So now the local WordCamps, I don’t think that’s happening. So I think you are much more likely to get value out of local word camps for sure.

So I’m not talking bad about word camps in general, just WordCamp US 2023, the one that I went to, was not super impressed with that. And for that reason, I feel like it was too manipulated and there’s, you know, there’s too much politics going on. If I had to guess, that would be my guess.

Okay, I’ve used Gear Designer before, took longer to explain what needed to be done and how for them to do it properly than to just do it myself. That’s the thing with any designer, honestly. Like you do have to be good at communicating.

You do have to know exactly what needs to be communicated. And for example, with needing a UI design, if you just are like, hey I have a request for a UI design for a website, you know, here’s some example sites, here’s the clients requirements blah blah blah. Yeah, it may take you a lot to explain it may take you a Few rounds of iterations to get to something that you actually like But if you’re able to hand them wireframes and I talked to Tiago about this and he was like He’s like listen our biggest challenge is that people don’t know how to talk to designers like they don’t know how to prepare You know for the design to happen correctly So you know they give they scratch notes on a napkin they said like it’s just it’s a mess You know and we know that we get requests from our own clients all the time like here’s my ideas for the site It’s like what the fuck is this like come on now like you know So you do have to know how to communicate to a design team But he was like dude if you hand our team wireframes like they will absolutely love you.

He’s like, almost nobody does that. And so it’s just, and that’s part of a professional process, right? So I think if you hand them wireframes, and you give them some basic guidelines on what do you want the UI to look like, then it should be a good result.

Now again, I haven’t personally used them. This is just the vibe that I got, and I’ve seen the work that they did for other people, okay? And there’s a ton of people using them and literally everybody at R3 was like, yes, Dear Designer’s awesome.

So I’m just going on what I’ve heard so far. I will, again, try it personally and I will see what the outcome is, but that’s the vibe that I get. 0:43:06

Okay, let’s see. 0:43:07 Okay, let’s scroll up a little bit.

We are into Q&A now, right? So any questions you have, it’s Q&A, AMA, ask me anything. But Josh Hall referred me to you at WordCamp DC, so I guess it was still worth it.

Well, like I said, the people that you’re going to meet at WordCamp is the best part. And so like I said, the best part of WordCamp US was at the bar at 11 p. m.

In the case of Josh Hall, I ran into Josh in the museum. What was it? The Smithsonian Museum.

So one of the cool things about WordCamp US was final day, final evening, they basically rented out a large portion of the Smithsonian Museum. So we’re actually, all of our WordCampers, we’re like going through a dark museum, like with no other people. It’s like we had the Smithsonian Museum all to ourselves.

Absolutely fantastic experience. And that’s where I ran into Josh Hall. And then next thing you know, well actually we had already had the podcast I did with Josh.

If you haven’t heard, I did a podcast episode with Josh. He’s got a great podcast, great guy. I highly recommend you go listen to that.

0:44:24 We had already had that scheduled, 0:44:26

but then it got rescheduled. Then I saw him at WordCamp, and then I think we ended up recording shortly after WordCamp. But yeah, that’s the kind of stuff that you.

. . that’s the value you get out of WordCamp.

Like, I can’t tell you how many amazing people and really valuable, just from a business perspective, a lot of the networking that I was able to do at WordCamp. But by far, by far, the best part of it was the private parties the private, you know, like, you know Elementor’s crew will throw a party go daddy. You’ll throw a party this company over here with a Kinsta will throw a party something like that.

So the private parties and the networking at the bars, right? That was the the most valuable aspects of this particular word camp Okay, let’s see here. Okay, I used to attend the Microsoft conferences, cost was over $5,000, no meals, no hotel, $1,700 for R3 is cheap.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Very, very affordable for what you get for sure. Guys, you like $1,700, just the mastermind aspect of it if you actually have like business challenges and you want to kick in the ass you want to Swift kick in the ass from people who are Ahead of you above you like they can give you really really valuable advice Not only are you getting the talks?

But you’re getting that mastermind experience and your hotel all paid for for seven that’s seventeen hundred dollars that you just mentioned Includes the hotel. Okay, so like all of that buttoned up in $1,700, it’s a tremendous value. Did you see the Termageddon team at R3?

I absolutely did. I absolutely did. Hung out with them.

They were bowling in the lane next to me. Funny, funny thing, funny thing. So she, you know, it’s a two-part team, right?

She was one of the only people with a umbrella in Orlando. We go to the speakers dinner. The night of the speakers dinner, it was speakers and sponsors, private dinner for speakers and sponsors.

And it’s raining all day. Guys, I’m in Florida all the time. It almost never, like it’ll rain, but like it’s a afternoon shower kind of situation.

It’s like it pours for like an hour and then it’s done. And then it’s just back to being sunny and warm and bright 0:46:51

and all that. 0:46:52 OK, so I get to Orlando.

It’s raining when I get to Orlando, like the whole day. And then the next day, it’s raining. And then the next day, it’s raining.

It like would not stop. It was relentless. There was no like, it’s not like hurricanes coming.

It was just rain. I don’t, you rarely see that. And they said for the three weeks before the conference, it had been all sunshine, like no rain whatsoever.

So anyway, they’ve got this speaker sponsored dinner plan. So we get shuttled over to Disney Springs and When you get off the shuttle, there’s no cover. So you have to walk and Disney Springs is quite large It’s like an outdoor.

There’s like, you know restaurants and shops and all that all this stuff, right? and so we’re literally like huddled under some umbrellas and There was only a few umbrellas, we’re all huddled. We’re literally walking like a quarter mile or a half mile or something, like huddled under umbrellas.

It didn’t really matter, we were all soaked by the end. But I was under the Termageddon umbrella, okay? Because they were one of the only ones with an umbrella.

So I literally was under the, getting soaked under the Termageddon, we’ll call it the Termageddon sponsored umbrella on the way to that to that event but I also met them at word camp as well so you got it I’m telling you I’m telling you got it you got it this it’s a great part of attending these events and if you did attend these events you you you know bump into me and then I could smoke you I could absolutely smoke you at bowling and we would all have a fantastic time okay let’s see here. How can I efficiently design a WordPress website that caters to two different locations providing unique and location-specific info while maintaining a cohesive UX under a single domain? Well, two different locations providing unique info.

I mean this sounds to me it’s pretty standard. It’s pretty standard. Info I Mean, this is sounds to me.

It’s pretty standard. It’s pretty standard. I mean, this is what every multi location business does For the most part I I would probably ask you a little bit more about what you mean by unique and location specific info That’s a little bit.

Maybe there’s a an interesting little twist there that complicates things, but maybe not Maybe it’s just ends up being a very very standard thing so fusion plus TV if you want to expand on that, like is there anything beyond that that’s like what’s the. . .

I’m trying to wonder what the hard part of that is that you’re that you’re having trouble with, right? Your locations would be a CPT. So you have one location and you add your other location to the CPT, you have a locations page, each location has its own overview page.

You could bi-directionally relate blog posts to a specific location. You can bi-directionally relate team members to a specific location. You can bi-directionally relate FAQs to a specific location.

Services can be bi-directionally related to a specific location. If you have a services CPT, you would do all this with CPTs. Team members of CPT, services of CPT, FAQs are a CPT.

That’s all very standard and straightforward though. Is there any other challenge that we haven’t discussed yet about this that you’re concerned about? That would be my follow-up question to you.

0:50:09 He says, imagine I’m doing a similar thing 0:50:11

like in the UK and another in the US. Well, what kind of business is it? Is this like there’s just office locations but you serve the entire world and people don’t actually come into the office?

Is it a thing where people actually have to physically show up at the location? I guess that would be the next follow-up question. So that’s the thing about strategizing like this.

It’s always like we need more and more and more details. The answer to almost everything in web design, as we all know, right? Let’s do a pop quiz.

What is the answer that you will almost always see to every question in web design. It’s not a trick question. It’s not a trick question.

And I know it’s a very vague question but the answer is very vague. People actually make fun of it all the time. Just pop it in the chat if you know.

We’ll just do a little fun pop quiz. What’s the answer to that? To any, almost any question in web design.

It’s two words by the way. Just to give you, just to give you a, no, it’s not CPT, that’s not the answer. The answer, I will give it to you in just a second.

Does ACSS version three will be launched in January? It is a very, we are, it’s a massive overhaul, it’s a massive change in workflow, and because of this, I cannot put a timeline on it. Would I love for it to be released in January?

Oh, yes, I would love for it to be released in January. But I just can’t, I can’t make any promises. Fusion TV says it’s an event.

I mean, if it’s an event, I think, I think, yes, there you go, guys. It depends. It depends.

That is the, that is the go-to answer in web design. We organize events yearly, one for Europe and another one for Africa, same kind of event but need different information. That’s totally, totally, totally under one website, all day, very easy to do.

Yeah, it’s just CPTs, it’s CPTs. I don’t think you have to do anything crazy because each, well really, so if it’s an event, if it’s an event, you would have an event CPT I don’t think you even need a location CPT even if the event like if the event is in the same location every single what you wouldn’t want to do is like you wouldn’t want to create a location CPT in that capacity because it feels to me like you would lock yourself into a specific location like did you put you put so Europe and another for Africa? Okay, like let’s say it’s South Africa or something.

And so you put South Africa in this in the location CPT That’s not really what we’re that’s not really the type of thing, right? The type of thing is not a location. The type of thing is an event.

So you’d want to create an events CPT What is the event called give it a name and it exists to exist in South Africa right now, but it could exist anywhere. We can move that event to somewhere else. Whereas if you have a location CPT and you create a South Africa location and try to put an event page together there, if that event ever moves, you now have a CPT called South Africa and URL that’s no longer relevant to anything or anybody, right?

So what you’re creating is an event. So the CPT is for events. That’s it.

And you basically have a landing page for every single event. And it doesn’t matter where it’s located. That’s the way I would approach it.

What about TranslatePress or a tool like that? Let me, yeah, we can leave that up. OK, that’s fine.

What about TranslatePress or a tool like that with auto sensing where traffic is coming from English grammar is not the same for US and UK. Yeah you there’s plugins that can absolutely do that for you. I don’t have a lot of experience for them because I don’t do a lot of multilingual websites but I’m sure that there’s somebody on here who can make a recommendation for you or there’s somebody in the inner circle.

Absolutely I mean you post that in the inner circle is insanely diverse, right? There are people from everywhere, everywhere. This is not a situation where it’s like, I wouldn’t even say it’s majority US, like vast majority are from other places, right?

And there’s a lot of people doing multilingual sites, like you post something like that in the inner circle, I think you’re gonna get a lot of really good recommendations. When is the header builder element from frames going to be ready? I thought that was going to be our Christmas present.

That’s not your Christmas present, no. I am working on a Christmas present for everybody in the inner circle. It is not the header builder for frames.

Actually, my team doesn’t even really know anything about it. It’s something I’m working on myself. It’s something that could end up being a product at some, well, I’m not gonna give too many more details.

I’m not going to give too many more details. But you guys are going to get. .

. it’s going to. .

. I think you’re going to really, really, really like it. If you’re a frames user you’re going to like it even more.

But you don’t even have. . .

you don’t have to be a WSForm user. I don’t think that gives too much away. You have to be a WSForm user.

But you should be already. I mean, if you’re not a WSForm user, I don’t know what you’re doing with your life, honestly. So you know, if you have WSForm, you are going to like the Christmas gift.

I can’t spill it yet. I can’t spill it yet. I’m still working out some details.

We’re getting close though. It’s gonna be very valuable. Like you’re gonna really, really like it.

And it’s something that is going to really enhance your business. And so if you’re an agency freelancer kind of situation, 0:56:15

you’re gonna like it. 0:56:16 I think, I think you’re gonna like it.

Okay, I’m wondering when frames for Figma will be launched. Okay, we already talked about that. That’s going to be launched in January.

That’s our target date for that. Let’s see. Regarding clamp functions, I’m having trouble seeing it work in Internet Explorer, of course.

Is there a fix or should I exclude Internet Explorer users? You should absolutely exclude Internet Explorer users. This is not a situation.

. . IE doesn’t even exist anymore.

It’s not even officially supported by Microsoft. It’s dead. It’s done.

We’ve moved on. The whole. .

. the entirety of the Internet has moved on. If anybody is still on Internet Explorer, you know, not only are they probably undergoing massive security vulnerabilities, they’re just.

. . it’s.

. . it is what it is.

Like, nobody. . .

nobody for IE anymore. Okay what’s coming in the inner circle till end of year oh oh you mean like trainings train what what trainings are coming in the inner circle you can always go to giri. ca I do my best to keep this updated inner circle roadmap I know I’m not screen sharing just give me a second I gotta give it I gotta get back to Ecamm screen and then I gotta hit this button and then I gotta go back here.

Okay, I should be screen sharing now. Alright so, how to dominate local search with service area pages part 2, that actually was released. That was just released already.

So I gotta update that. Oh, how to run a technical SEO audit, that was released as well. So those two and those two are very, this one right here is another one that will literally add tens of thousands of dollars in revenue to your agency.

Like just go watch this training right here and do what I say to do. It’s actually a, it kinda goes with the discovery trainings that I’ve done. But I cover the three ways that this is going to increase your revenue and the results that you’re getting for your client, by the way.

But literally, like if you haven’t watched this yet, go run to the inner circle and go watch this. It’s like, it will, almost overnight, the next lead that you get, you will make at least $1,000 more. Probably, you know, multi-thousand dollars over the course of the proposal that you put together for them.

Tens of thousands of dollars easily could be for one client, if it’s a big client but you know it’s a you know two three four clients down the road you’re easily in the tens of thousands of dollars so I would just go run and watch that if you haven’t yet how to create a dynamic event management system is a series that’s ongoing right now you see over here it says ongoing I’ve got a third episode coming out in December for that sadly sadly I’ve done everything I possibly can. People requesting recurring events, it is beyond the scope of that kind of system that we are putting together. So we won’t be doing recurring events, but there’s a lot of other requests that people have made that we will be implementing.

And so part three will be coming out in December for that. Start to finish keyword targeting with article content is going to be coming out in December. And then I’ve got a couple things that are not on this list that I need to add that will likely be coming out December and January as well.

Plus that tool that I’m building for you that will be a good Christmas gift. So that’s kind of the plan between now and the end of the year. Okay, let’s go back to Ecamm.

Maybe I can make my way back here okay question what does your hat say it says Travis Martin I really like I’m not gonna see I got headphones on I’m not gonna take it off I have a lot of Travis Martin hats not necessarily I don’t even know who Travis Martin is necessarily but damn they fit really good they’re really comfortable I just really like them and I can get them easily on Amazon. I do have, what’s the other brand? I like Melon, I like Melon hats.

There’s a few different brands of hats that I like. Let’s see. Recurring events is hard, needs separate CPT for instances, but tightly integrated multi-CPTs is fun.

Yeah, and I don’t even know. I mean, I feel like in a lot of ways that just completely obliterates the data. Like, I don’t know, it’s really, it’s not as hard necessarily to just make an event recurring where a lot of the complication comes in because a lot of people think like, oh, I just need recurring events.

I hate these laptop cameras, by the way. It’s like, if you, you don’t wanna look straight down on your camera, people have to look up at you. Anyway, what I was saying is, making an event, people think, oh, I want recurring events, you just have to take the event and make it recurring on an interval.

It’s like, no, that’s not all you have to do, because you know what then they say is, I want the ability to go choose an instance of the event and delete it without affecting the others. Hey, oh, that’s not so easy anymore, is it? I wanna go change the date of a one-off event or change the time of a one-off event.

Like basically, remove it from the series and edit it or whatever. So this kind of thing adds a lot of complications. It’s like when we talk to clients, you know?

The idea they have in their head seems super simple. And then they start saying, but it needs to do this, and it needs to do this, and it needs to do this, and then now, it’s obviously not so simple anymore. And so the point of the event series, by the way, was, hey, you don’t need a big, gigantic event management system for a lot of things.

So like, I’m doing a gym client right now. They need an event system. They don’t need recurring events.

They don’t need a lot of fancy stuff. They just need a simple way to manage events and display them on the website and use some like to show me events in a specific category or at a specific price point or anything like that and to be able to sign up for something, that’s all manageable without a giant plugin for events. And so I’m showing people how to build that natively in WordPress just using Advanced Custom Fields and WP Grid Builder for facets.

And we go through the whole entire process. And yeah, we’re gonna put like a calendar integration in there, like that’s one of the next things that we’re gonna do. But we don’t have to go crazy with like a whole recurring event system that you can then tightly manage and granularly edit and all this stuff.

Like that’s beyond the scope of what we’re trying to do. If you need all that stuff, then yeah, by all means, go buy an event management plugin that does all of that for you. The point of the series was to teach people how to do simple event management so that you don’t need a big plugin that’s overkill for a lot of clients.

Justin says, I’m getting PyCalendar to see how far that will get me with things. I have a PyCalendar license. I’m going to be testing it out, probably doing a video on it very soon.

Would you recommend the Events Calendar plugin, Jonathan, or PyCalendar or something else. I’ve used the events calendar, I’ve used a lot of them. The thing is, is you know, they’re all decent, right?

A lot of them feel like overkill for most use cases. If you don’t need really advanced stuff going on, most of them are just bloat and overkill. And so it’s good to just be able to kind of build your own when you need it.

And by the way, the one that I’m showing how to build, I would recommend having a blueprint for it. It’s like, here’s my normal blueprint, and then here’s my blueprint for clients who need events. And you spin up that blueprint, and it’s got your own little custom event management system already ready to go, so you don’t have to rebuild it for every client that needs events.

It’s a good thing to have. It’s a good thing to have. 1:04:18

Let’s see, this question here. 1:04:20 Regarding events non-recurring, does the inner circle touch on disappearing buttons depending on date?

Say the event already passed, so the ticket button needs to turn into no longer. Yes, yes, yeah. We talk about all that kind of logic, hiding past events and loops.

Yeah, all of that stuff. You can hide buttons, you can disable buttons, you can do whatever you want to do. What are the next frames you are going to release?

What about a sticky card frame? We just did, let’s see, getframes. io slash frames.

Should pull up the library here. I just did this one that I like, CTA section hotel. It’s a pretty good one.

You can use that for, that’s kind of like, that’s like a user’s profile over here But you can actually just put any kind of photos over there We got article card Juliet. I noticed we didn’t have any We’re limited on some wide format article cards. So just put this grid in here So that’s a good one I Just use these so this shows you how frames you know, let’s go to automaticcss.

com. I wonder if I might have, oh, oh yeah, I’m not, I’m not screen sharing again, hang on. One, two, and then back.

Okay. It’s, I’m cookied out of it. Let me go to an incognito window.

Here we go. So see this little strip at the top right here? Don’t miss our Black Friday Pro Plan offers.

See the deal? And then I can actually close this if I if I want to dismiss it basically and then I can refresh and I revisit the sites I’m hard refreshing right now notice it’s not coming back okay that’s a frame that’s a frame and so you know it would it would have taken me a little bit of time to put that together for the frame side and then for the ACS I know I just went and got notification alpha it’s notification alpha added it in like two seconds, customized the colors, moved on with my life. It’s already got the logic for dismissing it with the close button, storing that preference in local storage so that when the user comes back, they don’t see it again.

All of that’s already done for you, right? So there’s an example of a frame that I was able to just, hey, here we are, Black Friday, I need a little notification bar at the top that is able to be hidden and stores the user’s preference, well it’s right there as a frame, notification alpha. There’s always more frames in development.

I’m traveling right now so off the top of my head I don’t know what’s coming next but as soon as I get back another batch will be released. I know there’s some some good stuff in the works and we just got to button some things up here and there. But yeah, it’s always, always new stuff coming in the frames library.

Question cookies, GDPR, accessibility, how to sell it when clients feel they can just get away with not having these. No fines, no issues in their minds. I don’t sell accessibility.

Now the cookies GDPR stuff, that’s just sold with a legal policy. So now we’re in Termageddon land, right? Termageddon, you go to Termageddon, you get a, you can use my affiliate link or not use my affiliate link, I don’t really care.

But Termageddon supplies you with all the legal policies that your clients need for their website. And in doing that, in implementing that, and you, by the way, just make that part of your monthly management fee, like your care plan or whatever. That’s exactly what I do.

So the legal policies, the cookie notices, all of that is all provided by Termageddon. So that’s taken care of, right? Accessibility.

I bake the cost of accessibility into the pricing for a project because we build accessible websites. Like we focus on accessibility in our process. And so you’re just automatically paying for that now I will say you know when you’re building from scratch like a custom website Or you’re using frames Accessibility is a big part of frames a lot of it is already done for you Obviously the end user has to you know like we’re not choosing your colors for example, so things like color contrast That’s something you have to manage on your own, but if you’re doing that from scratch It’s much more affordable than taking a site that is absolute dog doo-doo and built in like element or divi and a client’s like we need this to be accessible.

Well dog that’s expensive, that’s expensive. But if you’re building from scratch and something like Bricks and you’re building accessibility in along the way, that’s not super expensive. Just bake that extra knowledge and that extra quality into your pricing from the jump and you’re good to go.

And you don’t even have to just tell your client, by the way, we care a lot about accessibility. We focus on it and we build that in automatically to your website. Now, ongoing accessibility, like, you know, accessibility is an ongoing thing.

So you need, someone needs to be doing accessibility audits, like every six months, you can do an accessibility audit. Or quarterly, however you want to manage it. That, again, should be baked into your monthly management fee.

And these are all reasons why that monthly management fee or your care plan, whatever you want to call it, needs to be on the higher end of things. You should not be charging like $39 a month for maintenance and care plans and stuff like that. You should be probably minimum $99 a month, $199 a month.

You should have some different tiers. I’m gonna do a whole write-up on, I’m gonna put it on the blog, because this is like a mission-critical thing. I could put it in the inner circle, right, lock it away behind behind the paywall, okay, but I’m not gonna do it.

I feel like just from a fundamental, like even responsibility standpoint, a lot of these agencies out here, if you don’t have a care plan, and you don’t have a good care plan and you’re not approaching this the way you should be approaching it actually harms your clients as well and it harms the industry and so I feel like I’m just gonna do a write-up on the blog so it’s available to anyone and everyone on like how to structure your care plans why they should be structured this way what to charge for them how to sell them I’m gonna do a whole like it’s gonna be the ultimate guide to like care plans And I’m not the only one that’s obviously, you know talked about this and and produce content around it But a lot of people do want my perspective on it And I do think that there’s a lot of things missing from a lot of care plans that people are offering So I’m just gonna put my two cents into the pot and I’ll do that on the on the Gary dot CEO blog It’s actually I already started drafting it. So it’s not like an idea I just came up with. It’s one that’s already kind of in the works.

But I will be publishing that as soon as possible. OK, where did Ecamm go? I hate not having two monitors.

Absolutely hate it. Will there be a follow-up series to PB101? No.

No, there will not be. And let’s talk about why. There will not be a 201.

There will not be a 301. There will not be, here’s the thing. PB101 is already, first of all, it’s very hard.

It’s very hard to organize a course on what we do. And actually, Kevin Powell talked about this not long ago. Because he’s done some courses as well on like CSS.

And I’ve done courses on like JavaScript, for example. And I almost always feel like, and I’ll just tell the story of learning SAS, because this is a good example. So originally Automatic CSS was built in Vanilla CSS.

It’s just like, I just, here’s a style sheet, Vanilla CSS all the way, start to finish, which by the way, you know, people talk about creating their own framework or whatever. If you try to create a CSS framework in vanilla CSS, you are a psychopath As I was I was a psychopath Back when I did it. It’s it’s it’s a it is absolutely a situation for SAS Okay, it is not a vanilla CSS kind of situation But I wrote the first version in vanilla CSS and quickly realized I’m an absolute psychopath for trying to do this, that I need to rewrite this.

It has to all be rewritten in SAS. I didn’t know SAS at the time. So what do you do?

Do you do a course on SAS? What do you do? 1:12:59

Well, no. 1:13:00 For me, the best way to learn, and I think the best way for all of us to learn, in essence, beyond the very basics, is to tackle a project.

That is the best way to learn. So if I’m going to learn JavaScript, I tried the whole, like, let me do module one, let me do module two, let me do module three of JavaScript. And it’s always like, they’re trying to teach you these concepts, but in what we do, there’s no linear path to learning.

There just isn’t. There just isn’t. Just think about, CSS is the easiest thing to learn, right?

What do you learn first? Well, you need to learn that there’s this thing called IDs and these things called classes. You need to know the fundamentals of how those things work.

But then what do you do with the classes? How do you style them? What do you need to learn first?

In some situations, you need to know what font size does. And then you go down the font size rabbit hole. That’s a rabbit hole on its own.

Because there’s rims. You could do it in IMS. But if you do it in IMS, you’re a psychopath.

So we have to learn why you wouldn’t want to do it in IMS. But then we learn this thing called clamps. It’s like a fluid responsive typography.

And now we’re down a clamp rabbit hole. But in order to understand clamps, you have to understand VH units. Now we’re in the VH rabbit hole.

Like, you see that there’s no linear, like, just learn this thing. Then you can learn this thing. Anything that you try to learn has, like, eight other things that you have to learn sprouting off of it.

So because there’s no linear path, it’s very hard to put a course together. I put the best possible course that I could put together for PB101. But beyond that, people are like, well, we need a 201.

You don’t. You don’t need a 201. You know what you need to do?

You need to learn concepts, one-off concepts, okay, that are 201 level or 301 level or 401 level or however you want to structure it, but you just have them available as one-off training so that when people are working on real-world projects and are like, shit, I don’t know how to do this, they can go find that specific training and learn how to do it. Now they know how to do it. And that’s how you learn.

Beyond the fundamentals, beyond the basics, you learn by doing real projects. And when you run into a sticking point, and so when I was doing SaaS, right, so I was like, okay, got the fundamentals of SAS down, so I’m going to get started. And I’m doing a real project called Automatic CSS.

And then I run into a situation where I’m like, oh, this needs what’s called a loop. How does a loop work in SAS? Now guess what I do.

I go off and I learn how loops work. Then I come back and I build the loop. And now it’s like I’m putting pieces together.

Then I get to this next section, and it’s like, oh, this needs a different kind of math variable. OK, got to figure out how to do that in SAS. So I go off and solve that problem.

Now that’s in the knowledge bank. OK, then I come over here, and I say, oh, this maybe could be done with SAS extend. Oh, what’s that?

OK, got to go off in that rabbit hole, find that piece. OK, bring that into the knowledge bank. Oh, now we need a function in SAS for what we’re trying to do.

How do functions work in SAS? Got to go learn functions. So whatever I’m running into, that’s the piece I’m going to find education around, and then putting that in my knowledge bank.

There is no 201 course that just linearly teaches you how to go to the next level. It’s always pieces of information that you’ve got to pull in, put in your knowledge bank, put in your toolbox. And then as you continue to practice and implement and execute your toolbox grows and your knowledge bank expands and you get better and better and better and that’s the best way to learn.

Best way to learn is by tackling actual real world projects. So you don’t need that you don’t need if you watch PV 101 the idea was you watch PV 101 you do you build along with it then you tackle a real project and most of the stuff you’re gonna run into in a real project is gonna be talked about in PB101. So you go back to the necessary lessons that you need to brush up on, and then anything beyond that is handled by one-off trainings in the inner circle, like event management training, for example, okay?

You go, you’re like, hey, my client needs events. Well, great, here’s an event. We can’t be like, well, in 301, stop what you’re doing, because we don’t cover events until 301, right?

That’s the linear progression that you have to know. It’s not. It’s whatever you need at the time.

You need real-time learning. That’s what you need. So you just need a library of trainings that you can go into and say, that’s the topic I need right now, teach me on.

It’s not a course. It’s just one-off trainings. That’s what the inner circle is.

That’s the library of trainings that you can just go in and be like, that’s the thing I need right now. And you access it, you learn it, and you move on with your life. So yeah, that’s the approach that I would take.

I’m moving from Bootstrap to Tailwind CSS. Are you custom coding? What are you, where are you building sites?

Because this could be a good move if you are custom coding things. But if you’re working in a page builder, I would say that I would rethink your strategy. We want to say that the most polite way possible.

Tailwind is a nightmare in page builders, an absolute nightmare. Let’s see. 1:18:21

Okay. 1:18:22 I’m very thankful for your efforts, GreatPB101.

It’s a great series. Thank you. 1:18:27

I appreciate it. 1:18:28 I saw you switch from Calendly to Latepoint, any drawbacks?

None so far, well yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of things that need to be improved with Latepoint but, you know, I’ve talked a lot with Adam and, you know, I just, I have faith in a lot of the, basically everything that they do, you know, SureCart, SureMembers, now LayPoint, right? So LayPoint was just acquired, well, I guess partially acquired is the most accurate thing to say. But I really, really do like where LayPoint is at right now, and I know it’s only gonna get better and better and better, and so I wanna be in on the ground floor, right?

And so that’s kind of where we’re at right now. Oh, let’s see here. Go up.

I got about 15, 20 more minutes and then we’ll probably wrap this thing up. I have really good turnout today, which is fantastic. Turn your ACSS Black Friday banner red or bright green.

I don’t know. I mean I could. I could.

I think people are going to find it. I think it’s easy. I think it’s easy enough.

Can you talk about your come up story? You have mentioned that you suffered a lot and it’s awesome to see you doing well. I find it motivating, would love to hear more stories.

Well I have a lot of them. I mean, depends on what angle you want to discuss from. I don’t want to rehash exactly what we talked about on the last live stream.

If you do, if you want to go back to the last, I think it was toward the very end of the last live stream. Because we were talking about mentality, right? We were talking about, I believe we were talking about poor versus broke, right?

And the mentality difference between those two things. And then I shared a little bit about my experiences with being broke. So I don’t know, I think we should, if you have any specific questions, I might be able to answer them.

But I would point people to the end of that live stream. It was the live stream before this one. OK, let’s see.

Are there any other tools, Bricks, ACSS, Frames, and InnerCircle? Are there any other tools I need to be able to redo my local business website? As a dad of three girls, I appreciate the work you put into this.

No, no, no, no, no. I mean, Bricks, ACSS, and Frames, and that’s pretty much all you need. Well, I mean, advanced custom fields.

You can look at my stack. Go to my Brics blueprint. But a lot of that is not like necessary necessary.

Look at the stack that I used for the zendesk. com home page. Brics, automatic CSS, frames, advanced custom fields.

Literally, that’s all that’s installed on that site. So that’s a very minimal stack. And I was still able to do, what was I able to do on that Zendesk.

com homepage? The multi-sync tab slider situations, all the loops, all the, everything. Everything that’s, it’s not a simple homepage.

Everything that was done there was just done with those, with that stack. Very, very minimal stack. So yeah, you don’t need a lot.

That is the good thing. Have you tried Amelia? My team’s tried Amelia for a client.

I’ve talked to a lot of people that use Amelia. I mean, I know it’s powerful, but like the customization aspect of it is very, very difficult. Which is actually a knock on Latepoint right now as well.

Like, it’s not easy to customize Latepoint. But what I do know is because I talked to Adam it’s on the top of their to-do list like they want it to be much more very easy to customize and sure card is very easy to customize so you know I have no doubt that they will that they will make that happen with late point as well isn’t inner circle same the same prices as it was before your offer well we talked about that at the beginning of the stream. The price is about to go up.

So this is your last chance to lock in the current prices. Is this on Inner Circle or YouTube, the videos? Which videos are you talking about?

Ground Pets, that’s an interesting little name. Okay, I got to get down to more recent questions here. 1:22:50

Let’s go all the way down. 1:22:51 Okay.

1:22:52 Do you have any insider info from Thomas about the native facets progress in BRICS? Unfortunately not.

I don’t have any insider info from Thomas on anything. Thomas, I’m not sure is a real person. He could be AI.

Never met him, never seen him, never seen a video of him, never seen. . .

I don’t even know if I’ve seen a photo of Thomas. Thomas could be like an Elon Musk, like you know, he could be, he could be like a robot. He could be like the Tesla, he could be a Tesla robot, like the first model.

I don’t know, I don’t know anything about Thomas. I wish I did. I wish there was more transparency there.

I invited him on the channel. He said he’s too busy. I wanted to get him on a stream or an interview or something.

I wanted to talk to him, pick his brain. I wanted to see what his vision is for BRICS, what his philosophy is on various things. That’s why I will say this.

I will say this. Quickly, I’m quickly becoming a bigger fan of Quikly. I don’t like the name.

I don’t like the name, Quikly. But I do like Quikly as a product. And I do like Lewis from Quikly.

Not the other Lewis. Don’t get us confused. Don’t get our Lewis-ies confused, okay?

I’m a big fan of the Lewis from Quikly. And one of the things that I’m a big, and you guys know me. I mean, here I am every single Wednesday.

Here I am on the ACSS channel doing live streams on ACSS, doing Q&A, painting a picture, talking about vision, talking about philosophy, talking about process, talking about anything and anything you guys want to talk about. I am very very big on transparency. Very big on transparency, very big on like, I feel like if you’re buying into a product like Automatic CSS, like Frames, you should absolutely be able to know the philosophy, the vision, all of it.

The founder, like, you know, it should all be made available to you. Quikly is doing a great job at that. Like, they’re doing live streams.

Lewis is on camera, face to face, talking about philosophy, answering objections, answering questions, talking about the future of Quikly, talking about like, what does he want to do with it, where is it going to go, what’s coming next. He’s doing a fantastic job with that. Like as far as transparency goes, Quickly beats Bricks in that department by a long shot.

I wish Thomas did more of it, okay. So you know if you’re grading the page builders, you got to give that win to Quickly over there. Components, Quickly was the first one with the component, got to give them a win there, right.

A lot of things I like about Quickly. Quickly is my number two right now, by the way. Oxygen has slipped again.

It has slipped again. Oxygen slipped out of number one because of Bricks. And now it’s slipped out of the number two spot because of Quickly.

And it is nestled in the number three spot at the current time. 1:25:57 I saw Jira in your bookmarks.

Man, what is going on? I don’t know. There’s like a I don’t know

1:25:59 I don’t know what you guys can say. Okay, are we putting these things in the right places?

Sarah Martin? Hey, just let’s just Sarah can fly around here. I saw Jira in your bookmarks tab.

Are you switching away from base camp? Not for agency stuff not for agency stuff. We had to switch I tried to make base camp work on the development side of things for like automatic CSS and frames and all that.

And we made it work for as long as possible. Basecamp is not really for software development workflows in my opinion and then Matteo’s opinion and so we switched to Jira for automatic CSS and frames stuff. But all my agency stuff is still in Basecamp.

And I still highly, highly, highly recommend Basecamp for, and they changed their pricing back again. They changed their pricing back again, so go check that out. I think it’s much more manageable now for smaller agencies.

But yeah, I’m still with Basecamp for that stuff. I emailed the other Lewis with questions on how he’ll move forward in current issue stances he’s taken because I was actually considering buying Breakdance. Well, did you get a response?

Spill the beans, what did he say? Did you get a response? Louis is not like um it’s not like he’s not trans transparent I mean I don’t know I don’t know you know he did say breakdance will not have XYZ and then you know breakdance has XYZ so that’s a knock on I don’t know I don’t know why that happened I mean you could just argue that he changed his mind right it’s not that he lied it’s like I just changed his mind I guess I don’t know.

The thing with the menu builder, the challenge with that is that our resources are all like, the Death Star is pointed at ACSS 3. 0 right now, right? Like all resources, all hands on deck is ACSS 3.

0 right now. You say that we can replace bricks extras with frames but will frames have dynamic charts and x-ray mode? Don’t know what x-ray mode is.

I’ve never needed an x-ray mode whatever it is. So no it probably won’t have that. Dynamic charts.

I’ve never needed to put a chart on a website in all my years. In all my years. I mean it sounds fun it’s like okay yeah how often are you gonna use it that’s the thing right is there a charts plug-in that I could quickly get to make it happen do I really need it to be a part of frames what we focus on is like the fundamental stuff you use over and over and over and day in and day out and like that’s that’s really what we focus on I think there’s a lot of yeah I think there’s there’s a lot of like stuff that’s, you know, I don’t know.

Lottie files, I’ve never used a Lottie file in my life. I mean, it’s like, it’s kind of, it’s kind of cute. It’s like, that’s cute.

1:29:04 It’s cute. 1:29:05

Never had a client request a Lottie file. Are we really making money with Lottie files? Is this like, is this, if somebody can make a case for like, dude, you’re leaving thousands of dollars on the table because you didn’t use a Lottie file.

Then I’ll, then I’ll, I’ll take note. I’ll take note. But like, you know, and it’s, it’s, it kind of goes back to, I never did it.

I should have, I should have done the rant episode on the websites that win design awards. There’s websites that win design awards. They’re all absolutely fucking atrocious.

Every single one of them. Like in terms of UX, like user experience, and probably conversions, absolutely atrocious. It’s like I’m in the business of building websites that make money for my clients.

Like I’m in the business of websites that rank, websites that generate an ROI, websites ROI. Websites that convert like crazy. Websites where we know, let’s all be on the same page, that copy is the most important thing.

Okay. So it’s like, will it have Lottie files? Will it have cute little cursors?

Will it have that? None of this stuff makes us any more money. Now, a modal, a modal makes us a crap load of money.

Okay. Like, you know, you’re able to pop up various stuff and modals are very important. Modals are very important.

That’s something we focus on in frames We focus on a lot of stuff that it’s very value a mega menu builder That’s accessible that makes your life really easy get what you want done with your mega menu or your just standard menu Hey that you know, that’s ROI right there. That’s ROI right there That’s something we’re gonna focus on and and I could ask people it’s like would you rather us, let’s say for frames, let’s all take a vote right now. What do you guys want for frames next?

If you could take a vote. Do you want the accessible menu builder? Or do you want dynamic charts and graphs?

1:31:05 Which one? 1:31:06

Which one are you going to use more? Which one’s more valuable to you? Which one’s going to have a better ROI?

And I think 99% of people would be like Doug I don’t need the charts and graphs please give me the menu builder please please give me the menu builder and then I say of course that’s why we’re focused on the menu builder next so that’s where we’re gonna put our money and our resources is in the menu builder because we know that’s gonna bring the most value to the most users like charts are cool whatever I’ve never used a chart on a site ever. I don’t think ever. I can’t remember when it happened, if it did happen.

It’s just like, man, yeah, see, everybody’s going to say menu builder. Every single person is pretty much going to vote for menu builder. So yeah, I think that’s where we go.

I charge between $600,000 and $1,000,000 starting for custom Lottie files. It’s not worth it in my opinion, but if a client insists there is good money to be made in animation work. You know there could be a random one-off instance where it makes a ton of sense, you know, but it’s like how many sites are we building?

Can anybody raise their hand where there’s like, man I just I just had to have a Lottie file. You know it’s like, I don’t know. It’s just it’s not that exciting For sure if you’re like a lottie file creator There’s probably a lot of people that need lottie files for various reasons But as an agency who builds websites that convert it’s like, you know, how often do we run into the need for a lottie file?

Yeah, OGC says one site ever So if he says, I just have a passion for animation, not too much though, I make GIFs, Lotties, and explainer videos. Yeah, and there’s, you can make a lot of money I’m sure, filling that need, but you’re a specialist in Lottie files, right? It’s like, you know, the average agency probably just doesn’t need Lottie files.

It’s not to say that there’s nobody out there that doesn’t need them it’s but it’s you know the average agency probably just doesn’t have much use for it breakdance new pricing is interesting well I mean if I had to guess it’s probably just like element or because they’re doing what element or does more or less I mean they’ve said that they’ve they pretty much said that I’m not screen sharing I’m just going to the pricing real quick to see to see what’s going on last chance for low prices guys breakdance Pro soon to be 399 a year Well, you know I’m not gonna knock you know anything related to pricing I think you know people complain about element or its pricing. I guess let me go back here. Let me let me go back We can all visit this together.

Here’s Breakdance’s pricing. Here’s Elementor. Am I on the pricing page already?

No. Hold on. What’s going on here?

Page Builder Plugin. Let’s go there. So their expert plan is normally $1.

99 a year. Their agency plan is $3. 99 a year.

Okay, what did I say? What did I say? Didn’t I say it probably looks something like Elementor, because they just copy Elementor pretty much on everything.

So Elementor is $3. 99 a year, so Breakdance is going to $3. 99 a year.

Okay, called it, right? Didn’t even need to look. That’s a thousand websites.

This is unlimited websites. That’s the differentiator that they’re going for. But you know, if you’re going to get me to complain about prices, I’m not going to, I’m rarely ever going to complain about prices because I’ve already been on record a gazillion and a half times saying that every single one of these tools is underpriced.

Elementor is underpriced. Breakdance is underpriced. Bricks is stupidly underpriced.

priced like that LTD that’s currently available for bricks is just guys this is like absolutely dumb it’s just the pricing for all these things is stupid low so I you’re not gonna catch me complaining about prices for any of these tools yeah I think I yeah well I just said I just said what I said I think that’s all that really needs to be said. Now there’s gonna be people who disagree obviously you know everything should be free there’s those people you know I love the everything should be free people those are fantastic like yeah yeah you’re all the sites that you do for your clients should also be free I guess why why why don’t they ever seem to extend that to their own work hmm hmm it’s always like know nothing do nothing people. They’re like, everything should be free.

Everything should be on LTD. Okay, buddy. All right.

Yeah, why don’t you, why don’t you, why don’t you just, every client you come across, $299, $299, lifetime, that’s how much their website costs. Go for it. See how far you get.

Let’s see. I’m waiting for bricks new pricing before buying yearly might be more sustainable for dev see look at this look at this champ right here look at this champ now I wouldn’t go that far I wouldn’t go that far I mean if it’s available right now you go get it but you also encourage them hey because because honestly and I made this case the other day all these LTD collectors they run around collecting LTDs for everything and they and they love when stuff’s on LTD. But what they never admit to themselves is that they have a whole wallet full of dead LTDs.

Like, we know this is the case. There’s so many LTDs. Like, I got my LTD, and then two years later it’s like, how’s that LTD doing for you?

That dead app that you have, that dead plugin that’s not supported anymore, that doesn’t even work anymore with the latest version of WordPress, because 6. 4. 1 absolutely merked their plugin and there’s nobody around to fix it anymore, right?

Everybody’s got all these dead LTVs. Why like, yeah, why don’t we focus on if you really care about the tool and you really think the tool is super valuable, let’s make sure that they’re going to be around. Let’s make sure they have a good cash flow situation going on.

Let’s get on subscription with them. Let’s fund future development for this tool, because it is very important that it sticks around for all of us Like it should make people Very comfortable that people pay annually for automatic CSS that people are going to pay and well They already a lot of them do pay annually for frames right now The LCD for that will be going away. So a CSS and frames will be on Like continued funding.

I don’t have to go find new buyers all the time for these tools. It’s on continued funding. Everybody chips in and we chip in a tremendous amount of effort and time and focus on making it better and better and better constantly.

Go look at the change logs. Go look at the change logs, right? And then you don’t run into an oxygen situation where the founder gets on a live stream and literally says, I don’t care what people think because I already have their money and they’re not going to pay me anymore So I don’t care what they think Literally said that on a live stream now most people aren’t stupid enough to say that on a live stream But that’s how all the LTD authors think by the way They also think that you know what a lot of these people buying my LTD aren’t even going to use my product And I don’t care.

I just want their money When I created automatic CSS and put it on the LTD, I was like, please, please use the product after you buy it. I do not want you to buy this LTD and then not use it. Please, please, please use it.

Right. I hate that about LTDs. I hate that people just collect them and don’t even use the products.

It’s stupid. And, and, but you know, a lot of people that create products love that. They’re like, yes, I love the fact that people just give me money Don’t actually use the product don’t ever use my support system.

They love that They love that’s like part of the reason they’re they keep the LCD model around. I hate that. I absolutely hate it Okay, we got to get out of here in just a minute What about the ACSS cheat sheet?

It’s right around the corner. We’ve got the JSON pretty much refactored. It was waiting on JSON refactoring.

So that refactoring is pretty much complete. We’re just doing some final round of testing just to make sure nothing else has to change with the structure. It’s quite complicated.

But now we’re going to take the JSON and we’re going to create the cheat sheet with the JSON file. So it’ll always be 100% updated. There won’t be any missing utilities like there have been in the past, right?

Because we were always updating it manually in the past. Now the JSON, which controls the plugin, which controls the contextual menus, which controls everything about the experience of automatic CSS, is also going to control the cheat sheet. So always, everything will be 100% in sync at all times.

That’s that was the reason why we were moving to this model and we’re right around the corner. Question, third time, will there be a video playlist component in frames? There’s no in Bricks universe so far or is there a plug-in you recommend?

Bricks has a video player component. Now, if you tell me, I don’t like that component and here’s why it’s missing XYZ feature, then absolutely something we can consider. But right now, like when we put videos in frames or when I put videos in Bricks in my own websites, I’m using the frame of the Bricks video component.

They already have a video component. And I haven’t run into any deal breaker limitations with it, I guess. So I haven’t felt the need to build my own.

But if there is something that you wanna make a case for, I’m all ears. 1:41:27 All right.

1:41:28 Initial offering of LTD for seed money is not a bad thing, 1:41:31

subscription model after a sound. 1:41:33 Yeah, that’s exactly the approach I’ve taken we do LTD for a brand new offer basically a fund it right and then we move as quickly as possible to a subscription model okay let’s see that was a multi-part comment it seems oh no here we go yeah cuz this I think this is an important point right into the day we work from home, we only need internet and a PC, right?

We don’t need a location, we don’t need tremendous amount of expenses that other businesses need. So it’s insane to me, the main tool that we all use as a page builder. Bricks, whatever it happens to be, breakdance, Elementor, right?

All of the, well, I won’t make the joke, okay? But anyway, that’s the primary tool that we do almost all of our work with. That we make, some of us, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from this tool.

So we go back to price to value ratio. What is the price to value ratio on BRICS? My God, how many hundreds of thousands of dollars I’ve made with BRICS?

And what did I pay them? What did I pay? Imagine you’re the Bricks team.

Let’s go to bricksbuilder. io and I didn’t even buy it the current price. Let’s get Bricks.

This is their new homepage. I’m not a huge fan but whatever. $249 and I think I got it at $199, $229, $199, somewhere in there.

$169? Maybe I paid $169. I can’t remember.

I can’t remember. But it wasn’t, I mean, it doesn’t even matter. Doesn’t even matter.

Guys, I paid Thomas. I paid Thomas. Let’s say it was $200.

I paid Thomas $200 and then I took his tool and went and made seven figures with it. 1:43:27 The price to value,

1:43:29 isn’t there a little bit of a mismatch there? Don’t you feel like that’s a little bit of a mismatch?

So we’ve got all these people. Now if you’re broke and you’re not, you know, your agency’s going nowhere And it’s basically a hobby or something then maybe it’s expensive to you. I don’t it’s still not expensive but My gosh Mismatch that’s like me.

That’s like, you know a company that makes ten million dollars a year going We need a brand new website and we want this website. We want to rank on Google We want to we want you to send a PPC for us You know, our goal is to grow from 10 million to 50 million That’s our goal and we think that you know ranking really well having really good UX having really good conversion rates We think that this is really going to help us in that effort to get from 10 million to 50 million dollars and so That’s a tremendous amount of value They want me to add to their business and if I go back and put a proposal together where I’m like, dog, I got you. I got you.

Just pay me $1,500 and I’m going to get that all done for you. That would be like me doing that. Maybe even worse than that.

Maybe it would be like, dog, I got you. $500. I’ll take care of you.

$500. That’s kind of the value mismatch there. 1:44:46

It’s insane. 1:44:47 The price of these tools is stupid it is absolutely dumb dumb and so but literally people will complain every day people complain about the cost of bricks every I can’t believe I can’t believe how much you’re raising the price on this can’t believe you’re raising the price it’s like what I can’t believe he hasn’t raised the price ten times already that’s what I can’t believe yeah let’s see this comment.

I love this. I love these. Suddenly having all the builders increase their prices to the frames builder corners the market in 12 months.

Sneaky. There won’t be a there won’t be a builder. Not anytime soon.

Not anytime soon. But yeah, I mean, like, we all know, we all we all know that these most of us that are in, let’s say everybody in the know, everybody in the know. Anybody with a micro-ounce of business sense understands that these builders are stupidly priced.

You know what they’re priced for? They’re priced for, here’s the thing, here’s the problem that I think they’re facing. And they don’t know any other way to solve the problem other than price, which is a common thing in business.

There’s a lot of page builders and more or less they have the same workflow right so the workflow in Bricks of like I’ve got my elements on the left I’ve got my structure panel on the right and I’ve got a canvas in the middle and I’ve got breakpoints and I can add things to the canvas and I can restructure them that general thing right nobody’s coming out with like a revolutionary new way to page build it’s like you open Divi you open Elementor then you open breakdance and you open Webflow then you open bricks and you open oxygen you open them all and you just go from tab to tab to tab it’s relatively the same experience now in page building 101 I made a very good case for how the output of all of these builders is not the same the output of bricks and the output of Elementor are wildly different. And we see that BRICS and Oxygen have a class-first workflow, where Elementor and Breakdance and Divi do not have a class-first workflow, and Gutenberg does not have a. .

. Gutenberg, the block editor, you could argue, is actually more of a fundamentally different building experience. Now, it’s a massive downgrade in experience, nevertheless it is a different experience.

But I think these page builders feel like we’re not all that unique, you know. Yes, we have clean code output if you’re BRX and Oxygen. Yes, we have a class first workflow.

But they’re worried at the same time that people don’t know what a class first workflow is, the majority of buyers. If you’re targeting mass market, you’re going for like an Elementor, mass market share, Divi, mass market share. It’s tough to build a breakdance and compete with those if you’re not competing on price.

You can’t make breakdance twice as much as Divi or Elementor because people are just like, I think I’ll stick with Elementor. Because what do you have to offer them? A way of cleaner code output.

We have a friendlier loop, we have like we’re a little bit better for e-commerce, like is that enough to justify? So in a market where every every product is under priced, right, is way too cheap, it’s hard for you to come out with more or less the same experience and price it correctly. Now you could, you could in a way with a BRX because I think that the clean code output and the class first workflow are fundamentally different and fundamentally more valuable.

But the problem that they run into is education. So they think, we can’t really mass market that because the mass market doesn’t know what a class is. The mass market doesn’t know what BIM is.

The mass market doesn’t know a lot about CSS. And so how are we going to go there? And the only builder that’s done it properly is Webflow.

That’s the only builder that’s actually done it properly. Where they built a legitimately professional tool and they went to mass market with that tool and that workflow because along with their marketing came education. They put millions of dollars into education that’s if you’re a bricks or an oxygen and you want to pay if you want to charge top dollar and You want to bring a class first workflow to the mass market you have to come with education That’s why bricks has skyrocketed right in popularity I mean, I don’t mean to pat myself on the back, but I feel like it’s, they were missing the education component.

So I bring in the education component to like, look at this tool that’s very fundamentally different from the others, here’s how you use it. And then people are just like, fantastic, let’s go, let’s rock and roll. Like if that education was not there, there wouldn’t be a big reason to use Bricks.

If you were gonna style everything at the ID level, there’s not a big reason to use Bricks, right? The only value you get out of Bricks, other than the clean code output, is the class-first workflow, which you can also do in Oxygen, but Oxygen has its own issues. CPTs, repeaters, all the stuff that we talk about in PB101, the ability to assign custom CSS with a dynamic root selector to individual elements or groups of elements.

That’s very, very powerful. But if you don’t have education, you don’t know jack shit about that, right? Nor do you care about it.

Most beginners wouldn’t even, because they don’t even know the power of it. They don’t even understand. It’s not even a concept in their mind.

So you bring education to the table and suddenly now you can sell lots of these copies of this tool. And now you can increase the price. Because now people understand the fundamental difference and value between this tool and the others, they’re willing to pay more for it.

If you bring a product like this to market with no education, people don’t know the value difference. They don’t, you can tell them, oh, class first workflow. Until they’ve experienced it and used it and built a workflow around it, they don’t comprehend the value.

They cannot comprehend the value. I have this problem with automatic CSS all the time. I blatantly say this.

I don’t put a lot of effort into convincing people to use automatic CSS on the ACSS website. Building a website that converts people into automatic CSS is not my game plan. I do not rely or try to get the ACSS website to really rank for anything, to convince people to use it or to buy it, that is, because I know, fundamentally, you cannot understand the value of automatic CSS until you use it or watch somebody else use it extensively.

Once you use it, once you see other people using it, then you can get it. And once you get it, you’re gonna buy it, right? But I don’t, and I don’t even want people, if you, day one, you come to auto, you just somehow land on the automatic CSS website, right?

You just, oh, here we are, here we are. What is this thing? I don’t know what this thing is.

I don’t want you to buy it. I want you to look around, I want you to watch a video, I want you to leave, and I want you to maybe stumble upon more automatic CSS videos on YouTube and see other people using it, right? And then I want you to come back a month from now and buy it.

That is the flow I hope people go through. Because I know, even with all the education I provide, all of the onboarding, all the community that can help you, if you just day one, you don’t know what a CSS framework is, you don’t know what automatic CSS is, you never used something like this before in your workflow, the idea that you’re going to buy it, install it, and immediately have a great experience with it, not even understanding the philosophy. Like, it’s slim to none.

You’re probably not gonna have a good experience with it. So I don’t want people to buy it the first time they see it. I want people to like interact and see it happening.

That’s why I do so many videos, so many trainings. You see it in every single video. I want people to get it before they buy it, right?

You have to, something in your mind has to be unlocked of like, oh, I get it. Then you buy it. Then you have a good experience with it.

If you don’t get it, I don’t want you to buy it. So same thing with a, with a BRICS, right? You can build a page builder with a class first workflow.

If somebody doesn’t get it, they don’t understand the value, the philosophy of what are we even doing with this thing? They’re going to be frustrated as hell. What the hell is a class?

What am I doing with these things? I just want to go back to Elementor, where I can just style things and not have to think. That’s what they want.

They don’t know what they need, but they know what they want, right? They need classes, but they want ID styling, because ID styling is easy. It’s like, there’s not a lot for me to think about.

Oh, I don’t have to name things. Naming things is hard. Why would I want to name things when I don’t have to name things then you explain to them the whole laundry list of you?

Know I actually it’s funny. I was in Gutenberg Okay, because I’m planning a video the video concept is this can I build? XYZ in the block editor, I’m gonna pick a home page or a random page We’re gonna do this as maybe a little you know every year and This is embarrassing.

It’s not embarrassing for me. It’s embarrassing for WordPress and This is embarrassing. It’s not embarrassing for me.

It’s embarrassing for WordPress guys, we are five plus years into Gutenberg’s development and I’m doing a video called Can I build it in the block editor? I like shouldn’t be a five plus years in should it be like what can’t I build like that? Well, shouldn’t that be the model like like, you know, what is the limitation there?

My concept for the video is, can I even build a simple page? Like, is it even possible? And I’m not talking about with like a block pack, right?

I’m not talking about like, oh, well, you know, I put generate blocks in here. 1:55:05 No, no, no, no, no, no.

1:55:07 Native block editor, can I build a simple homepage? Can I build a simple sales page?

Can I build a simple landing page? Is it possible? The fact that I’m asking that five plus years into development is unbearably embarrassing, right?

For the Gutenberg team, if I was them. I started to poke around. I started to poke around.

I was like, let me see what’s going on here. And I will tell you right now, I mean, supposedly this thing is built for beginners. Do you know if you wanted to use the native block editor versus something like Bricks, okay?

And remember they want the block editor to kill page builders. That is absolutely a hundred percent their vision. They do not want WordPress users using page builders.

They want everybody using the block editor. I will tell you right now, if you don’t know a lick of page building, if you don’t know a lick of CSS, your ass better be in Elementor or Divi or Breakdance or something and not in the block editor. The block editor, it is a requirement that you know absolutely what you are doing.

And you have to know custom CSS because they don’t have controls for hardly anything. Simple typography stuff, whatever, background color, main color, whatever. Anything beyond that, you’re writing custom CSS.

100% every day of the week. So if you don’t know custom CSS, you cannot use the block editor in its current form. Which is astonishing to me, because they’ve spent five plus years trying to build something that supposedly anybody can pick up and use.

And then the actual aspects of the layout, I can hardly use. After 20 plus years of development, I can hardly use it. I don’t know what I’m doing.

I’m like, where’s my div? Well, there is one. I’ve got to use a group.

What the hell is a group? I don’t know. It’s not a concept in web design.

Grouping things is a concept, but there’s no group element. That’s never been a thing. We’re just out of thin air coming up with new concepts for things that don’t really need to exist.

But if you think about a beginner, yes, I guess a group is more semantically meaningful than div. Okay, whatever. I guess that’s the argument.

But then, you know, if you have a, you can have a group, you can have a stack, you can have a row. A row and a stack are both groups, by the way, but they’re not called groups, they’re called different things. You have a group, a row, and a stack, right?

If you make the group a stack, which you can do, and nothing will change. You make the group a stack, nothing changes, but the options you have for styling have changed. You’ve lost options, right, in one versus the other.

This is mind-boggling to me, right? In a world where we know a div in Bricks can be flex, row, column, doesn’t matter, it can also be grid if I wanted to. It can also be a block level element if I wanted to.

It can also be a list. It can also be a list item. It can be anything I want it to be or need it to be.

This is not true in Gutenberg, right? In Gutenberg, you have a stack, and a stack can’t be a row, I don’t think. Maybe it can, but then it’s not a stack anymore.

It’s morphed into something else. It can’t be a group and a stack, right? And then if you make it a group, you have certain options.

If you make it a stack, you lose some options. This is insanity. This is psychopath stuff, right?

This is like, I don’t know what’s going on here. There is no grid to speak of. There’s no grid whatsoever.

There’s not a lot of, there’s a lot of nothing is what there is. And so the idea that anybody could open it and build a page with it, that’s not happening. You’re gonna need a theme that gives you layouts and then maybe you can shuffle stuff around and like but again anything you need to customize beyond the ultra basics is cut you’re writing custom CSS.

So I’m gonna do this series to prove a point like because the answer is no. The answer is no. Can I can I like if I was a beginner can I open the block editor and put a page together?

The answer unequivocally is no. After five plus years of trying to make that the possibility. And not only is it no, you are as far away from a yes as you can possibly get.

Like I would recommend every day of the week that somebody use Elementor instead of the block editor, if that’s what they’re gonna do. Or Divi instead of the block editor, or Bricks instead of the block. Hell, use Bricks and just style everything at the ideal level.

Because by the way, in the block editor, you don’t have classes. There’s no classes in the block. I mean, you can add them to things, but you can’t style them.

So there is no class first workflow in the block editor. I got instantly frustrated. People will see this in the video when I put one together.

I was building pricing cards. And I went back to the day. Guys, you know how long it’s been since I’ve styled stuff at the ID level?

It’s been years and years and years and years. Okay, I’m used to if I build a component called a card and I want to change the styling, it’s just all my pricing cards will update. I was back in like copy paste lands, manually move stuff around lands.

And I was like, what the fuck are we doing? What are we doing here? It makes no sense.

It’s but I have to show people I have to do a video and it’s going to be a video full of just you’re going to see me. Just be like, what are we doing here? What do they want us to do here?

What are they asking us to do here? And why? Why is this the workflow being proposed after five plus years of development?

That’s kind of what you’re going to see. Now, does that mean it can’t ultimately get to where they want it to go? No, there’s nothing stopping it from getting to where it needs to be.

But it’s embarrassing where it is five plus years into development. And there’s people who like they hate me for saying this. There’s a lot of like block editor lovers out there.

Okay. They absolutely hate this. But I think it’s undeniable.

You cannot and I have to do a video so that it can be visually undeniable. 2:01:06 Watch me do it.

2:01:07 Hey, can I can a 20 plus year vet even pick this thing up and get something done with it without writing a bunch of customs? The answer is no.

But when I write a bunch of custom CSS, we will get to the finish line. But I want I’m going to show you what it takes to get to the finish line. And that’s embarrassing.

Okay, I think we got to we got to cut it there. I’ll read some final comments just to see see what people are saying. This is why it drives me mad when people say, just stay with Gutenberg builders and proceed to install three block plugins.

Hey, absolutely. This idea that like, oh, I don’t want bricks because I want to build natively in WordPress. I’m like, OK, well, are you using the block editor by itself?

No, I’m using generate. 2:01:55 I’m like, what?

2:01:56 This is the same thing. You put a third party layer on top of WordPress.

That’s all you’ve done. 2:02:01 Oh, I’m using Quickly.

2:02:02 It’s the same thing. Just because Quickly’s in Gutenberg, it doesn’t mean it’s any closer, really.

Like, you’re still, it’s still a third-party layer. It’s still a third-party layer. And it doesn’t give you any advantages.

It gives you the same disadvantages. You’re relying on a third-party layer. So, yeah, this is absolutely 100% correct.

Like, if you’re, and that’s why the series is going to be, can I do it, like, I want to do it natively we are not going to install any third-party layer and I will show you how limited it is and even going into FSC because I know the block editor there here’s the argument they’re gonna make oh we’re not supposed to do all that stuff in the block editor you’re supposed to do it in FSC land and in FSC land you can do it with the block editor but you’re templating things in FSC land and okay we will go there we’ll go there. We’ll go there. We’ll explore FSE together.

We’ll all take a look at it Because I think it’s very important that we all understand what’s happening in core. Okay? But five plus years into development you need a third-party layer And by the way, the FSE theme is going to be a third-party layer like unless you build one yourself So we’re still back to square one of I’m using a third-party layer on top of WordPress So that is a good point there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the things that we did on Zendesk. com will likely be frames, don’t worry about that. Let’s see.

Opinion on JetEngine or Crocoblock, I’ve never personally used them, I’ve never had a need to use them. So I just, I can’t give an opinion on them. Let’s see.

I rebuilt four websites because I couldn’t update Gutenberg. I call it Hindenburg. I think Hindenburg is a.

. . If we’re going cultural, if we’re going cultural, you know, Gutenberg, it’s all cultural references in WordPress.

I think Hindenburg is a very good cultural reference. They should consider rebranding. rebranding but that that’s what I’m personally going with let’s see some good comments in here the yes I feel the same way the block editor is harder than using a page it’s way harder it’s not even just harder it’s way harder way harder way more limiting absolutely All right, everybody’s pretty much in agreement here.

But I think there’s a lot of people that do wanna see this block editor thing. And I have to at some point start branching out and start bringing in more of the WordPress ecosystem 2:04:34

to what we’re doing here. 2:04:35 And the more we bring more of the WordPress ecosystem by creating content that’s outside of Bricksland, outside of Oxygenland, right?

If I can go create some block editor content, if I can go create some, you know, some late point content, some sure cart content, some, like I can bring in more of the ecosystem and then we can convert them over to this better workflow and more professionalism and a better vision, right? It’s gonna benefit everybody but that’s kind of what needs to start happening. Okay, I’m out.

It’s been two hours. I love you guys. Been live from Sarasota.

I’ve had fun. Happy Thanksgiving, number one. Number two, you’ve seen the LTD stuff right here, right?

Don’t be the person that comes like back crawling on their knees begging for like, oh, I should have got it when it was a just, just get it now. You should have all three things. You should have automatic CSS in your toolkit.

You should have frames in your toolkit, you should be using those things every single day and you should have Inner Circle as your resource center. All right? These are no brainers, they’re all underpriced.

We already talked about that. Everything in WordPress land is underpriced. I hope you have a fantastic holiday.

I’ll be back next week in Atlanta. I’ll be back in Atlanta next week pumping out more videos, pumping out more content. ACSS 3.

0 is right around the corner. Frames for Figma will be back in January, right around the corner. 2024 is going to be a killer year for everything that we do, us collectively, our agencies, our tools.

2024 is going to be on fire, okay? I’m out. I’ll see you guys soon.

Peace. 2:06:24 I’ll see you guys soon.

I’ll see you guys soon.

2:06:25 Peace.