WDD LIVE 070: Full Open Q&A / AMA Beginner to Advanced

What’s up, everybody?

It is WDD time.

Stripe goat in the house.

What’s up, man?

Tell me what’s good today.

I just got off a two-hour call with the team.

It was an etch call.

Some super exciting stuff.

Oh, I got to shut this thing down before it comes in here and disturbs us.

Okay, good.

All right.

I need a good dose of rant today, says John Frascos.

Maybe, maybe you guys get to choose the topic.

That’s what we’re doing today.

It is a full episode of Q&A, AMA.

A lot of people don’t know what AMA stands for.

It’s just ask me anything.

That’s what it stands for.

Very simple.

Very simple.

You guys choose the topics today.

You guys choose the questions, but they need to have a hashtag question attached to them or hashtag Q.

Otherwise, they are absolutely going to get lost and they are not going to get answered.

Before we get too far into the stream, go ahead and hit like on the stream.

Let’s make sure that YouTube gets this distributed out properly to everybody.

Feed the algorithm.

So hit that like button.

But as I was saying, I just got off a two-hour call with the team on Etch.

It’s just, I mean, the excitement, the excitement, the possibilities, the just seeing, seeing it’s, it’s, you know, the proof of concept that’s, that’s, that’s coming to get, it’s just, it’s, it’s absolutely fantastic.

So going to be some good stuff ahead.

The future is bright.

The future is bright.

Marcus Burnett in the house.

Hey, hey, KG listening in while I keep getting ready for WordCamp Minneapolis and WordCamp US.

Absolutely.

We need to connect at WordCamp US for sure.

Let’s not, let’s not let that go by without that, without that happening.

Okay.

Uh, did you see new?

Okay.

Yeah, that’s a good question.

We’ll get, we’ll get to that.

Etch had better not be a mouse mat.

Um, okay, man, questions are already flowing in.

Questions can be, let’s just make sure everybody’s on the same page.

Questions can be about pretty much anything.

Uh, a lot of people think that because of how other people have done live streams, maybe like this, or Q and A’s in the past, that it’s all kind of a development thing, like, uh, asking questions about design development, yada, yada, yada.

But it’s really, it can be business related for those of you who are agency owners and freelancers, uh, process related, pricing related, anything related to making your business more successful.

A lot of times people get the most value out of that side of things.

Um, but it can also be about design development.

Uh, it could be about, Hey, how do I solve this specific problem?

It could be about CSS.

It could be about a wide range of things.

If I don’t know the answer, I’ll just tell you, I don’t know, ask somebody else.

Uh, but if I do know, then I will give you as much value as I possibly can.

So that’s it.

This is a complete viewer driven stream today.

Sometimes we have topics.

If you’re new here, sometimes we have topics.

Sometimes we, it’s a variety show.

Really?

We, we do a lot of different things, but today’s episode, 100% viewer driven.

You choose the topics, you choose the questions, and we are just going to rock and roll.

I don’t really have any other, uh, announcements or anything else to talk about.

So we will dive right in general commentary in the chat is, um, I can’t really see it all that much unless I jump out of the questions.

So keep that in mind.

Um, put a, put a hashtag Q or turn it into a question.

If you want me to see it, that’s probably the easiest way to make sure, uh, that I see something.

Okay.

Um, let’s see.

Sebastian says, when you are designing a mid-sized directory, uh, 1,000 entries plus, uh, would you go for something like WPGO directory or would ACF also be able to scale easily with its relationship fields?

Your advice?

Um, I don’t know that I would be doing a lot with relationships in that regard.

I mean, probably have heavy on taxonomy use.

Um, I’ve never used WPGO directory, so I can’t speak to that specifically.

I, I always would try to do it with, um, something like ACF, but you’re probably going to want to look into custom tables, uh, when you’re going to have a ton of data like that.

So I, I do trend away from, you know, third-party plugins like that though.

If we can, if we can just use CPTs, custom fields, taxonomies, that’s where I try to live.

Okay.

What are the plans for ACSS and its Breakdance builder integration?

Well, uh, the framework is integrated with Breakdance, so you can use ACSS seamlessly inside of Breakdance.

I believe the dashboard works just fine inside of Breakdance as well.

In fact, we had to get them to write us a custom hook to be able to get the dashboard to show up in Breakdance.

So yeah, that’s, uh, that side of things should all be good.

Now there’s the question of context menus.

There’s the question of variable expansion and validation.

There’s the question of recipes.

There’s the quiet.

Okay.

So there’s a lot of other features that ACSS has and other builders, primarily bricks, um, that would potentially come to Breakdance.

The context menus are being completely rewritten right now.

Um, so there’s context menus 2.0 coming out and those are going to be, it’s going to be a huge upgrade over the 1.0 version, just in terms of, uh, stability, accuracy, uh, fluidness by, you know, native, it looking native to match the rest of ACSS.

Right now, you know, the context menus look different from the ACSS dashboard.

Um, and, and it’s not even, they’re not even built in the same language.

Right.

So that’s all getting unified essentially.

And I don’t think it makes sense to focus on getting the context menus and all of that into Breakdance in the current version.

Right.

It’s like, let’s finish the 2.0 rewrite of the context menus and then let’s get it into Breakdance if there’s enough people.

So the thing we have to understand too is we, we want to integrate with other builders where it makes sense to integrate, but prime, it’s not just to like appease people.

It would be good if that helped us reach a bigger market, but, um, there’s limitations.

There’s limitations in terms of like the content that I’m able to produce.

I am not permitted to, I mean, I guess I could, I, if it’s strictly Breakdance, you know, related content, but that requires me to actually like start building sites and Breakdance just for the purposes of demonstrating ACSS and Breakdance and all of that.

Um, I’ve got a, I’ve got a lot on my plate.

What I, what I do kind of need is a Breakdance focused content creator who uses ACSS to kind of do that work.

And we reward through an affiliate program for them to do that.

Uh, but then there’s the question of, you know, is, is the content going to be allowed?

Are they allowed to promote that content in, in like Breakdance’s user group?

And there’s all, there’s a lot of hurdles, right?

So if it doesn’t help us reach a bigger market, it doesn’t make all that much sense.

I mean, I’m spending tens of thousands of dollars potentially to integrate with a builder.

It’s got to get something.

It’s got to, like, something’s got to come to us for that.

Right.

It’s not, it’s not, we’re not running a charity.

Uh, and it’s not just the idea of saying, Ooh, look, we, we integrate over here.

Like other frameworks do.

They, they say they integrate with anything.

They don’t integrate with everything.

They don’t integrate with everything.

Um, it’s not a seamless integration and it’s not all their features and they just do it for marketing purposes.

If I, if we tell you that we integrate with something, we fully integrate with the thing.

Um, now auto BIM is like another feature that’s would, we would have to think about.

Does, does any Breakdance user even really use BIM?

Do they use a class first workflow?

Do they like, now it speaks to the culture of the builder itself.

Uh, we know Breakdance is not designed for those people, uh, or people who, who use that workflow.

Most people who use that workflow recognize that they should probably be using bricks.

Right.

Uh, or a page builder that facilitates that kind of work where Breakdance, that kind of work is really a work around, right?

You’re, you’re spending a lot of your time working around, uh, who Breakdance was designed for.

So just keep that kind of stuff in mind.

Keep that kind of stuff in mind.

Uh, and I, and I would ask, you know, uh, and I do ask, I say, why, why are you choosing Breakdance over something like bricks?

It’s a really good question.

Really good question.

If you, if you BIM, if you use a class first workflow, if you want to, you know, have the most seamless experience with full control over everything that you’re doing and not rely on a bunch of pre-made stuff and why, why?

And the one answer that I do here consistently is it’s easier for my clients or something like that.

And then we get into the whole discussion about like easier for what, or what, what, why should your clients be in there doing things?

It’s a, now it speaks to the culture of agency work and freelance work.

And, uh, do clients even know what they’re doing?

Should they be changing things?

What are the implications of those changes?

Why don’t people seem to understand that those kinds of changes have really important implications?

Um, that, but that’s a whole side tangent.

If we get, we’ll get into that if you want to get into it, but somebody is going to have to ask about it.

Why we shouldn’t let clients be editing websites.

Okay.

Rob Cooper.

Do I understand correctly that once a frame is imported, there’s no need or reason to rename all the classes, but to only BIM the pieces I need to customize for my need and add custom classes.

Um, that’s a really, uh, there’s a lot of angles to that question there, Rob.

On its face, if you import a frame, let’s just ask the question.

If I import a frame, do I have to change its classes?

And the answer is no, unequivocally no.

You can use the frame as is.

You can style the classes that are attached to it.

What is the benefit?

What is the benefit to changing the names of the classes?

Um, one is aesthetic.

It’s like, I don’t like the name.

I don’t like, um, I don’t like my hero section being called hero Chicago or something.

It doesn’t make any sense to me.

Um, we use generic namings obviously, cause how else are you going to name them?

Right?

We it’s, we don’t want to name it one, two, seven, eight, seven.

Like that doesn’t make any sense.

So we put like generic names on them, like, you know, hero section Chicago.

Great.

If you don’t care that it’s called hero section to Chicago, they, uh, you don’t need to change it.

You don’t need to change it.

But if you want to change it, you can use auto BIM to change it.

You can just edit the class names and change them, but it’s not required.

It is not required.

Um, now, uh, the, another benefit, I guess, an easy benefit is that you then have the potential to import a fresh version of hero section Chicago.

So if I’ve changed it to hero, whatever, and then I want to import, if you turn on the setting in ACSS to allow this to happen, because it doesn’t natively happen in bricks, uh, you can then import a fresh version of the frame.

So yeah, that maybe that’s another benefit.

If that’s important to you, maybe you want to go that route.

But, um, I, I think the main thing to hit on here is, is no, you do not have, it’s not a requirement to rename the classes when you are using frames.

Um, let’s see.

Oh my gosh.

Okay.

I don’t need the phone call right now.

What are, okay.

That one we already answered.

Um, did you see Paul WP Tut’s new video about stopping WP development thoughts?

I did not see the video.

I saw, I mean, I saw it come up in my feed.

Uh, I haven’t watched it yet.

It’s not, um, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a thing that’s been kicked around for a while.

An idea that’s been kicked around for a while.

Uh, and I do heavily believe as you guys will see soon, um, there’s going to be a special announcement video, uh, coming next week.

I believe, I believe next week it will go up special announcement video.

And this, this is really going to be a video, um, starting to set the stage, uh, for etch, but really it speaks to what needs to happen for the future of WordPress.

Uh, we talk a lot about the future of WordPress on this channel.

Uh, I’ve been running polls on X.

I don’t know if you guys have, if you’re not following me on X, you should go follow me on X.

I’ve been running some very interesting polls with very interesting results.

I’ve also seems to be a little bit of, a little bit of manipulation in, in some of the results.

I think there’s some, there’s some WordPress sycophants maybe, uh, that see some of these polls and then they share them internally and say, guys, we got to pump the numbers up on this answer right here.

Cause it’s not looking great.

Okay.

Cause I did one poll that started out drastic difference in the answers.

And then suddenly just kind of like, Oh, you know, in the dark of night, it’s like, wow, they caught up this one answer just caught up.

Um, and it was the answer that benefited kind of, uh, WordPress in that regard.

And then I compared that.

Cause by the way, I’m asking the question on different platforms.

And so I compare the results to this platform over here where there’s still a wide gap between the two answers and miraculously over here, um, when it started trending the wrong direction, things tightened up.

Uh, so there might be a little bit of politicking going on behind the scenes there.

Um, but it’s very interesting.

It’s very interesting.

And it’s all going to get baked into the special announcement video, uh, that’s going to go up next week.

And that’s going to be a really, really interesting and fun day.

Um, okay.

But I will speak to that in that announcement video for sure.

Okay.

Uh, dose of rant is needed.

Do you have a public opinion on awesome motive and then buying plugins, lots of times development halts after that?

Uh, I, I think, you know, people have asked me about, I don’t, I don’t have any opinions on awesome motive in particular that are of any interest, but I do have some thoughts on selling plugins.

Uh, people have asked me like, would you sell automatic CSS?

Would you sell frames?

Whatever.

Uh, what, what, what would happen potentially with etch if somebody wanted to acquire etch?

And it’s like, well, um, some people think just about money.

They think just about like, okay, well, if the number’s right, then I’ll sell.

I tend to be much more protective of my work, protective of the mission that that work is trying to accomplish.

Uh, the people who have bought into that mission, the people who care about that mission.

And so we talk about fundamentally transforming the landscape of front end development.

If I’m in a position where somebody’s trying to buy the thing that I’m working on, but I feel like we haven’t achieved our mission of fundamentally changing the landscape of front end development yet, I don’t want to hand it over to somebody else necessarily.

Um, and it doesn’t really matter to me.

The thing that we have to understand about acquisition of products, a lot of times, a lot of products are started with acquisition in mind.

People will come up with an idea and they’re, they want to get it to a point where it is, um, interesting enough to acquire.

And then they’re going to take the first good deal that comes along.

Right.

Then there’s other products where they, they build it without the intention of selling.

And it gets to the point where it’s super interesting and it’s done really great things and it’s proven itself in the market.

And then it becomes attractive to people who want to acquire it for whatever reason.

And people start making offers and then people start weighing their options.

And it’s like, Oh, that’s so much money though.

And the, and then sometimes also the people who are building that product don’t realize or didn’t realize the amount of work that actually went into it at that point.

And by the time the offers start coming, those people have lost a little bit of stamina and they’ve lost a little bit of their, the focus on the mission and they’re just kind of tired and they’re beaten down and they’re like, man, this money looks real nice and I can just get out and I can just take the money.

And that would be, that would solve all my problems that I’m dealing with right now.

Um, I don’t lose, I don’t, I don’t lose stamina.

Okay.

Uh, number one, uh, number two, I don’t lose sight of the mission.

All right.

Those are two really, really important things.

And I also understand that if people are making offers, it means the thing they’re trying to buy is worth a lot more than the number on the paper that they’re passing across.

Right.

And so to me, it always comes back to have we, have we completed our mission?

Um, and then it’s also ensuring like, are the users going to be in a good place after this acquisition?

If somebody like awesome motive comes along and they have a track record of killing products after they acquire it, uh, for whatever reason, or just fucking products up after they buy it.

And I’m not saying awesome motive does that.

I’m just saying if a company has that reputation and they’re giving me an offer, the answer is no, like you’re not, you’re not going to do that to my product.

Okay.

So, um, it would have to be a situation where I 100% believe in the people who are acquiring it and something else has to have happened at some point, or either I feel like I’ve done, I’ve done all I can do in this regard.

And maybe this bigger thing needs to take it to the next place that it’s going to go, whatever.

I don’t know.

We don’t have a crystal ball.

Um, but am I, am I focused on acquisition?

No, a hundred percent.

No.

Um, and what I, what I let anybody acquire it just because they put some number in front of me, that’s interesting.

No, it wouldn’t be just anybody.

It would have to be a very, um, specific situation where I know the product and the user base are still going to be taken care of like without a doubt.

And if there’s a doubt in my mind, then the answer is just no at that point.

So there, there’s some things that would be very important that would need to be put in place.

Um, okay.

There’s also, by the way, the, the potential of acquisition where the visionary like stays on board, right?

That that’s another possibility too.

So, uh, but I, I don’t have any interest at this point in time.

I don’t, I’m not even thinking about it, considering it, uh, with any of the products that we’re doing, it’s just not, it’s not really something that interests me.

Uh, okay.

So can I use okay LCH colors in ACSS?

Um, I mean, no, like not in the dashboard.

You can’t, uh, in custom CSS, you can.

And, uh, we’re looking at okay LCH for, um, potentially switching over from HSL.

So right now automatic CSS uses HSL primarily to do all of its magic.

Uh, but we are looking into okay LCH.

Uh, and so there could be a switch at some point over to okay LCH.

Such a mouthful.

Uh, let’s see.

Um, looking for, let’s find some interesting ones.

Uh, do you come to Web Summit in November in Lisbon?

Well, considering that, um, this is the first time I’m hearing of Web Summit.

I, I, the answer as, um, you know, as it stands right now is no.

Uh, but I do, and you know, I, I do, I do love how these, these conferences give me a really great excuse to travel.

I do like to travel.

Um, it just depends.

It depends.

Send me the information on it.

Somebody send me Web Summit information and I will take a look.

Uh, let’s see.

Best way after the fact to add a new, okay.

Best way after the fact to add a new mobile break point due to a wide nap.

Okay.

Like you need an extra mobile break point.

Um, well you said mobile break point.

Is that like the smallest break point?

Is it a tweener break point?

Is it in between others?

What kind of break point is it?

I think we need a little bit more context on that.

Um, got a super chat from Ruben Garcia.

It most likely, I don’t even need to look.

It most likely says leave breakdance alone.

Uh, but when I get to it, we’ll see, we’ll see what it says.

Um, if it’s the smallest level break point, you’re probably okay.

It’s probably safe at any point in time to add that.

If it’s a tweener break point, those are kind of some decisions you’re, you’re going to want to make early on in your, in your projects.

Um, can you please run very quick, the setup of ACSS and bricks?

What should I sync between these two?

I mean, that’s so simple.

It’s super, super simple.

Uh, let’s go.

Let me, let me, let me screen share before we forget here.

Uh, magic login, by the way, you can, you can just go to automatic CSS.com slash docs.

Uh, we give everything to you for the most part on a silver platter.

You go to bricks builder set up right here and import brick settings file.

So you download this brick settings file.

That’s going to give you all the backend brick settings that we recommend.

None of which really are required by the way, maybe one or two things in there that are important, but I wouldn’t really say any are, are like required.

Uh, but then the theme file, the theme file we give you, which you can just upload.

So it’s literally two files.

You go upload, upload, and you’re done.

Um, it’s, it’s, it’s like that, but in the bricks theme file, there’s really nothing there.

Uh, it’s like two settings.

Um, so let’s go in and let’s go into the builder and let’s go to theme styles.

Okay.

So obviously the condition is the entire website.

Okay.

That’s like by default.

Um, and then in typography, actually, this is not even my blueprint.

So these things don’t even need to be set here.

Uh, so typography root font size right here.

You do that.

Essentially you put the variable root font size in there and then element container.

You put your content with variable in the width field.

And that is like it.

No, you see yellow dots here.

Those aren’t, those are just on this install right here.

Like I set my default age.

That’s just a, these are preference things.

The only requirement is what I just showed you root font size right here and content width right here.

Done.

Start building.

That’s it.

Uh, it is not a difficult setup.

It is.

Um, and if you import the setup files, it’s that’s parts done for you anyway, and you can just move on with your life.

Super easy.

Okay.

Whenever sure cart V3 comes out as frames going to release frames for it.

Um, we already have frames for it.

That’s what I think people need to understand.

I, I went to the sure cart team and I said, if we can’t loop through products, if we can’t loop through things, it’s going to, it’s, it’s not a great experience, right?

It’s not, it’s not what people actually need.

And so they were essentially like we’re on it and they’ve delivered now.

And so products, for example, you can loop through as if there are any other posts in any other post type.

And so that means you can use any frames, any, any of the card frames, section frames, layout frames that use anything that looks like a product card or stuff that we built for WooCommerce.

Um, essentially you just anything that’s native to WooCommerce, you can just swap out for, for sure cart.

Um, but it’s the database side of things that they’re really giving us access to is like, we couldn’t loop through products before.

So how do you make a custom product layout?

You couldn’t now you can, and you could use any frame that exists to do that.

There might be some sure cart specific things that we could bake into specific frames here and there, but we’ll have to see, right?

It’s not even, it’s not here yet.

So I haven’t been able to play with it yet.

Therefore, I don’t know all the implications and all the possibilities, but we will definitely be looking at it.

Can you please run a very, okay, we did that one.

Um, do you see a near future?

Uh, okay.

Do you see a near future where you, your agency switch from WordPress to another platform?

No, I don’t, I don’t see that.

I don’t see that future.

I am doing everything I possibly can to encourage the WordPress team to shore up current issues with WordPress.

Um, to keep focused on the most important aspects of WordPress, which are not the block editor, by the way, not the site editor, but the CMS and the CMS, unfortunately you’ll, you’ll hear all of this in my announcement video.

The CMS has been dramatically neglected, dramatically, criminally neglected.

Like if we’re talking about felonies and misdemeanors and jail time, you know, you could make the case.

This is all just being, it’s, it’s, uh, for entertainment value only, but you understand what I’m getting at.

You understand that it’s, it’s fairly criminal to neglect the core of the product for seven straight years and leave it in the condition that it’s currently in.

Now I’m not the kind of person that’s like, we should all leave WordPress.

No, no, no, no, no.

That’s not, that’s not my position.

My position is we should refocus.

My position is we should try to get WordPress back to a place of market dominance.

It is currently losing its position as the dominant player in the market.

It has, um, it has major issues with how it is seen and interpreted in the market, especially by key demographics, by the way.

I don’t think you can, if we’re talking about leading indicators for where WordPress is going in this, this goes back to a lot.

Let’s, let’s just make sure we’re all on the same page.

A lot of people don’t know what leading indicators are.

A lot of people are blind to leading indicators.

There are things that happen that when some people see them understand, Oh, this is going to play out a certain way in three years or five years or seven years.

When stuff happened in oxygen land, there were leading indicators.

And I use those leading indicators to make statements about the future of oxygen and the people who are blind to leading indicators, or they don’t know what a leading indicator is, or they don’t know how to interpret them properly would all say, Kevin, you’re crazy.

Look at the now, look at how great the now is.

And I don’t know why this disconnect occurs, but I’m trying to say, guys, now is not relevant.

Then Israel, like the future is the relevant piece here.

And what we’re seeing does not bode well for the future.

And therefore I can make statements about the now and statements like, if I say, oxygen is dead, let’s interpret it as dead, let’s essentially treat it as dead, you should start looking for a new platform.

People will be like, Kevin, it’s not, it’s clearly not dead.

Look at it now.

Look at it.

And they start firing off these things that are not leading indicators that are indicators that are indicators of nothing really that are facts.

They are facts.

Let’s get that straight.

And this is where it gets so cloudy.

The things that they’re saying are facts, but they’re unable to think ahead.

Right?

And so if you say oxygen is not dead, if I go oxygen’s dead, guys, let’s move on.

That’s based on leading indicators.

They say oxygen’s not dead.

That’s a fact.

It’s not, it’s not now.

I’m asking you to put yourself into your future self.

Okay.

Like, are you, should you stick with this platform?

Should you sell a client?

Cause remember what we really have to do here.

This is not about us.

So for most of us, agency owners, freelancers, you, and I’ve, I’ve had conversations with clients where I sit in a boardroom and they go, and I’m talking big clients and they go, we’re not sure about this oxygen thing.

I’m putting myself back five years ago, six years ago, whatever it was, we’re not sure about this oxygen thing.

And I’ve got to fucking sell them on it.

Right?

No, no, no, no.

You should, you should use this tool right here.

Quickly is another example.

We just had this discussion about quickly, quickly.

Oh, look, quickly’s back.

No, it’s not back.

Now, is it a fact to say that it’s back?

That’s a fucking fact, but I’m not talking about now facts.

I’m talking about future facts.

These are two different things.

Okay.

And so if you’re in a position where you are faced with the decision, do I sell my client on using quickly or do we do something at, well, you can’t sell them on using quickly based on the historical record of what’s happened.

You can’t do that.

It’s just not, that’s negligence.

That’s negligence.

Same thing.

If I say you’re going to sell clients on using oxygen, knowing what we know, looking at these leading indicators, you’re going to sell clients on using oxygen.

That’s negligence.

So you’d need to put yourself into your future shoes and go, that’s dead to us.

This thing is dead to us.

Now we got to go a different direction.

That was the argument.

Those are made on leading indicators.

So now you look at the leading indicators of WordPress.

It’s to the point where I say three to five years, if something doesn’t change, our reality is not going to be the reality we enjoy now.

So you can say all you want.

WordPress is still the leading thing in the market.

It’s still the dominant market player.

It’s still, whatever.

I don’t care.

Whatever you want to say, those may be facts right now, but based on the things that I’m seeing in three to five years, you’re not going to be able to say that.

And so we need to fast forward and figure out how do we not get to this point?

What do we need to change now to ensure that you can still say those facts in three to five years?

Because based on what I’m seeing, you’re not going to be able to say that three to five years from now.

And I don’t give a fuck about what’s going on right now.

Because right now doesn’t really help me all that much when I’m dedicating everything to this platform.

I need to know that three to five years from now, we’re still going to be winning.

I enjoy being on the winning team.

And if I see that our team is doing something where we’re not going to be the winning team in three to five years, then we got to change something, don’t we?

Right?

I am still in my winning phase and I don’t plan to leave my winning phase anytime in the near future.

So we look at what’s going on right now, three to five years from now, it’s not going to be a good situation.

What do we need to change?

Those are the leading indicators that I’m looking at.

One of them being, by the way, let’s talk about demographics.

So if you are losing in the teenager and twenties demographic, and not just losing, but getting absolutely trounced, pummeled to death in that category, like Facebook is, okay?

How do you stay a dominant platform when you’re losing the key demographic of the next generation of users?

How is that possible?

That doesn’t, that math does not math.

You have to be able to get that demographic.

Why are we not getting that demographic?

Well, for various reasons.

One of them is like, I would think that the interface looks like it’s from fucking 2008.

Nobody in the current generation wants to use that interface.

That’s one big problem.

Okay.

But that UI problem speaks to many different other issues, but these are just pieces.

These are things that I’m looking at.

And you look at real stats.

You can’t, it’s just a fact of life.

You can’t lose the next generation and then still claim that you’re going to be the dominant player.

That does not work.

Okay.

So that’s something we have to think about.

And that’s just one thing to think about.

There’s so many things, but we could see there’s a lot of work to be done.

Big point, big point though, where I can say it would be a negligence to use quickly right now.

It would be negligent to use oxygen after, after Lewis literally got on a live stream and said, it’s a legacy product.

That’s his words, not mine.

He’s, he said it’s a legacy product.

Well, once that’s been said, I mean, and you’re thinking ahead, you got to start looking for a different platform.

Don’t you to, to continue like putting every egg in that basket seems to be, to be negligent.

All right.

So WordPress, I see the red flags.

I see the leading indicators, but it’s not to the point where I say, guys, we got to look for something else.

I’m not looking for anything else.

I’m not looking because I 100% believe that the problems WordPress has are absolutely fixable.

They are absolutely fixable.

We can turn things around, right?

They’re not headed in a great direction, but we can absolutely turn things around and we can go back to clearly being dominant in the marketplace.

We can make Wix and Webflow and Squarespace and these other tools that are encroaching right now on WordPress.

We can easily beat them back and we can win the key demographics and we can win in the court of public opinion, right?

We can win in the court of public opinion, right?

Because if you look at, if you look at, you know, just ask people, what do you think of WordPress compared to Webflow?

This is one of the polls that I did.

Webflow is kind of seen as, oh, it’s like the, the hipper platform, the cooler platform.

That’s where all the design talent is.

And it’s a more modern interface and it’s okay.

That is a perception of the tool.

The perception of WordPress is kind of like, it’s a dinosaur.

It’s old.

It’s ugly.

It’s the wild, wild west.

It’s like, now there’s a lot of advantage.

It’s not to say that WordPress isn’t more powerful than Webflow or anything else.

I’m talking specifically about perception and perception is very important.

You don’t want your tool to be perceived as the dinosaur.

You don’t want your tool to be perceived as a clusterfuck.

Okay.

Cause a lot of people perceive that.

They’re like, it’s got three UIs dog.

It’s got three different UIs.

It’s got, one of them’s from 2008.

Like, I mean, nobody can feel good, like, and be cool using that tool.

This is what the lower demographics think, right?

That’s why they want nothing to do with Facebook.

Facebook, that’s where my fucking grandmother is.

That’s where she posts cat photos.

I don’t want to go on that platform.

That’s a perception of Facebook that is driving away key demographics that then lead Facebook to not being the dominant social media platform in the future.

You guys see how all this stuff ties together?

WordPress is losing in key areas right now that are going to spell some semblance of disaster in the future.

If they don’t change, now we can change them.

Absolutely.

We can change them, but somebody has got to step up and quit being a yes man.

Cause WordPress has a lot of yes men and a lot of yes women.

They have both.

Uh, we, we have to make sure that there’s some counter voices.

Those counter voices are very important because we’re all just like, yeah, like nobody wants to admit that the ship is kind of sinking.

Like nobody’s like, Hey, uh, this part’s leaking over here.

If nobody wants to do that, then it’s going to get to be a bigger leak and a bigger leak and a bigger leak.

And then you’re halfway underwater and everybody wants to look around like, Oh, what happened?

I don’t know.

We didn’t see this coming.

The ice.

We see it coming.

You just, you look at the leading indicators and things become very clear.

Okay.

Um, there, somebody wanted a rant.

Somebody called for a rant.

You got, you got your first one.

Uh, let’s see for a section in bricks.

How can I limit the background color to the width of the site?

Wow.

Okay.

Limit the background color to the width of the site.

Well, if you’re adding a section element, you’ve got a container element, the container element is the width of the site by default.

Right.

Um, now if you wanted content to exist in here, I think one of the easiest ways essentially, um, would be, you know, if you cleared out the top and bottom padding, and now you have this kind of thing and let’s put, uh, like another block inside of here, you could really put anything you want inside of there, but we, we do still want to be kind of in a grouping content, uh, method, methodology here.

Um, you know, you’re starting to get to something like this.

Now the question is like, do you really want that to, to be touching?

Well, I mean, it’s, you know, it’s as simple as adding the padding back.

I don’t know really what you’re, what you’re wanting, but this is a colored section where the background color stops at the edges of the content width.

It just depends on, you know, if you want it to go all the way to the top, the reason most people don’t do this is because that right there, depending on what it’s bumping up against may not look that great.

And then if you put padding around it, does that make sense within the greater context of your layout and the page that you’re trying to build?

Really what we need to see is an example.

It’s like, what are you trying to accomplish?

And I will, I will say this because it’s actually very important when we’re giving support, right?

In ACSS group.

And for this happens all the time, people will ask a question that’s specific.

And this is a perfect example of one where it’s like, how do I limit the background color to the width of the site?

Well, if I don’t know the context for why that’s being asked or what is trying to be accomplished, I could actually give you five different answers.

I mean, I, we could go into, I could create a pseudo element that does this.

I could, I mean, there’s many different paths that we could go down.

And the only way to really answer the question is to know exactly what the outcome is supposed to be, right?

The outcome is not supposed to be background color content width of the website.

There’s some reason why that’s being asked, right?

So if you’re formulating questions, especially if you’re asking for support, really, really good idea to always include, what is my goal?

What is the overall objective?

What am I trying to accomplish?

Give the context of that situation.

And then people can actually dive in with a specific answer.

Ah, you want to do that.

And what they may, what may even happen is you actually don’t want to quote unquote, limit the background color to the content with there actually is just a completely different approach you should be taking.

And when somebody knows what the outcome is supposed to be, they’re free to give you a full answer and not just answer that specific, uh, little question, right?

So add some context there and then we can revisit that.

Will it be possible in the new frames for Figma to generate ACSS colors inside of Figma?

That’s a Tommy question.

Um, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think so.

Um, and you wouldn’t want to like the point of frames for Figma is that it maps to ACSS.

So if you’re generating like a gazillion colors and those don’t map to ACSS, it’s going to be, uh, it’s not going to be a great situation.

Right.

And I talked to Tommy about that.

Like Tommy is our lead designer, right?

He’s, you know, in the, he lives in the UI world.

He lives in design system world.

People think that I am the primary person who said we have to limit the amount of colors that ACSS uses, right?

And standardize the names for them and things like that.

That didn’t come straight from me.

That also came from Tommy.

There were discussions back and forth about, and it, it all boils down to, and you’ll see this in general software use as well, that things work better when they’re opinionated.

And that when you have something that is completely open-ended, what it typically generates is chaos and a lack of consistency.

And what you already have that.

You already, why are you using a framework?

Like you, by default, if you open code pen, what do you have in a blank code pen file?

What do you have?

Endless possibilities.

You know, fucking chaos.

You have anything could happen.

Anything you want to have happen can happen.

The reason you use a framework is for the opinions, the standardization, the efficiency, the, all the things that a framework provides.

But now you, you have this concept of like a, an open-ended framework where anything can happen.

Anything is possible.

Like, well, you’re not frameworking anymore.

Or if you are, you are spending your time, and I’ll give you a perfect example in a different industry, uh, notion, right?

People ask me, do I like notion over?

And the first thing I say is over what?

Um, notion is the possibilities engine.

You can do a look at all the things you can do in notion, which is seems fantastic until you start to use notion.

And if anybody that uses notion is just honest with themselves for just a fucking minute, right?

You have to admit, you know what I spend the majority of time doing in notion is engineering notion.

You have to be like a notion engineer.

You just became, look at all these qualifications you just got by doing all this work in notion.

You’re a fucking notion engineer.

I thought, I’m sorry.

I thought you were a web designer for a minute there.

I thought you built websites for people.

No, it turns out you do a lot of notion stuff.

Also you’re a, you’re a part-time notion engineer.

Congratulations, right?

Why?

Cause it requires, it’s so open-ended.

It requires all of that engineering.

And there’s, there’s five different ways to do things.

How do I organize my content?

Oh, I didn’t like the way I organized my content.

Let me refactor notion, right?

You find, if you’re, if you’re honest with yourself, you find that you’re spending way too much time in notion and way too little time working on actual client project stuff, right?

Um, is that a good situation?

Well, it’s not a profitable situation.

I’ll tell you that.

It’s not, that’s not efficient.

That’s not a big ROI.

Okay.

Um, framework you use it because it gives you guardrails and everybody’s like, how do I jump over the guardrail?

Stop jumping over the guardrail.

The guardrails are there for a reason.

Fucking go straight ahead.

Just go straight ahead to the finish line.

Uh, and it’s, and it’s fantastic.

It’s great.

And then there’s way less decision-making.

There’s way less engineering.

There’s way more standardization.

There’s way more consistency.

There’s way more efficiency.

Just accept it.

Just that’s why you’re using it.

Okay.

Um, and so with notion, I’ve said, no, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not going to notion.

It’s why I said, um, people ask me why base camp base camp, right?

Um, project management software over, um, what’s that other one?

Cause I haven’t used it in so long.

Um, Oh God.

Click, click up, click up, click up, man.

I tried click up.

I tried click up.

Oh, so, Oh guys, you could do so much in click up.

Haven’t you heard?

Oh, you do everything in click up.

Huh?

Great.

Okay.

I tried click up.

You know why I chose base camp guardrails?

Like man, so simple.

So sleek, streamlined, basic, just gets the job done.

What I found is that when I was in click up, I was like, do I get like a certification at some point?

What the fuck?

When do I get the awards?

When do I get, uh, can I just start, maybe I should just start selling click up services.

I can, we can have a whole click up agency on the side.

Look, I’m a master of click up now, but I haven’t gotten any client work done.

I, I, I, my, my web design business has fallen apart because I am now a certified click up engineer.

You gotta, at some point say like, what are we accomplishing here?

What are we trying to do here?

I need a tool that has already decided all of the things it’s decided.

This is the best way to do things.

And I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m just going to accept that.

And I’m going to go with it and I’m going to get my work done.

I’m going to make my money.

Uh, that’s, that’s the ultimately the, that’s the core value.

That’s the core value.

Um, people think they want the wild, wild west.

You don’t want the wild, wild west.

That’s a problem with WordPress, by the way.

It’s why people have a hard time.

We know and love the WordPress ecosystem, but I mean the fucking learning curve on this thing.

Uh, and I’ve gone through the steps of like, if my mom came into WordPress, Oh, what’s step one?

And we could rehash all that again if you want to.

But the wild, wild west has for any benefits that it has, it has a lot of cons as well.

Um, and a lot of it, we spend our time blocking all that noise out.

Don’t we?

Why does everybody want to know what’s your stack?

What’s your stack?

What’s your stack?

What’s your stack?

And they’re trying to streamline their stack.

They’re trying to simplify their stack.

Do we want 90 plugins or do we want 20 plugins?

Right?

And so if, if we feel like we’re operating within chaos, we continue to try to work to simplify.

And guess what?

When there’s a more opinionated platform, you don’t have to do that work.

When it’s less opinionated and more open and chaotic, you have to do a lot of work frameworking.

I, I, um, I would encourage everybody to go here.

Let’s go to giri.co and read this article.

Uh, because if you read the title and I titled it this for a very specific reason, because I love to get the poppies, you know, the, the poppies of the world, you got, you got to get them riled up sometimes, um, because they inadvertently then promote all of your stuff for you because they’re so enraged.

They’re so, it’s so outlandish.

All the poppies, their mouths start going off, popping off.

Right.

Um, and that’s, that’s actually good.

That’s actually, we want that to be happening.

Um, but let’s come down right here.

You, if you just read the headline, you’d be like, that’s a bullshit.

This guy selling a framework.

He just wants us to believe this.

And well, it’s written that way for a reason because, um, you know, not everybody is entitled to, uh, the information and knowledge and insight, the people that would read a headline and then just dismiss it, uh, at face value.

They don’t need the information.

They don’t deserve the information.

Okay.

But it says a CSS framework is required for maintainable web design.

Now, if you actually read the article, it’s an undeniable, undisputable fact.

If you read the article.

Okay.

Now, if you just read the headline, you can, I mean, you have a lot of poppy opinions, right?

But if you actually read it’s, it’s really not, um, and I, and I actually go through this, right?

Style this link into a button.

Here’s a link.

Now we go through different methods, methodologies, ways of thinking about this, different pros and cons and maintainability and scalability and global styling versus independent atomized styling.

And it’s, it’s all, it’s, it’s a lot of theory about how a framework actually comes to be and comes together and why you would make the decision even down into how are you naming the colors, right?

Um, it just, it goes into great detail.

I would highly recommend you read it because it’s very, um, knowledge heavy.

It will give you a lot of understanding of, and by the way, there’s a lot of poppies out there that you can build, anybody can build a CSS framework.

Just build your own framework.

Just, I just couple hours, just a couple hours to talk.

Like, no.

Okay.

They have no idea what they’re talking about.

They have no idea.

It’s hilarious.

They have no idea what they’re talking about.

Um, okay.

And then we’re just, we get down to the end of buttons.

The conclusion of the article is that you can choose a framework.

Here are your options.

At the end of the day, here are your options.

You can choose a framework and you can accept it and you can use it.

That’s the one I recommend by the way, because it’s turns out most people aren’t qualified to do this.

Um, and if they try, we get to option two, option two is you try you, you can, you can try to kind of come up with your own framework.

And if you go to and do that, what you accept is you are going to bleed a lot of time and a lot of money.

Okay.

We have to understand, Oh, Kevin, I’m doing it for free.

It’s not, nothing is free.

Calculate your time, add it up, lost opportunity cost, add it up.

It is insanely expensive to try to do this stuff on your own and to manage it on your own and stay up to date with trends and stay up to date with the possibilities of CSS and all of this other stuff.

Not to mention that like, you’re never going to get to the level that a framework got to.

You’re never going to get to the tailwind level.

You’re never going to get to the automatic CSS level.

You’ll only ever have like a tiny base level thing, but you’re still going to spend tremendous hours just getting to that point.

Or, or there is possibility number three, which is every site you do is fucking random, different magic numbers, no organization, no standardization, no nothing.

So you can build chaos projects, or you can choose a framework, accept it and move forward with it and build very efficiently and very scalably and maintainably.

And all the most important decisions have already been figured out.

And it’s just nice to be handed that on a silver platter, or you can live in the middle where you are just saying, I am going to do as much frame working as I do working.

And it’s going to be tremendously expensive.

But at the end of the day, I get to plant my flag in the ground and be like, but I did it myself.

Right.

And if that’s you, I mean, that’s you, I don’t care.

Right.

But you have to understand that those are the three decisions you’re making.

Hand it to me on a silver platter, spend my time and energy managing it and doing it all myself and probably making a shitload of mistakes along the way.

Or over here, I just build chaos projects, uh, that when people open them, they go, what the actual fuck happened here.

Um, and that happens all the time, by the way, I don’t think anybody really wants to live in that camp.

Um, it should break your brain.

Like nobody wants to build in chaos, right?

Uh, where there’s no standards, there’s no consistency.

That’s it.

Does that sound like a workflow that you want to, does that sound like a profitable workflow?

Does it sound like a professional workflow?

No, it’s not.

So that one’s even excluded.

So now you’ve got two options.

Am I going to get it to hand it to me on a silver platter that I, okay, I know, like, and believe in this framework and it just works and I just, I just use it all the time.

Or are you going to just waste gobs of time and money trying to do it on your own?

Okay.

There’s your options.

Those are just, that’s just, there’s no way around that.

It’s just the facts of the situation.

Uh, how many people are employed in an endeavor?

Like, Oh, my whole left leg is asleep.

Absolutely asleep.

Uh, if I got up right now, I’d look like a newborn deer.

Uh, how many people are employed in an endeavor like ACSS frames, etch all in all?

Uh, well, I mean, the team is on the digital gravy site.

We just added another support team member, uh, Brendan O’Connell.

You probably are familiar with him.

Uh, so he’s on the team helping with support now.

Uh, we have 10 right now, I think.

And then with etch, we’re actually probably, we’re adding a PHP developer.

Um, yeah, we’re, we’re probably going to be at 11, 12.

Now, how, how far beyond that do we need to go?

Do we want to go?

I don’t know.

Uh, I, I add, I add where we have needs.

Um, but that’s the other thing people need to keep in mind, right?

Like we, this is not a one guy project, uh, building things in the dark of night.

This is a, this is a very talented team.

And I just got off that call.

I said two hours on the call with, uh, my team talking about etch, looking at proof of concept, uh, aspects of the development.

It’s just like, man, these guys are, uh, they’re, they’re just, they’re so impressive, right?

They’re so impressive, which is not, it does not speak to me really at all.

Other than, other than I, I believe I have a gut instinct for choosing talent.

Okay.

That would be the extent of it.

Did I do extensive technical interviews with these people?

No, uh, I did not.

Um, I, I recruited everybody out of the inner circle and I also trust people that are around me.

So, you know, Mateo being very technical, Chris, Wadgie, all being very technical.

When, if they vet a new person, they’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This guy’s legit.

Okay, good.

What I primarily focus on is culture fit and the personality of the person and other broader aspect things.

And then just the gut instinct on, um, you know, I don’t know.

I don’t know what it is.

I don’t even know how to describe it.

Okay.

But what I do know is in since inception of these tools, starting with Mateo, Mateo was the first on the software side of things.

Andrea was the first on the agency web design side of things.

Both of them are still with me.

Both of them are key players.

Both of them are phenomenal assets, right?

Uh, how did that happen?

I don’t fucking know.

Every, the whole team, everybody that’s been hired is still here.

Every single, except one, except one.

We had one that was with us for two weeks.

Uh, that one, I’ll take the L.

I’ll take the L on that one.

I thought it was going to be a good fit.

It wasn’t a good fit.

They actually left on their own.

Every single other person is just like, man, this is, and then I get on calls and I’m like, these people are brilliant.

These people are awesome.

These people are amazing.

And, um, it really has very little, very little to do with me.

Um, so, you know, I, I don’t know.

I don’t know how to, I don’t know how the math mathed essentially.

Right.

Um, but we don’t have any team problems.

We don’t have any culture problems.

We don’t have, uh, any, any real problems at all.

It’s like very seamless, very smooth.

Um, and people just know their shit and they know what they’re supposed to do and they do their thing and it’s, and it’s been fantastic.

Hopefully it keeps trending that direction.

That’s all I can say.

Okay.

Um, in your event build part three within the IC, you show a different way of fetching CPT relationships.

I know it’s possible via ACF due to the way they store relations, but do you know if it’s possible in Metabox?

Ah, it’s been, it’s been a long time now since I’ve used Metabox and I just don’t know.

Uh, I kind of wrote off Metabox with the ACF switch and I have not looked back and I have never once said, I wish I was still using Metabox or I bet Metabox can do this thing that AC, it’s just not happened.

I have not had a reason to look back at Metabox.

So I have not.

So I can’t answer that question.

Unfortunately, do you think an agency that focuses on cost-effective sites around $500 has a market?

I’d focus on simple sites, library, local corner shop.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Okay.

No.

Uh, hopefully that’s not unclear.

Why though?

I’m not just going to say no.

We got to talk about why this is legitimately where I think like if a company doesn’t have, we’re talking about a business.

First of all, there’s no business.

Let’s just get this in your mind right now.

There’s no business in existence that can’t afford a $500 website, right?

If it’s, oh, 500 is our budget.

A thousand is our budget.

$2,500.

You are not dealing with a business.

You’re dealing with a glorified hobby, uh, uh, infrastructure, right?

Organization, whatever you want to call it.

Um, it, or, or you’re dealing with somebody that’s trying to rip you off.

No, that’s all we can do.

That’s all we can.

That’s not all you can do.

My guy.

Okay.

You got a BMW.

You got, you got, you got all these expenses in your other parts of your business.

I seen you buying all this other stuff.

Okay.

That’s not all you can do.

It’s all you’re willing to do because you have a view of the value that I bring to the table that is well below reality.

That’s probably, probably what you’re dealing with in that regard.

So let’s just get clear on that.

If a business doesn’t have $500 or a thousand or 2,500 or $5,000 laying around or $10,000 laying around, um, that’s, you’re probably not dealing with a business.

Uh, you’re dealing with a hobby.

They’re struggling to turn it into a business.

Okay.

These are, these are just the facts.

So what are you going to do?

Well, I mean, if we’re at that small amount of money, that is essentially, that is the market for Wix and squares.

They should go to Wix and square, or they should go to WordPress and just choose a theme and just customize it themselves or whatever to, to expect another human being to come on and build you this whole website for your business.

Like for $500, what are we, I don’t know what we’re doing here.

Right.

Don’t put yourself in that situation.

You also have to understand that if you’re, if there, there’s two fundamental facts here about the $500.

Let’s just say if $500 is all they can scrape together, they can’t scrape together anything else to market the business.

And that’s certain that money certainly isn’t going to go to you to manage that marketing.

So you’re, you’ve already hit the ceiling of revenue generation from this client.

That’s it.

You’re, you’re immediately banging your head against the ceiling.

Like you are living in a little box and you fucking start to stand up and bang, you hit your head on it.

Like there’s nowhere to go.

You, my friend are in a little cage.

Okay.

With every single one of these clients you’re in, and the cage never seems to get bigger because they’re all, they’re all sitting on top of the thing.

Okay.

Um, so that, that’s, that’s one big problem.

If you care at all about like maximizing revenue per client, the thing about good clients, real businesses, the people with actual money is they come in and say, I want this, this, this, this.

And you’re like, yep, yep, yep.

And then you’re like, but you should also do this, this, this, and this.

And they go, okay, let’s do that too.

And then it’s just that revenue turns into more revenue, turns into more revenue.

And you look up three to five years down the line, you’re still working for this client.

This client is still feeding you work and feeding you money because they’ve had it since the beginning.

Okay. $500 is all we can spend.

Okay.

You don’t have any more money.

I don’t, I’m sorry.

Like why, why should I enter into this relationship with you?

I’m not interested in one month engagements.

I’m interesting in finding clients that I can be with for the next three to five years or however many it is.

The second thing you have to understand is that when people are scraping together their life savings to hand to you, uh, for this website, it’s all we can afford.

That’s all I’ve got.

Okay.

Bad situation, really bad situation.

These are the clients that care where every dollar goes, where every minute is spent, where every fucking pixel lives.

Okay.

These are the clients that are constantly breathing down your neck.

It’s the ones where everybody’s like, Oh, I hate this client.

A nightmare client.

Rich people are the best clients.

Okay.

The people with the most money are the best clients because they don’t give a fuck.

They’re like, look, if you waste $5,000, like they got a gazillion more where that came from.

Right?

So it’s like, man, we did this.

It didn’t work.

They’re not.

Imagine, imagine you give me your only $500.

And you’re like, Kevin, you’ve got to run.

You’ve got to use this $500.

You’ve got to run a profitable ad campaign on Facebook for me.

I can’t stand to lose this money.

It’s got to produce an ROI.

Well, in your mind, you should be like, I mean, a lot of advertising is theory and testing.

And we, you have to spend money figuring out what doesn’t work a lot of times in order to get to something that does work.

Try having those conversations when you’re juggling this person’s like only last cent.

Okay.

It doesn’t work.

They’re there.

They have so much anxiety.

They’re like, fuck, I can’t lose any money.

I got it.

I got to get an ROI.

Whereas rich people are like, yeah, I mean, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Lose that money.

Figure, figure out how to make more of it, whatever.

Like I need an ROI in like three months from now.

They’re not worried about every dollar, every pixel, every, the clients with no money are the worst ones to have because they just care about every single detail.

You need the clients who will give you the money and step back and give you some breathing room to actually do your work.

Okay.

Um, so many bad reasons why the $500 clients are, are a no go.

Don’t touch them with a 10 foot pole.

That is not the business that you want to be in.

Okay.

Um, how would you productize websites for service businesses?

I probably wouldn’t.

I probably wouldn’t productize them.

I don’t.

Um, here’s another article right here.

I, I try to give, this will actually save us time.

I try to give detailed reasoning for the positions that I take.

Right.

Um, where is it?

WordPress.

Here you go.

Eight major arguments against website as a service, which is essentially productized websites.

Um, there’s financial reasons in here.

There’s quality reasons in here.

There’s culture reasons in here.

There’s, um, just speaking to the core of who you are as a human being and the kind of work you want to be doing on a day by day basis.

That’s in here.

Okay.

There’s many, many, many reasons why I would not go that route.

Okay.

I, it’s again, very detailed articles.

It’s all freely available.

Uh, this is a doozy long time client, husband and wife home construction business getting divorced.

And the wife is holding social media accounts, email scheduling app hostage.

And they’re putting me in the middle.

Um, you had some other followup.

No, that was the only, that was the only part of the question.

Okay.

I know we’re limited in the amount of texts that can be asked.

Okay.

Long time client, husband and wife home construction business getting divorced.

And the wife is holding social media accounts, email scheduling app hostage.

They’re putting me in the middle.

Well, I mean, they, they can’t, they can’t, I don’t know how they’re putting you in the middle.

Um, but they, they can’t, they can’t put you in the middle.

Now, if you followed all my other advice up to this point, you have all the money that’s already been owed to you.

There really shouldn’t be anything outstanding.

Um, and, and at this point it is a, uh, yeah, you know, Jamie Lynn, it’s not, it doesn’t say Jamie Lynn Ross comma therapist, right?

Let me pull her back up on the, so we can all see this.

You guys, can you read that?

It says Jamie Lynn Ross graphic designer.

It doesn’t say Jamie Lynn Ross couples therapist.

Okay.

Um, so you’re not in that business.

Pretty, pretty simple, right?

Get your shit together, come back, let me know when it’s together and then we can continue forward.

Now, if it’s a long time client, like, well, I’ve been working with the husband this entire time and I really believe in his business and I don’t want it to go down.

Okay.

Well, I don’t know what needs to happen as the next step.

Probably a court is going to get involved.

Maybe you show up for him.

You donate your time and say, Hey, I’m going to give my side of the thing.

And you know, we got to get control of these assets to be able to do our work and yada.

Okay.

Maybe you do that for him.

I don’t know all the details of the situation, but what I would not involve yourself in is the therapy side of all of it.

It’s like, what, what do you have control over?

Uh, what are you supposed to be working on?

Is the money still there?

Is it not there?

Like we need more information, obviously about the thing.

Um, but just do everything you possibly can to not become the therapist for, for these people.

You, you are a graphic designer and that is where your mission ends.

Uh, let’s see.

Would you attribute your success to your personality or was it due to learned trained behaviors?

Um, I don’t, I don’t attribute my success cause I haven’t achieved the success yet.

The success part is still, is still to come.

Um, I don’t consider myself to be successful.

I consider myself to be on the way to success.

Um, so I, it’s not really an answerable question.

The future remains to be seen.

Would you want to talk about taxonomies again?

Anything new on that front, new pros or new cons to consider?

Um, we’re going to talk about it more in the series.

So I would say just wait for the series that’s currently going because it’s about to take a twist and we are going to talk about it more in that when that twist happens.

Uh, why shouldn’t we be letting clients edit websites?

I’ve talked about this a lot.

I’ve ranted about it a lot, so I’m just going to keep it concise.

There’s also a full video on it, but if I had to say the main thing is number one, they’re not qualified to edit it.

Now people will, they, uh, all the poppies come out of the wood where everybody starts crying.

There’s so many tears.

You just see tears everywhere when, no, who are you to say, uh, I’m not qualified to edit a website or my client’s not qualified to edit a website.

Well, if you take the average business owner, the average business owner knows about their business, but we know they’re not copywriters.

I mean, we look at the copy by and large.

Now, am I talking about every specific one?

No, of course not.

Like you have to talk in generalities.

You have to talk about generalities.

If you just chose a random small business owner and you just put them, sit at this desk, sir.

Okay.

Tell me everything you know about copywriting.

Tell me everything you know about Facebook ads.

Tell me everything you know about conversion tracking.

Tell me everything you know about accessible web development.

Tell me everything you know about a class first workflow.

Tell me everything you know about image optimization.

Tell me everything you know about performance.

I mean, would they fail or would they pass this test?

Right?

Most of them, I think they would not just fail.

They would fail in dramatic fashion.

Right?

Okay.

So what we have to understand about content editing on the website, well, it starts with number one thing about content, the content.

Let’s all get on the same page is the most important part of the website.

I know the graphic designers now are like, their heads about to explode.

Um, it’s not you.

Okay.

The design, it’s not you.

The developers are like, Oh, the smoke’s coming out of their ears.

Like, no, it’s not you either.

It’s not sit down.

It’s not you either.

Calm down.

Take a deep breath.

Okay.

Um, content is the most important part of the website.

So that’s the part, by the way, I don’t know what, wait, what, how did this math math?

If you understand that you can’t then say, you know, who should provide the content, the client.

Now that’s a great idea.

Let’s let the least qualified person on the team provide all the most important stuff.

Like where did that fucking equation come from?

I don’t know.

And then the second part of that is, well, what we need to do guys, let’s all just get on the same page.

What we need to do is use tools that make it so easy for the least qualified people to come in and change all the things that we did.

What none of these things make any sense.

Those two things.

If you start with the fact, the fundamental fact that the content is the most important part.

And what is the content important for, by the way, it’s important for conversion to, to the sale.

Isn’t this thing supposed to sell?

It’s also important to attracting the visitors, like in terms of maybe SEO, right?

So, um, you know, if, if you just willy nilly change the content and then the rankings go away, it’s like, wow, well, we had the people.

Now we don’t have the people.

What happened?

Well, fucking Bev, you let Bev, you thought it was a good idea for Bev to edit some content.

And she did.

She changed the heading.

She changed the accent heading.

She changed some of the core content and the body of the copy.

Then now we don’t rank anymore.

Huh?

Fantastic.

Right?

Did that help us or did that hurt us?

Uh, so you see, this is obviously a problem.

None of the arguments that people make, make any sense.

We have to start there.

You recognize content’s the most important thing.

Therefore, right?

Logical argumentation.

If content is the most important thing, therefore the least qualified people should not be responsible for creating it, should not be responsible for willy nilly changing it.

And when you do change it, we have to understand the implications.

There’s SEO implications.

There’s conversion implications.

There’s conversion tracking implications.

Okay.

Like analytic implications to editing content because somebody that’s analyzing, imagine you don’t know what’s happening on the front end.

You’re only managing the analytics.

You’re the analytics expert.

Okay.

And your job is to look at analytics and say, what are the trends?

What’s happening?

What’s working?

What do we need to change?

What do we need to fix?

Okay, great.

And then you start to see stuff tank.

Right?

And then you’re, you got to go to somebody like there’s a fire we have to put out.

These analytics are not looking good.

Leading indicators.

Okay.

And you’re like, what happened?

And then Joe’s like, I don’t know.

And then Mary’s like, Oh, I don’t know.

And then you’re like, well, okay.

Uh, who does know?

Well, check with Bev.

Bev.

I think Bev was in there.

Okay.

We go, we go check with Bev and Bev’s like, Oh yeah, I thought some stuff needed to change.

So I changed some stuff.

And it’s like, Bev, Bev, Bev, hold on.

What did you change?

He’s like, ah, I don’t remember.

Don’t remember what it said before.

Hey, does anybody have a copy of what it said before?

Cause we need it to say what it said before.

Uh, cause this thing is not trending in the right direction.

Right.

And so what a, what an absolute dumpster fire this is, is this, does this sound like a professional project of any kind?

Does it sound like, um, we should be doing this for a client that cares about outcomes?

No.

So now it becomes a question of who is qualified, who is qualified?

Well, if you hire a copywriter, a lot of times what they do is they give you the copy and they, they would give that to the person that manages the website.

There’s always an argument for, well, let’s just let them in.

It’s just more efficient.

Let’s make them an account.

They can just, they can do the copy part themselves, but can they be, because just in, in terms of a copywriter, let’s say they’re going to write a blog post for you.

Okay.

Well, they are a copywriting expert.

I’m sorry.

Are they also an expert in internal linking in external linking?

Are they also happen to have SEO skills and they know that some of this copy needs to be tweaked a little bit to provide for SEO?

Um, what about image?

They’re going to throw images in here.

Are they also an image optimization expert?

Are they, you know, are we going to find out that our copywriter threw a fucking five megabyte image file into all these blog posts?

Is that what we’re going to find out three months from now?

You, if there’s a website management team for a reason, because all of this stuff is not, this is not easy stuff.

It’s a highly, highly technical field and every change has implications.

And somebody has got to know what those implications are.

And there has to be some sort of mitigation strategy for just all these hands in the pot.

Cause the more hands that get into the pot, the more of a mess it becomes.

And then we don’t have a thing that’s reaching the goals that we want it to reach.

And by the way, I’ve, I’ve handed over websites to teams.

Roof claim is one of them.

Go look at roof claim.

Yeah.

You want an example?

And people, people, people message me all the time.

Kevin, what the hell have you done with roof claim?

What the hell have I done?

What the, what the hell have they done?

Right?

This is a prime example, right?

They, they got a hotshot new, um, what was she?

Chief marketing officer.

Got a hotshot new chief marketing officer.

And they, and she decided she knows what’s best about everything.

And she also knew that her team was super capable.

They were going to, it’s going to, we don’t need an agency anymore.

I’ve got a super capable team and they’re going to implement all my brilliant ideas.

Okay.

They take it over and it looks like a fucking carnival now.

And, um, it’s just, it’s, it’s atrocious.

It’s atrocious.

Um, that was a long time ago that that happened.

And you, but you see this over and over and over again, it’s not a good situation.

Okay.

You, you, you just, the more clients, the more hands in the pot, it’s just not a good situation.

If somebody is legitimately qualified to do their part, then they should absolutely do their part.

But you’re just like, Oh, clients need to be able to edit.

Well, who, who is that?

And what do they know?

And what do they not know?

What are they qualified to do and not qualified to do?

But this general understanding of now and now we got, I’m, I’m, I’m trying to debate for the people.

Cause I know if there were people on the stream, they’d be objecting in certain ways.

I know what all the objections are.

Okay.

The next objection is, well, Kevin, you can’t, this is theirs.

This is their website.

They own it.

You can’t stop them from editing it.

You’re right.

I never said I stopped them.

I never said I, I don’t physically get in their way.

I don’t threaten them.

I don’t, I give them an admin login.

I give every single client an admin login, every single one.

And then, you know what I tell them?

I sit down and I say, listen, um, we are the ones who are qualified to do this work.

You have put the goals and the aspirations and everything on us.

Like, right.

We are responsible for producing this thing that works for you.

And in order for us to do that, we have to be making the changes.

And if somebody is coming in willy nilly, those changes have implications.

And here’s the deal.

We can’t be responsible for the end result.

If we’re not responsible for the project in the first place, if other people are contributing, those other people are going to have to be responsible for the implications that come with them.

And by the way, what is the best use of your time?

Mr.

Client is the best use of your time dicking around in the WordPress admin, or is the best use of your time running your actual business.

And then when you need something, you tell us and we implement it, right?

It’s very simple.

We have a very fast response time.

Uh, and not everything is emergency.

They might think everything’s an emergency, but it’s just not.

And so when we spell this out for clients, you know what they, most of them do, they go, you’re right.

I don’t really have any business in there.

I don’t know what I’m doing in there.

I, there are better uses of my time.

I mean, it could even go to like, what do you value per hour your own time, right?

Oh, you value your time, Mr.

Business Owner at $250 an hour.

Who the hell gets paid $250 an hour to fill out those custom fields down there that you’re filling out?

Not anybody that I know.

I mean, that tells me that there’s a much better use of your time, even if you could do it, right?

Um, you have us for a reason.

You have an agency for a reason.

You have a website management team for a reason.

You, you rely on them and good things happen.

And then guess what?

They can be fully responsible for the outcome.

And if they fuck it up, you get to fire them and you could say, Hey, but you know what happens all the time?

Agencies build the websites.

We build them a certain way.

By the way, let’s just cover this.

If anybody can willy nilly change shit, you know what that means.

You know what the logical conclusion of that reality means?

You doing it for a specific reason, a specific way doesn’t even matter.

It’s just your opinions, isn’t it?

I mean, if somebody else’s opinions are just as valid, if fucking Bev off the street, if her opinions are just as valid as yours, why are you even here?

I thought you were the expert.

You’re not the expert.

You’re not doing this for us.

Guys.

It’s like, I did the layout like this for a specific reason.

Like a UI designer could tell you, here’s why I did that.

A UX designer could tell you, here’s why I did that.

Bev can’t tell you why she did it.

It’s just how Bev feels that day.

Right?

And so Bev makes the changes.

And if you’re allowing that, you’re encouraging that, all you’re saying is all the decisions I made don’t actually matter.

There really are no implications for all that work that I did because it can just be changed.

And there’s no, I have no problem with that.

Why don’t you have a problem with that?

You have to admit that the decision, you made really don’t matter all that much.

Right?

And I don’t think any of us want to admit that because it’s not true.

That’s fundamentally not true.

There are things that we do for very specific reasons, really good reasons, and they produce consistent outcomes that are positive outcomes.

That’s why we do the things that we do.

And so no, no, nobody random can just come in and change all that stuff.

That just doesn’t make sense.

The math doesn’t math.

It’s never made sense.

And we need to quit making that argument point blank period end of story.

And if somebody cries about it, it’s okay to cry.

It’s okay to cry.

It’s therapy.

It’s therapeutic.

Let them cry.

It’s fine.

Okay.

But we can’t change the reality of the situation.

We’re running businesses here.

We’re running.

This is not about Bev’s feelings.

This is not about, and I’m not blocking client ownership.

Clients own their site.

They just know and agree that they don’t log in and touch it.

That’s it.

They just, they’ve come, I’ve helped them come to that conclusion on their own.

And at the end of the day, they are happier.

They are happier.

You know, I hear from clients all the time who are like, you know, I used to try to do all this stuff myself.

I haven’t touched the website in six months.

It’s really freeing.

I’m really glad I don’t have to deal with all those headaches and nightmares and yada, yada, yada.

Like they love it.

And they can, they’re free to go do the high value things that they should be doing in their business.

Period.

End of story.

Okay.

There’s some other tangents that we can go on related to that, but that’s my short answer to, to that question.

Believe it or not, that is the short version.

We could do hours on just that topic alone.

Okay.

How are we doing on time?

We’re good.

We’re good.

We’re good.

Are we having fun?

Are we having fun?

What?

Let me go back to the normal chat here.

Let’s see what the normal chat is saying.

Are we, are we enjoying ourselves today?

Bev’s back.

I’m sweating over here.

Okay.

Oh, this is good, man.

Questions are still, still flowing in.

All right.

Just tell me in the chat, are we, are we having fun?

I love the fact that that’s the short version.

Uh, yes.

Um, that, that man, it’s so, I, that side of things, that side of the WordPress, especially in WordPress, right?

It’s actually kind of, um, the more the platform is open, is like a for everyone platform, the more you’re going to hear those arguments and they just do not ever make sense.

Uh, the only time it makes sense is if you’re building hobby websites for people.

Cause hobby, there’s no implications to changing a hobby website.

I go back to my mom’s like bunco club website.

Like there’s no implications to changing content on, of course, my mom should be able to, to come in and edit it.

At which point I say, mom, that’s why I should be using Wix or Squarespace or one of these dumbed down superficial platforms.

You know, you don’t care about data ownership.

You don’t care about, you know, all the important stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Edit content willy nilly.

There’s no, you’re not trying to SEO, this thing to death.

You’re not trying to maximize ROI.

Nobody’s, nobody’s meals are at stake here, right?

No, there’s, you got no employees that rely on this thing being successful.

Okay.

Hmm.

Tudor says, uh, refreshing to have this kind of an open, uh, Ruth is, is that ruthless?

Rule-less, rule-less, same thing.

Hang out again.

Um, when Kevin goes on a gear your hand, it’s always fun.

Hmm.

Okay.

Let’s go back to questions.

We gotta, we gotta keep the train.

We gotta keep the train rolling here.

Uh, okay.

Let me get back to where I was.

Here we are.

Hmm.

Is there a way to make relationships between taxonomies?

I want to use the same terms, taxonomy A and two other taxonomies B or C, but I want a single source of truth.

It’s something we’re going to be exploring, um, in, in this series that we’re currently in.

So just, yeah, stay tuned on the series.

We are absolutely going to be exploring that.

If you’ve seen my centralized taxonomy concept live stream that I did, that’s, it’s actually going to become somewhat of a requirement that we relate taxonomies to other taxonomies because of the nature of that structure.

But I want to reiterate that all of this, all of this is workaround, right?

We are workarounding our way through WordPress.

Why are we working around?

Well, because the CMS side of WordPress has been neglected for the last seven to 10 years and innovations that should have happened within the CMS have not happened.

And it left us in a state where we are, the sites that we are building, let’s all understand this.

The sites we are building in 2024 are not the sites that WordPress was designed to build in 2005 and 2007 and even 2009.

WordPress started as a blogging platform, right?

And then it opened the door to guys.

We can actually, it’s so easy actually to build fully fledged websites on this thing.

We can, we don’t have to live in the blogging verse.

We can, we can branch out and do anything that we want with WordPress, but it always required some workarounds and how, and how things are done.

Let me show you one of the, here’s one of the holdouts, right?

If people want actual examples and understand things that we’re dealing with when we talk about workarounds in WordPress.

So I’m going to go into settings and I’m going to go to permalinks and you see this little blog slug right here.

Well, because WordPress is a blogging platform popularized in the mid two thousands.

And because the CMS side of things was abandoned at some point along the way.

And we essentially have this interface that I don’t even know.

This has been updated guys.

Can you believe that this has been updated since the early days?

You couldn’t tell, you couldn’t tell, but it has been, uh, it has been updated.

But because this, the underlying architecture hasn’t really been, improved or innovated all that much.

What we’re left with is this custom structure thing that controls the permalink for the entire website.

And when you say, I, and by the way, this post area, which is native, this is a native post area.

You can’t go in here and say, I want all posts to have a blog slug, a blog part of the slug, right?

You can’t do that.

You cannot do that.

The way that I can go to ACF, post types, and I can go to post type, watch this, watch this.

I’m going to fundamentally sidestep.

I’m going to, I’m going to fucking jujitsu, uh, Akito fucking WordPress right now.

And I’m going to go, uh, blog and I’m going to go, uh, this, I don’t even know if this is, I don’t think it’s a reserved slug.

Um, blog, blog, blog, whatever.

I don’t, I don’t care.

There’s the key.

Okay.

Very important.

There’s the key.

So, uh, let’s just go ahead and hit save.

I have this thing called blog.

And now I actually have the slug that I want slash blog slash post title.

You can’t do that with a native post.

Like it’s a blogging platform.

You can’t do that with that thing right there, unless you opt in to that slash blog being on everything.

Huh?

Except pages, except pages, but pages don’t have taxonomies.

Pages don’t have pages.

That’s a junk drawer.

We’ve talked about that as a junk drawer.

That’s a mostly useless area.

Um, but now anytime I create a, if I, if I go to permalinks settings, permalinks, this is a site wide change, site wide rewriting of all of your URLs.

Uh, if I go create more custom post types, guess what?

And actually that one that I just created is probably going to say blog, blog.

It’s going to go slash blog slash blog slash post type, unless I turn off the front part of the URL, which now has to be managed.

Every instance of this website going forward has to account for the fact that that slug is there.

And somebody actually put a comment in and they were like, well, I’m using a third party system that creates custom post types and it doesn’t have the ability to remove the front part of the URL.

So I’m forced to have slash blog slash my thing slash this is WordPress.

This is because there’s been no innovation on the CMS side of things.

This is what we’re left with.

We are trying to build complex architectures in a glorified blogging platform that never graduated out of being a blogging platform, right?

That’s where we live right now.

That’s where we live.

Think about the stuff I’ve talked about.

Okay.

With relational content, we live in a world with query loops and dynamic data and relational content.

WordPress has not kept up with this.

Everything is a fucking workaround.

Everything.

We should be operating in a CMS that has innovated to say, you know what?

You know what websites have?

They just literally have URLs.

That’s it.

What is this post pages, custom post types, custom data types, they have data and they have URLs and some URLs need to be categorized and some URLs need to be related to other URLs.

And the categories that we’re using sometimes need to be related to other categories.

You need to think of like more of an open-ended URL based relational structure where almost anything can happen.

And you’re not put in these drawers of no, no, but that’s a page.

You can’t, yeah, no, no, no.

Oh, that’s a post.

You can’t do that.

Nope.

Oh, taxonomies though.

They’re not, it’s not possible to do that.

The idea that, um, if you look, if you look at the, uh, architecture of a website where you have something that lives under something else, right?

So I have, uh, let’s say services.

I want to be services.

And then the name of the service.

Well, the minute you taxonomize your services, it creates this whole other taxonomy URL structure that doesn’t actually live under services or with services.

It’s like completely independent.

And you’re always like, ah, the slugs don’t match.

And man, like when you, when you go to the, uh, the, a product in a category, like, does it have the category slug?

Or when I go over here, it doesn’t have the category slug.

It’s just, it’s a nightmare.

Like if even explaining it is difficult because it’s like, it’s a nightmare.

Why is it like this?

Well, this is the result of pressing the pause button on the CMS and pushing the play button on the block editor site editor vision, right?

They didn’t do both at the same time.

They said, pause over here.

So no innovation on the CMS side, really.

And then let’s spend all our time and resources in block editor land and site editor land.

And this is the result of that.

And we are all like, ah, the things that we need are not here now because 2024 is not 2015 is not 20, 2009 is not 2005.

Like there’s got to be innovation constantly.

And then people start going, you know, the core part of WordPress, these are leading indicators that I’m talking about.

We talked about this earlier.

Here’s some insight into it.

The core aspect of WordPress, which is the content management system has not kept up and therefore, I need to start looking at other options.

Oh, what’s, what’s web flow got going on?

Oh, look, oh look, it’s not, it’s not a chaotic experience over here.

It’s a modernized editor.

It’s a professional building experience.

They have a CMS that actually appears to be functional and relational.

And yeah, and I don’t even know, I don’t know that much about work, uh, web flow, but these things could be said about other platforms.

When the platform you’re using has so many architectural problems.

These are the things that we have to fix.

You’ve got, this will be the downfall of WordPress.

If it is not fixed, you cannot build modern relational dynamic websites in 2024 with a 2005 blogging platform.

You can’t do that for much longer.

I don’t care how you want to slice it.

The math doesn’t math.

The outcome is already known.

We don’t need to play around with the idea.

Oh, well maybe things will change.

No, no, no, you got to fix it.

You got to fix it.

You got to innovate on the core product, period, plain and simple.

So these are the, this is the problem we face.

The reality we live in.

So when I do these videos, literally everything is a workaround and people are asking me questions.

It’s like, I don’t know.

I haven’t tried that yet.

We’re, we’re, we’re in workaround land.

There’s no manual for this.

There’s no documentation for this.

There’s no, there’s an exploration exploration of what is the limit of the workaround.

That’s what we’re all doing right now.

We are pushing the limits of workarounds and it’s not a fun place to be particularly.

Hmm.

Okay.

Here’s Dubai says, uh, what do you think is WordPress’s biggest problem at the moment?

One of them I just hit on.

I just, I just outlined it.

That is, that answers that question.

When a project needs a specific plugin, you don’t own a license for, do you ask the client to get one or do you ask the client to pay it back to you every year?

Really, really, really good question.

Um, if I decide that I need a plugin for something, uh, it’s, it’s purchased and it’s baked into the, the price of the, of the project.

This is stuff you’re supposed to figure out in discovery.

It’s why discovery exists.

Like you unveil all of the things this project is supposed to do and accomplish.

And you, you got it all on the table in front of you.

And this is work you get paid to do, by the way, people not doing paid discovery, don’t know what you’re doing.

That’s not a professional workflow.

Okay.

The, a professional process includes discovery upfront that is paid discovery.

We got to figure out what does the client expect to happen with this project.

And they’re going to talk about some feature and you’re going to figure out, is this feature actually valuable or is this just another one of Bev’s dumpster fire ideas?

Okay.

It turns out this is a valuable feature.

Now we realize our current stack does not really support that feature.

So we’re going to either do something custom or we’re going to have to vet third-party tools, bring those in guys.

This is all happening in discovery.

And so you, you’re not going to run in to, Oh, we didn’t map this.

Well, that’s your fault.

Now, if that happens, guess what?

You have to eat the cost.

You got to eat the cost there.

You can’t go back to the client and be like, well, you know, we should have explored this in the very beginning, but, uh, we didn’t, we didn’t do our job.

I’m sorry.

And so now it’s going to cost you more money, right?

I’m sorry.

You just can’t do that.

You just have to eat the cost, right?

Now there will be times where the client, this always happens, you know, you’re halfway into the project, things are going smoothly and the client comes out of left field with this new brilliant idea.

Well, guess what?

That’s not a problem either.

You have something over here called a change order template, right?

And you fill that out.

It’s got, here’s the cost of that.

Here’s the timeline of that.

Here’s, here’s what it’s going to do to the timeline.

Here’s what it’s going to do to our previous promises, send it away and they read it and they have to sign it and they have to opt in to this grand new vision.

And that’s cool.

Cause you just made more money.

And by the way, that change order says it’s going to require this extra tool right here.

Here’s the cost of that thing.

Um, okay.

So that’s how it’s done.

That’s how it’s done.

You figure out everything ahead of time.

You get paid to figure out everything ahead of time.

You eat the cost of anything you didn’t figure out ahead of time.

And then if they come up with a brilliant new idea, good change order, they pay for it all as well in the world.

So, um, it shouldn’t really be, uh, uh, uh, a place where you feel stuck.

There’s a, there’s a way out regardless.

It might be a little painful if you were supposed to figure that out and now you have to eat the cost, but that’s the line of professional work that you happen to be in.

Okay.

Uh, would a team member position be a custom field rather than a taxonomy?

If there was no intention of categorizing by executive manager, et cetera.

Um, I would default to taxonomies because you can pull the dynamic data of the taxonomy either way, but you’re not limiting yourself in terms of like, cause that, that could be an area where somebody changes their mind very easily.

Uh, and it’s, there’s, what’s the downside to making it a taxonomy?

It is, that is essentially what you’re describing.

I mean, executive manager, these are categories of people, right?

So I would just, in those situations, just default to the taxonomy process.

Uh, okay.

How would you compare Webflow and Bricks Builder?

Who is better?

Thank you.

Webflow does some things better.

Uh, Bricks does some things better.

At the end of the day, it’s not even a question.

At the end of the day, you go with the WordPress solution.

And I will outline this in my announcement video next week.

There are, uh, two things.

There are two things that WordPress has aces in the back pocket.

And a lot of people don’t even understand the implications of these aces.

Um, really one ace, one ace is the unknown implication of, and that is data ownership.

That is the open source nature of WordPress.

The idea, and even web, I argue with Webflow people till the cows come home on this.

They can’t, I don’t think they don’t understand.

I think they don’t want to admit it.

They don’t want to get it.

They just don’t want to say it out loud.

That’s it.

Um, but you cannot put a price or a value on data ownership, your data ownership in a Webflow situation, a Shopify situation, a, um, uh, Squarespace situation, a Wix situation is very limited.

Can you do backups?

Yeah.

Uh, yeah, I get, but what, what good do those backups give you in certain situations, right?

Can you export clean exports of, uh, content and HTML?

Yes, but you can’t easily port it to somewhere else.

Okay.

Um, so what is the ultimate situation?

You have to take things to the logical conclusion.

Webflow has the ability.

Now I’m not saying they will do this.

I’m not saying they have done this.

I’m not, but they have the potential and we have seen this done in other industries.

They can wake up any day they want and go and just nuke your fucking website from orbit, right?

Which by the way, nukes the entire online presence of your business.

Somebody at Webflow has the power to do that.

Nobody at WordPress has the power to do that, right?

That is true data ownership versus limited scope data ownership.

Now the Webflow people, instead of saying, you’re right, that could happen.

And I accept those risks, right?

No, they don’t say that.

They’re like, but that would never happen.

Oh, but that hasn’t happened.

Right.

Yes.

It hasn’t happened.

Good, good point, Mr.

Webflow user.

Cause we know that past behavior always predicts future behavior.

So fantastic point that you’ve made there.

Uh, and then they’re like, but that wouldn’t happen.

Oh, great.

Great argument, Mr.

Webflow man, because we know that you always know the future behavior of random people who you’ve never met.

Um, so these are great arguments that you’re presenting.

Uh, but unfortunately I’m going to stick with WordPress where we do have true data ownership and an open source platform.

Right.

Um, so that’s the end.

Now there are other implications as well.

Webflow may not nuke your business from orbit, but you may decide, Hey, we’re going to go into this new territory of business and Webflow goes, that’s against our terms of service.

Ah, well, um, that sucks.

Can I please?

And they’re like, no, no, no.

Well, I, do I want to be in a situation where I’m begging the platform?

Please let me pursue this line a bit.

No, I don’t want to be in that situation.

And then you just ask me, well, what will happen if I go and do that anyway?

Well, that’s when we have to talk about, you know, the uncomfortable situation where we may have to nuke you from orbit, right?

Um, this is, you are, you are leasing the land that you are building your whole business on.

And that’s why I even go as far as to say, and a Webflow user got very, very upset, very teary eyed over this.

Okay.

Uh, I said, if you sell your client into the Webflow platform without disclosing that they don’t fully own their data or their businesses instance in that situation, uh, that’s negligent.

That is negligent.

That should be disclosed.

You should tell your client, look, we are building on a platform that could nuke you from orbit at any time.

That is a known risk to building on this platform.

And it is not a known risk on WordPress on something like WordPress.

So if you’re helping your clients decide between platforms, this is the ace in the pocket.

This is the thing.

That’s why so many people put up with WordPress, right?

Um, not to mention the extensibility of WordPress, but we don’t even need to get into that data ownership.

If you are running a legitimate organization or a legitimate business, data ownership should be at the top of the list of importance.

And Webflow cannot say that Wix cannot say that Wix enterprise cannot say that as far as I know.

Um, Squarespace cannot say that.

It is very, very, very dangerous.

And people will say, well, it could never happen.

It probably won’t happen.

I’m we, I don’t live and my business doesn’t live pretending that we have a crystal ball sitting on our desk.

You have no idea what’s going to happen next, especially in an industry that changes this rapidly and in a culture that changes this rapidly and in a culture filled quite frankly, with absolute chaos.

I feel like we live in the upside down.

So don’t tell me what’s about to happen next, right?

I’m not in that business.

I’m in the business of owning my data because then I can just go to sleep at night and I don’t care who, what happens in the upside down.

Um, I just, I own my data and that’s what I want.

Uh, that is the ace that WordPress holds in its back pocket.

Okay.

Hmm. 20 minutes.

How are we doing?

Oh, we’re still good on viewership.

I mean, this is fantastic.

I think people are having fun.

I think I, this is the best part of my week.

It’s my hanging out with you guys.

Favorite, favorite part of the week.

Okay.

Ever looking at a non WP builders to get ideas to stuff to advocate for in WP.

Yeah.

I think it’s, I think it’s smart.

I think it’s, I think it’s good to not even look at builders.

It’s good to look at design tools.

It’s good to look at, um, any type of interface that’s involved in doing the work that we do.

Good ideas can come from many, many, many different places.

We don’t want to live in an echo chamber.

We don’t want to live in a very tightly controlled environment where we just think in a certain way.

I a hundred percent outside of CPTs.

Do you prefer per page meta fields or a central options page for clients?

Uh, it really depends on whether we’re talking about a data that’s attached to objects or global data, right?

Um, obviously if we want to dynamically reference a phone number, dynamically reference an address for the business dynamic.

Well, okay.

So good.

That creates a tangent right there that we have to talk about.

So many things you have to consider.

If it’s a one location business with no aspirations to ever have more locations, you could use globalized data, right?

On an options page, for example, to have the address, the phone number, blah, blah, blah.

And then anywhere you need to reference that you can reference that.

But the minute they go, well, actually we want to expand.

We’re going to have multiple locations.

Now I’m thinking location CPT and I’m thinking address, phone number, et cetera, attached to those posts and that custom post type.

Cause that data needs to live with its object.

Uh, so it really, it really depends.

It depends on the data.

It depends on the aspirations of the project.

Um, these are, this is why discovery has to be done because you can’t just answer these.

The clients will ask you the same thing or, you know, you’ll have the same kind of questions yourself in the early phases of a project.

You know, you know what?

I really need to ask the client what might happen.

Well, why didn’t you already, why are you starting a project where you don’t even know where you’re going?

You don’t even know where you’re going.

Um, okay.

Uh, let’s see.

Attack on WordPress is attack on FOSS ownership of data, self-determination.

I believe it is actively, uh, sabotage.

Uh, I do believe that there’s a lot of, um, I don’t know.

I think webflow people, for example, who refuse to admit that data ownership is important, refuse to admit that you don’t really own your data on webflow.

They are not attacking WordPress.

They are not, um, obviously they don’t have a leg to stand on.

Um, but they’re not malicious.

What they are actively working to do is defend their own decisions to use word, uh, webflow, right?

That’s all they want.

They’re arguing for their own self comfort.

And, um, once you understand that you don’t have to get upset about it, it’s like this dude just wants to convince himself.

He’s not convincing anybody else, but he really, really, really, really, really wants to convince himself.

And that’s why so many tears had to happen.

When I said, if you don’t disclose this data ownership problem to your clients, that’s negligent.

Oh my gosh, this guy, I mean, smoke out the ears, tears down the face.

It was, it was, this guy was a mess.

He needed somebody.

He needed somebody to help the comfort, right?

Um, why?

Because that spoke to he, like that hit that, you know, I was over the target where somebody is like, they don’t want to admit that they actually, yeah, like they should have disclosed this to their clients and didn’t, their clients are in a situation they may not know they’re in.

Uh, and there’s a lot of implications of that.

And so, but he didn’t want to just be like, like admit it.

I mean, you could just admit it.

You could just say, yeah, that should, that should happen.

Uh, cause guys, you got, we got to remember these are lay people in most cases, these business owners out on the streets coming into us, they don’t know a lick of what we do or why we do it or the tools we use.

They are reliant on us for the information.

And if we don’t disclose certain things, right, shouldn’t that be seen as, as, as negligent?

I think it should be.

So yeah.

All right.

Let’s, let’s answer another one.

Hmm.

How to effectively place a background image to the entire website, uh, fixed on PC, responsive on mobile.

Well, I mean, this is one of those areas where I’d probably be like, what kind of, what background image is it?

Is this a Bev situation going on?

Is this a, what is, is it a cat?

Is it a, is it a pattern?

Oh, if it’s a pattern, I’m thinking more like, we don’t need an image.

Maybe we just need some CSS.

I’m tricky.

Like we did on, uh, you know, 2024.getframes.io.

Uh, this is the rebuild.

Uh, if I zoom way in, that doesn’t really help us with the pattern.

If you look in the background back there, there’s a pattern back there, right?

That was done in Figma in Figma.

That was an image.

Now I could have just exported the image and I could have made it the background of the website.

And cause that is the background of the entire website.

Um, but I said, and that’s probably not the best way to do that.

I should just remake that pattern using CSS.

And so I remade the pattern using CSS and all is well in the world.

So this is yet again, where it’s like, we need more details of what you’re actually trying to do.

Um, now the way I did it is where am I?

I’m logged in over here.

So it doesn’t matter what site we’re on.

Uh, you can go to global CSS in here and you can go to body and then you can go to background image.

Like you could just do it right here with custom CSS.

That’s one method.

Uh, you could edit with bricks.

I think this might be, I think it might be an option.

I don’t spend a lot of time here.

Page settings, general doesn’t look like it’s here.

Oh no, here it is right here.

Site background, background image.

There you go.

Um, so here you go.

You can assign a background image to the entire website.

Uh, so there’s one way to do it.

But again, I wouldn’t just say do it this way, like without knowing more about what you’re actually trying to do.

But there are possibilities.

There are pathways to doing that pretty easily.

Okay.

I like the fluidness of auto and variable grid.

Let’s say a grid auto four, but in terms of filters and pagination, there could be less than four results, but I don’t want a one result fill up a hundred percent width.

Um, well there’s other, you know, you don’t have to use variable grid.

There’s other forms of auto grid that you can use.

Um, but here’s the thing is, uh, you know, I, I don’t want to sound obvious, like I’m pointing out the obvious, but, uh, the reason you have a grid is typically because there’s more than one thing.

So ideally you want to be in the situation where you’re not querying one thing into a grid.

Now I know this is not always possible.

Um, but for example, let’s just say, okay, we need a team.

We have a team CPT right now.

It’s just the owner, but they told me they’re getting ready to hire people.

But right now it’s just the owner.

Well, what I’m going to do on the about page is I’m not going to use a variable grid and query that owner, uh, using a card layout that’s designed for a multi element grid.

And I’m not going to put him in there as the only person.

What I’m going to do for the time being is design a card that represents him very well.

And then when he starts adding team members, I’m going to come back and I’m going to turn it into a grid.

Right.

Um, and, and build it out for scale at that point.

So sometimes it’s, uh, just a matter of, we got to handle the content we have right now.

Now there could be like, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know when it would ever have, it’s very rare for there to, I need a query loop for one element.

Um, it’s a very rare situation.

There are other ways to handle it that are kind of manual.

Um, you know, so you could use JavaScript.

If there’s one, I want to do this.

Like there, there are pathways, but again, I would question the, like, why is that happening?

Why is that scenario playing out?

And is there just a way to avoid the scenario in the first place?

What are your thoughts on one page websites?

Super fantastic question.

Really, really fantastic question.

Um, one page websites are tremendously valuable.

They are terrible for SEO.

They can be tremendously valuable for conversion though.

Uh, if SEO is not a factor or at least not a factor right now, do not discount the power of one page websites.

If you go to sell one page websites are the ultimate downsell opportunity for agencies and freelancers.

You propose the full project.

Hey, Mr.

Client, this is, this is, if this was my business, this is what I would do.

Uh, that’s going to be like $20,000.

Oh, okay.

Well, we don’t have $20,000, right?

Well, okay.

Well, you should have talked about this beforehand, first of all, but if in your discussions with the client, you determine, all right, I do actually want to work with this guy.

I do actually like what his business is doing.

And I do acknowledge that, you know, he, he’s basically at our project minimum right now.

Let’s say our project minimum is $7,500.

Okay.

Well, guess what that minimum gets you?

That minimum is the first page.

We’ve talked about this by the way, of the amazing front loaded nature of projects that people don’t really grasp.

Um, but a lot of work is done to get to page one and very little relative work is done to get to page two.

Right?

So it makes sense that most of the cost is up on the front end.

So project minimum, always good to set a project minimum.

I’m just going over fundamentals of agency and freelance work here.

If your project minimum $7,500, you think this guy should have like a $20,000 website, but he’s not there yet.

He wants to start slow, but you don’t want to be like, all right, well, somebody else will be a better fit.

You like the guy, you want to work with the guy or girl, whoever it is.

Okay.

And so immediately you go, well, what we can do, which works very well, Mr.

Client, we just focus on an amazing one page website experience.

Um, it’s going to hit our project minimum, $7,500.

Uh, but what we’re going to have in there is fantastic copy, a fantastic offer.

You’re going to have a one page website that converts very well.

And while we can’t do SEO or, or a lot of other stuff we can absolutely do, you can do social media to this.

We can run PPC campaigns to this.

We can absolutely use this website, one page website to grow your business dramatically online.

And then as we prove that we can generate a really good ROI with what we do on this one page.

And as your business grows, what we’re going to recommend to you is that we start to, and by the way, we’re going to build this one page on a platform and a framework that is fully scalable with a hundred percent data ownership.

Okay.

Uh, so as your business grows and scales, and we need to build out more and more and more of this website because of the nature of our work, because of the process we follow, because of the framework we use, because of how we build, it’s going to be very easy and actually, you know, relatively inexpensive to continue to build out those various pages and aspects of this website.

And by the way, we are, you know, we’re all about relationships.

We want to be working with you three years from now, five years from now, we are going to help you drive this online experience for your business.

We’re going to help you navigate it.

We’re going to tell you what needs to happen.

We’re going to look at the analytics.

We’re going to come in and say, here’s what needs to happen next and next and next.

And you get to green light it for sure.

Right.

Or red light it, whatever you want to do, but we’re going to be managing this thing for you.

And if you need anything, we’re one email away, one call away, whatever it is, we’re going to step in and do that thing for you.

Don’t have to worry about any of the headaches, any of the nightmares, any of the security, any of the anything, right?

This is how you start to present this stuff to clients.

And you’re, this is how you turn a one website thing, or I’m sorry, a one page website thing into eventually a 10 page, a 20 page, a 30 page over the course of three to five years, where you take somebody who they didn’t want to spend more than $7,500, your project minimum, and you look up three to five years from now, and they’ve spent $70,000 with you over the course of that time.

That all started with just downselling to a one page website that actually produced an ROI.

But that also goes back to what I’ve said about, you’re not just in the website building game, right?

You’ve got to have another, uh, you’ve got to have an ace in your pocket.

What is the marketing angle that you’re an expert at that can immediately drive ROI to that website you just built for somebody?

It could, it could be SEO.

It could be PPC.

It could be email marketing.

It can be a lot of different things.

Okay.

But you can’t just, we’re not in the business of, well, there it is.

Uh, good luck, right?

We don’t want to be in that business.

You have to be in the ROI business, uh, which requires more than just the website that you happen to be building.

Okay.

Um, I don’t, uh, don’t you think WordPress has become expensive for a single site user since plugin went to subscriptions?

No, I think that the WordPress ecosystem is the most underpriced and insanely valued.

Like, uh, I just, it’s, it’s actually absurd.

It’s quite absurd.

Um, I mean, we’ve talked about this, like brick bricks being on subscription, the price of what does it even cost?

What does it even cost?

Bricks builder.io let’s, I don’t even know what the price is anymore.

I will tell you the truth of these products.

I will go to sure cart and look at that in a second.

Where, where this is not a good navigation.

This is not a good navigation.

Try bricks.

I wasn’t looking for try.

I don’t say that’s not even it.

Um, get bricks.

Okay.

Can we just make it seem like, just say the thing I’m looking for.

Pricing always works.

Uh, okay. $249 a year.

This is fucking pennies.

This is pennies.

I know not for everybody.

Okay.

I know you, you might live in a place where that is tremendously expensive.

And I know we, we operate in a worldwide economy.

I get it.

But relative to most things in life, like most businesses, most businesses, especially, uh, you know, business is businesses in strong economy countries, right?

Uh, which is how we kind of have to, Oh God, well, you’re going to get me onto a tangent about pricing parody.

Okay.

Don’t get me onto that rant.

And that we’ll have to say that for next time.

We’ll be here for another hour.

Um, but relatively speaking, guys, this is absolute pennies.

This is absolute pennies.

Uh, let’s go to sure.

Card pricing.

Okay.

Um, let’s go pay monthly $39 a month, $69 guys.

You should be pumping, um, minimum.

If you have more than a hobby, more than a hobby, you should be pumping tens of thousands of dollars a month through sure card, right?

If you have a legit business, like real, like real legit business, not a little startup, not a hopeful business, not a hobby, not a legit business, right?

You should be pumping in the tens of thousands of dollars a month through these tools.

Okay.

And you’re going to say like relative to that, the, the, the $69 that’s the deal breaker.

That’s the, uh, and by the way, this cart is responsible for processing all of those transactions, handling the integrations with your email marketing software, which then kicks off other integrations, which then upsells people, downsells people, side sells people, whatever.

You’re going to tell me all of this.

This is, this is the deal break, right?

This is the thing that’s too expensive right here.

The $69.

That’s the, that’s the wall.

We can’t climb over.

Right.

And I get it.

There’s, there’s many things that we need to piece together, but I’ve used this example at all at, uh, in many live streams because we have to keep things, certain things in perspective.

When I had offline businesses, right?

Not online business.

You have an offline, you have a brick and mortar store.

The first thing, the first thing is a retail location.

The first thing I had to agree to before I could do anything else, equipment, people, whatever else was marketing, whatever else was necessary.

I had to sign a thing that says, Hey, Mr.

Shopping Center, I agree to pay you $5,000 a month just for this box, just for this little space, right?

Before I could do anything else.

Now you compare the costs of running like a brick and mortar business to the cost of what we do for online.

Oh my God.

Like anybody in their right mind would be like, I want to do that online thing.

Look at the no overhead.

There’s like practically any overhead over here.

This is tremendous.

But why, why do all the online people like, that’s why, you know, in, in, uh, other aspects of life culture, the current phrase now is get offline, like get off the world out there is very different from the world you’re seeing on here, right?

We’ve got all the online people crying over expenses, full tears, full tears about this expenses, right?

And the offline people are like, I would trade in a heartbeat for those expenses.

Like it’s not even a comparison.

So we have to keep perspective.

Um, this stuff is not expensive.

It is, it is cheap.

Now what goes into, this is why you guys got to be, and you will be very soon.

You will be on the inside development of etch.

How many times do I have to say, we do not build products in the dark of night.

You, you are going to get more transparency, more insight, more visibility into the development of etch than you have gotten into any other product in the WordPress ecosystem.

Because part of this is, wow, how do these decisions get made?

How does this stuff actually come together?

And what is the scope of what’s involved to do something like this?

And how much money does it actually cost?

If you saw, I met the SureCard team.

Let’s just use them as an example.

I know Adam text with Adam all the time.

I met the SureCard team in person.

I’m going to meet them in person again at WordCamp US.

I have been in their Slack.

I have watched this platform essentially come to life.

Okay.

If you looked behind the scenes, if you just saw what was required and what these people are doing and the time and attention and everything that goes into making this thing exist and they put a price of $69 a month on it and you cry about that, it just tells me you have zero knowledge, zero insight into what it actually takes to build these tools.

If you saw what we had to do, what we do on the backend of automatic CSS, all the pieces, all the players, all the conversations, all the everything that we do, to then look at the price.

And then by the way, what it produces, because that’s only one half of the argument.

I mean, it’s nobody’s fault that it takes a lot of work, right?

So you can’t be like, well, it’s got to be the price because it takes a lot of work.

If it produces no value, if it produces no value, then the work doesn’t matter.

And you can’t justify the price just by saying, well, look at the labor that went into it.

That’s, that’s just one part of the price, right?

Assuming the value is there.

So now you have to look at the value proposition of the tool.

I just said, I can use SureCart to make six figures, seven figures in my business.

And so obviously $69 is a drop in the bucket.

That’s absolutely nothing.

Okay.

Um, automatic CSS bricks.

Look at the price of these tools.

Look at the amount of money in a successful agency.

I’m not measuring against the agencies twiddling their thumbs doing nothing with no clients.

I’m measuring against people maximizing the value of the tool.

And then probably finding some sort of middle ground in there, right?

The average, what’s the average agency doing?

What’s the average freelancer doing where you’re taking a product that like, if we’re talking about ACSS now that adds so much consistency, maintainability, efficiency, and workflow, all these things that it does for you, decision-making off the table, headaches, nightmares, sticking points in projects, solve with the click of a button.

Okay.

That all adds up to lots and lots and lots and lots of money and a, and a certain outcome that is very valuable for an agency or a freelance business.

Paling in comparison to the cost of the tool.

Same thing with bricks builder or Elementor or what, oh, so many tears.

Every time Elementor raises prices, just tears, tears, tears, tears, tears, because you don’t realize you are the one winning that, that little battle of value, whatever, right?

You’re, you’re billing your clients tremendous money and then Elementor is getting like $299 every year from you.

And you’re using their tool as the number one tool in your business.

And that’s what you’re feeding them, that little peanut every now and then, right?

And you want to complain about it.

This is, this is absurd, right?

You got to put, when you put these things into context, they just, the arguments just don’t make sense, right?

They don’t make sense.

Sorry to rant for the, for the people who are sensitive about, um, you know, pricing and things like that.

I’m just letting you know the reality.

And by the way, the more you understand, the more you’re able to help your own clients and the more you’re able to have conversations with your own clients and be comfortable talking about money with your own clients.

You’ve got to the sooner, oh my gosh, let’s, let’s just, maybe we should end on this point because we are at time and it got us to here.

Okay.

The sooner you can get the emotion out of the money, the faster you are going to find success.

The more emotion you bake into any talk about money, the more you are going to be held back.

I promise it is always going to be a struggle.

It’s always going to feel tough.

It’s all, you have got to take the emotion out of money.

I don’t care what these tools caught.

Like they, not a single one of these tools has ever gotten to a point where I was like, I really got to consider that from a financial perspective.

Right.

And if you do, you do.

I’m not saying that like, if you’re startup phase or whatever, I’m not saying that you can, you know, if you don’t have the income, you don’t have the income plain and simple, but that’s a different problem you need to solve.

It’s a, you need to go get more business problem.

Not a, I need to whine about the cost of the tools problem.

You understand, right?

You got to own the situation and be like, this is a me problem, not a them problem.

Okay.

And now guess what?

You’re empowered to actually solve the problem because it doesn’t matter how many tiers show up.

Uh, Thomas is not going to lower the price of the tool just for you.

And, uh, Adam is not going to lower the price of the tool just for you.

And Kevin is not going to lower the price of the tool just for you.

This is not a, uh, us problem.

Uh, and this goes back to basic, uh, just a fundamental misunderstanding of, of basic economics.

People will use this phrase.

You need to look for this phrase.

This, this phrase is used by people who do not understand basic economics.

Okay.

They will look at a tool and they’ll say, that’s overpriced.

This would be the term when you hear this term, just, it should trigger in your mind.

Oh, red flag.

This person does not understand basic.

There is no such thing as a product that exists in the marketplace that is overpriced.

Okay.

Because if it was truly overpriced, it would not be profitable.

Why?

Because everybody would come to the conclusion that it’s not worth buying at that price and it would stop selling.

Right.

The fact that somebody is still buying it lets you know that it’s not actually overpriced because other people are coming to a different conclusion than you are.

Okay.

And the entirety of the market control, like the Adam doesn’t even really set the price of this.

At the end of the day, uh, Thomas doesn’t really set the price of his product at the end of the day.

We are all confined by what the market expects something to be priced to a degree.

Now we can shift that over time up, shift it down over time in some cases, but really the market sets a lot of the prices.

And we see this because a company will try to go to this price and things just won’t work out.

They can’t make, get the dots connected and they have to bring it back down.

Well, this, when they bring it back down, that’s not the price they wanted to be at.

Everybody acts like they chose the price they chose.

No, they got to a price that worked in the market.

The market decided what the price should be by how they behaved, whether they said no or whether they said yes.

How many said no, how many said yes.

And that pushes and pulls the price around until it settles at a spot where everybody’s happy.

Right?

So you can’t come along and be like that thing that’s selling millions and millions and millions of dollars is overpriced.

This is just, this is a, that’s like a, that’s an uneducated statement.

Right?

Um, so again, basic, I could not like a lot of, a lot of, and again, take the emotion out of it.

Right?

That’s an emotional statement.

That’s over, that’s a purely emotional statement.

You need to check your emotion.

And because I said, this is only harming you.

He doesn’t harm that guy, that guy you’re saying his product is overpriced.

He’s not harmed by your emotional assessment of his tool.

Okay.

Um, the faster you, this is kind of like the, um, in psychology, why should you not hold grudges against other people?

Why should you not be angry at this person all the time?

Because they don’t, it doesn’t affect them.

It’s only affecting you.

Right?

It’s only tearing you down.

It’s only adding stress to your life.

It’s only making you not enjoy your life.

So it’s actually better for you to forgive them for your own benefit.

Right?

So it’s better for you to stop blaming these tools for your own benefit.

It’s better for you to take emotion out of pricing for your own benefit.

You don’t have to wrap up money and emotion so tightly.

And the faster you get that unraveled, the better off your life is going to be.

I promise.

Promise.

Okay.

And with that, with that, we got to go.

Um, everybody say bye so I can say bye to everybody.

I hate going from the questions area to, um, you know, just signing off.

Right?

Okay.

Grant does say preach.

Uh, look, it’s not, everybody’s not going to be happy about it.

It’s people watch because I come on here and I, and I, and I, and I, I’m not in the business of sugarcoating, telling everybody what they want to hear, living in the middle, being a fake, right?

Being a phony.

Oh, just, oh, things might upset people.

I, I probably shouldn’t say that.

Um, I just, I just kind of tell it like it is.

That’s why people watch.

They know they’re going to get the reality.

They know they’re going to get the truth.

Uh, most people appreciate that.

The people that don’t appreciate that, I think they just, they don’t value, uh, honesty like this.

Okay.

But I love you guys.

Um, damn, no archive template answer.

Ah, I couldn’t get it.

I could not get to them all.

I apologize.

We will be back next week.

Okay.

Love you.

Peace.

Thank you.