WP Townhall 012: What Do Enterprise Web Projects Actually Look Like? w/ Jake Goldman

We are live up everybody welcome back wp town hall this is the show that drops you deep into

the heart of pivotal debate shaping the wordpress ecosystem of course i’m kevin geary joined as

always by the great mark zemansky and today’s topic is all about agencies and enterprise level

projects we have special guest jake goldman in the house we’re going to bring him on in just a

second mark is going to have a quick word from our sponsor omni send uh and then i do want to say

this is going to be like um as far as all the episodes that we’ve done go if you are an agency

owner or you are a freelancer when we get to the audience participation segment of this show i

highly highly highly encourage you to jump in we’re going to put the url up on the screen in just a

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the link you come on it can be audio it can be video whatever your preference is but if you have

questions for us if you have questions for jake this is going to be your chance to get your agency and

freelance questions answers i’m gonna let mark get into the uh omni send sponsor and then we’re gonna

get right into the show let’s go oh yeah thanks kevin again guys thank you for being here today’s

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service at no cost to you once again that’s wp townhall.show slash omni send let’s dive into this man

all right jake let’s bring him on let’s bring him on here we go here we go look at jake

good to be here with you both so jake thank you for coming yeah thank you for coming absolutely give us

uh and everybody watching if they don’t know who you are just a little bit of an introduction

sure so uh i think the way most people probably have bumped into me into this space is i founded a

little company called 10up back in 2011 aiming to at that time position ourselves in a growing uh promising

little ecosystem about wordpress into one of the leading sort of agency agencies of record leading

enterprise integrators for that space um grew that uh over the next 12 or 13 years uh in 2023

i merged that company into a company called fuel that i would say where 10ups renown was very

specifically probably around wordpress and making websites and making tools fuel is very renowned for

doing mobile applications product design product thinking into a sort of larger uh digital studio

and that newly combined company i simply take the title partner um these days i’m working on a little

bit of a bunch of like marketing storytelling about our own brand and where we’re going as a business

content creation uh general advising and support for the exec team and get a little bit involved in some sales

and business development and networking cool what’s the what’s the trajectory been so when you first

started 10up what what kind of projects were you guys focusing on and what kind of clients and then

kind of walk us through the shift maybe into an enterprise of what caused that shift uh just a little insight on that

yeah the first thing that goes through my head is i feel like that word enterprise needs a better

definition again because i feel like you say that to five different people they might take five different

things from it what i think of as enterprise which is to say organizations that are not small businesses

with two or three decision makers but more complicated organizations that have both the budget and the

complexity of multiple owners of a project multiple people that need to be involved in digital marketing and

online marketing i think we were enterprise from the beginning in our intent in our intent we did have some

smaller business customers that were you know maybe border what we call enterprise at the beginning

but most of our customers from the first year that i was developing the company or what i would classify

as like larger companies and businesses like a flagship uh customer we took on in year one would have been

the first time we worked with tech crunch as an example uh after i’ve been acquired at that time if i’m

keeping my acquirers treat by i think aol and at that time the huffington post definitely multiple

multiple stakeholders multiple people a larger organization a lot of revenue a lot of complexity

i think over the years since we’ve started certainly our customers have gotten

to generalize larger they have gotten higher in their expectations uh our average project size in 2023 let

alone 2025 you know 10x the size of what it was on year in year one for a lot of reasons but i don’t

know that i would earnestly say that the you know if we leave aside the integration with fuel and a

larger set of services we offer i don’t know that for simplification purposes i would really say the

persona we were targeting was different it was always aimed to be a larger publishers larger companies

using wordpress as a platform we’ve expanded a little bit beyond wordpress i think what changed

was as we got larger as the technologies got more complicated as we were able to offer more around

that core capability which was like engineering and back in editorial ux we naturally find out

found ourselves sort of working up the ladder of clients who want to invest more comfortable work

with us to spend more on their digital marketing and there’s probably a whole other uh

a whole other diatribe but also i do think the technology got more complex during those times the

expectations of what you build when you build a website from 2011 going through 2025 have gone up a

lot um now we may have forces pushing us the opposite direction but um yeah i don’t know that i would say

try to be a little less long with it i don’t know that i’d say the fundamental persona that we were

targeting the kind of businesses we wanted to work with dramatically changed um we were just able to work

with more of them those that wanted to spend more got it i want to i want to ask a quick question

i want to take it back i want to actually reference a friend of the show in the chat matt maderos uh i

was watching a live stream between you and jake uh jake you jake and matt maderos from 12 years ago i

was watching that recently uh great production um and and i i i i was listening to it and i was thinking at

that time remind me when 10 up started how many years ago at this point was it like it was february 2011

so that would like be over 14 years ago okay so when i was watching that that you were a couple years in

basically i want you to hit on because you’ve already mentioned it here kind of like you started

from the get-go with almost like trying to hit enterprise level and like had that in mind

but you mentioned in that in that interview with matt that you had already had experience in

basically positions of power management etc in like other agencies so it wasn’t your first time around

the block so if you could tell because again i think a lot of people that listen to us they’re

freelancers they’re agency owners maybe they’re trying to scale bigger we’re always talking about

dealing with bigger clients things like that how did you actually get to the point where you were

comfortable going after those people and like how did you set up 10 up from the get-go what happened in

your path that history before that to get you to be comfortable with going after those and some of the

ins and outs for those types of people that are maybe working to working to move up that ladder like that

yeah this is an important point that i talk about quite a bit when i get into conversations about 10 up

i think um and you’ll give me some grace on a friday as i probably broadly generalize for a moment here

i mean it’d be a little bit provocative but i do think that there is a certain group of people a certain

uh class of entrepreneur that thinks of being an entrepreneur as i shall always own my own company

the day that i feel like i have finished my school and my education whether that’s after they graduate

from high school or whether that’s after college or a graduate’s degree or something that uh my my

career and trajectory in business will be immediately being the owner of a business and a creator and

owner of that you know that capital that was not my point of view i did always think that there was

a lot of time that i was going to be a time where i wanted to own my own business i did have that

calling i was a like you know a freelancer through college frankly even through late high school going

way back uh here and thought that there would be a point where i will own and sort of build my own

business but i also really believe that there was a real power for a certain number of years for a

certain period of my life and time in uh i’ll be a little bit uh preachy here um or a little bit provocative

in learning from others having a chance you might say having a chance to make some mistakes on other

people’s dime on having good mentors that is to say if i was to say this again very directly i did

not have an ego that said i immediately know the best way to run a business and i am prepared on day

one graduating school to do the best possible run at starting my first company i wanted to go work for

other companies i wanted to have mentors in sales and engineering management i wanted to have that

structure and frankly also use it as an opportunity not only to make mistakes but to build a network to

build connections to be able to be in a position where i felt like i could hit the ground running

effectively um as in starting my own company and being very taking very seriously what it would mean

to be an independent entrepreneur all of that experience which will roughly say was you know we don’t

count like jobs during school we’ll roughly say it was like six seven years before i started my own company was

uh instrumental vital in understanding the story of how 10up could very quickly be created and very

quickly be successful i was able to very quickly get the kind of customers that i wanted to target because

i had spent many years building a network of people that enjoyed working with me wanted to follow what i was

doing wanted to regardless of where i happened to land or where i happened to be wanted to work with me

opportunities respected what i could do for them or their customers and we’re talking about like integrator spaces like wordpress

um lessons that i learned i could talk all day about lessons learned from mentors about how to think

about salary and payroll and how to handle if it’s not working out in those circumstances just like

those memories you have of being in a coffee shop or somebody sits down and say let me explain to you sort

of how we calculate the payroll how you calculate its implications looking out 12 months let’s talk about

what happens if that plan doesn’t work out how bad is it really if somebody heaven forbid has to find a new

job perhaps to find a new opportunity this is how much you really have to cover and look at all technical

but like gross margins and debt margins not as high as you think to be able to pay someone’s salary so

from like the finance and operations to you know god help me if i looked at proposals i wrote for the

first company as an employee to being you know getting completely like redlined having some first drafts

torn up by mentors and said this is not good this is not how you tell the story the connections the

understanding the operations and the finance the understanding what are the ingredients of actually

successfully winning new business what doesn’t work all of that went into the mixer which i think let

ten up and let me be very successful very quickly in building the business this business our first

customers didn’t just drop out of the sky or i didn’t just find them by my first year again just

falling from the sky into an ecosystem networking i found them because i had great relationships with

people that say at that time at automatic and their growing enterprise services arms were like we think

you’re doing cool things we trust you when we make an introduction to somebody i want to make some

connections for you my first two customers were people that had uh had come to me to work on projects

over the prior six seven eight years uh and were glad to hear i had started my own thing and wanted to

find projects to do together probably knew they were getting a good value in year one um of the company

uh so i feel like i’m rambling maybe a little bit at this point but i think uh you’re you’re hitting on

an important idea which is yes yeah backstory everything that came before starting my own business was

uh in again huge and uh where where we were able to go from there that’s great context appreciate it

kg what you got yeah i know um obviously your story is your story right uh and

uh a lot of people probably are wondering first of all i’m glad you explained that because i think

do you say you got tech crunch in the first year was that yep that was one of our yeah so i i knew a

lot i i visibly like in my uh peripheral vision i saw a lot of people just throwing in the towel

immediately like this guy was a first year tech crunch what like because their story that’s not their

story right um and your story is there’s a lot of background a lot of experience before actually starting

the agency and i know that’s your story so you tell that story but i’m wondering i’m curious if

you have any insight for the people who that path is not their path so they’re like i’m not i’m i just

started my agency i mean it’s already going like i just i need to know how to get my first customers

i can’t go like quit what i’m doing go work for other agencies for four or five years and get mentors

and all this other stuff and then i can try again like what should they do and what would your insight be for

them if they’re trying to get their thing off the ground but they don’t have those connections

they haven’t made those connections yet uh but they’re still trying to get traction

it’s a great question i feel like i need to start uh perhaps by exhibiting some humility and saying

that wasn’t the path that i went down the entrepreneurs and closest to it wasn’t the path

they pursued so i i can offer some ideas but i may not be the best person to advise on the right path

for people that took a very different path than i took um i think the logical thing i would suggest is

uh you know see the wisdom in finding those mentors see the wisdom in finding the people that

have had those battle scars don’t you know uh lean into the energy and confidence you have as an

entrepreneur but also embrace a little bit of humility that there are hard lessons you don’t

say bluntly you don’t know everything today especially if you haven’t had those battle scars

find those mentors find people that maybe there’s a lot of people now even in our space that have

effectively retired from starting businesses or moved on reach out to some of those people i suspect

they’d be open to giving advice they’d be open to being sounding boards uh building on real concrete

experience um i i think that’s a good point because i i get the feeling that a lot of people are hoping

their their first clients fall out of the sky and like you said they it just doesn’t actually happen

um and the connections of who you know and who you’re connected with and the opportunities that come

with that are a real key you know i think everybody has maybe this vision of i fire up a laptop

and i drop some google ads out into the space and i have my little website and people trickle in and

then they just magically turn into customers and then i get the ball rolling and then magic we have

an agency right uh and i don’t think it often looks like that yeah i think that’s right um i think maybe

more commonly and even then i think we can get over indexed on like the wild success stories but maybe

more commonly if like if you’re in your product space you’ve really carved out something different you’ve

clearly identified a space you know the classic entrepreneur story where there’s not a solution

there’s not five other options and you’ve done something original i think you have better

likelihood i still i still never believed like you build it and they will come like you still need

to market you still need to go find your your customers but in services particularly in a crowded space

with a lot of different choices in a very open market you know you know i i mean i don’t want to

poo poo i know some people who are like far more effective at like super networking than i do and

they just go out and you know rapidly try to build that network that i took six seven years to build

before starting a company and i think they have some success with that model just willing to hit the

pavement um really hard and make a lot of connections but um you know i guess the other maybe this is

obvious or cliche advice but the other you know the other advice i suppose i could offer apropos that

like product example is um and i think this was germane detenep’s origin story find us you know find what

makes you different um if you’re if you really want to maybe particularly at this moment in time which

let’s be clear it’s a very different moment in time than 2011 in the say the very least in technology and

wordpress and agency and services and all the rest um but i’ve always believed that it’s better to be

a to be and to aim to be uh let’s call it a big fish in a small to medium-sized pond

than to be a small fish in the largest pond and you know in the ocean um you know when we when i started

10 up the notion was i’m not going to go after drupal or the popular options at the time because

i felt they were overcrowded they were saturated those spaces were occupied the specific reason i

chose to go after wordpress other than i genuinely enjoyed the software was because i thought there was

a very specific opening to be different by focusing on that software and focusing on with a set of like

enterprise expertise so if you really want to like i think drop in at this point you’ll just be another

agency in the um another agency in the ecosystem at this point i would i’d probably urge somebody

very strongly to pick a place that you can hyper focus on a spot whether that’s an industry that you

focus on that’s a certain approach to building sites pick something that makes you different that stands

out um from a borderline commoditized crowd at the moment and just to give people an idea what um project

scope um of your and maybe along the way maybe there’s been stages or phases that you’ve gone

through um but what kind of numbers are we talking about in terms of project scope to give people an

idea of you know juxtaposed with the projects they might be working on and i know a lot of because i want

to get into what makes a project uh fit that level of a price point right i think a lot of people have

they struggle like hold on i like i can imagine what a 3500 website is i can imagine what a 10 000

website i can’t even imagine what like you know and so give us some numbers and and uh then talk a

little bit about like what goes into making that number actually happen yeah um i feel like uh before

i answer that question i have to like compartmentalize for a second that i think what pricing is and what

expectations are around cost at this particular moment in 2025 is undergoing a radical shift um so i think

we just like compartmentalize that little thing with ai and changes and how we do development

that question crisply or i’ll just turn into a mumbling a mumbling gas bag here um the so to start

with like what do typical projects look like at the business i will say they uh vary more than people

might think we are i would say the typical engagement to generalize it’s probably in the like 250 to 500k

kind of range but there are a lot of they’re not even outliers there’s a lot of things on both ends

of the spectrum so we have projects small projects foot in the door projects um very cool little things

like uh without naming names or doing some like interesting like payment integrations for woocommerce

uh the projects themselves are not crudely rocket science to pretty rinse and repeat

yeah the way that we know it’s a new api it’s some branding and everything else but they’re not like

radically new innovative problems to solve like so we’ve done projects like that for as little as

30 40 50 60 k sometimes if the scope is very narrow that’s not our ideal customer in terms of like long

term what we want to be doing with businesses but if they get our foot in the door if it’s an

interesting project um we do have some you know sometimes there’s even like just like a seo on it

that we’re doing for people or we have this new like seo brand visibility assessment that we do it’s

adjacent to seo that looks at um how is your brand performing in popular generative ai what can you do

to move the needle on its profile like that’s if you just wanted to come in to get your foot in the door

try something with us i think it’s like five thousand dollars or something to do a quick

a quick audit on the other end of the spectrum we have you know seven figure multi-million dollar

projects because because they have spent into eight figures i don’t know if we’ve ever had

like a single so w or single engagement um that’s gone that high um one thing to understand i think

about the projects on the upper end of that spectrum is i wouldn’t say we’re typically

building what i’m just calling website usually those projects are building

probably a tortured word i guess but platforms and what i guess to be more specific since

everything’s a platform nowadays i mean a few different things i mean things like i’m very

proud of the work our team does on google site kit in partnership with google that is a tech that that

is more tooling and platform building that we’re doing we’re working with a very large well-known

publisher that has like 200 sites uh running on but that you know will be i guess all running on

wordpress moving them from some proprietary uh cms is that i would that’s not really a website building

project that’s building platforms and technologies and uh tools for organizations um i think uh i guess

before i move on to uh why do organizations spend that much what does a project look like that does that

answer the first part i think so yeah i think it gives people a good view yeah in terms of the

characteristics uh that lead to that kind of level investment again it probably generalize at my

hazard um some of it has to do with expectations of quality a little bit of nobody you know i hate

using this metaphor but a little bit of like nobody gets fired for hiring ibm there they understand that

that with buying a more scaled more proven more complicated piece of machinery to do something

that you know you sacrifice on the famous iron triangle you sacrifice that it’s going to be cheap

to work with that kind of company but you have a certain confidence level that at the end of the

day they’ll have to have the resources to get it done they don’t just flame out right on you as an option

you’re willing to make that extra spend to have the confidence that there’s a larger apparatus even if

it costs more being a large enterprise some of it is technical complexity and integration complexity or

design complexity that they’re looking for if the website project is fundamentally rooted in we’re

exploring brand we want motion animation we really want to think about through discovery what is our

identity what should our website or web marketing or tool do that is to say it’s not just a that’s

just a development project it’s a design project it’s a creative project it’s a strategic and a

consultative project at least if it’s maybe its earliest phases in discovery i think that’s a huge

component um sometimes there is an understanding that the costs of project management uh in orchestration

of a project when you’re dealing with sometimes i mean in the worst cases dozens of stakeholders

dozens of people that need to be involved in the process and have a say in what comes out of that

is just a again that consulting lens that is just a more complex process again technical complexity

and scope it can be particularly in larger enterprises we’ve got these four or five back office systems and

this special single sign-on secured infrastructure and environment that we need you into we’re in health

care and we need you to deal with like uh measure three times cut ones for things like hipaa compliance

and data privacy data security um so there’s a lot of different reasons i suppose the the consistent theme

is uh uh willingness to pay for a more complex operation because of the kind of conf the the assurance

confidence durability it gives and just whether it’s again design or engineering or stakeholder management

high complexity within the organization um and then of course like the return is just very different so

they’re willing to spend more um you know some of the clients that we work with you know the the stakes

if you will and getting it wrong are millions tens of millions hundreds of millions of dollars in

revenue and credibility and you know when you have a lot more income you have a lot more risk you’re willing to

you have to have the security yeah you have to have the security of uh a specialized firm and a firm of a

specific size for sure yes i want to hone in on like one thing you said um foot in the door right you mentioned

250 to 500 you also mentioned 5000 um and i think this is such an important concept right but i’ll let you explain it

um but why is it important to do foot well first of all explain to everybody that’s listening what is a

foot in the door project and then why are those so important to take on a foot in the door project is a

project that you take on not because in isolation it’s necessarily the kind of work or relationships you

want to have but because it uh it opens up the door to pitch new opportunities to have your brand your

company known inside of an organization it’s the seed that can germinate into a larger set of opportunities

you’re interested in like we would not uh we would not be terribly successful as a business having three

over 300 mouths to feed in a large budget if we were selling if we had to sell i don’t even want to do the

math on that you know just five thousand dollar engagements or projects uh but for a certain you

know you know i again have to be sensitive i can’t name a lot of client names another joy that comes with

enterprise uh work but there are very large brands that are doing very impressive work that are you know

kicking the tires having an ongoing conversation with us for a year maybe exploring some projects and if

sometimes the thing that can just get you kick started get you the uh like the they don’t want

to be very technical but like you get like a master services agreement a contract a hunting license

inside of an organization you can start to get you some people inside the organization that it’s not

hypothetical these people do good work i like working with them i want to do more work with them and that

kicks off the relationship if that can be in some cases like look tiny amount of spend for you we have this

new offering that’s a brand you know ai brand visibility assessment um here’s a little bit

that we’ve just started to do looking into how your brain represents here’s a couple of things we’ve

written about how to move the needle in there um you know i think you’d be crazy not if you have the

bandwidth not to do that project because it you know i’m trying to think of a better metaphor than like

dating but sometimes you just need that starter yeah right to develop a relationship yep yeah

how do you um i got this question written down here and i think it’s i think it’s pertinent because

we’ve talked a lot about you know kind of there’s there’s obviously things that you know people in the

audience could take from this but not everyone’s running 10 up and i think it’s really interesting that

like you set out to do that at first i’m interested in if you ask a lot of people that are listening right

now what their biggest problem in their business is i would venture to say it’s probably like revenue

and leads and obviously most businesses that’s kind of generally biggest problem but i’m wondering at

a 10 up scale where you’ve worked with so many people very mature very like large scale is like is that

actually your biggest problem or like i know there’s probably a ton of problems but i’m saying at that

scale once you get to that what are what would you say is kind of like your biggest constraint that

you’re trying to solve for at at this point in you know the life cycle of of a business like this

it’s a great question there’s so many ways to slice that i mean i think any partner any owner

any leader inside of an organization you are in a very very privileged position one that i do not

consider us to be in if you’re first if you’re if you’re if you’re the the bottom of your maslow’s

pyramid if the thing that you most need to be concerned about all the time not just tomorrow

in a month in six months in 12 months is revenue you don’t have employees without revenue you don’t

have tools without revenue you want to be business without revenue let’s not mince words we can say

whatever politic things we want about team and everything else but revenue is the lifeblood of a

business now we can you know quibble about like startups that have uh you know over capitalized over

funding and don’t have to earn revenue in my opinion thankfully something that’s starting to fade in its

commonality across the industry but particularly for a services business where there’s no reason you need

five years of you know private capital runway to get going and building your company yeah i mean to this i

don’t need to be clear i don’t even own the majority of the company at this point since the merger i

i uh i have a with the third largest uh like owner in the business so it’s not all hanging over my head

in the way that it was three years ago and still probably one of the things i would most stress

about for this business is making sure that we are consistently bringing in good healthy revenue again

we may be privileged and have to worry about that for next week but you still have to worry about it for

six months for 12 months you have to worry about that durability there are obviously different ways you

can answer that question what at any given moment stresses you out the most i think uh the you know

maybe something useful here uh i think in a day more day-to-day kind of context um i think when you get to this kind of scale

one of the biggest challenges is uh is his culture and is the people and is this and i and i uh i guess

i want to be more specific again one of these overall words culture um there are a lot of things i mean by

that but i suppose one thing i’m indexing on in particular is uh how to say this in an increasingly

competitive space and at a moment in time particularly right now particularly the last few years where there

is so much change and so much need to be agile i don’t like the word pivot but at least rapidly adapt

to changes and how we need to do things rapidly adapt to stay competitive not get stuck in your old ways

of working the reason somebody chooses to join say a 300 headcount company over a five headcount company or

a 10 headcount company are often very different motivations sometimes what you’re indexed on they just

want to make cool things maybe it’s not radically different but for a lot of people there’s a calculus that is like

when i join a company of the size of fueled and 10 up um i have a i have a security i don’t need to worry

about a lot of things i don’t need i don’t it feels wrong so i don’t want to have as much of an ownership mentality but there’s an essential

that’s a lot of things that’s a lot of things that’s a lot of things that are going to be in

in the world and i don’t want to be in the world and i don’t want to be in such a uh uh i don’t know

what i’m looking for like a organization subject to rapid change um that you get with a much smaller team so i think

like hot on my mind at this moment in time is you know uh you know how do you move the battle carrier

right how do you move the aircraft carrier how do you in a time where people need to change the ways

that they work need to adapt how do you keep the culture hungry how do you keep people motivated and

feeling the shared incentive in the way that you do in a tiny close-knit team to make change to be on board with change

um i feel like i’m rambling at this point but how how big was the 10-up team when you first started

like would you start would you start with like a five person team just just you day one was in the office

and i had with uh within like i think like a month or so i had a couple like people doing contracting

with me just for some of the overflow um by the time we were at the end of year one i had to look back

so i get this question i can’t even remember anymore roughly eight to ten uh people by the end of year one

um but yeah i know i mean i did not have a partner in starting the business um at the time i didn’t

want a partner i wanted speaking of fast-moving ships i wanted to be able to make decisions quickly

i wanted the very um like the ability to be very opinionated without having to spend three weeks

arguing about certain decisions don’t know how i feel today about that in hindsight

but yeah just me bootstrapping uh if you will out of my office that’s really interesting though

because like you were you started by yourself you had 10-ish people by by year one i mean so you did

kind of i mean you’re fishing in kind of a different pond it sounds like but you did you you do have a

similar experience back then that people do now a lot again a lot of the viewers do now though because

like i mean you’re you were trying to scale just like that i mean i guess the one the one other

question around that is was your background software before and like did you just start selling as soon as

you got the like did you have to just put on like the ceo cap basically right away like once you started

the business obviously you would have had to but what was the transition there and how did you i don’t

just like the the short the short run up there i mean like it seems like it started progressing pretty

quickly yeah again i think a lot of the like it was not it was day one of 10 up it was not day one of

jake goldman as a consultant and uh uh experienced a subject matter expert in the space like we spoke

about earlier um trying to kind of answer the question i think day one it was definitely wearing

every hat including ceo which feels like a overall title for a one-person company um chief of all the

executives of one um but yeah i mean you know first first weeks first month was rapid networking

rapidly letting people in my circle know that my shingle is you know my shingle is down and i’m looking

for work i’m hungry for work um a lot of uh networking again thankfully building on a network that already kind

of knew what i did already had experience working with me um very fortunate that you know i think

i came off gosh 14 years ago but so some of this is foggy but i want to say within like the first

month i had you know two decent clients that had worked with me previously um on projects and you know

again probably you know if you want a good time to get value in your agency or service provider or your vendor

pick the one that just started from somebody that you know that you know uh you had good experiences

with because they’re you know supply and demand they’re don’t have a lot of demand for work on day

one so they’re going to give you a better price uh and you’re going to get that kind of like cat you

know it’s gonna be the person executing the work too so you’re going to get a kind of caliber of work that

in some ways gets better but it’s also maybe not quite as high bang for the buck once they sort of

you sort of have a scale whole scaled out team uh underneath that person um yeah i’ve lost

it have you uh what what are some of the big pivots that ten up has had to make if they any that stand

out to you over the years big pivots um

man there’s a that’s a bunch of different directions i could take uh i don’t i guess i

first want to say like i and maybe i’m just allergic to that word pivot but i don’t know that i’ve ever

said if you think of pivot as like radical hard right shift when like from this to this um i don’t

know that i would ever say we’ve pivoted uh as a business moments where i feel like we had uh

moments where there was hard change that had to happen i think you know there’s the operational

side of that there’s the you know there’s the classic you’re moving up to like 20 plus people

where you’ve got to start scaling out operations it can’t just be the founder handling payroll and

tax management and you know 17 of your back office things you need to start creating focus and you just

start figuring out how to delegate more not just the delivery of the work but again the back

office the ops um the management of the business and again you know i think about like 50 to 70 as

like you have to change the way you think of like people management and the structure of the organization

before it gets very fragile um there are obviously like moments of technology change within the

organization again i wouldn’t call them pivots you know but as you get more scale things like

figuring out how do we embrace more full page editing experiences how do we embrace low code and no code

approaches um how do we stop building everything from scratch on top of wordpress as a foundation

um we’re going through one now maybe the closest thing i would say to a pivot which is

how do we not in a month how do we in 12 months how do we in 24 months how does any agency how do we

still be relevant not be dinosaurs in this era the ai and vibe coding and you know all the rest

that’s a good segue i guess into that i mean what’s are you uh do you have thoughts that you want to

share on that um how much time we got i guess is the problem we have time for my thoughts um

yes is there a like a direction you want to go with uh just in in you’re looking at the landscape like

we’re looking at the landscape and i think there’s a lot of unknowns i think there’s a lot of possibilities

uh we don’t know to what extent things are going to shift or change um so i think everybody just has a

prediction you know or an outlook and they might think okay in a year from now probably not going to be a

radical significant change perhaps but in three years we got to be maybe ready for uh whatever

else is on their mind in terms of what this could become great question so and i will confess probably

like any other honest leader i’m of two minds we might simplistically say glass half empty glass half full

on this i think to make the arguments i’ll sort of tell you where i land i think there’s an argument

an argument that i was frankly making two years ago that you could look at if you wanted to look at it

as like a progression you could look at a i and generative ai and programming as a progression of

something that has changed over 50 years since programming was writing binary codes and so it was

writing exodecimal values into software if you look at the arc of technology leading up to ai it has

it has consistently and pretty dramatically gotten easier year over year there’s more annoying things

to deal with as we be for good or bad as we become more compliance centered as an organization as it

became even more sub-specialized and sometimes like adjacent technologies can feel more impenetrable

uh the notion of like a full stack developer i don’t know what that means anymore i guess it was find

coder now um the uh but if you compare like 20 no 1970s to 1980s to 90s to 2000s and what the difficulties

of programming it’s just like even forget even before ai radically easier in all in almost every sense from

being able to write in relatively readable human code from literally like in the earliest forms of

engineering looking up x values and impenetrable like you know alphanumeric uh commands for when

you know storage was smaller memory was smaller two things like having to deal with like i learned in

school how to deal with like memory management like stacks when’s the last time an engineer that wasn’t

writing like operating system level like code had to deal with thinking about like memory optimization

and like moving memory swaps right around in the writing software all the way to like you know you

could almost argue generative ai as a permutation and i can google just about any common engineering

question right and find an answer that was not it believe it or not that was not a thing like in the

even in the 90s right right open the book right and hope you look something up you know bang your head

against the keyboard all day trying to figure out why it’s not working um and uh and that is to say

even throughout that entire arc at no point as the work became easier and easier and easier at no

point did we see fewer and fewer software engineers or developers in fact the opposite happened as the

technology became easier and more accessible we had an absolute explosion uh an opportunity in software

development engineering so you could take one view and say i think this is another step where we’ll spend

less time doing tedious things do more creative things be able to do more be more innovative be more clever

um and we’re just we’ll still continue to see an explosion we’ll see more explosion i think there’s

a different kind of explosion there’s another view that i think uh you could argue that this is not just a

evolutionary step this is the the automobile to the horse this is the industrial revolution this is a

period of creative destruction where there of course still be applications there will be digital there will be

web and all the rest but the effort to do so the way that we do so and solve these problems is just

radically different that lens leads you down i think a path of we are you know uh today’s software engineers

as yesterday’s you know uh you know should have a better metaphor on the tip of my tongue but whatever

people were doing and you know before the industrial revolution before the uh before the combustion engine

before electricity for that matter we will wipe out a class um uh uh a class isn’t the right word a skill

set a practice a guild a practice um i don’t think it’s maybe not that dramatic on either side of the

spectrum if you had to ask me earnestly i think we need to reconcile with the reality that a lot of a a lot of

what we do today for engineering is probably going to drop in its effort not by in the way that i painted

that evolutionary step not over the next few years by 15 20 percent i think we are looking at a drop in the

effort to do most things in software engineering on the order of 80 to 90 percent and i think we are looking at that over the next two to three years

um more crass might already be there in terms of effort but just not everybody’s figured that out

and knows what to do with that on the buyer side of the market yet um trepidatious to do to just assume

that’s the way to do that and there is still some you know evolution that needs to happen in the in the tools

but i think if you talk to any great engineers really including this minute you know 10 up and fueled

as well that has had that like aha moment we all talk about where they plugged in cursor

you know windsurf one of these ones people are experimenting with the wordpress ecosystem that

you do have this aha moment of this is not 20 easier this is not next code complete

this is i am doing things in days and i spent weeks doing before i don’t think that we are going

to see a 10x explosion in the demand to create new things that would offset what i think is an 80 to 90

drop in what the effort is going to be to deliver the you know to deliver work now that doesn’t mean our

industry is doomed i do think like what it does mean is there will be more value there will be more

value placed on people that um put it candidly the most high skill people on our team the people that

are not doing you know basic i come in in code but are thinking in terms of larger architecture software

engineering solving harder problems as with almost any field that has gone through like evolution and

creative destruction you have to uh you have to develop the creative thinking skills the critical

thinking skills the problem solving skills if we uh again give me on friday and i’m you know probably

being even more blunt here but like i think we have to earnestly stop we work so software engineers

work in offices that are often air conditioning and comfortable if not from their comfort of their own home

in one sense it’s easy to call that a white collar job but if we are honest with ourselves about

probably what 70 of developers do it is it is like in an economic sense it is blue collar work

it is writing code it is a like it is a it is not it is a manual output i am it just happens to be on a

keyboard where we can be comfortable in air conditioning but i am using my hands to make something

and craft something people that all they know how to do is take somebody else’s thinking and creativity

this is a vision for how this thing should work this is a vision for how to solve problems and i

translate that into machine code i think are going to have a lot of difficulty over the next few years and

i think they they if they’re going to keep thriving and succeeding they need to up level into being

again problem solvers consultants people that can have a lens for quality and craftsmanship um

the artisan sounds pretentious but um you know auteurs something something like that yeah no i think i

think that’s spot on for sure i mean it sounds to me like the money question to me is because you mentioned

80 to 90 percent uh greater efficiency perhaps right what that really translates to i mean 900 greater

efficiency yeah yeah yeah yes correct correct um here’s the thing is do you think that that is going

to our 10 up clients like the uh the classic 10 up kind of client are they going to is there going to be a

large reduction in that or because if there isn’t if the answer is no because it’s not like and you

know no offense to mark like i don’t think mark in his pocket of tokens is going to come grab like you

know a large chunk of the 10 up client base right as an example like nobody’s just going to do that uh and

i i i don’t think those companies care all that much to do it themselves i mean obviously they can bring

in-house development teams and all this other stuff into the mix and they they could try to go that route

i don’t know if they’re really interested in doing it that way i think they’re still going to hire the

10 ups and i think they still which means that really all this does is increase 10 ups profitability

because and it does harm the and i’m being this is my positive this is positive kevin talking okay

uh it’s not positive for maybe a lot of the like your workforce because as you just said um you’re not

going to need as many of them to do the work right um but from a company perspective it’s your efficiency

threshold goes through the roof and you still have the same clients because they’re not to the point

where it’s like oh i can just type the cursor and it does everything we want it to do we still need

professional guidance we still need the consultancy we still need this agency to manage this for us

yes i mean there’s a lot there’s a lot there i’m not sure i’m i i i feel like i need to say like i

i may come off very strongly opinion about some of these issues but anybody including me that says

like damn it they’re sure about anything they are saying about what’s going to happen in the next few

years needs a needs a needs a reality check so i say this with the humility of i don’t know and i am

brainstorming with you and i am ideating and we all yeah crystal ball predictions that are hazard

i think i would argue that profitability by its nature comes from having a monopoly on something

or maybe an oligopoly or a monopoly is an overstatement but having uh uh having something

unique having something that somebody does not have uh monopoly is maybe the wrong word to make it more

concrete in professional services when you hire somebody you are hiring

just not rudimentary you are hiring somebody that has a skill set that you do not have

yourself right they have a monopoly if you will on a capability technical capability knowing a piece

of software knowing how it works or you just need more hands on deck of those of those kinds of people

you know right but the if when something is extremely commoditized which is to say there are a lot of ways

you know i mean it’s much flatter what it takes to be able to like find that talent that is a thing that

squeezes down margin right so like as the wordpress space as just as an example here that’s very relevant

as it um our work has gotten our work has gotten more competitive we have not gotten more profitable

over the years as that has happened because we no longer have as much of a

precious commodity as opposed to a generalized commodity like if in year one of 10 up like

you know how to do wordpress at an enterprise grade level of like security and that was a fairly

it’s going back to what makes your company different right right that was a fairly unique proposition

relatively hard to find in the market in a qualified way and that is what brings up profits you

don’t you have limited to be crude about it you have limited choices we have something you don’t have

you know i remember the years where we all talked about like the uh i will say having been through

like flash and everything else i i rolled my eyes up do you remember like there was like

three four years in wordpress when this when it was blossoming when all of us that were the special

early entrance into the space that knew how it worked like i remember the thing that was always

going around like events and word camps was raise your prices your rates aren’t high enough raise your rates

charge more has anybody in this room heard anybody say that for the last eight years

in the space i mean we we tell there’s a lot of uh low-level agencies who for sure need to raise their

prices right but yes you’re you’re right in general sure but you’re you’re not seeing the yes again we’re

generalizing yes it’s fair to say it’s like everybody and what what was actually happening was the space was

recognizing we had a special commodity the thing that was in demand that is the thing that drives

a profitability we could all charge more afford to get away with charging more i don’t think you see

like the larger players and agencies talking about right right raising rates now because the space has

flattened it has commoditized and i do think i remember you know like economic theory here i think to bring it

back home like i do think as ai proliferate i i do think the degree to which we have a special sauce

does go down not gone not that there’s not still specialization but it does continue to go down i do

think a good generalist developer that maybe doesn’t have the time to study exactly how wordpress hooks and

filters or apis work at a company that is an internal on internal staff is more likely to be able to get a lot of

the work done themselves across multiple platforms than they were before this right so i so i don’t

want to sound overly negative but i do think that there is some i don’t know that i would i would not

personally predict my investors can close their ears not personally predict that ai specifically is

something that would raise profits to be frank i suspect it would be something at least in the midterm

that puts more pressure on profitability we have to get more price competitive as we have less of a

special commodity don’t feel specifically when we’re talking about like thinking of us as like a

wordpress engineering shop right the special commodity that we have that’s going to get more and more

important is what i said before it is that we are creatives it’s that we you know our value to you is you

can say this is again way too simplistic but you can say i need a incredible website that drives the bottom

line leads and conversion on my site and not just yes you can do the technology too but my expectation

of most of what i’m getting most of the value i’m getting from you is you know how to solve this problem

from a design from a ux from an audience measurement audience growth from a like architecture standpoint see

what i yeah i mean i think what you’re saying for the average agency is 100 true it’s going to be very

difficult for them so for low level agencies as i’ve said i’ve told them time and time again if the

skills that you have amount to the skills that ai has we don’t need you you’re gone right like you’re

so the low level agencies that do ai quality work are effectively out of business the agencies that are

two to three steps above that are going to have a difficult time uh and it’s things are going to get a lot

harder and a lot more competitive and things like that uh i think that 10 up though it’s in this this

happens constantly in other industries and other markets and you can look at something like um you

know government regulations as an example where you know the facebooks the googles they actually in a lot

of ways they love government regulations because they look they’re the only ones that can afford to

comply and all of their competitors can’t and they go away and they’re like hey all right here we are

this is fantastic um and it’s kind of i think it’s kind of the same because the way 10 up is positioned

with the brand reputation that you said with companies looking to hey if we hire 10 up now i’m

not getting fired because like you know we’re hiring a reputable agency to come do this versus the well

we’re just gonna hire a vibe coding agency like that that’s a good way to get fired um you know so i feel

like this i i and i know your um your job is not to be super positive about this right your job is to

look at like the net because because you have to defend against it right you have to say um you know

we need to protect against the possibilities that this does go south and it is a a big troubling thing for

us to go through yada yada yada i don’t know i just i feel like um 10 up’s in a great position because you are

isolated towards the top and the top tends to stay at the top in tough situations like this because of

all the advantages you’ve built for yourself uh which i think is fantastic i think you’ve done

that’s exactly what you should have done this is it’s a it’s a great thing well thank you um

and i i want to be careful in the the degree of negative vibe i give off here i don’t think it’s that

we’re going to go south but i think what i right right perhaps what i was responding to is there

is a specific question about what they spend with us what what average project size looks like

i think that there will be cases not because we are the don’t fire ibm but because we have a set of

creative skills and analytic skills and skills that are much deeper than just coding on a website or

coding on an app um with fueled uh where we can still merit the same budgets but i will tell you

just like you know i’ll be transparent with you and your audience today we just sold the project for 20

of what we probably would have sold it for three years ago on the app side of the house because we

are pretty confident we can use these tools that the customer’s right to expect that we can use these

tools to get to version 0.8 of this in a fraction of the time that we did before and then to your point

we’re not still talking about the six figure project to your point expect that we know hey we know how to

use these tools correctly we there’s a creative component of the project and have confidence that

we know how to get that 80 to 100 in terms of quality and durability as a shipping product

but that is a real world case of a client who probably would have expected to spend seven

figures on an engagement like that three years ago expecting and we think they’re not wrong

that that can be done for about 15 to 20 percent of the price so was it a was it a situation where you

gave them a number and they were like oh hold on like we think we think with ai or was it a competitive

advantage of to be honest i wasn’t in every meeting so i don’t know exactly what the tone i want to

mischaracterize uh anything if i’m going to put a disclaimer on this um but my impression is that it

was more like um we knew that they probably would not have been able to afford a traditional project they

had a sense that a project like this we may not have been able to afford two or three years ago but maybe

we should be able to do that today and we shouldn’t have to go with like a you know let’s call it ai

level like lousy offshore yeah yeah approach to build it i don’t know that we ever came back to them with

like here’s what you would have paid two or three years ago i think we had dare i say the you know

pat ourselves on the back here the wisdom and the foresight to say

uh here’s an avenue we come back and say this number a that’s not something we would tell ourselves

right it’s if we were building this product is what it costs this year and we are very confident that

they will if they are searching for good options they will find somebody that knows they can take this

approach well there will be a competitor who wins this business who’s being smarter than us

yeah let’s not be dinosaurs let’s dare we say pivot right let’s take a different approach um

so i don’t know i didn’t mean to be i’m not trying to play semantic games but i think my reaction here in

terms of like profitability my reaction here in terms of like will deal size change i think we can be okay i

think we’re well positioned i think we’re fortunate to have a team that is uh innovative and creative

whether we’re better positioned for the next year for the next two years are we better position than

maybe like your mid-size or small size shop that’s you know um because of that like you don’t get fired

for high bm uh kind of thinking yeah i take your point that’s probably true on the flip side if i was you

know um again maybe i say this a little bit more dramatically than i mean it to be a little provocative

if i was just on the outside now and i was an investor being asked where would you spend your

dollars a 10 person five 10 person team that all has a sense of like we have an ownership in this

business and look at the you know uh and we don’t have these massive legacy overhead costs and structures

and personnel to carry and you know sit down with them they get it they’re also playing with ai they’re

experimenting with how to do these things faster or a company that was massive in size or much

larger in size that needs to once we get past this like adaptation period needs to completely adapt

their culture needs to adapt entirely their processes their way of working being big has its disadvantages

as well um i’m not sure which way you know somebody investing i don’t know which way i would go in

terms of what’s the smarter what’s the smarter five-year bet right in terms of who’s going to make it

i think we’ll make it i think you know i have to and do have optimism there’s amazing things like that

example i just told you going on in our team but you know i have 300 people maybe some of them are

watching this but i also don’t think we have any illusions i don’t know it’s 20 of our engineering

team just like i hate this and i’m fighting this and i don’t want to get up tomorrow and do the same work

for 20 20 of the effort interesting interesting well a few things one uh jake i don’t think you’re you

might not know this but the word provocative is in the slogan of this show so you’re right on point with

this stuff so we appreciate your earnestness in here and your and your directness on these topics

because these are these are really important things so we appreciate your opinion on that

second thing to the audience you guys listening uh hopefully you’re enjoying this so far i think it’s

it’s been fantastic so if you’re interested if you have any questions throw them in the chat and again

you know how it goes around here if you want to join wp townhall.show/join we’ll get you on here we’ll

bring you up you talk to jake and us directly we can ask questions we do have one question here

that i think kind of uh is kind of a good segue from what we were talking about there i think goes in

line everything we just talked about here for the last you know few minutes here was everything like

how ai is affecting the industry like what i would say like the work in the industry um i think it’s a

little further out but the one question that i have and i’ll read this one in a second is more about like

is it going to affect the actual landscape of the digital world do you think at all is that a question

you’ve had like so for instance 10up builds websites super broad websites and web apps a lot of

people here build websites maybe web apps something like that do we think that any of that’s going to

change or do we think it’s just going to get easier and easier to build those things but with this advent

of ai do we think we’re going to go from like websites it’s a kind of a different discussion but

like websites being like the main forefront for these for businesses and marketing everything like

that to something different where instead of going to google and searching you’re just going to chat gpt

and you’re like getting that information and maybe it doesn’t direct you to a website it directs you

somewhere else so that’s a super bigger topic we don’t have to super dive into that but i want to

read this question as i think goes along with it is um does jay think wordpress will be the right

platform for building enterprise sites in three years or do we all need to be learning something else

so i don’t know what your thoughts on that but this is again from 10ups perspective has always been

wordpress like have you guys been thinking about this dude you obviously do a lot of custom stuff but

what’s that what’s that look like so just make sure i’m parsed because i think there’s actually very two very

different questions there there’s a question of a thing that’s not necessarily about ai it’s about

wordpress as a platform and architecture in three years and get a different question about whether or

not uh ai is so transformative though again the automobile to our horse or the press that even you

know people don’t read hand scrolls anymore websites aren’t a thing uh you know speculating 10 20 years

from now i don’t know i you could you would put me in the camp of a humanity can make it 10 or 20 years

that it’s going to be it’s going you know this will be like talking to somebody before electricity

was spread um this will be like which i guess as many of us would be like talking to somebody about

what it was like before the internet right a completely different universe and landscape i call

the library to get a book for me if i have a question as opposed to i type it into my phone

in ways that we can speculate in ways we probably can’t imagine any more than we could have imagined

at the beginning of the internet what it was going to be in the short term in the midterm i still think

ai and llms and chat interfaces and natural language interfaces will do much more for us

but if you think of a website as effectively and effectively a way of just uh digesting content

and so for some markets a brochure for what you do like having this conversation with a couple other

executives in the space like i still think somebody wants to look at like in retail what does this

product look like let me read about and not have something tell me about it i’m not sure i really believe

you know the you know you know clothing stores still exist in the era of the internet people want to go try

things on right and will it be reduced probably will it still be around yes i think some sort of visual

medium for exploring and navigating products and goods will still be a thing in the in the near term

before everything before and the grand changes that come from wordpress specifically what a timely question uh

first of all i’m gonna plug for my own thing um but uh uh but if you if you’re if you’re not aware there’s a conference

called press conf uh that’s happening i think in a week and a half um if you still are available in a week and a half

and you’re not going to and i would urge you to i don’t normally show for conferences but i think

uh and i’m not just talking about myself here that there is a pretty impressive roster and that they put together

um i think it’s going to be a good time um good time to have something third party put together

um and uh i’m not going to entirely spoil that talk but i’m going to ask it stick with the theme going to ask a

provocative question of where does wordpress fit in the market now and maybe one spoiler alert the answer is not

it’s everything for every website that there is a hypothesis that there is a space for it in the market

the market and that we should not be telling ourselves that any website any web marketing need is solved for

best uh by wordpress today do i think wordpress will still be around three years i i have you know

it’d still be a good platform i do um i think the um i think where it succeeds right now i guess short

version of some of the ideas in my talk where i think it succeeds is for uh businesses that want a balance

the i think it’s a very big difference between extremely low complexity low code no code ai generated

brochure and on one extreme and on the other extreme companies still spending seven figures on other very

complex platforms that need complex integrations complex orchestration complex workflows i think

somewhere between these two competing ends of the spectrum there is a space in the word in the middle where it’s like

like in preference valuing the cost economies of uh integrations over say complex orchestration

and technology to solve for certain kind of problems i think for people that don’t necessarily want

the uh their editors their content creators coming in like creating an art project with every page on the

site but also don’t want totally free form every you know don’t want something totally uh rigid on the

other extreme that’s just like a contentful series of fields want something where there is some structure

but enough flexibility and fluidity that can rearrange items on a page that can create some interesting

page layouts i still think wordpress often is in a pretty competitive space um and yeah i i definitely

you know i’m not sure what market share but i definitely think wordpress is still around and

still a good platform in three years gotcha well we’re excited to see a press comp kevin and i will

also be there and on the stage at one point or another so yep yeah exciting super exciting hopefully you guys in

the chat too are going to be there seriously jake’s not messing around here it’s going to be a great time so

go to presscomp.events and uh check it out absolutely but yeah um this is wild times huh i mean like

a lot of a lot going on here i mean how do you how do you i don’t know i mean like what’s i can’t imagine

again like i asked about that question earlier like what’s you ask people at you know like you know small

agencies what their biggest problems are and then you ask you know somebody like you jake that’s at a huge

outfit and i mean it sounds like some of the problems are very similar i mean we’re dealing

with all of this and it’s like if if 10 up has to be extremely highly adaptable and you know constantly

be like paying attention then definitely the little guys have to as well so yeah i mean i know you say

we’re massive i mean i know agencies and ctos and agencies that are thousands of people

and size collectively around you know we’re in the sort of mid 300s i know folks like yourself

at fairy and others that are very small agencies i think you know different scale problem different

nature of the problem but i kind of think we’re all going through the same thing yeah i want to go back

to um because i i know that uh the i think the majority of people that listen to this show and follow

the show are the smaller agencies and up to the mid-size agencies and things like that you mentioned

battle scars in the very beginning um and i don’t know how much you interact with smaller agencies these

days um or even or even mid-size but when you look at the market of what agencies are out there doing

right now uh and you contrast that with your battle scars and your expertise and your experience what would be

your advice to them in terms of okay i’m identifying like there’s these things that i see over and over

and over again that i think um maybe even is a little bit of low-hanging fruit that agencies could do

better uh and that they could potentially change in their processes or their approach to things or their

pricing that would help them get to the next level that’s keeping them stuck and keeping them frustrated

and keeping them struggling at the level they’re currently at great question i think some of the patterns

that i consistently say um and you know advice may be cliche to some here one is definitely put the

emphasis on selling services that are repeatable not once and done projects not always doable not

usually the first foot you know going back to the first foot in the door with a customer but there for

any kind of business product businesses agency businesses there is nothing more important to

your sanity your durability the maintainability the scalability of a business than being able to have

recurring revenue so where you can push toward ongoing services we’re going to keep working on your

product this is agile this is iterative this is not we ship it and we’re done and move on even if it’s in

small numbers monthly to start um yeah i think that’s uh again vital and being able to scale out uh an

agency the other thing that i would say is if you don’t uh if you don’t have any if you don’t have a

lot of experience or understanding on the finance and sort of the mathematics of the business find yourself a

mentor or somebody that can walk that through uh walk through that for you i think a lot of uh small

businesses or even like single person kind of like agencies with contractors often over assess

what that what it takes to be able to keep someone employed and the risk

of keeping someone employed i think sometimes i have found even sitting down with some people that

i’ve tried in the past done some mentorship with it sounds like an obvious thing to say when you

actually do the math on like okay i have this full-time person it can be easy if you’re not thinking

through the math to think if i don’t have set keep them busy 75 of the time that they’re working

with for me i’m in deep trouble yeah and maybe that’s true if like you’re like very bargain you

know you squeeze down all the margin you’re doing bargain bargain basement rates or something but the

reality is even with fairly competitive rates some people are surprised to see if we actually stand to

the math here now maybe you’re not taking home a big bonus maybe you don’t have much margin to speak

of you know but you’d be surprised that oftentimes like no you’re kind of at breakeven especially if

you’re not concerned about giving yourself a raise this year you’re kind of at breakeven sometimes even

if you only keep them busy especially when you’re small and have a lot of overhead keep them busy 30 of

the time and you’re probably at least at breakeven for bringing somebody on board so i think um that’s

just an example but i think sometimes uh don’t under index as you you know as like maybe an auteur

that came into services because you’re good at making websites or good working with wordpress don’t

underestimate the value of really understanding the math the economics of your business because i think

it actually in some ways is very freeing in terms of understanding the risks that you can afford to take

um okay yep yep i wanted to say on the recurring revenue side of things the one thing i see uh very

common is somebody says recurring revenue immediately people just think like maintenance management plans

they they don’t they can’t think anywhere beyond that like level of like that’s recurring revenue to

them in the agency space but you’re talking about something different it sounds like you’re talking about

um project phases big big aspects of ongoing work for these companies finding ways um to take even even a

small business like it goes from okay we did uh step a you know the first process first phase is the brochure

aspect of the website and then it can move on to dynamic marketing and advertising campaigns that need landing

pages and copywriting and and then next phase next phase next phase like that’s really what you’re talking about in terms of recurring revenue i think not just like

let’s get them on a monthly management plan and then on to the next one yep i mean it’s both maintenance plans

yeah yeah way to have some recurring revenue but the more uh the ones that will really pay the bills

are uh to put it a little simply simply where you can get your customers to see a website or a web tool that you built for them

as a product not as a one-time ship brochure or something that you keep improving something that

is an investment that you keep that keeps getting better whether that’s measuring and analyzing how

people flow through the site uh to improve it whether that’s constantly improving personalization on the

site we can list a thousand examples here yeah but the mindset of some of the things we build our products

that we can keep improving keep working on keep making better after we ship a v1 or an mvp out the door

is that typically how you’re structuring your your deals too is okay here’s a phase one kind of project

outline and sow and then it’s with the understanding that there’s going to be a phase two and a phase three

in a phase four and that kind of work yeah i think it’s our preferred i think it’s all over the it

runs the gamut we have customers that come in day one oftentimes that already have websites or tools

or projects and want to do new ones that understand from day one the value of we’re not just hiring you

to do one project we’re putting in place a budget and a system to be able to work on any number of things

this year we have some customers who uh uh probably the dominant case come in for a specific project in

a scope but there’s already a notion out there that like this is to get us going this is to build trust

this is to get something done and then we’re going to want to keep working on this uh product and do more

and then there are definitely customers that don’t you know they get that they may want maintenance

they probably know we want to have that conversation um uh but then we have to earn that right

yeah during the project that it is only understood in this initially to be okay we’re going to help

you solve this problem and get this work done and then in those cases i think when we’re at our best

if we’re doing great work if we’re inevitably as we’re working on that project to try to get out

the door hearing well what about this what about that or whether it’s from the client whether it’s

you know going back to the the theme around how we need to evolve in the area of ai a creative thoughtful

innovative uh project manager or engineer on the team saying you know if i had if i had another week

i could do this it would be this much more easy for them or i think i would be that much better in

terms of like their lead capture uh on the site maybe capture those opportunities and we earn both

through excellence and the quality of work that we do for them and they don’t want to let us go as a

partner or we have a backlog of look at all the things we can do if we can keep working on your product

that we have to earn that our job is to earn that our job is to strive for success at the end of this

for the business is not just we shipped a great product and gave them a great experience but they

want to keep doing more with us they want to spend more they want to do it next project we don’t always

get that sometimes i’m sure sometimes our fault to be clear sometimes just because it’s not on the cards

for their budget or their internal corporate mandates but every single time that that is our

that is the you know again if you put it from a business lens put aside like of course quality and

customer service that that is our business or commercial north star yeah i have to uh i have to

ask a very pointed like pointed question about um kind of like everything that we see in our day-to-day

kind of in i would say again small agency land youtube land more or less page builder land wordpress land

that whole thing which i feel like jake maybe you’re further up much further up the chain on this on

this conversation but just just for the folks at home and myself included because i don’t know exactly

the answer i’ve only heard i’ve only heard rumors is when you take on wordpress projects at the scale that

you’re at is that effectively like you are just literally for lack of a better word like installing

wordpress installing like a git environment all that sort of stuff and then you are

building everything custom effectively like right on top of that like everyone that uses wordpress when

we in our circles that we hear that a lot of it is you know maybe we’ll use a page builder some

people use you know now the block editor is obviously maturing here and there like there’s

there’s things that are closer to core so to speak but i’m sure you hear these conversations

but how much of this is actually totally different at the enterprise level i imagine there’s a lot of

dependency discussion that you have to have and things like that on like the tools you can’t be using stuff so what’s that actually

actually what’s the reality of that the reality um and again i’m generalizing because there’s projects of all sorts

are projects that come in where they have the budget and interest in doing something uh

let’s call it unique uh where there’s not a lot of starting point to build off of again if we’re building like

a special platform for a healthcare business trying to solve a very specific problem where you know you don’t have a pre-existing thing to plug in uh as a starting point but in the

the dominant case is we absolutely have tool kits many which we’ve open source which we will open source

in the future we have starter foundations or we have an entire we have entire component libraries of common

blocks and the companies in common ways of solving problems where we’re not just starting from open up

wordpress with git and start building from there so there’s absolutely and it’s critical for competitiveness for

you know margin and profitability on this i think to not these days start from scratch to have a tool kit as

a starting point that is only becoming more true with time partly because the tools we work with including

wordpress are getting better and the tools that they offer partly because part of the way that we fight the

problem of a more competitive space without just you know higher expectations for what they get for the

dollar um without just like squeezing out our margin is we need to innovate innovation for us that means

the problems that customers are looking for us to solve effectively over and over again are not things

we rebuild every time we work on a project many of the things that we’ve open source like our distributor

plugin which solves like cross-site content sharing like before i made that plugin whatever that was seven or eight years ago

i was like anytime a customer came to us and they’re like i have this thing where i have multiple sites

and in different permutations we need content to be on multiple of these sites it was like you know it

was goofy in retrospect like every single team’s like i don’t know how are you gonna solve that problem

and we have to build some special fields and some special connectors silly let’s build one really good

thing better than we would build for each project let’s use it over and over again i’m not talking about a

wild idea right so i think the short answer to be a little bit more concise the short answer to your question

is we absolutely have starter kits we absolutely have shared components we use over and over again

we are constantly making a push for where can we build reusable foundations um where we can use the

same tools over and over again concrete examples um headstart wp it’s headstart wp.com if you’re

interested was our open sourcing an entire uh toolkit that is a starting point for building headless sites

with wordpress um this is not wordpress we actually just put out a blog post today about a tool that we

released for cms called sanity that is a uh uh basically a temp it’s their version of themes in

some ways but it’s kind of like themes and some functionality because it’s headless a little bit

more complicated but to be simple it’s kind of like their version of themes they call it a template

it’s a template we build for sites that are fun marketing sites that are fundamental about content

marketing publishing stories articles news blogs and the rest um you go to town.com blog you’ll see it

right at the top um because we just put out the uh the post about it today um that is a starter framework

with a lot of pre-built components for that kind of use case but i don’t think we you know with that said

maybe the nuance here is um what we don’t typically do uh how to say this it’s it is not a free-for-all

across 300 people so it’s we have these toolkits we have approved third-party extensions we use if one

of those is not already doing the job we are we encourage going out and using existing open source i think

we’re very judicious about just go find a plugin or a blog right um for a lot of reasons security

maintainability um performance um a lot of the things that you don’t necessarily get that our customers

expect um and we are what we are definitely be careful about this what we are rarely doing in

wordpress is like plugging in like a full page builder and just going and designing the entire site

in like a full page building kind of experience sometimes with an internal tool kit we have we

do do full page editing with gutenberg but again we have a couple bunch of like tools components things

we’ve made to build that possible for some sites but this you know there’s a there’s a wide ecosystem

now of like full page building drag and drop kind of experiences and i think it’s fairly rare for our

customer type that that is the way that we are constructing or designing a site gotcha just based

off of pure just things that could go wrong at that scale like almost like dependencies and things that

you would i mean obviously it’s magnified you know a hundred thousand fold at that point so you just have to

control for those variables i guess if you just do most of the stuff yourself or the approved things that

you have i guess yeah yeah i think that’s some of it i think the the um like going back going back to this

like not getting fired for hiring ibm or something when you’re spending part of the reason that they spend

more is they expect that we are not taking some shortcuts that to be frank may be fine for small businesses

or medium businesses but um the cost of those shortcuts can be magnified in a larger organization so to put

it just quite crudely things like uh uh again this i’m over i’m grossly oversimplifying but like uh

overly convoluted like html markup in inline css that bloats a page weight right on the page or slows down

uh you know cumulative like rendering you know cumulative layout shift right on a page or makes

it very fragile if somebody on your editorial team who’s not an expert in a cms has to go in and change

a couple of lines both to navigate how you even do that in the editor to say nothing of the risk that

you moved one thing and your page just fell apart um on mobile so i think there’s a variety of different

different factors the the trick what you get with a lot of those tools is speed and velocity and that payoff is

worth it for some businesses what you sacrifice with a lot of these tools is uh like that hyper optimization

of page performance dirt you know uh less fragility uh in the page layout um

and uh impenetrability for people that need to edit content on your website but again are not

don’t want to be full page designers gotcha okay interesting um kg got anything i think we got one

question at least in the chat yeah let’s uh we’re bumping up on time here so let’s get to that one

and maybe close it out on that for sure um dan says i’m curious what jake’s take is on trend among

traditional media slash content slash publisher publishers to gate their prized offerings away from

search and ai where are the opportunities shifting for agencies as a result of that any thoughts there

yeah that’s great question nice to see you dan um uh where to start um the shift toward gated content is

understandable at the moment what that is really about is for reasons that were good and reasons which

you know i guess depends on your perspective were less good to put it quite frankly we have the value of

programmatic advertising that led to a flourishing of content websites has been decimated uh in many cases

that might be slightly exaggerating but not dramatically um i mean you could do a whole

thesis paper on this but i think if i was to do the short run version of it to talk about what’s

i think it’s interesting you all cut me off if you think this is boring your audience to death

um uh basically like we saw in the 2010s in particular an absolute explosion of like people

being successful creating online publications and people being able to still be lucrative

that were even legacy publishers still cheaper but still be able to make a decent amount of money

moving uh print to online the reason for that and again i’m way oversimplifying the larger thesis

but the main reason for that is that the lack of privacy at the time on the web let us do very

sophisticated targeting of programmatic advertising and on-the-fly advertising which meant that we had

very high yield rates without having a direct sales ad team to just programmatically with almost no

sales force generate revenue from advertising on your site that has been heavily unwound

as a technology over the last five years apple’s content blockers or i’m sorry not content blockers

apple’s tracking uh tracking uh tracking opt-in regulation in many countries around uh tracking

on the web um opt into cookies and cookie management rules which were key um some of it’s also economic

some of it’s also some of the big spenders um pulling back some spend on just mass advertising

campaigns and going to more targeted the result of that for good or bad has been it is much much harder

right now to make a killing and get started just programming and programming programmatic advertising

also the uh the the uh just changes in seo wild like in 2010 2012 you could publishing online i mean

you could you could rank like crazy you could bring in hundreds of thousands of visitors for free and you

can’t you can’t do that much anymore great point on top of the the cratering of like the ability to

you know hyper target ads i mean if you’ve been i suspect if you’re in small business marketing websites i’m

sure you’ve heard business owners talking about like it used to be 2017 or 2015 you put a dollar in the

facebook targeted advertising spend you got three dollars back right on purchases and you know now

it’s like the opposite generous and that is because of well intentioned we can talk about whether this is

good in the long term hyper aggressive like clamping down on privacy but you are right to make it worse

we also like clamped down the funnel yeah unlike people finding content through seo through radical

changes in the space the big algorithm changes google made in 2022 2023 that prioritized like evergreen

content and domain knowledge sources you know you know like so many social dynamics of this like on one

you know on the other hand like we all got open arms about fake news and how easy it was to put garbage

out on the internet it’s harder to do that now because you can’t really make money as easily with that

business model there’s so many permutations to this but anyways we’re drifting the net effect of that is

like publishers cannot make money off of just having programmatic advertising depending on the market goes

the bigger ones can make decent amount of can make some decent amount of money on direct sales if you have

a sales force to sell ads all of which means is like sad i guess sad to say you need to get people to pay for

your content now directly not through advertisers so that is to say i understand why publishers are

doing this i don’t know that publishers have a choice if they want their business model to be sustainable

but to do this um what it means for like ai i guess the question is what value do they think it provides

for ai to crawl um and index their content um i i would say that if you’re not if your business is

not publishing if your business is you are using publishing as a means to sell product or goods you

have a blog that you post on you want those to be open because you want this competition we’re having

you want generative ai to associate your brand with common because you know with uh common keywords or ideas

or questions because they’re ultimately going to buy something from your brand i’m not sure what the

argument is for publishers to have their content the the publication the content is the product

in their cases there’s no gain to be had from chad gpt saying according to so and so maybe we’ll

figure out economics for that later on but right now i think that’s uh am i have i even answered the

question or have i just gone i think so no i think dan i think dan got a lot of good insights in that

so thank you for that question dan we appreciate it oh yeah oh yeah um yeah so we’re up against time

this has been great uh great jay thank you so much for coming on uh do you have a link for to share that

you want anybody to uh to go to or you just want to tell everybody to come out to press conf and see all

of us and hell yeah you get it you get a chance for a call to action jake if you need one i’d say uh

i’ll share my call to action with press conf of course you know go to tenet.com go to fuel.com learn

about what we’re doing um i don’t even dare share a url but i probably my most active social network is

linkedin so if you want to search for me there um most of the the business things i’m doing you’ll find

excellent excellent we appreciate it jake we appreciate it jake thank you so much all right

guys we’ll be back in two weeks two weeks okay check uh wp townhall.show for the next stream see ya see