WP Townhall 11: The Faulty Premise That Ruins Page Builders

We are live welcome back everybody it is another episode of wp town hall this is the show that

drops you deep into the heart of pivotal debates shaping the wordpress ecosystem i’m kevin geary

joined as always by mark zemansky there’s our first notification going off in my computer uh

let’s do not disturb until this evening that always works well um okay so if you are watching

you can watch this on youtube you can watch it on my facebook channel you can watch it on

my x did we get it streaming to you mark are we not this time stream yeah stream yard’s a little

weird it’s all good okay yeah it’s on your stuff we’ll figure it out we’ll figure it out um okay

mark uh you you just got back from a trip it was it was quite the trip yeah yeah all the way to

germany that was uh that was fun cloud fest yes yes i haven’t been to a cloud fest before would you

recommend it uh i mean i’m definitely gonna do some content on it i would say for you for you

particularly you’d probably find some some value in it um it’s really a big festival though man it’s

like 12 000 people it’s in a theme park there’s a lot to do um but at the same time it’s a big expo

hall with like a lot of bigger companies not just like smaller ones that you or you know like just

work like there’s a wordpress area but it’s like you know you’ll see intel you’ll see amd you’ll see

those types of companies there so that’s probably not where the most amount of value is but there’s a

lot of really good people there that you could connect with and so if you’re if you’re out there

listening i would definitely recommend for those reasons yeah because i made a ton of great

connections okay yeah good good good sounds like fun sounds like fun did we decide on whether we’re

supposed to do this view or this view i like this one this one’s nice you like this one okay yeah yeah

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the title of our episode is the faulty premise that ruins page builders i think we have uh yeah i told

you to line up a bunch of you know questions and uh you know you said hey not gonna go not gonna take

it easy on you okay which is good i i think we we need to set up a really good discussion here uh i think

what i’ll do should i just give them the faulty premise i just get that as the foundation of the of the

episode i’m not even 100 sure what i mean i could guess what it is but i do think it’d be good if you

just kind of set the stage there and then we could kind of unpack it yeah okay and i guess before we dive

too deep into this first of all let’s get to the let me pull up the comments here i like having the comments

up here um okay good people are people are rolling in um i do want to say this is a you know when we get

to the viewer participation segment very important like you you the thing with wp townhall you don’t just sit

around and listen you get to participate in the conversation if you want to go to wp townhall dot

show slash join that link will get you into the room with me and mark okay and we can elevate you onto

the stage and you can be part of the discussion you can ask your questions you can make your own arguments

uh we have a banner rolling right here at the bottom of the screen where you can see that

um so if you you just come in you just chill out you just sit in kind of the green room area and then when

we’re ready for the viewer participation segment which usually happens around the 45 minute mark

sometimes a little bit sooner um you can come on you can be part of this discussion okay so wp townhall

dot show slash join all right the premise is is is this uh essentially when if we go back into the eras of

wordpress that i’ve covered before um but era two is the era where like page building really started

okay like if you think of era one is like traditional wordpress like just blogging themes and the themes

were very very limited you couldn’t do a lot of stuff era two started to say okay well we’re gonna

develop this concept called like a page builder where people can do more like drag and drop type stuff

and style some stuff and yada yada yada and that’s where the premise became like okay we need to

design an interface that is really friendly to beginners and lay people because developers

at the time people who know how to create their own themes they would not use a page builder they would

just create their own theme and it kind of this solidified even into era three which is like more

advanced page builders this same premise was followed as if it was still true as if the idea

is that a developer would never use a page builder and it kind of bypasses the idea that a page builder

could in fact innovate a professional workflow so it could be a tool that a developer who knows how to

write code would still prefer to use if it was built correctly now along the way because none of the page builders

followed that premise all of the page builders followed the premise of we have to make it easy we have to like lay people

should be able to use it by the way that’s where they see all the money because they see a gigantic pool of people who

are like if we empower these people this is the wix concept this is the squarespace concept this is the

wordpress page builder concept if we empower these people to build websites we not only will that you know

they’ll love it uh but we’ll just make gobs of money that’s like kind of the whole concept of page building

um again on the idea that professionals would not do this they would not use a tool like this and because all the page builders were designed for

lay people and beginners professionals looked at them and said i would never use that and of course you

wouldn’t because it doesn’t have the features that you care about and it doesn’t output code the way you

want your code output and it doesn’t give you enough control it only introduces limitation and so the premise

like became true in the mind of developers because they looked at all of the existing tools and they said yeah

for sure i like i don’t want to use that i would never use that but again it’s all a faulty premise

premise and what we have to look at now going forwards and this is the premise of etch um and this is kind of where era

for wordpress is going to go not not i think will go i it’s this is where era four is going to go uh

especially as we get into the realm of ai which you may have questions about but uh

uh especially especially especially given the facts of this new era um we now have the opportunity to say

okay what if we built and designed a visual development environment that professionals would actually want to

use that found ways to innovate a professional workflow and didn’t have the limitations of the

existing page builders and didn’t do things kind of backwards or oddly or proprietary in a proprietary

fashion like these other page builders do what if the environment spoke the language of web design the

language that you already know as a professional what if it spoke that language what if all it did was

expedited the work that you do does a lot of the heavy lifting for you but without the limitations

and it just made you work faster and it was a joyful experience to use what would that look like and

that’s the era that we are currently entering right now but again the other page builders fail and have

been ruined and i’ve talked about this ad nauseum they’ve been ruined by this focus on lay people and

beginners because the decisions that they make when you ask that question how do we make it easy for

beginners how do we make it easy for lay people the answers that are going to come back are the exact

answers that ruin the thing that you are building okay um so i’m just gonna that’s what i’m putting out on

the table that’s the premise of today’s discussion i’ll let you take it from there gotcha okay

i appreciate that yeah like like you mentioned there kevin i i do have some questions lined up i feel like

you know that’s funny that we mentioned ai because i do want to get to that in order to prepare for

this i don’t know if you i don’t know if you saw this announcement recently but claude now has web

search so it didn’t before it was just like kind of closed source based off their model whatever what i

did to prepare for this i asked cloud i was like hey do you know about kevin geary and etch and search

it up yeah so then i did that and i think we’re in an interesting time now because correct me if i’m

wrong we’re about six months into you’re about six months into the etch uh it’s like right around the

corner right we are this is i think monday’s demo there’s a public demo on monday first time

the general public will get to see etch i think that is exactly the six month mark okay so i don’t

i think i think you know with this episode obviously we want to like kind of toe line obviously edge is

coming and there’s like a huge and like it’s a huge we’ll call it like the you know the entrance in the

era for and and obviously you can kind of already see too i think it might be interesting to talk about

some other ones like elementor has their new version coming out it seems like a lot of things are

are kind of like falling kind of in line and you know continuing the the trends here so there’s

there’s definitely a lot to talk about um but with etch specifically being at this point i go back to

that story that i was telling you about the claude thing i searched it and it gave me like all these

different you know like cited articles of people talking about like oh you know some people are

skeptical about like timeline of edge and all this sort of stuff right oh yeah so so i i just i kind of

want to like i don’t want to make it all about you and etch but i want to talk about like kind

of this general software thing too and this page builder land in general there’s so many things

going on there’s so many different options out there we see youtube videos all the time i cover

them you cover them right like all this stuff how it’s amazing though how how fast things move and how

quickly you can either be like oh that was legit or that wasn’t legit i think last time we were just on uh

where were we at did you where did you introduce yourself as the ceo of vaporware or something like

that i mean like it’s just like it’s it’s where were we now that yeah that was a wp town hall that

was the last time was it i don’t know no i think it was the bridge builders there’s bridge builders

that’s what it was so it’s just it’s just kind of funny and i mean the whole thing is like again i’m

just trying to pull these pieces together because it’s really funny because it gave me some really good

things gave me some questions and i do want to i want to dive into the ai thing at some point because

i utilize it so heavily in my workflow and i’m in a position right now where you know you know me

you’ve given me some nice you know you know kind of behind the scenes stuff that i think now is public

about like kind of all the inputs and everything like that i think at the very beginning of this

if we’re trying to go in kind of like logical order what problem does etch solve i feel like you’ve

kind of already talked about it there but like and again not necessarily making about etch it’s just

the comparison that we’re making like what what are you seeing etch versus all the other ones

and all these other things and like specifically we’ll talk about like era four builders yeah that

there was there’s there’s maybe a ton of problems but i guess really to summarize it was just the

language of web design being at the core of it right yeah well to understand the major benefits it

really depends on what camp you’re in so if you are in a beginner camp etch is still for you to a a a

huge capacity depending on your mindset right uh if you’re an intermediate for sure like if you’re so

and i have an article on on etch’s website about who is etch for which i think everybody should read

because people will think well it’s a if it’s a pro tool or it’s for aspiring professionals uh it’s like

the second group as we refer to them that’s the two groups it’s professionals and aspiring professionals

it’s not for a beginner who’s like a hobbyist like well i mean they could even be a hobbyist but it’s

i have a lot of hobbyists in my audience who love to build their own sites it is not money for other

people that they are not an agency they are not a freelancer but they want to do it right they care

about craftsmanship they actually want to learn they want to learn the language of web design they want to

feel empowered by knowing the language of web design and doing things the right way they don’t

want to just whip something together in wix or squarespace or wherever and call it a day that’s

not what they’re here for it’s like it’s a hobby like if i did photography as a hobby it’s not i don’t

i’m not like oh i just am doing it as a hobby therefore i want to be a shitty photographer like

nobody says that right um there are hobbyists that really want to do high quality work i have a lot of

those okay so you can definitely be a hobbyist it is for anybody who knows or wants to learn the language

of web design and use a tool that respects that and doesn’t limit them and has a quality output right

so that automatically a lot of beginners fall into that bucket because you have to start somewhere you

come into this game and if you’re saying i want to do this for a as a profession i want to make money at

this i want to be an agency i want to be a freelancer to me that says i want to like be

proficient okay that’s like part of the word of profession right is that i’m proficient at it

um we should also like have probably a debate about like what is a professional like is it just somebody

who who uh you know accepts checks from people or is there some other thing that goes along with that

definition that everybody uh should consider but if you are just a fly-by-night person you’re like

dude i just gotta like my mom like i i gotta whip up a bunco club website for my bunco club um is she

gonna use that no a thousand percent no that is not that’s not who it’s for uh because she has no care

to learn anything to uh you know excel in this industry to do anything beyond just does a bunco club

website for my bunco club exist or not exist that’s all she cares about that is the perfect user to go

to wix or squarespace or elementor or whatever right that is not an etch user but anybody who wants to

do professional work and aspires to a higher level uh would absolutely want to use that so it really

depends on who who who you are and what bucket you fall into now in terms of actual pros doing work

right now why would they want to switch to etch they would want to switch to etch because it expedites

the work that they do uh because it um it unifies like this is like the biggest thing it unifies their

workflow uh right now they’re probably bouncing back and forth between wordpress admin and uh vs code and

a json file and three other things and uh php and javascript and all these things happening in all these

different places custom blocks and then they’re in the block editor trying to assemble things we’re

like i don’t have a block for that let me hop back over to vs code and make a custom block for that by

the way i’m using a proprietary thing called acf blocks to help me do this because i don’t even

really do i don’t want to do all the work of an actual custom block i mean this is on and on and on

they could just go into etch they could just do all of their work in etch in one unified place manage

their media custom post types and custom fields and relationships never bounce around ever again so

they go from chaos to complete sanity uh they’re working at hyperspeed now uh all of the other features and

innovations that are being built into to look at that workflow and say how do we take a professional

workflow and make it faster and make it easier and make it better nobody’s ever asked that question

before nobody’s ever asked that question before so that’s that’s where we live and those are the

benefits that are going to come to an actual professional i know you have a whole blog post

on this and i do i think we my thought for this is we set the stage with the etch specific questions

because obviously that’s the product that you guys are currently working on it’s it’s based on this

premise but if we if we zoom out as we go further because i do want to ask you i want to kind of have

this conversation the professional debate is a really good one and there’s some other things that

i feel like this is the core of obviously because it’s the product that you’re working on but like

outside of that there’s so many other topics that i feel like don’t get talked about enough that i’d like

to hit on but at the core of it again here is i know you have a blog post on this is etch a page builder

etch is a page builder as much as an iphone is a phone that’s the that’s the comparison that i use

right so in 2005 is that when the iphone came out when did the it was somewhere around there right 2004

2005 if you showed up at a party and you were the only person that had an iphone everybody else had the

old you know flip phone style phones and you put it on the table and you were like you guys got to take

a look at this and everybody crowded around and then they were just like that’s just a phone

right you’d be like i mean it is a phone but like is it really just a phone um that’s that’s what we’re

dealing with here right um so it does page building things is it a page build could you could you just

say that’s just a page builder you can’t because first of all the way that it does things is different

from how every other page builder does them their limitations that other page builders have don’t

exist uh it does things that other page builders don’t do uh it’s it’s it’s it is radically different

so you can’t just be like well that’s a page builder okay i mean it does page builder things that’s like

taking an iphone or any smartphone i mean that’s just a phone it’s not a it’s not a a fair label it’s not

an accurate label um so we call it a visual development environment that’s what it is

it goes above and beyond what a traditional page builder is known to do even though it allows you

to do page building things gotcha okay okay so then maybe one of the other things that i again going back

to that claude story because it talked a lot about the i literally i use ai like so much now it’s crazy

like it’s it’s just just to completely like rock is insanely better than claude i don’t know if you’ve

realized this yet i i i just got the grok beta app i feel like on my phone like this morning or

something i feel like i saw it downloaded i haven’t tried it i feel like as much i use i tried it but

didn’t get updated now it has like its own i don’t know i don’t i don’t track the updates and all that

stuff it does have its own website for sure yes it does well i i’ve been trying to follow automation

and ai a lot closer i know that like google just had gemini pro 2.0 2.5 come out it’s apparently fire

there’s new uh open ai mod i mean this shit moves so fast but yeah but um i went over there and i did

that and and again a lot of the criticism stuff popped up so one of the i feel like the one of

the bows on the on the edge side of things is six months in it’s i mean i would say it’s obviously

not vaporware if you’re in there you’ve seen it you’ve seen this stuff and everything like that but

also development timeline i just a high level question how has it been moving has it been

faster slower more intense or less intense than you thought it was going to be

building something like this for a new era uh it’s we’re way ahead of schedule it’s been

surprisingly faster and smoother than i imagined that it would be

um which is just kudos to our team essentially i mean they’re they’re amazing we we recently um i mean

i think there’s 11 people working on etch right now 12 people total simultaneously um and i i actually

need to have mateo my cto on uh we’ll probably do this on uh the the etch channel that’s like i need

to make an etch channel we’ll we’ll have him on but we’re gonna do a whole meet the team kind of segment

type thing but i think it’s very important for and this would be very helpful to other software

developers plug-in developers anybody like to for us to talk about the logistics and how we manage

week to week to week and what things look like behind the scenes and how specifically mateo has led

organizing um our sprints and our conversations around sprints and how teams are created and yada yada

that would be a very very helpful discussion for everybody but to answer your question we’re we’re

far ahead of schedule i think that what people are going to see on i mean if you look at the detractors

and the naysayers my edge wasn’t going to exist for two years right um it was it was just gonna there

was wasn’t gonna be able to do anything for two years that was like the the general consensus of the

detractors um and in the reality is that six months in it does far more than in in certain capacities and

the things that actually matter it does far more than any other tool on the market currently does

um so obviously there’s still a long way to go and there’s still a lot of stuff to button up but what

people are going to see on monday i think is is going to be rather shocking to them uh given the

timeline i think that’s been and i say that because the people who have access to etch now that has been

their standard conclusion is um and it actually they they leaves themselves asking like what has everybody

else been doing this entire time um so and that’s again it’s kudos to our team but i think what people

are going to see on monday is going to be very exciting okay okay um so i feel like we’ve i mean

obviously probably a lot of viewers kind of already maybe they’ve already purchased etch maybe they’ve

been seeing it maybe you know following you obviously so they kind of know like a lot of that and i i think

that’s good i think that’s a good premise to kind of set up because again you’ve been in the weeds of

this you’re not you’re literally a again not necessarily a page builder like you know a special page

builder but like you’re a page builder founder now so you so rather than i feel like the topic of

today’s episode is the way that it i work that out in my head is that specifically through your eyes

potentially you’ve gone through this thing of of creating products for you know other page builders

that integrate and stuff like that and now you’re actually creating one so like you have the best

perspective on like what it is from the outside and then what it is from the inside at least you

know in this in this six month run up here and and prior as you’re planning everything so now if we

start to zoom out a little bit and we talk about not just the faulty premise but there’s so many things

around that that core point there that you know start to stem off of literally i feel like your

experience and just everybody else that’s in this whole game of like oh which page builder should i use

or what’s the best or what things matter you said something really important there and i i kind of want to

i kind of want to hit on that one first um because all these things are relevant i think one of the

things that i see in these page builder conversations and again using your ethos of the things that you talk

about you know that i’ve watched you talk about for you know over a year and a half now you have a very

specific definition of the things that matter like that matter to you the things that are like you know

the things in a page builder that you want to see and you know you’re making blog posts about like section

elements and shed and containers right yeah i’m sure i’m sure you i’ve listened enough stuff that you’ve said

you’ve talked about this but how do you actually arrive what’s the calculus that you do because i

think a lot of people get confused with how you arrive at the conclusions that you arrive at not like

they look at it and like that makes logical sense but it’s almost like i feel like the biggest reaction

i get when somebody like reads the things that you do is like why does this guy care so much about the

the smallest shit now yeah that leads to you creating something like etch that is going to

absolutely give a about the smallest detail yeah ever right yes so i mean i have a follow-up question

to this but i want to get this part first because we need to set the scene here because i i’m trying to

do some like i i don’t know if anybody’s ever asked you it this way but i’ve been dying to ask you that like

this for a long time because so how how how did how have you arrived at that what’s the calculus like

what is how do you get to that point and and why i guess i think it stemmed from the uh i mean i think

i know what you’re asking i mean it’s it stemmed from the idea that i kept hearing over and over and

over again which is you can just do this stuff however however you want to do like i just wing it i mean

just just do whatever like and and and the idea because i i used to talk about uh any type of

standard any type of like best practice and then of course like a lot of detractors are like who says

it’s best okay and it’s like okay well one uh i can demonstrate it on video uh for a hundred hours

and then i’ll be like you know we’re doing things and it’s any industry it’s like if i go into photography

photography and because i have a lot of experience in photography and and i was once a very very

beginner lowly doesn’t know what he’s doing with the camera kind of guy and if you go into a photography

forum well i mean people have spent just an incalculable amount of hours doing photography

and they figure out that certain things work way better than other things and certain ways to set up

lighting works better than other ways to set up lighting and certain camera settings do better in certain

situations than others and yada yada yada and they come up with these best practices it’s not like and

best practice doesn’t mean best forever it just means like the best we know right now or the best that’s

currently available or whatever until somebody else comes along and does something that’s provably better

then we can all agree and we can switch to that right um so that’s what i think it’s important to

to establish those kinds of things in an industry we go back to language we go back to do we all speak

the same language like that would be very very helpful if i go into elementor and all of the things

are called different things from what they’re called in divi and those are called different things from

what they’re called in webflow and those are called different things from what they’re called in oxygen

that is not empowering to and by the way i get i get uh you know the detractors also talk about like

gatekeeping and all this other stuff you know the best way to gatekeep an industry is that the language

is insanely confusing there’s no standards there’s no best practices everybody does everything the

whatever way that they want that is that is a method of gatekeeping because to an outsider to

somebody coming in it is chaos there’s nothing to latch on to there’s no clear path to learning or

getting better it’s just everybody doing whatever and then we look at the product of everybody doing

whatever we look at most websites on wdd live i do this i i do this i used to do it weekly now i do it by

every other week i’d bring on people submit websites we look at them together 90 of them are are awful

they’re coded awful they they don’t like it’s just it’s bad ux it’s bad copy it’s bad design it’s just

down the list and we say the same things over and over and over again so clearly this idea of just use

whatever tool you want do things however you want it’s not working we don’t have an epidemic of amazing

websites we don’t have an epidemic of like amazingly satisfied customers we have an epidemic of unfinished

projects we have an epidemic of slow websites poorly designed especially in the wordpress space by the way

um just websites that aren’t very good that’s what we have the epidemic of so i align that with okay

well everybody on youtube seems to be just telling everybody we’ll just do whatever you want use

whatever tool makes you feel good blah blah blah blah blah and then we have the outcome over here that

is not good okay objectively not good it’s i think it’s time where we start to bring some order and sanity

to the chaos and say oh hold on hold on do you remember back in you know before the era of page

builders and everybody’s using page builders there was actually like standards did you know there’s

actual documentation on how this stuff should be done you know there’s this uh fundamentally important

concept called classes uh for this styling workflow thing that you’re actually not supposed to style

everything at the id level and then it just goes down the list from there it goes down the list of how do we

unify the language that we are all trying to speak and i’ve said this before uh like the biggest limit

on on beginners and again this is i’m anti gatekeeping i want beginners to be able to come into this space

i just don’t want them to be lied to as they enter the door and the lie that elementor wix and squares

but all of these things tell is anybody can do this just come on in we just make it so easy for you just

use our tool we make it so easy for you anybody can do it you’ll be off to the races in no time

yada yada yada and even if that is true even if that is true it traps that individual in a state of

understanding the proprietary language of a single tool and not the language of web design not an actual

empowerment mindset they’re not empowered by actual knowledge or skill or anything else they are only

empowered by what that tool allows them to do and all of its limitations and if you take them outside

of that tool they can’t do a single thing and that is not true empowerment and that is not uh that is not

uh taking the gates away that is a gate in itself it’s actually it’s keeping that person contained inside of

that proprietary tool and they have uh they have no freedom to leave unless they want to start over

unless they want to start from scratch and actually learn the correct language and so my view has just

been let’s get as many beginners as they if they want to come in let’s bring them in but let’s teach

them the right things that’s what page building 101 was all about it was like hey stop this hold on we’re

not going to do the we’re not going to do the proprietary thing i’m going to teach you the language

of web design through a page building lens in a course called page building 101 and by the end of

this course you will use any you can use you are empowered to use any tool that speaks the language

of web design and what so many people came to the conclusion of by doing that course is well i can’t

choose elementor i can’t choose divi i can’t because everything you taught me doesn’t work in those tools

they don’t it doesn’t make sense now and and i see and so they they’re free to go to any tool that

speaks the language of web design right and that’s where we want them to go and that’s where era four

is going by the way uh and so yeah that i hopefully that answers your question definitely does um a lot of

good stuff there i would i have several i have several uh questions written down here uh and i don’t

know which direction to go i would say next is because you bring up so many good points there of

of things i want i want to dive into i’m gonna i’m gonna start with this by the way i will say when

people are if they’re going to be a user of etch i they could just ask themselves this question would

you prefer the version of etch where i told my development team just do whatever you want just do

just code it however you want i mean what just whatever do whatever just vibe it just whatever you

you whatever you you know floats your boat today or makes you feel good you do that right or would

you prefer the version of etch where we set development standards and we talked about best

practices and the best way to architect this thing for scalability and maintainability and so that we

don’t have to go backwards and we don’t have an insane amount of technical debt uh that limits us

from putting new features into the tool going for like which version and every single user would say

i want the version with standards and best practices and scalability and maintain it that’s the version i

i hope you guys build well of course it’s obvious okay so the people that and this was my biggest thing

i it never felt honest to me when youtubers got on and were like just use whatever tool you want do

things however you want whatever it doesn’t matter don’t listen to that guy he’s just opinionated

there’s no such thing as best practices yada yada yada that’s it felt so dishonest to me because they would never

choose that from a provider that they hired if they hired somebody they would not want to hire somebody

that acts like that they would want to hire somebody that cares about standards and best practices and

scalability and maintainability that’s who they would hire so it’s it’s completely dishonest to get on youtube

and tell people the exact opposite in my opinion maybe a difficult question here but i’m wondering

from a general perspective and also more so your product perspective how how large do you think or

have you estimated the audience for etch is uh it it’s huge it’s huge because it’s it’s huge if you

shift the mindset because right now you again if you’re gonna lie to people that’s you have the biggest

audience if you’re just gonna lie to people and be like i mean well we’re just building the easiest tool

for everybody everybody can come and use it yada yada like obviously that’s the biggest size audience

um so we’re not we’re not trying to reach everybody we’re trying to reach everybody that wants to do work

in this industry whether that’s a hobbyist or whether it’s a an agency or a freelancer or whatever

um that’s a that’s a whole lot of people and i don’t care about the number because it’s enough

so whatever the number is it’s enough uh and all i care about are the details and actually serving

those people versus like the total market size okay another question related to that then is

last time i took a look at actions before my trip and we i think when we kind of had our our our chat

and looked at kind of the inputs and all that sort of stuff all the cool stuff that you have going on

obviously as you mentioned the ui is not done functionality before ui and all and the ux and

everything like that so definitely noted however for the sake of a comparison um and maybe something

people are familiar with like a bricks or an oxygen or what have you all of those tools have a

what i would classify as like a similar feel inside them to some degree they don’t look the same but the

concept is the same a page builder is like a page builder it’s going to have some level of element panel

a structure panel it’s going to have a canvas you’re going to put on it it’s going to go like that

i know what etch looks like now but my question is for etch and broader for like potentially era four

tools now that we’re kind of like getting into this kind of new frontier it’s a two-parter how is etch

going to look at that when it’s done i don’t mean you don’t you don’t need to tell me colors and

shit like that i’m saying like how is it going to feel and look because my follow-up to that is

another i feel like a quick snapback that people would have is you have a spectrum of like a wix

where you just drag and drop random i know they have studio now or whatever like the

laberis bone thing that you could think of as far as like a builder and then you have literally vs code

basically on the other end so the the concept and maybe this is faulty i’d love to hear your thoughts

the more that you go towards like a vs code the more code that you are able to see the more things

you’re able to do like that at what point does somebody just go why am i even using something

like etch or something that’s getting closer to that why don’t i just go the other the other the other

10 and just do everything kind of myself like where is that happy medium and is that something you’re

trying to create with that where it’s visual enough but at the same time you have access to

everything you need and is that the the antithesis of what an era for builder is would you say because

that’s that’s definitely a big thing that i would hear and i think you’re going to continue to hear

yeah it’s a good question um so to be clear etch’s interface is modular so you can you can arrange it

however you want to arrange it you can decide what you want to see and what you don’t want to see

if you are a beginner intermediate and you’re learning but you are intimidated by code and you

want the tool to aid you assist you in writing the code which means you want to uh click elements

click a section click a heading click an image click a whatever and add them to the page uh it will do

that for you if you want to fill out css inputs and because you wanted to write the css for you it will do

that for you you can hide the html so you don’t see it you can hide the css so that you never see it you

can use etch without ever looking at code or touching code just like you could do in another page builder

the difference is you can also do completely the opposite you could write all of the code by hand you

you could write all of the CSS by hand,

which you cannot do in current page builders.

You cannot do that, right?

I could copy HTML from a done HTML from an outside page

and paste it into etch and it will render.

And then I could work with it.

And so again, you cannot do that.

So it has all of the benefits of a visual tool.

By the way, if we just use an example of like,

I wanna add a section and a heading and a text

and a button and an image and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

At the end of the day, when I go click, click, click, click, click, click,

that’s probably faster than me writing out whatever HTML is required

to make those things happen, right?

Even if I’m using Emmet or something like that,

which Emmet is a whole nother language that you have to learn.

It’s another barrier, yada, yada, yada.

I think a lot of people would argue it’s just easier and more joyful

to go click, click, click, click, click,

and those elements are on the page.

That is a benefit.

That is a benefit to why wouldn’t we use VS Code?

Because I can’t do that in VS Code.

I can’t do visual things in VS Code.

When it’s time to do a loop, when it’s time to do logic,

when it’s time to create components.

Components, now you’re hopping into a completely different territory

in VS Code, right?

Now, it’s a whole nother language.

Well, in Etch, I can just right click,

and so I can say create component.

And now, magic.

Oh, it’s component.

Like, to do that in VS Code, it would take a long time, right?

It doesn’t take any time at all in Etch.

So we’re combining all, you get all of the benefits of a visual environment, like a page builder,

with zero of the downsides.

And that’s been the problem with all the existing tools, because they asked the wrong question.

When you say, how do we make it easy for beginners?

You come to conclusions like, don’t have access to the code.

They don’t need it.

Don’t even worry about clean code output.

They don’t need it.

They don’t care.

They don’t even know what a DOM is.

They’re never going to check it.

Don’t give them, don’t worry about CSS, right?

They’re not going to write CSS.

They don’t know CSS.

Just give them all the inputs.

If they have to write CSS as an afterthought, just give them a little tiny.

See, we go down this whole path of like, these decisions are awful.

So when an actual professional comes in, they’re like, what is going on here?

This is ridiculous.

This is a toy.

I would never use this, right?

But you go into Etch, you can do all the things.

Like, a professional is going to be like, oh, I feel right at home here.

Okay, this speaks my language.

It lets me do all the things I want to do.

It has no limitations.

But a beginner can also be like, oh, I don’t want to see that advanced stuff.

I just want to do my stuff the visual way.

I just want to click a bunch of stuff and fill out a bunch of input.

They can do that too.

So everybody can be happy, right?

And the interface is modular.

So you’re not locked into like one kind of method of doing things.

Gotcha.

Okay.

That all makes sense.

I mean, I have to ask this question.

Does that, has that never existed?

No, no, no.

Well, I, it exists outside of WordPress, I guess.

I don’t, but not, but not really.

Because it’s just, there’s so many things that, and this is why people like begged me to build

a page builder in the first place, which I said no to for two straight years.

I said, no, we’re not going to do it.

But I would always talk about like the problems, the limitations, the lack of innovation and

like what people who do this stuff day in and day out, like to, to a high level actually

care about.

And it’s a culmination of, it’s not one thing.

It’s a culmination of hundreds of little details that just were, the pieces were never put together.

Like now we’re finally putting them together and it creates an entirely different experience.

Interesting.

Because I mean, like to me, if it, it seemed, it, I mean, it seemed like you, the way you

explain it makes total sense.

It’s basically an IDE meets like a, like a complete visual builder and you just don’t need anything

else.

But the one thing I’m also getting, and maybe this is something that you’re already thinking

about is the way that you’re describing this sounds like it’s way larger than WordPress

and WordPress is just the first stop.

Because if you could, if you could create a situation where you basically have an IDE, full

IDE, like in your building environment, and you could also visually build the thing, then

at what point couldn’t you just do something else?

I guess Gutenberg is playing a role there to some degree because you’re, you’re authoring

blocks over there and that’s where it is.

But like, I feel like this, I feel like there’s just so much more opportunity there for, again,

not just Etch, but like other tools to, to do a similar methodology.

You know, Etch does not, it, it leverages WordPress.

Does it have to be connected to WordPress?

No, it can be picked up and it could be put down over here on this other CMS and it could

empower developers using that other CMS in the exact way that it empowers developers on

WordPress.

So yeah, the future has a lot of options and a lot of pathways.

We are dedicated to WordPress because all of our products are in WordPress.

We’re in WordPress.

We’re WordPress users.

We, we love WordPress.

We want to continue moving WordPress forward.

I mean, this is kind of like if, if I was automatic, if I, if I was making the decisions and we

were making a native development environment for WordPress, again, with the context that this

is WordPress.org we are talking about, this is not WordPress.com situation.

Everybody looked at me fucking sideways when I was on Jamie Marsland’s, uh, lives.

Was it a lie?

I don’t know.

I don’t know what it was.

He was interviewing me two years ago or something.

You can go watch the video.

And we were talking about the distinction between WordPress.org and WordPress.com and the confusion

that everybody has.

And we were also talking about that in the context of Gutenberg.

And it’s, it’s severely dumbed down, simplified interface.

And this has never made sense to me that you would do that on WordPress.org.

It made sense to me that you would do that on WordPress.com.

If you want to compete with Wix or Squarespace or whatever, WordPress.com is the place that

people who don’t know what they’re doing, go to create WordPress sites.

People that know what they’re doing, go to WordPress.org.

Okay.

In other words, you can’t take like, they were like, well, anybody should be able to

do this.

And Gutenberg is for everybody and anybody.

And we had to make it super simple because your grandma has to be able to do it.

And, but my grandma is not a WordPress.org user and never will be.

Okay.

The, the, the, the hurdles that you have to jump to get into a WordPress.org install, she

would never be able to clear those hurdles to get to the stupid dumbed down interface you

created for her to make it easy.

It would just, that is such a, the most ridiculous disconnect in the history of software probably.

And so if you tasked Kevin, you were like, Hey, okay.

A.org native interface for doing our work.

What would it look like?

That would probably look like it.

Like, this is the, this is the concept that you have to unify everything.

You have to modernize everything.

You have to speak the language of web design.

You have to empower both beginners and developers.

Assuming that the beginners want to learn again, that they’re not just coming in for a fly by

night, you know, make a website exist kind of deal, right.

That they actually want to do things the right way.

So, um, yeah, I think that, uh, this is, that’s why I think etches would, it should be the

go-to platform.

It’s like, when you go into WordPress.org to do your work, the consensus is you use etch.

Why would you use anything different?

Like the, the way that it empowers you to get your work done is second to none.

Uh, and that’s what people are going to start to see.

And that’s the, the conclusion that I think that they’re going to come to.

Uh, and it just should be what the native environment for WordPress should have been in the first

place.

Okay.

I got one more question.

Then if Rob is ready, we can go to him.

Uh, if he’s in the, we see him in the, in the green room area.

But, um, here’s, here’s one thing that I’ve thought about very recently.

When you did the presentation, you’re going to do the other one, obviously, and kind of show

the stuff, right?

But when you did the presentation with the etch specifically, uh, you, it was like, like

10 plugins, you know, plugin categories, let’s say that you wouldn’t need anymore.

Right.

Yeah.

Uh, at what point does this become just kind of an all in one solution that I’m not saying

it’s its own CMS potentially, cause you’re not doing, doing, dealing with all the CMS

portion of it.

But like, is that, is that like, does it, does it end somewhere?

Do you have like right now in your mind, like a hard stop of where you’re not going to like

cross into the territories of like these types of areas.

So what’s that look like?

Um, the easiest one is what is proprietary WordPress and what is not proprietary WordPress?

What is core WordPress and what is not core WordPress?

I think there’s a lot of, um, misunderstanding, right?

When we say that we are going to allow you to create custom post types and custom fields,

I think a lot of people imagine a proprietary, um, build for that or something like, oh, okay.

Etch is going to manage that like WordPress already does that, but they don’t have a UI

for it, but Etch is going to do it.

It’s going to do it in its own way or whatever.

No, that’s not what we’re doing.

It’s not what we’re doing.

When you register a custom post type in Etch, it is registered using core WordPress.

When you register custom fields, it is registered using core WordPress.

This architecture already exists.

WordPress automatic just did not provide a UI for it.

Plain and simple.

So all we’re doing is doing essentially what ACF does.

We, we provide the UI.

We provide the logic for the custom fields, like depending on how you’re assigning them

and when you want one to display and yada, yada, yada.

Okay.

All of that is obviously very beneficial, but we’re not building a custom, custom post types,

uh, architecture or custom fields architecture or anything like that.

Media management.

You can manage media in Etch, right?

You will be able to manage media in Etch in, um, a much more modern way.

Nobody likes the media library in WordPress.

It’s archaic.

It’s very limited.

You can’t organize things properly.

You can’t loop through things properly.

I mean, there’s so many limitations, right?

Etch will remove all of those limitations.

But when you manage media in Etch, it’s essentially going into the WordPress media library.

Okay.

It’s just a different interface and there’s additional features attached to it when you do that.

Um, but we’re not completely re-architecting media management.

So we are not like, and that’s the, so that’s the extent of it, right?

Um, there’s a lot of things that we, in terms of the builder that we architected from scratch,

but these other things where we’re talking about unifying a development environment, where the idea

is if I am going down building a team page and I get to the part where I need my team grid,

all right, here’s my team.

I need to display my team.

By the way, there are so many people that are not on point with this.

Like they’re not, they, they’re not, they can’t even conceptualize this because of the

way that they build sites sites like hyper-statically.

Okay.

And I actually had this argument the other day on, on Twitter or something with a, with a

developer who was telling me never use custom fields or never use custom post types.

I was like, what?

Come again?

Like he was like, you just make it all pages.

I’m like, no, no, you can’t.

And this is where we talk about the best practices thing where people are like, well, who are you

to say?

Well, I can get on video and show you 20 reasons why not to do it with pages.

Like, where is your video showing 20 reasons to not do it with, they don’t have one.

It doesn’t exist.

It’s, this is, it’s, it’s so frustrating that people can just be like, no, don’t do it.

But they never provide any evidence or, or example or demonstration of why their opinion is better.

That’s insanely frustrating.

So I know if I get, I get to the team grid and I’m trying to get my team to display.

Okay.

I need to create a custom post type for my team.

I don’t care what anybody else says.

I need to create a custom post type for my team.

This is how you manage content in a content management system.

The idea that you would put team members as pages is fucking a 2000, 2005 wants their development

practices back.

Okay.

Um, you create a custom post type.

The idea that I would stop everything that I’m doing and leave the builder and go install

another plugin called ACF and then go into that area and ACF and register the custom post type,

or I don’t care.

Go to functions.php and do whatever.

Like, it’s just a different area that I was not currently doing my work in.

And then when I’m done over there, by the way, I have to go to a different area for custom fields.

Okay.

And then make sure that those two things are assigned to each other.

And then I got to go back into the builder where I already had been.

I was already there doing work.

Why didn’t I just keep doing the work there?

Like it’s, and once people put, like connect the dots on this and they experience it and they

realize, oh my God, I didn’t have to leave to do that.

Like I just saved 15 minutes of time and I’m going to continue to save giant chunks of

time.

When I, when it’s time to manage media, I got to, oh, stop, stop.

We’re doing, stop.

We’re doing, I got to go over here and I got to organize my media in this different place.

It’s Matt.

I call these magic areas.

It’s well, why couldn’t we do it there?

Well, I mean, it’s, that’s magic workflow.

You can’t just do that right there.

You got to do it over here.

That never made sense to me.

So we were just like, why don’t we fix that?

Why don’t we stop pretending that this is some magic that has to happen somewhere else?

It can all happen right here.

And that’s unifying the workflow, right?

And when you unify the workflow, it, first of all, takes the compartmentalization that your

brain has to do.

Cause you got to, oh, okay.

I’m doing this over here.

I’m doing this over here.

I’m doing this.

You’re keeping track of all of this shit.

It’s fucking draining.

It’s draining.

It’s wildly inefficient.

Um, and when you get rid of all of that, it feels, this is why I like where it’s joyful

again to actually build websites.

Cause you don’t have to constantly stop and you don’t have to constantly run into these

roadblocks and issues and headaches and nightmares.

And it’s just nice.

And this is just how it should be.

Okay.

That’s the conclusion that people are going to come to.

I’ve heard you talk about that for a while.

The, the unified, obviously that, that type of thing.

I can’t even, I can, it makes logical sense.

I cannot conceptually and visually wrap my mind around how that is going to look, but I,

I have faith that you guys are going to figure it out.

So I’m looking forward to that.

I’m looking forward to that.

Should we bring Rob in here?

I can pull him on the stage.

See how this works here.

Rob, can you hear us?

I think you can talk to, we’re not gonna be able to see on the screen without the camera,

which is totally fine, but can you hear us?

I can hear you.

I’ve been hearing you the whole time.

Can you hear me?

Yes, sir.

All right.

Jumping on.

So I have a lot of things to speak to here.

And as I said, what Kevin was just talking about, the last two points were brilliant.

Now he’s talking about this from his point of view as the developer of the software.

I want to speak to how this is being received from my end as a former developer.

I don’t even know if I can still call myself a developer.

It’s more like a developer manager.

I know what has to be done and can be done and the possibilities.

But my tweak right now is not knowing how to put it in place exactly with current technology.

So I think that I actually am an ideal customer avatar for you, Kevin, based on what I’m seeing

in the inner circle and all these old guys coming back.

And they’re all saying how you have now reinvigorated them into getting back into this.

And same as me.

So my beginning at this was writing a notepad in the 90s.

Before that, I learned Apple Basic in the 80s.

Okay.

I did program, pardon programming.

I typed in notepad to build websites in the 90s.

Then I got some skills in active service pages.

ASP, Microsoft, running on IIS.

I ended up working at a startup in 2000.

We used to draw out on paper the database design.

Then we would write the code or I would write the code to create the database to do what,

create the database that I needed.

I would write the ASP to do exactly what I needed to do.

I had full control.

I knew exactly what I was doing in ASP, 100%.

Then I started getting a little older, getting into my 30s.

Head and tail became far more interesting.

I wanted to do things easy.

WordPress was coming around and I’m like, well, why would I get into WordPress?

Because, you know, Blogger exists and I’m running ASP sites.

So then I combined an ASP website with a Blogger back in.

Then WordPress came around, like I said.

Then it changed to PHP.

Then it became kind of easier because themes were there.

Like, okay, this is far more quicker.

And again, my life kind of moved on.

But then while building WordPress websites, not understanding PHP perfectly,

like I can look at it and know what it’s doing and I can tweak it, but I can’t write it.

So that became very frustrating that what I wanted my websites to do,

I didn’t know how to make it work because it was PHP.

Then I also didn’t know how, like the dominoes of if I did something,

I’m doing this wrong and I’m setting myself up for failure down the pipe.

Okay, so then another 10 years goes by.

I run into Kevin, page building, building 101.

And I’m like, oh my God, this can be done.

I can literally do what I want to do using bricks.

I’m like, okay.

So 2024 was professional development for me.

I went back to school essentially and I’m still in school.

I thought CSS was done in 2003.

I thought it had maxed out and there was nothing else to learn.

I was wrong.

I got to wrap my head around CSS.

Okay.

Now itch is coming into the picture.

Oh, pardon me.

Before that, what I, my epiphany in 2024 was that when I first discounted custom post types,

because it was PHP and programming, I’m like, okay, I kind of get it, but I don’t know how to do it.

When I realized in 2024 that ACF was essentially a GUI to create custom databases, I would, I woke up.

I’m like, okay, we’re getting somewhere.

Beerts can do what I need it to do and, and I can create what I need there.

However, there’s still some things like PHP.

Where am I actually going to work this in?

How am I putting the loops into bricks?

Where’s the right place to do this if I want to do this custom?

Now with etch, I’m looking at etch 0.10, I believe it was the one I saw.

And I’m looking at this thinking I can custom code.

I can custom CSS.

I can create my tables that I need right in this screen where I need it to do it.

What I need to have happen, I can actually make happen right here, either hard coding it or clicking a button and using a frame.

Like this speeds everything up and gets me back into doing what I need to do.

And I’m seriously looking forward to where this is going to go.

And like I said, my demographic having 30 years ago being a programmer, getting away from it and now coming back, there’s a lot of us.

Yeah, no, I totally agree.

And I think what a big part of that is, and I think a lot of people identify with this when they do use tools that are not really built for scalability and maintainability.

It’s not really just getting your work done, getting from point A to point B, like you mentioned, like, okay, it empowers me to do this, this, this, and this.

But really, it’s the maintainability side of it that nobody likes going back to a project.

And now it’s time to iterate.

Now it’s time to make changes.

Now it’s time to even do major, major work on this thing.

Because it’s been sitting for a year.

It’s been sitting for a year and a half or whatever.

Always, especially in this modern era, websites are like living, breathing things.

They’re not just brochures that we just build and then it sits there for three years.

We’re doing a lot of stuff with it.

And we’re creating marketing landing pages.

And now a new PPC campaign is coming out.

A new Facebook campaign is coming out.

We’re running a sale over here.

It’s constantly moving.

It’s constantly being iterated on and worked on.

And if you don’t have maintainability practices in place, you don’t have a dynamic website.

You’re not properly looping things.

You don’t have actual components.

You’re not using classes.

It is an absolute nightmare.

It is not fun.

Our work is so absurdly tedious.

When you build like that.

And that’s what all of these other tools, not just like, they ask you to do it.

They ask, like, they just, and Bricks is guilty of this as well.

You know, for as good as Bricks is, if you open a new page in Bricks and you add something to it.

And you’re like, I want to start styling that.

What does Bricks do?

Bricks defaults to styling that at the ID level.

It adds, it generates an ID and it assigns those styles to it.

Every other page builder does exactly the same thing.

Now, you know, breakdance or whatever will be like, oh, we use classes.

We don’t use ID.

Okay.

You generated a random class and you assign the styles to that.

It’s a unique class.

It might as well be an idea.

It has a little less specificity.

But you’re still styling at the ID level effectively.

And, you know, that’s like that fundamental thing of like, you’re encouraged to just start the wrong way.

It’s crazy.

And so, you know, we have an epidemic of sites that are not scalable, are not maintainable.

And then the developers are like, man, this is just not fun.

It’s not profitable.

Like, it’s, you know, it’s just, it’s not a good situation.

And so, like you said, when all of these practices can actually exist and they can be put in place very easily, and then we can actually do really great work and we can make that work maintainable and scalable and iterable.

Now, now we’re having fun.

Like, now we’re actually empowered to do, because we could only do this before in VS Code Land and learning all these different languages and putting them all together and having this completely disconnected kind of workflow experience where nothing was unified.

We can abandon all that now.

We can come into one unified visual development environment, still check all of those boxes, and now have more fun than ever, because it’s a way better experience to do this in a visual environment than it is to do in VS Code.

It’s just, it’s the best of everything with none of the downsides.

Well, having fun, 100%.

Like, I’ve woke up again.

This is really, really good.

The problem I’m experiencing is actually is there’s so much interesting things to do and play with.

Like, API, I’m watching Brendan do API stuff is absolutely brilliant.

And I just left him a message a couple days ago and said that I don’t have time to play with API, even though I know what it can do.

I just don’t have the time to do it for free.

I just don’t.

I’m working.

I’m working with Bill’s to pay.

But I told him that by watching him play with it and show the possibilities of what it can do led me to thinking of solutions that I can use this in.

And I pitched this to a client for a grant that they’re going to get for 10 grand.

And I said, we can do this.

And they said, oh, this is brilliant.

And I said to Brendan, if I hadn’t seen him, Brendan, if I hadn’t seen him doing this, I wouldn’t have known it was possible to pitch it as the solution.

And I know I can do it.

Now I’m going to get paid to do it.

So brilliant.

I’ll let you go with that.

Yeah.

Appreciate it, Rob.

Appreciate it, Rob.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I don’t.

Dude, there’s a lot.

There’s a lot to cover.

Honestly, I don’t know if this is something you, I mean, you have to be thinking about this, Kevin, but like, it kind of spills over with what Rob was talking about there.

Is there’s so much shit happening.

Like, I wasn’t here five years ago or whatever, but like, I feel like this is just going so much faster.

And how are you guys, I mean, internally and actually just you and you personally in general.

You know, I was talking about AI earlier.

AI can do a lot of this stuff.

Now I know you can’t do it perfectly.

But I mean, there’s, if you, if you stay up on it, like there’s a, it’s doing some crazy shit.

So I don’t know what your personal experience has been, but like, where do you honestly see this all moving in like a five year time period, just from what you’ve seen, what you know, and what you feel.

And how is, is that going to affect anything?

I’m assuming you would, you would evolve appropriately, but like, what, what do you, what do you think is going to happen?

Or like, what are you, what are you feeling?

No, you’re right.

Well, I mean, I can, I can pretty much boldly claim that if in the era of AI, if you are interested in using AI to its fullest capacity, no professional, no, nobody, no agency, no freelancer would use.

And they’re in their right mind would use a tool where their only pathway to using AI is to prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt, and then settle.

That’s what you have to do with AI.

You have to prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt, settle.

If, if you cannot touch the code because it’s going to spit results back at you and it’s not going to be perfect.

And if you have client requirements or you have a Figma file or you have a something, something, something where things are kind of specific, you are probably not going to arrive at the exact destination you want to arrive at.

You’re going to prompt incessantly and then you are going to settle unless you can have access to the code.

Because if you have access to the code, what an actual professional does using AI right now is they get the code that is spit back to them, which you cannot see in any other environment in WordPress.

In any other visual environment, you cannot see the code.

So you have to just accept what the AI will spit back if these tools ever get to the point where they can empower it to spit back stuff that’s actually relevant, right?

In their environment.

So in Etch, Etch is the only environment where, one, you can prompt it once and what it gives back to you can just be altered and fixed, okay?

It would be very much like how AI is used in Cursor, right?

Now imagine you go into an Elementor or a Divi or a wherever where you cannot access the code and you’re prompting AI to do things.

Nobody in their right mind would use those tools with AI because they can’t control the output of what’s fed back to them.

All they can do is re-prompt and re-prompt and re-prompt.

Where in Etch, you could just take the code and manipulate it to make it perfect.

That’s exactly how, like, thank you for giving me the starting point.

Now I will finish it up.

That’s what an actual professional does.

They don’t just sit there going, oh, God, please.

They get to it.

There’s begging the tool.

Like, more prompts.

And then you’re out of fucking tokens.

This is ridiculous.

This is, Mark, this is not going to work.

This is not going to work, Mark.

Okay?

You have to be able to touch the code that is fed back to you.

And the only place people can do that is in Etch.

So it’s going to be fantastic for people who want to leverage that.

Okay, so you’re saying at some point then, you’re going to be in, you know, V1 basically, you know, in prior.

Visual building environment that you could manually code and you could basically drag and drop effectively.

Like, Visual Builder, as we’re accustomed to, as well as, like, literally build the whole website manually coded if you wanted to.

You have full access to all that.

The next version, I’m not talking versions specifically of the software, but in your mind, the next evolution of that is you put that on hyperdrive.

And you’re able to now have one environment where you could prompt something and Etch, you know, or another error for build or whatever.

Like, you know, like Etch could create that, do what it needs to do.

It’s like almost like an AI assistant, so to speak, where it’s going to create, it’s going to write the code.

And obviously the code and the visual blocks and everything like that are going to match and it’s going to match in Gutenberg and everything.

So it creates that via AI.

And then you can almost, like, spin up your own, basically, like, frames, I guess, in a way, or like any sort of, like, layout or anything like that.

And then you just, you get it from there and then you can go and move ahead.

But you still have full access to the code.

You see everything that it did.

And it’s all still in the same environment.

So it’s very integrated in that form.

Yeah.

You know, there’s no, wherever AI goes, Etch can go with it.

Because I think you’re always going to, regardless of how good it gets, like, you’re always going to need to touch the code for some reason or another.

And, or you would have to spend just an endless amount of time teaching it and setting up standards and all of this other stuff for it to work by.

Which probably a lot of people don’t want to bother doing.

It’s just way better when you can just touch the stuff it gives back to you versus just look at the stuff.

Like, it’s like through a looking glass, right?

You’re like, ah, I wish I could touch that.

I wish I could just fix that thing right there.

But, nope, I got to re-prompt it.

I got to see if it, you know, and you’re just playing this prompt game constantly.

Why?

Why?

Well, these other builders are going to be forced to do it that way.

Because, again, they made, and our decisions continue to pay off.

The closer you stay to the spec, the better off you are.

The closer you stay to the code, the better off you are.

The more access you give, the better off you are.

The more standards you follow, and the more consistent you are with language, the better off you are.

It wasn’t our plan to be more compatible with AI than these other builders.

It just naturally happened because we didn’t take away things that the other builders decided should be taken away from people, right?

And so it just kind of, that’s just, the reality is the reality.

And that’s why I said the faulty premise that ruins page builders is the idea that professionals would never use these tools.

And we should just dumb them down as much as possible.

We should make it as easy for beginners.

Well, when you ask that question, how do we do that?

You get a bunch of shitty answers.

And the result is a very bad experience for anybody who wants to do actual work.

Gotcha.

Well, you just said the magic word.

So let’s talk about the professional topic that we were talking about earlier.

Not too long ago, I want to say maybe a week or two ago, I saw in the admin bar, somebody asked about like, if you use, or said, if you use Canva, like, are you a professional?

And they said, you know, whatever.

Now, my take on this is probably slightly different than yours.

And I feel like I kind of know where yours is at.

I think, like most things, though, we have maybe a semantic issue to some degree.

Like, it’s basically, again, like, we just have to, we all have to agree what words mean.

You know what I mean?

I think there’s a way for us to all describe this.

But like, ultimately, forget the Canva example, or we can use it, whatever.

But the idea is, you were talking about it earlier, is a professional somebody that just takes, like, money from people effectively, like, just cashes, checks, and does whatever?

Or is a professional somebody that actually cares more about the product or, you know, like, the actual fundamentals and things like that in the web space?

I do, I have definitely said that my perspective has shifted a little bit on this to some degree.

But again, I think it’s mostly in language rather than in, you know, I don’t know, belief system, I guess.

But like, high level, I mean, what do you think on this?

So, let’s go, I want to define professional here.

Because the actual definition, I would, okay, so professional, of relating to engage in or suitable for a profession.

Okay, there’s actual, that’s number one that I was fed back.

Conforming to the standards of a profession.

Okay, engaging in a given activity as a source of livelihood or as a career.

And so, this is where, okay, performed by persons receiving pay.

And this is where the, you are, you are correct that it’s a semantic question.

But I think we can all probably come to an objective agreement that there is a specific understanding of the word professional that makes it relevant.

And the idea that it’s just anybody who gets paid to do something as a professional is a completely unhelpful description of professional.

So, we can take any of these definitions.

Like, engaging in a, this would be the closest to that argument that people make.

Engaging in a given activity as a source of livelihood or as a career.

The idea that you are going to make something a career.

Like, if I, a standard career would be, okay, I’m not an entrepreneur.

I’m going to have a standard career.

Which means I am going to go to a, an employer.

And I am going to try to get a job there.

And if I get a job there, I am being paid to do work.

And so, am I a professional or am I not a professional?

Well, the work would dictate, the company that you work for most likely is going to what?

Assess your ability and skill at doing the thing they are paying you to do.

And if you can’t do it to a certain degree of quality, they will fire you.

You will no longer be making the money.

So, you can’t say, well, I mean, I was getting paid, therefore I was a professional.

But why did you get fired?

Why are you no longer getting paid?

Right?

Because the idea of a professional, it’s the same thing if I like, my car needs to be fixed.

Okay?

So, I can drive around and I can find somebody on the side of the road and I can be like,

can you fix my car?

I’ll give you $500 to fix my car.

Would you fix my car?

You’ll get somebody to say yes.

Does that make that person a professional?

The word professional comes with a distinct understanding that the person knows what they’re

doing.

Like, they have some certain level of skill.

They align to a certain degree with some semblance of standards.

If you told your friend or your spouse or whatever, well, I got the car fixed.

Well, did you hire a professional?

I mean, yeah.

Like, imagine that scenario where I just found a rando who would accept $500.

I don’t know what he did.

I don’t know.

Maybe he slapped some duct tape under that bitch.

Like, I don’t know what he did.

Okay?

But I go home and I tell my wife, I’m like, I got the car fixed.

And she’s like, oh, who did it?

I’m like, well, you know, Joe.

Is Joe a professional?

Yeah.

And that’s just the end of our discussion?

Like, I’m not going to tell her?

Well, you know, I bet Joe on the side of the road.

I don’t know much about him.

But he did take my $500.

So, I mean, technically, right?

He’s a professional, I guess I would say.

Nobody would do that.

This is, once again, an example of where people will try to make an argument, but then never in real life would they actually follow through with the definition that they’re giving in their line of argumentation.

If you claim to be a professional, what you are claiming is that you have a certain degree of skill and expertise.

And, by the way, when people are hiring you, they hire based on that expectation.

Okay.

When I say I need a professional plumber, that means I don’t need a rando who’s going to agree to fix my plumbing.

I need somebody who knows what they’re doing around here.

That is what people are communicating when they say professional.

So, the idea that people would come into web design and, well, I mean, there’s not a big barrier to entry.

Do you own a laptop?

Do you know what WordPress.org is?

Even WordPress.com will work.

Do you know what Wix is?

Do you know what Squarespace is?

Any of these things will work.

The minute somebody pays you some money to do something, you can consider yourself to be a professional.

I think that’s kind of an absurd definition.

So, what would you say then that the level is?

That’s question one.

Yeah.

And then also, question two is, by that logic, what tools, it almost sounds like some tools should not exist.

Okay.

So, the question of does a professional use Canva is a really, it’s like a really good example.

The answer is, a professional can use Canva.

So, if a professional who knows what they’re doing and they have a high degree of skill and ability, if they decide to use Canva for whatever purpose, does that make them, does that revoke their professional status?

Of course not.

Just like a photographer who is a professional photographer.

A sports illustrated photographer could come in and take photos with an iPhone.

Does that make them not a professional photographer?

No.

They are a professional photographer who chose to use an iPhone.

Does that mean the iPhone is a professional photography tool?

No.

It wasn’t designed for that purpose.

It’s not made for that purpose.

It doesn’t have the capabilities of that purpose.

Okay.

Depending on most projects requirements.

It’s inarguably, it’s used widespread by non-professionals to take photos.

It’s not a professional tool.

Is Canva a professional tool?

No.

No.

It’s not.

And you can get all up in your feelings about it.

It’s not.

A professional can use it.

But it’s not a professional tool.

Right?

It’s not designed for professionals.

The premise wasn’t for professionals.

It wasn’t designed for professional work.

Again, a professional can use it if they so choose.

But it’s not a professional tool.

So that is the main distinction that I think people have to understand.

Okay.

So then it’s not necessarily about the tools.

Or I mean, like, a tool could be professional or it’s not professional.

Based on how it was designed.

So that’s like the first thing.

So you would say like Wix, for instance, is not a professional tool.

As an example.

Wix is objectively not a professional tool because they had to create Wix Studio, which they claim is their professional version of Wix.

So that tells you right away that the original version of Wix was not designed for professionals.

But you can see.

Okay.

So if you have to have a specific level of expertise.

Okay.

Like if I walked into a professional mechanic.

Like I walked into their garage or whatever.

And I look around and I open the toolbox.

And all I see is fucking duct tape and bubble gum.

It raises some questions, doesn’t it?

Like, they’re like, well, trust me.

That’s a professional.

Like, no.

You just.

And in that case, you actually really can’t get the job done with those tools.

Right.

So there’s some middle ground.

Okay.

But if you open a drawer and like if a person’s like, I’m a professional web designer.

And then you open up and they’re using Wix.

Okay.

It raises some questions.

And that we at least have to ask them a few more questions about what they’re planning on doing with this tool.

Right.

And how they’re planning on doing with it.

Because we know that the tools, we know duct tape and bubble gum is not adequate to do a mechanic’s job.

They need specialized tools to do their job.

Right.

It’s the same thing with a surgeon or like anybody, a photographer.

Photographer walks in.

You hire.

Imagine you’re Nike.

And you’re like, dude, we got to hire a professional.

And you’re a marketing intern or whatever.

She hires someone.

This dude rolls in with just the iPhone in his back pocket.

He has no lights, no cameras, no gear, nothing.

He just rolls in with an iPhone.

He’s going to raise some eyebrows, right?

Some red flags.

You really know what he’s doing.

That’s what people in web design do.

They roll in with web.

And then you go, that’s not a professional tool.

And now they’re all up in their field.

Oh, it could be a professional.

It was this whole thing.

It’s like, I mean, come on.

Really, look at it.

You can’t do class.

You can’t do loops.

You can’t do so many things that you need to be able to do.

It’s not an adequate tool.

I don’t know why this is, they pretend like this is a subjective discussion.

It’s all feelings based.

I don’t feel good when you say that.

So I’m going to disagree with it.

That’s not reality.

Okay.

So professional, we’ll say a true professional would at least know the difference between

professional and non-professional tools.

Yes.

They would most likely, in most cases, be using professional tooling rather than, and if

they weren’t, they wouldn’t know why, right?

Like maybe you use Canva on occasion, but it’s only for certain things that you don’t deem

to be professional enough or like past a certain thing or whatever.

What do we call, if we’re going to do this, what do we call people that aren’t professionals?

We just call them amateurs?

Or is there a better word?

Sure.

Or it will, it depends.

I mean, you could be, are you an aspiring professional?

Right.

And I think to me, an amateur is somebody who wants to remain non paid.

Right.

So like a hobbyist, like I, I don’t, I’m not going to try.

I’m like, I study photography.

I do photography.

I love photography.

I buy all the fancy equipment.

I do all the things.

I don’t want to be paid as a photographer.

Like I am an amateur photographer.

I don’t, I don’t, I don’t care to be paid.

Right.

I’m doing all the things maybe like to the level of, of a professional would be doing

them.

But again, I don’t want it to be my profession.

That’s the root word.

Like, I don’t want it to be my profession.

So I am, it’s like an amateur athlete, right?

It’s like a college athlete that doesn’t care to go.

Like I’m an amateur athlete.

What do you want me to tell you?

I, there’s not, it’s not bad.

I don’t know.

Maybe some people look at that as like a bad label.

I don’t, it’s just a label.

It’s just facts.

This is what it is.

Um, so yeah, I, I think you would call them an amateur unless they, so they, let’s say their

skills do not meet the requirement to be a professional, but they want to be a professional.

Well, they’re an aspiring professional.

They aspire to be a professional.

Um, and by the way, there’s a lot of people who aspire to be a professional that are currently

being paid.

Does not make them a professional just because they’re paid.

They don’t have the other requirements to meet the definition of a professional.

And I don’t think this, again, it’s not a knock on it.

It’s just, it just is what it is.

When you go to try to be a lawyer, there’s a fucking bar exam and they go, you didn’t pass

it.

You are an aspiring lawyer.

Okay.

You’re not a lawyer.

All right.

And it’s just a, there’s a clear cutoff line.

And, uh, I, I think that that’s, uh, quite a good example.

We don’t have that in web design, but it’s still in reality does exist.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Um, hmm.

I have written down here.

Anyone can make a website.

I know that’s a, I know that’s a fiery question.

Um, make a website.

Yeah.

Thoughts on that one.

That’s a no.

That’s a no.

No, no.

Just like that.

We’ll hang on there.

Just like that.

Or do you have to qualify it?

No, the, no, you have to qualify it.

The premise of all of these page builders is if we dumb it down enough, if we make it easy

enough, anybody will be able to do it.

And the reality after how long have we been going down this road?

So 2011 was Elementor came out, right?

And the Wix has been around for about the same amount of time where we’re, uh, 14 years down

this, down this pathway of anybody.

If we just dumb it down enough, anybody will be able to do it.

And what is the reality for the vast majority of lay people users of these tools?

The reality is the best they can muster is they can install a template that is pre-made

for them.

They can swap some content.

They can swap some colors.

They maybe can drag a few things around.

Not a single one of those people without going through a significant learning curve can start

with a blank page and build a website.

Not, not, I would like, it would take them so it would be very entertaining to watch,

but they would not be able to do it without going through a significant learning curve or

just at the end of it, it would just be dog shit.

That’s what it would end up being.

Right?

So the premise that everybody was trying to arrive at, like, oh, we can do it.

We just make it dumber.

If we just make it simpler, we did it.

They will be able.

No, they will not.

This is, and by the way, you just spoke about how fast this industry moves.

It’s moving at light speed.

They can’t keep up.

We can barely keep up.

Of course they, they can’t keep up.

Well, for sure.

Right?

I’ve definitely, I’ve definitely changed.

I’ve definitely changed my tune on initially when we saw like AI, like booming with website

stuff.

I don’t really think the thing to worry about is clients building websites with AI.

Like some people are going to try that.

And at some point, maybe it’ll be, maybe it’ll be good enough at some point for it to be like

passable for people.

Specifically though, the question of like anyone can make a website.

I mean, again, I feel like we did a little bit of a semantic here, but like in your, the

way you answered that is no, because your definition of building a website is building a good website,

a professional website.

That’s what it sounds like.

I say a website of consequence.

I mean, if you want to just slap some shit on a page and call it a day and say you won,

like you checked the box, like that’s, yeah.

I mean, anybody can do that.

Right.

A website of consequence that, that meets real goals for like a business or like, again, my,

my mom’s Bunko club website is not really a website of consequence.

It’s just, okay.

Can she get, but again, my mom is not going to start from scratch.

She’s, she’s going to install a template the best she can do.

She’s not even going to do that, but I think she can, I would, I don’t, my mom might not

be able to log in.

Okay.

Let’s just put it there.

Um, but like, seriously, if you take people who are, I mean, you could take my, my wife

who’s like moderately tech inclined and put them in front of Wix or I would love to see

it.

I would love to see it.

Um, the best they can do click, click and install a theme, maybe, you know, change some

colors, some content around.

And if that, is that meeting your definition of like making a website, Mark, or are we talking

about like, give them a blank slate?

Can they make a website of consequence?

I mean, I think on the surface making a website is, would be, they don’t have a website and

now they have a website that somebody could go to.

Now I agree when you throw the word of consequence on there.

But if I paid somebody to do that, I didn’t make it.

They made it.

Like, what does it, what does it mean for me to make a website?

Because somebody else did, if somebody else did 99% of the work and I just changed what

the headline says, did I make a website just because I clicked a few buttons on a platform?

Like, no, somebody else made the website.

I launched the website.

How about that?

I can give myself credit for launching the website.

I didn’t, did I really, what part of it did I make?

I mean, again, that’s a good, that’s a good semantic difference there.

I would say, yeah, launching is probably more accurate than actually creating stuff.

Just changing.

My point is that the premise was these tools, the promise of the tools was if we make it

simple enough, they will be able to do it and they still can’t do it.

They still can’t even get close to doing it.

All they can do is install template files and change simple things around.

That’s all they can do.

It didn’t work.

The premise failed.

It didn’t work.

Yeah.

I mean, I think we are pretty early.

I’ve been trying to rack my brain and think about other examples of things that we’ve seen

before because we’re so hyper fixated on this and this moves really fast, but it’s also really

young comparatively to all the other examples that we could have.

You know what I mean?

I don’t know.

Horses to cars and all this other shit that has evolved over time, so to speak.

Again, modes of transportation, XYZ, whatever.

So, yeah.

I don’t, obviously, I don’t have the answers because I don’t have a crystal ball.

By the way, I want to add something because you asked about the levels of professionalism.

Because there could be a cutoff, like a bar exam where it’s like you are now a lawyer.

But even in lawyers, there’s like really, really good lawyers.

And then there’s just like public defenders.

You know, and you’re fucking going to prison because you have good representation.

Like there’s bad lawyers, right?

There’s, and there’s good and bad in every single industry.

So, how do you parse that out?

That is parsed out or really should be parsed out in a lot of ways by price.

Like when people in Inner Circle ask me, like, Kevin, I don’t feel like, you know, I came up

on Elementor.

I came up on Divi.

I’m still on the page building 101 education train.

Like I’m trying my best to absorb all this stuff and put it into practice.

And I want to build better sites.

But now I almost feel like when I ask people for money, I’m like, should I even be?

And I’m like, yeah, you should be.

Like, you know, you are, there is a road to higher degrees of professionalism, which by the

way, professionals care about always getting better, always doing better, right?

It’s just part of being a professional.

It’s part of that word.

I tell people, I’m like, look, if you’re like you, if you’re like, be honest with people

ask me, I’m just starting out.

How do I get started?

Can I even take people’s money?

Yes, you can.

Just be honest and upfront with them and say, hey, I’m in my first year of web design.

I’m studying.

I got a lot of like, I can produce really good quality for you.

I was here.

Some examples of my work, but I’m in my first year.

I’m still doing a lot of learning, yada, yada, yada.

So what I’m going to do, this is the price that I’m giving you reflects my experience

and my expertise.

Right.

And as I continue to grow and have this relationship with you, things are going to get better and

better.

And then my price will go up.

And yeah, but you’re being like upfront and honest.

You’re not saying, well, everybody else is charging $10,000.

I don’t think I can do $10,000 quality work, but I’m going to charge $10,000 anyway.

I don’t think that does anybody any good.

Right.

There are different levels of where people are at.

And if they price accordingly, then that’s great because there are businesses out there

who need more of a budget provider, but they still want somebody who is treating the job

like a true profession.

Yeah.

SK, I know you were in there.

I don’t know if you actually meant to be in there or want to come back or whatever,

but we could definitely have you.

I know you have some questions in here.

They’re all related.

So, I mean, you’re just talking about professionals always want to get better.

I do want to make a point about that.

We got one, two questions in here from SK.

I think the market is growing.

This was a little earlier.

The market is growing in both directions.

Many people want to have more of an involved slash code-based interface etch, for example.

And also many want to just speak the code like vibe coding.

So, I mean, we’ve kind of touched on that, I feel like a little bit,

but I see that.

Like, I try to like, you know, see like the people that are getting deeper and deeper into it

and then the people that are also like kind of trying to leverage AI to build, you know,

apps or websites or what have you.

It’s pretty impressive what you’re able to do without knowing how to code now.

And I think that’s, I think we would be remiss if we did not think that was going to continue to improve.

I was going to tweet this or whatever the other day.

I was thinking like, it’s just going to keep getting better.

Like, there’s no way it’s not.

Now, does that mean you shouldn’t learn the things?

That’s not what I’m saying.

But I think it’s going to continue to get better.

So, I parlay that off of SK is asking great questions here.

The real question is what the learning curve is going to be.

Also, how much the team is going to educate and make the product better.

That’s kind of like related to etch.

And I know you’re going to do a hell of a lot of education.

But to combine those two things is the question becomes if you’re a business owner,

I feel like I messaged you this directly, Kevin, the other day or whatever.

We talked about it a little bit.

For everyone here, the question becomes if you think of your professional expertise on like a spectrum

of technician to entrepreneur or technician to business person or what have you

and those different buckets.

It’s like the question for me, this is very vulnerable, just becomes where do I spend my time?

Do I spend my time in the code, learning code?

Or do I spend my time like learning and actually doing like that would be doing projects

or like doing business transactions or something like that.

Like spending your time selling, spending your time coding, spending your time marketing.

You could probably do them all for sure.

And if you’re your startup, obviously you have to do them all.

But the idea is like where do you – I feel like there’s a level to this that I feel like a lot of times,

like Kevin, like you talk to people and you’re talking to those types of people where they have to do all of it

because you give good business advice, you give technical advice.

I think sometimes though, myself, like I get into this mode of like I need to learn more about coding

or I need to learn more about CSS or HTML.

When in reality though, it could, doesn’t have to happen like this,

but you could go so deep into that that you don’t make any money because you’re constantly worried about the other thing.

So I know this is kind of like tangential.

I have the perfect answer for you.

Yeah.

Okay.

So I have the perfect answer for you.

What did I say earlier about people using Elementor Divi?

What are they – what language are they learning?

They are learning the language of Elementor and Divi.

Plain and simple.

They are not learning the language of web design because those two languages are very, very different.

If I say I want to learn Spanish, where do you go to learn Spanish?

Probably best to go to a Spanish-speaking country.

Probably not great to go to Poland, right?

It doesn’t matter how long you spend in Poland, you’re probably not going to come out speaking Spanish, okay?

If you go into Etch, and Etch, remember, Etch empowers you to do work like you do it in Elementor.

If you’re clicking to add elements to a page, you’re filling out CSS inputs.

But the language of everything you’re looking at is the actual language of web design.

When you look at the labels on the inputs, it’s teaching you what the actual property names are.

When you fill out the inputs, which, by the way, writes the CSS for you, like in a visible fashion where you can see it, touch it, feel it,

it’s actually bidirectionally synced, right?

Solved a major problem with CSS inputs and page builders.

You can literally fill out the inputs, go to the CSS code, and look at what it wrote, and stare at it, right?

And by the way, all the property names are the same names as they were on the labels, because Etch speaks the language of web design.

And then you’re adding things to a page, and the HTML is writing itself right before your very eyes.

And you’re looking down there like, oh, that’s how a div is made.

Oh, that’s how a section is made.

Oh, that’s how.

And you’re looking, and you’re looking, and you spend a week, and then a month, and then six months.

You are spending a lot of time in a Spanish-speaking country here, and you are going to come out speaking Spanish.

You are going to know, like, it is literally, as you do your work, teaching you the language of web design.

You are immersed in it.

It does not use proprietary terminology.

It does not use proprietary workflows.

It does everything the way it’s always been done.

And it uses the same words and the same language that are in the spec.

And so you look at it, and you’re doing your work.

But again, you don’t have to learn these things to do your work.

Like I said, you’re still filling out inputs.

It’s writing the code for you, but you’re just seeing real stuff.

You’re seeing real words and real information, and you’re immersing yourself in that.

And so when you use Etch, that’s why I said a beginner should absolutely use it, because it is the only tool that’s going to teach you as you use it.

It’s going to be the only tool that expedites your learning workflow.

It doesn’t matter how long you spend in Elementor, you will not come out knowing the language of web design.

If you spend time in Etch, you will come out knowing the language of web design.

That is actual empowerment.

Because now I’m doing stuff in VS Code that I would never have done before in VS Code because of this immersion.

This is the kind of conclusion they’re going to come to.

They’re going to be far more empowered by doing work this way.

Gotcha.

Okay.

That all made sense.

I mean, I guess the only part was like the business side of it.

Like, you know, the people that are also running out.

The business side is a completely different thing, which is if you don’t aspire to – like a lot of people, okay, they’re like,

I really want this opportunity of building an agency or a freelance business because I want to be location independent.

I love the idea of being an entrepreneur.

I love the idea of helping businesses succeed online and do their marketing and yada, yada, yada.

I want to get them results.

Okay.

You got all these mission-focused things.

But do you love development or not?

That is like a lot of people will say, yes, I do.

A lot of people will say, no, I don’t.

I am in this for all the other things.

If you can answer that honestly and say, no, I don’t, then don’t spend your time learning more code.

Spend your time learning more business and then hire somebody to do the development stuff.

That is what a business does.

You don’t have to – and if you’re like, well, I just want to be a one-man bid.

Okay.

Well, then you got to do everything.

You got to do everything.

I wouldn’t recommend that, but you do.

That’s just – this is just a math equation, right?

But be honest with yourself.

So if you don’t want to do the code much, stop doing the code so much, right?

Just do the business side of it.

But don’t go – this is the wrong conclusion.

Well, I don’t really want to do the code that much.

So what I’m actually going to do, I’m going to focus on all the business stuff,

and I’m just going to cut all the corners when it comes to development.

I’m just going to use Elementor or Divi or whatever.

I’m just going to whip these things up.

I’m going to ship them out.

I’m going to cash the checks.

That’s not the route I would recommend.

That’s not a true professional route.

Because a true professional doesn’t say, well, in order to get around this lack of wanting to do things

and this lack of knowing things, I’m just going to cut as many corners as I possibly can.

Nobody would want to hire that agency.

And no agency would be able to put that on their website.

Like, come to us where we cut all the corners, right?

Like, nobody’s hiring you, right?

You have to hide that fact away.

Let’s not let anybody know that that’s really what we’re doing behind this.

That’s not really the best premise for founding a business, right?

That would be my argument.

Gotcha.

All right.

Shall we bring SK in?

Yes.

Let’s see.

SK, can you hear us?

Hey, guys.

Can you guys hear me?

Yes, sir.

Hey.

Okay.

First of all, I’m super excited for Edge and waiting for Monday.

So that’s that.

But I have a few different things in my mind.

And again, I’m not coming on camera because I went for a night run,

as you guys spoke of this, I’m just sitting in all this.

Right.

Okay.

So most of my clients, when it comes to bricks, right?

So they were initially like, you know, business people who wanted to put

something quick up and they ended up using Elementor and all these kind of

things.

Right.

And then they realized like, oh my God, I kind of like have to build something

more concrete, better build and with better site maps and all this kind of

stuff.

And then they come and meet us and probably they Googled or like they looked at

Reddit or something.

They’re like, hey, I’m interested in this bricks thing.

I noticed like people are like advocating for it online.

And then I caught to like, oh, there’s this new bricks thing.

And that’s how I learned about bricks and all that.

Right.

So I feel like your real challenge will be like, how can we get a lot of people

advocating for bricks and you need advocating for Edge and a lot of people

need to talk about it.

And then a lot of people need to be able to learn it.

Right.

And we don’t need to convert these like new entrepreneurs who are just trying to

put something together to use it.

We just need to make sure when they’re ready to spend the money, they’re willing to

spend like, you know, five figures, six figures of the website.

They come and ask for it.

I think that’s the key.

Not like we have to go to the guy who’s just putting up like a few pages.

They can use Elementor, whatever they need.

But then when they want to build something that’s like more permanent, more professional,

better converting and all that, they got asked for it.

And that’s how this should work.

If you ask me.

So I don’t think that there is a, like, I would ask the question, why does Elementor,

why do people feel like Elementor makes it easy for them?

And yeah, so answer the question.

The answer is because they don’t know what they’re doing.

Now, if you, if you, um, if you asked, can they use Edge the same, the same person could

use Edge again, you don’t have to look at the code.

You don’t have to write code.

Um, there is one extra layer, which is the, and it’s a very basic question.

What is a selector?

What is a selector?

What is a class?

Okay.

Now, every page builder has come to the conclusion that users are so dumb that we cannot use this

word class.

We have to call it a preset.

We have to call it a, we just got to, we got to find like all these fancy, cute names

for it.

Can’t call it a class.

They will not understand.

And I’ve always been like, what do you mean they won’t understand?

How about this?

How about I record a one video covering what a class is?

And then everybody that watches that video goes, oh my God, this is the best thing I’ve

ever heard.

And I’m like, it’s just classes.

But they’d never, they’d never heard that no other tool bothered to tell them or inform

them of how this works.

Right.

And yes, there’s, you get into like, okay, there’s a specific issues and how to organize

your class.

But this is all very basic education.

This is all like, the thing is, is so many people do page.

We have evidence where beginners, these people where these other page builders like, ah,

these, these people are either too dumb or they just don’t care enough.

They just, they don’t care to know.

Well, I have direct evidence that says otherwise, because the minute they watch page building one

on one, they ditch element or they ditch divvy and they want to do everything differently.

Why?

Because they were empowered with actual information, basic, basic facts about how web design has

always worked.

Right.

This tells me they want to do these things.

They want to do it the right way.

And they want to use a capable tool.

The only reason somebody would say, well, Elementor is just fast and it’s easy.

I can whip stuff up in etch in the same amount of time, probably less, but have none of the

downsides.

Right.

The reason they say that Elementor is faster is one, they only speak the language of Elementor.

They cannot go into another environment and feel like they know what they’re doing.

Okay.

And two, they probably have a bunch of, you know, stuff already, already done, templating,

whatever that they’re using, or they’re going to theme for us and grabbing something off

there and plugging it in because everything uses Elementor and yada, yada, yada.

This is why they come to the conclusion that it’s faster.

Is it faster?

No, it is not fast.

There’s nothing proprietary about Elementor that makes it a faster workflow or an easier

workflow than anything else.

If you put me in Elementor, it would not be easy and it would not be fast.

Why?

Because it doesn’t speak the language of web design.

It’s proprietary.

I have to learn what I’m doing.

I have to figure out how they’re doing things and why they made the decisions that they made.

And I have to navigate my way around the UI and they don’t have the things that I’m looking

for and that I need.

Right.

It’s not objectively faster.

It’s only faster for people who have already been using it for a very long time.

Not because of anything that it does special.

Right.

So I think that’s, that’s the first thing that people have to admit to themselves is it’s

only feels faster and feels easier because I don’t actually know the language of web design

outside of this tool.

Yeah, I get that.

Right.

But what I was in etch.

Could they not whip up a landing page?

If they, if they understand the, if you bring in somebody that knows HTML and, and knows CSS,

do you know how fast they can whip up a landing page and etch?

Even if they’ve never used etch, by the way, they’ve never used that.

Why?

Because nothing is proprietary.

Nothing is different.

Nothing is, needs to be figured out.

It just is the way that it should have been.

And so they’re empowered to do their work without any barriers or limitations.

This is an education problem.

This is not a tool problem.

Elementor is not better, faster, easier, or anything else.

There is a large user base of people who don’t have proper web design education who can only

use these tools.

And then they come to the wrong conclusion that these other tools are harder.

No, web design is hard and you don’t know how to do web design.

So the only option is this thing that feels easy.

Why?

Because you did spend whatever learning curve amount of time was, was, was there learning

that one proprietary tool.

And now you feel like you’ve got traction and momentum and it’s pretty easy to do what

you need to do, but it has nothing to do with the tool.

It has not.

If you had spent the same amount of time in etch and just watched a few videos, you would

be light years better off than you are right now.

I, I, I, I really, I want to steer people away from these proprietary tools because it harms

it harms them dramatically in the long run and it harms their clients dramatically in the long

run.

It is not good for anybody, right?

It is the, the standards, language practices, best practices.

These are the things that are good for developers.

These are the things that are good for developers, clients and our industry as a whole.

And I, I don’t know that that can be argued with, right?

Uh, even if people have a low budget, how they can get a low budget provider that’s still

using professional tool.

Like, you know, it’s, I don’t have to hire the very best photographer that ever existed

to shoot my wedding.

I just need somebody who’s competent at weddings.

And if I don’t have a lot of money, I might have to settle on a not so great photographer

to shoot my wedding.

But if that’s the decision I come to, that’s the decision I come to, but I don’t want that

person showing up with an iPhone.

I, I, at least like look the part, like, you know, bring, bring some, some semblance of some

professional tools and do what you can do.

Right.

Um, that’s kind of the situation that we’re in.

Yeah, I get that.

Right.

But what I was trying to say is that, you know, if you take this as Elementor, right, you can

go to like places like theme forest and you can get like a bunch of templates and put

something quick together.

And I empathize with the entrepreneurs and people like, you know, if you just want to

set up a paint shop, you just want to have a website and you’re going to put something

quick, right?

Because you are scrappy and you think they do it.

And I empathize with that.

And I think that H will win.

If when they are ready to spend a lot more money, we are then, and they want to request

H, right.

Compared to like something else.

And that’s the way to it because all the, all the WordPress agents that listen to me, they

get it, right.

Because we have all these like secret area problem and all these things you’re talking

about.

All that makes sense.

We already bought in, right.

But now we got to make sure that these entrepreneurs, these people that want to upgrade to a quote

unquote professional website need to ask for H. And that’s why we can read.

If not, it’s going to be a problem again, because.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

I, I, I, this is, I hear this argument all the time.

I actually made a video on this exact argument.

Um, I, again, I think this has to be, it’s a, another false premise.

The question is, why do I need something fast and cheap?

If I’m a business, I’m a real, am I a real business or am I a hobby business?

Am I a broke business?

What am I?

What am I that I need something fast and cheap?

A real business has money.

An aspiring, this goes back to real versus aspiring.

An aspiring business might be broke.

You can’t be a real business and be broke.

Those two things don’t go together, right?

You’re, you’re either an aspiring business.

You’re trying to make things work or you made them work.

You’re an actual business, right?

So somebody will say, well, I need something fast and cheap.

What do you need something fast and cheap for?

Like, let’s say I am from scratch.

I have no business.

Okay.

SK.

I want to create a, um, I want to clean houses.

That’s my business.

Okay.

I want to create a house cleaning business.

And I go and I say, why do I, why do I come to the conclusion?

You know what I need?

SK.

I need a website for my business, but I don’t have a lot of money because I’m an aspiring

business.

I need it fast and cheap.

Can you put me something fast and cheap online?

Even if you say yes, if you go, yeah, sure.

We got these element or templates.

I can get this thing for you.

Online fat.

What is that actually going to do for me?

Is that going, am I going to out SEO all of the other home cleaning businesses?

No, objectively.

No, it’s, it’s really, it’s not going to do anything.

Whatever $500 I give you is going, I should just light that on fire.

I’d be way better off taking that $500 and, um, and running ads to a Google, my business

listing or something like I could do any number of things that would actually generate an ROI.

A fast, dirty, quick element or landing page is probably going to do nada.

Unless let’s say you make me a landing page.

Now you’re like, well, we need to run ads to that because I mean, it’s not gonna get traffic

by itself.

Okay.

So we’re going to do PPC.

Oh, how much money do you need for the PPC?

Well, I mean like $1,500.

Well, I don’t have that.

If I had that, I would have needed the quick and dirty landing page for $500 that I just

paid you to build that now I can’t do anything with, without another big bill.

Right?

So the, what we have to get out of, we are in a different era now.

I think a lot of people are still stuck in the era where everybody needs a website.

Just everybody, you got to check the box.

You have a business.

So why don’t you have a website?

You, that does not exist anymore.

That is a fairy tale now.

Now you, why did we need it before?

Well, you could rank before.

You can’t rank now.

There’s no ranking going on with a $500 out of the box element or landing page for $500 on

a brand new domain.

That’s not going to happen.

Right?

Do you have to have a lot more money to put into marketing that website online?

So if you don’t, you either have that money or you don’t.

It’s, there is no quick and dirty cheap thing.

Where are the results?

Show me the results that these quick and dirty Elementor sites are getting.

Normally they sit there and they do nothing.

The business has to drum up customers, some other form or fashion until they have enough

money to then go, all right, it’s time to upgrade our website.

Well, what did the first one even do for you?

The first one didn’t even really do much other than what you drove to it manually.

And you could have done that with a Google, my business listing or anything else, right?

We didn’t need this Elementor thing.

We’re still stuck in this idea that everybody needs a website.

Legitimate businesses need a website.

Inspiring businesses, you can make gobs of money with zero website.

And I, I actually made the argument that I could have sold etch with zero website.

We could have done a seven figure launch for software.

If I can sell software without a website, you could sell anything without a website.

So the, the idea that you have to drum up like, oh, let’s take this person’s only $500

that they have to their name right now.

Cause they’re broke and they’re having an aspiring business.

And let’s sync that into an Elementor website that isn’t going to do anything for them

unless they pour a whole bunch more money into it.

Right.

I don’t understand how that, um, computes.

The one, the one thing I have to say here though, real quick, Kevin is I agree with most

of what you said there.

The one thing I have to like ever so slightly push back on is that you didn’t have a website

for etch, but you like, I think a lot of the business owners that like immediately think

they need a website, they have no brand, they have nothing.

They have nothing.

So, I mean, it can, it kind of does go to the point, but as far as like that, that being

a comparison and example, like you obviously had a lot of, a lot of leverage and good faith

already built up these other people.

What they should be, what they should be doing is they should be going and building up some

correct.

Some, some level of good faith or a brand or something.

$500 they have.

Like they would be so much better.

Put that $500 and like any offline active, you might not be ready.

Like, and this is guys, we’re agencies and freelancers.

This is like blasphemy, but this is actual legitimate consulting.

This is what you should be telling your customers.

If somebody comes to you and says, I only have a thousand dollars budget for this website.

I will point blank, tell them you cannot afford to be online.

Take that thousand dollars that you have.

And I will give you a laundry list of shit to go do offline, to drum up more business so

that you can come back to me with five or $10,000 so we can actually get started.

But I will be honest with you.

You do not, you cannot afford a website.

You cannot afford to be online period.

You don’t have a business.

You have a hobby.

You have an aspiring business, whatever you want to call it.

You’re not ready.

Go build a bigger, better business and in like an infinite amount of ways and then come

back and we’ll talk about the online thing.

But you’re not ready.

You were ready for the online space in 2007 and 2009.

We could put something cheap online, do a bunch of SEO tricks, tactics, whatever, start getting

you organic traffic.

That is not the era we live in anymore.

You cannot take a thousand dollars and go anywhere on this internet.

Okay.

So I just tell them point blank.

And is that turning away business?

Yeah.

That’s what real consulting sounds like.

Tell people the truth about the situation that they are currently in.

We are living in 2025.

This is not the era of cheap, quick, dirty online results.

Just not.

You got to build a legit business.

You have to have a legit brand.

You have to do a shitload of work.

You have to pour a shitload of money into it.

And if you don’t have those things, you’re not going to go very far.

And they need to know this before we start cashing their checks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Kevin, I get your point.

Yeah.

Very quick point.

Right.

I think you already sold us on this.

I mean, like I already bought in all this.

Right.

But I feel like I would be very, very interested to know like what kind of education you’re going to put out.

What kind of skills somebody has.

They’re going to start working with edge.

So we can think about hiring those kinds of people.

What are the prerequisites and all this kind of stuff?

Because I think we got to start moving towards like not just buying into edge, but preparing to start using edge.

You know, that’s what I’m thinking.

But maybe you’ll cover this next Monday.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s actually not a lot.

Like if you use Element or Divi, you have to be or Beaver or whatever.

Like they’re all the same.

They’re all the same.

Here’s a couple of things you have to do.

One, you have to be comfortable relearning.

You have to acknowledge that you have not learned much of anything.

Okay.

You just you have not been taught the language of web design.

The tool did not help you in any form or fashion.

Okay.

All you know is a proprietary language called the name of the builder that you happen to be using.

And so if you are okay taking a step back for a minute and saying, okay, I do need to actually learn what I’m doing here.

By the way, this is true empowerment.

We can have the conversation again that we’ve had a few times about people come to me and they’re like, how do I get rid of my imposter syndrome?

And I’m like, well, like a big part of that is to stop being an imposter, right?

If you’re using, if you don’t know what’s going on under the hood, of course you have imposter syndrome.

Your client’s asking you technical questions and you don’t really know the answers.

Of course you have imposter syndrome, right?

It starts by actually learning what you’re doing.

That would be step one.

So you have to be okay stepping out of those old environments, stepping into a new environment where the language is going to seem different.

But what you have to know is this is not a proprietary language that you are relearning.

You are now learning the global language of web design.

Like now you are getting truly empowered in this process.

And then you have to learn what classes are.

Like essentially, like what is a selector?

What is the difference between styling something at the ID level and assigning classes to things?

And then how am I going to organize those classes?

And just that alone.

If you’re just, okay, I’m okay with the learning curve.

And I need to know what this thing called classes is.

Everything else will feel very similar.

Can I fill out inputs and it writes the CSS for me?

Yeah, 100%.

Can I click buttons and it adds elements to the page for me?

Yeah, 100%.

Can I, will it do the looping for me?

Yeah, 100%.

Okay.

So there’s not like all that other stuff you’re going to slowly work your way through.

The biggest hurdles is, are you mentally willing to leave the safe, feel good environment that you are currently in and actually learn what you’re doing?

And then can you interpret what a class is?

And I think you can.

And I think I proved that people very easily can understand how a class works.

It’s not really that hard.

That’s it.

That’s all you need.

Good stuff.

I think SK dropped out there.

We are over time.

We got a couple things here though.

Ruben, appreciate the $2.

I think that’s USD, which is huge because normally it’s Colombian pesos.

Man, he’s really, he went deep in the box.

Damn, Ruben.

Appreciate you, man.

You did not need to give us all that.

That was great.

I get a dollar, you get a dollar.

Hell yeah.

Hell yeah.

And then we got another question here.

Could we create plugins and site architecture in Etch in the future?

I mean, I would need examples of what you’re planning on doing with those things, you know?

I feel like site architecture might be just like templating and singles archives.

That’s going to be obviously, yes.

Plugins, maybe.

I mean, how are you going to do that?

AI?

AI create a plugin or maybe just like.

I need an example of what they’re actually referring to.

Like, you know, WP Codebox, you can, you can, you can add functionality to a website, which will live in WP Codebox.

But then WP Codebox allows you to extract it into its own plugin to then go easily put it here or there or deactivate it on certain sites, whatever.

Like, but I don’t know what degree that they’re talking about there.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Okay.

I think we’re good.

There’s one question here kind of answered as well.

But how is a small business going to build their brand without at least a simple website?

I mean, again, it was kind of answered.

I think the Boulder got it here.

But yeah, I mean, content in-person events.

I mean, again, for me, it’s just there are free ways to get attention.

I mean, they take a fuck ton of time.

Yeah.

There’s free ways.

You know, so let’s go back to the house cleaning thing.

The challenge would be, Kevin, can you start a house cleaning business and make it super successful and not have a website?

Like, never, never deploy a website for that house cleaning business.

And I, like, without hesitation, I would say a thousand percent.

A thousand percent.

Now, name any other thing.

Name any other thing.

Up to software.

Like, if software doesn’t require a website, like, pretty sure nothing requires a website.

But I want people to continue feeding me examples where I’d be like, okay, yeah, I guess.

The only exception, and this is only because it has E in the name, is an e-commerce brand.

But again, if you’re like, I would say, what are you selling?

Give that shit to me and I will drive it somewhere and I will sell it.

This is, the internet does not, all the internet does.

Expand your capabilities.

But everybody acts like the internet is required.

What do you mean the internet is required?

There’s an entire world out there.

And by the way, if you can’t, here’s, there’s a great Jay-Z line.

Can I just, we just, we just, yeah.

Please.

New, new Nick D album.

That’s hot.

Jay-Z.

Jay-Z said, put me anywhere on God’s green earth.

I’ll triple my worth.

And if you don’t have that mindset, if you don’t know what that means, if you don’t know, like, put me just, it doesn’t matter.

Give me whatever mission.

Put me anywhere.

Okay.

I will make it happen.

That’s the, that’s the mindset of an entrepreneur.

Like a real fucking, like, somebody that is undeniably going to be successful.

That is kind of the mindset that they act with in life.

Right?

Everybody sits around going, what are we going to do if we aren’t allowed to have a website?

What do you, like, go sell shit.

Right?

There’s a really great, uh, there’s a really awesome dude.

Uh, I think he just does it as a, a, a stick now.

Um, but he goes around selling cleaner door to door.

And he’s like a, he’s like a comedian guy.

I don’t know his name.

I’ve seen that.

I’ve seen that guy.

I don’t know his name.

Fucking entertaining as hell.

Just sitting around watching him and listening to him.

Um, but he’s like proof positive, you know, like it’s a perfect example.

I don’t know why people feel like maybe it’s because the agency freelance, maybe they’re

believing their own lives where they’ve been telling their clients, you, you gotta have a

web.

I mean, you gotta be online.

What are you going to do if you’re not online?

Like now they believe it themselves.

That’s always been a fairy tale.

You could have always succeeded if you don’t have a website.

Um, and again, in the era we live in websites require so much money now, like to make them work.

They require so much money and time or time.

Um, the businesses would be so much.

If like early stage businesses will be so much better off, uh, hustling in so many

other different arenas.

Yeah.

Definitely.

Always have to invest time or money.

You gotta pick one.

Uh, really both too, but, um, at least at first, uh, one from CJ here.

Will plugins like WP code box, sure cart, et cetera, be compatible with that?

I think the answer to that’s yes.

Yeah.

By the way, a lot of these developers are sitting around, uh, and cause you know, I’m in the

inner circle.

Like it’s, it’s not a, it’s a common thing.

People are like, Oh, where do we get clients?

Where do we get clients?

Well, I’m having struggle.

I’m having trouble getting my, my agency off the ground.

My freelance business is struggling.

Where do I get clients?

Well, what I’ve identified is that a lot of these people are sitting behind a keyboard

going, how do I make this keyboard work?

How do I, how do I make this keyboard find me work?

Like, how do I digitally do this?

And the answer is the same answer I gave a minute ago.

Like if you get out from behind the keyboard, there’s an infinite world out there where you

can go make deals and opportunities.

It’s, it’s your insistence on, I must find a way to do this online that is actually holding

you back.

And if you put your own clients into that same lens, it’s going to hold them back in

the same form and fashion.

Right.

Um, you, like the best way in a lot of cases is to get out from behind the keyboard.

Gotcha.

I think last one here we got is we’ll actually be able to modify any aspect of a WooCommerce

website, like cart checkout, et cetera.

Uh, let’s put that up again.

One more time.

The WooCommerce, like the templates for the WooCommerce stuff.

Um, I mean, no, like I don’t, that’s not really its, its purpose.

Um, it’s not to, it’s not to develop, it’s not to like hack into other people’s plugins

and such.

I don’t even know that you would want to do that because now you’re incompatible with

updates and so on and so forth.

I think Bricks has WooCommerce templates that you can set.

It’s just another template.

No, but he was actually hacking to like the, like edit the WooCommerce code is what it sounded

like.

I thought he just meant, I thought he meant cart checkout templates and such, but.

Yeah.

I mean, if you’re just talking templates for sure, a hundred percent.

Okay.

We shall find out.

Um, cool.

I think we’re, I think we’re good here.

Um, this has been fantastic a little over time, but I thought it was all great.

What do you guys think?

Yeah.

It was fun.

It was fun.

Um, drop comments.

Uh, below and, uh, remember WP town hall.

Dot show slash Omni send.

Thanks to Omni send for sponsoring.

And, um, yeah, we’ll be back.

What?

Two weeks.

Yes, sir.

Okay.

Press calm pretty soon.

Lots coming up.

Press calm.

Exciting here.

Monday is the public demo.

Uh, HWP.com.

If you want to get on the list for the public demo, uh, it’s going to be one event.

We’re not going to do a multi series event kind of thing.

It’s one event.

It is not a, uh, it’s not a presentation.

It’s not a sales pitch.

There’s no slides.

There’s no, there all you are going to see.

I think I saw somebody like what’s going to happen on Monday.

It is literally going to be a demo.

Like a, let me walk you through.

Here’s exactly what it looks like.

Here’s exactly how it works.

I’m using it in front of your eyes.

I’m explaining the decisions that we made along the way, what it does, what it does differently,

why these things are important.

It is a full blown demo where you just come to the conclusion that you want to come to at

the end of it, whether you’re going to be in or you’re not in, we don’t, uh, we’re

not worried either way.

It’s completely up to you.

This is an opportunity for people.

Essentially, first time we did it, people were like, look, I love you.

Uh, I love these ideas.

I can’t see anything.

And just out of principle, I’m not going to buy because I can’t see anything.

This is your opportunity to see the thing.

And so that’s all that.

And now we can all move forward.

Right.

Awesome.

Love it.

Looking forward to it.

Appreciate y’all talk to you in the next one.

We’ll be back.

Yep.