Latest / WP Builds / This Week in WordPress #385

Transcript

This Week in WordPress #385 · WP Builds

• 0:03
  Nathan Wrigley: It's time for This Week in WordPress, episode number 385, entitled Irish Goodbye. It was recorded on Monday, the 19th of October, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by co-host Michelle Frechette, but also by Vito Peleg and Andrew Palmer. It's a WordPress podcast, so we spend most of the time talking about AI. We honestly do get into WordPress-y things as the show goes on.
• 0:31
  Nathan Wrigley: For example, we talk about what's coming up in Gutenberg 24.2. We talk about the fact that AI is making it easy to make websites, but does that mean that 80% of the work is actually achievable by AI? Web Dev Studios have built an entire website just to prove that it's not. Kathy Zant has got a new community, let's call it that, which she's trying to offer to help people build sites with AI.
• 0:58
  Nathan Wrigley: Devin Walker has been with Automatic over at the Jetpack side of things for a whole year. What's happened over there? Dave Foy is back and I for one welcome it into the web dev WordPress space. Shopify, WooCommerce, which is leading. Katie Keith has some insights onto that. And we spend a few minutes talking about Show.fm, a brand new podcasting platform which I've built with my good friend, Dan Maybe. I'll be talking about that more in the days, weeks and months to come. Anyway, that's the episode that's ahead of you. I hope that you enjoy it. This Week in WordPress, coming up.
• 1:37
  Nathan Wrigley: The music is awful, but sometimes it's less awful than other times because that, I don't know if it's just me, but you know, occasionally a thing which is two minutes takes about four seconds and sometimes a thing which takes two minutes takes about three hours. That was one of the four second variants.
• 1:53
  Michelle Frechette: Yeah.
• 1:55
  Nathan Wrigley: That just sort of seriously disappeared. Hello. It's episode number 385. Live. Of This Week in WordPress, which is rather a lot. Sometimes I question my sanity.
• 2:11
  Nathan Wrigley: But here we are.
• 2:12
  Andrew: It's not just you.
• 2:13
  Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That's good. I'm pleased to hear it. The dulcet tones of Andrew Palmer there, and we'll go around our little group in a moment and say hi to everybody. But before we do that, just a few bits of housekeeping, if that's okay with everybody. The first thing to mention is if you're watching this anywhere other than YouTube or the WP Builds Live page, don't comment because the comments don't come to us.
• 2:40
  Nathan Wrigley: So if you're in Twitter or LinkedIn or anything like that, it'll just be a... You'll comment and it'll, you know, it'll appear in the thread over there, but we won't see it. So the best thing to do is to head to wpbuilds.com, go to this URL, wpbuilds.com forward slash live. And if you go over there, there's a little live chat widget inside the video. Top right says live chat. Or you can use the YouTube comments embedded on the right-hand side a little bit. Mr. Richmond, Elliot Richmond, saying hi, folks. And also, oh, Andrew's got the measure of it. Look, there he is. So do that. And if you go to one of those two places, you can actually have your voice heard. So wpbuilds.com forward slash live. Or go to the YouTube channel.
• 3:32
  Nathan Wrigley: Hello, says Taco. Good to see you all. Whoever is typing, if they wouldn't mind just pressing mute, that would be great because it's really loud. Anybody else getting the keyboard in their ears? I'm getting it.
• 3:47
  Andrew: It's very soft laptop. Yeah, I'll stop doing it. I'm a newbie to podcasting. Sorry about that.
• 3:52
  Nathan Wrigley: It's just fine. Don't you worry about it. So there's the bits of housekeeping. So in that case, what we'll do is we will go around the houses and say hi to everybody. Firstly, we'll go. Go there. Actually, let me remove that caption first. Yes, sorry. What's going on? I can't make Taco go away. Oh, it's because there's another one hiding behind it. Wait a second. Make that one go away. There we go. How are you doing, Michelle?
• 4:17
  Michelle Frechette: I am very well, thank you. How are you?
• 4:19
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good, good, good, good. The weather here is becoming wintry. We had our dalliance with the heat a few weeks ago, and now it's back to normal. Michelle Frechet is the Executive Director of PostStatus. In addition to her work over there, she is the podcast barista at W3 Coffee Talk, co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers, WP Career Pages, and sponsor of MeWP. She's also the co-founder of Speed Network Online. She likes to write things, and so is an author, influencer, and frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events. She lives outside of Rochester.
• 4:55
  Michelle Frechette: Rochester. Where she likes to take photographs of nature. And if you want one URL to sum it all up, it's meetmichelle.online.
• 5:05
  Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Thank you for joining us. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you. And over there, we have Mr. Andrew Palmer. How are you doing, Andrew? I'm very well, thank you. Good to see you. You've always got such a nice, like, Barry White style. Let's go with that. Deep and enjoyable. Delighted to see my former boss and my former co-founder. That's right. You're over him. I don't know if you've noticed. He's dead to me. He's dead to me. He's dead to you. Despite the fact he spent Sunday with it. There's Andrew Palmer anyway. Andrew is a WordPress and SaaS founder. He's an investor and he likes to merge things together through M&As. He's an advisor who's also built and scaled and exited five digital agencies.
• 5:54
  Michelle Frechette: And anything else you want to add? Because I think you'd want to talk about it. Nothing. Nothing really. I worked with Atterim. I was an investor at Atterim. So it's great to see Vito. We spent all Sunday, last Sunday together. And done. In between cuddling the kids and stuff like that. Went through everything that you're doing. It's great. We had a great Sunday outdoorsy at our rim.
• 6:15
  Nathan Wrigley: I'm trying to make the answer. Put your hand behind it.
• 6:19
  Andrew: We decided to change the name.
• 6:23
  Andrew: There's a new logo already. We decided to change the name. Yeah, change the name to Adarim as people say it.
• 6:32
  Nathan Wrigley: That's a great episode title. Nathan has out-of-date swag. I like that. I'm trying to remember that one. That's Andrew anyway. Thank you for joining us, Andrew. I appreciate it. Finally, what feels like an ice age ago, Vito Peleg, how are you doing? It's been ages.
• 6:52
  Vito Peleg: Good. Yes, it's good to be here. I can't believe it's 345. I think I was in episode 35.
• 6:58
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like that length of time ago. It's an absolute pleasure having you back.
• 7:06
  Nathan Wrigley: Have you done anything since then? Not really. It's too chilly. I have three kids now. As you say, not children. Oh, kids, businesses, empires. Back then I had none.
• 7:20
  Vito Peleg: Yeah, I've been busy for sure.
• 7:22
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, life gets in the way. Vito has bought the shortest of a bio, so it'd be really easy to say. Vito is the founder and CEO at Atarim, and I'm just going to add father of, what did
• 7:36
  Nathan Wrigley: you say, three? Three now, yes. With the latest one joining less than two months ago. Oh, you wait. I, as of this week, I no longer have any children. All of my children have now gone into that kind of buying beer at the pub, being able to vote period in life where they've all become 18. And I tell you, enjoy it, Vito.
• 8:02
  Nathan Wrigley: It goes, I know everybody says it, right? Everybody says it and you don't quite believe it, but it goes quicker than you think. I can already see. And we'll enjoy that part. I'm, I'm actually... Semi, looking forward to that part already, you know? Yeah, yeah. Well, if you like driving people places, it's great. Yeah, I am now a taxi driver to my 24-year-old university daughter. Yeah, it's absolutely crazy.
• 8:29
  Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, we're going to talk about WordPress-y things, but let's see if anybody has dropped any comments in. Like I said, feel free to drop some comments in if you want.
• 8:38
  Nathan Wrigley: Taco's the only one so far, well, Andrew has as well, but saying hi to people.
• 8:42
  Nathan Wrigley: You've been trying for years to make me go away, Nathan. I refuse, so I simply like your customer.
• 8:46
  Nathan Wrigley: Did I say make Taco go away when I removed your comment?
• 8:50
  Nathan Wrigley: I believe you did. I'm sorry, Taco. I didn't mean it in that way.
• 8:54
  Michelle Frechette: And Elliot says hello.
• 8:56
  Michelle Frechette: Who does? Elliot Richman says hello.
• 8:59
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah, we got him. I think, hi there, says Elliot. Yeah, thank you. That's great. And we've got some other comments coming in. There's a little bit of a lag, actually, between the various platforms, but I can see Jackson that says, ciao.
• 9:13
  Nathan Wrigley: But it hasn't come through to our platform. I don't quite know why that is, Jackson. We sometimes have these problems, but I'll keep my eyes peeled on the actual YouTube comments and what the platform consumes. So the idea is to talk about WordPress-y things. Increasingly, we go off the rails and talk about all sorts of other things as well, including AI quite a lot. But what we tend to do these days is, firstly, have a massive long advert for things that I do. So let's begin there.
• 9:40
  Nathan Wrigley: Now it's a good time to get your coffee. I'm just kidding. Yeah, you go get coffee. In fact, have a long meal, and then come back and ask.
• 9:49
  Nathan Wrigley: No, I'll keep it brief. This is us, WP Builds. Stick your email address into there, and I'll send you two emails a week when we produce new content. More recently, we had a hijack episode about Show.fm, which I'm going to get onto in a moment. But the latest and greatest thing at the moment is Black Friday, isn't it? Everybody's sort of gearing up for Black Friday. I expect at Atarim you're doing the same thing. We throw this page together each year, and at the minute, I don't know, I think it's got about 50, 60 deals on there, something like that.
• 10:21
  Nathan Wrigley: You can sort of search and filter it for, you know, what kind of category it falls under, how much the discount is and what have you. And there's some little sponsor slots at the moment taken up by NovaMira and WSForm. If you fancy doing one of those, feel free. Click this little button here. But it's at wpbuilds.com forward slash black. Despite what this URL at the top says, it really is at wpbuilds.com forward slash black. And as Black Friday comes along, yeah, I strip out all the UTM parameters and stuff like that.
• 10:52
  Nathan Wrigley: So hopefully it'll load quickly without tracking and all of that business. But yeah, if you want to submit your deal, you can stick your deal, whatever you've got, stick it in behind that form there, add a deal and we'll put it on. Which is free to do, right? Oh, yeah. It doesn't cost anything. Yeah, yeah. Usually we end up with about somewhere between four and five hundred deals. It is a bit noisy. When I started doing that page, I don't know, we had like 70 or something.
• 11:19
  Nathan Wrigley: And now it does get a bit noisy and I don't really have the perfect system for sort of filtering it. And other than search, you know, so if you go there and you click the little filter thing.
• 11:30
  Nathan Wrigley: I don't know if you guys line yourselves up. I've kind of stopped putting money to one side for Black Friday. I don't really do that anymore, but I know that if you've got a plug-in and things like that, then it is quite a big time of year. So anyway, that page is there if you want to. The other thing to say is we were taken over. This has never happened. Never before have I not been the interviewer on one of my podcasts, but for the first time ever, some 485 episodes of that show in, Mark Benzercane took over and he did an interview with me and Dan about this podcast that we've got, show.fm, which actually the three of you have used for the show notes and all of that to get in on this episode.
• 12:15
  Nathan Wrigley: Hopefully it was fairly straightforward and easy to use. I have four episodes of my own show out on it.
• 12:22
  Michelle Frechette: Have you published it? Is it all going? Yeah, I'm on my fourth episode published at 2am today.
• 12:28
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay, and all the problems that you had, don't say a word.
• 12:33
  Michelle Frechette: They were user error and user understanding, but now I understand the flow better, so we're fine. Once you've got the flow, it's a piece of cake. Powerful, actually. Finding the right places to click was just the challenge. Yeah, because there's so many options. There's quite a lot that sort of gets buried.
• 12:50
  Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, last little promo from me. In the run-up to Halloween, we're running a deal. We're calling it our founder's deal because we would like to get 100 people onboarded onto the platform just to act as our initial phalanx of people. There's still a bunch left, so if you want to be one of those, what we're doing is we're offering you 75% off three years of the platform. But the quid pro quo is that you give us feedback, that you get a good deal and hopefully give us some feedback when things don't work as you're expecting or if you just want a different feature.
• 13:26
  Nathan Wrigley: So far, and I am not actually being... I'm disingenuous about this. So far, we've had no negative comments, but we've had lots of people saying, can you do this? And in answer to all of them so far, the answer has been, yes. And we've built it within like 24, 48, 36 hours, something like that, including a massive overhaul over the weekend of the whole permissions system. So get on board and you could make this platform pretty much anything you want at the moment. So show.fm, go check it out.
• 14:00
  Nathan Wrigley: Where do we pay for the commercial, non-commercial version? There is no... Oh, I'm so sorry. Yeah, that's a whole thing. Do any of you pay for content that, like, excludes ads? Do any of you actually do that? Like, podcasts?
• 14:16
  Vito Peleg: Shopify?
• 14:18
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
• 14:20
  Andrew: I don't. I like the ads. I think it supports businesses, the ads. You know, the reason they're... The reason that these platforms exist, I think, in general, you know, I'm talking about the YouTubes, the Spotifys, the things that we kind of advertise on as businesses, digital businesses, I think that I want to be able to support the advertisers rather than the platform.
• 14:50
  Andrew: I'm a bit weird in that way, but I think it's fine to listen to an advert for 10 seconds and on YouTube. Or, in this case, six minutes of… Well, I mean, you can't avoid this because, you know, you're still learning on self-promotion. So, you know… That's right. We're giving you a bit of leeway here.
• 15:09
  Vito Peleg: Unless you actually buy something, Andrew, you're actually costing the money. Oh, yeah. Right? Cost per view.
• 15:17
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but I'm listening to them. I'm hearing them. Their branding is in my head, so I feel that I'm doing them a good turn. There's one podcast that I pay for, and I pay $99 a year, and basically what they do, and I absolutely love it. And I think to myself, gosh, that's like half the cost of the TV license in the UK. And the guy produces one episode maybe every two weeks or something. I really, really like it.
• 15:43
  Nathan Wrigley: And his technique is none of his content has sponsored slots, none, but he just cuts it off in the most annoying place if you don't pay for it. So you'll be like 12 minutes in and you just get into it, and then it's like, right, that's it. And he doesn't even announce it. It just suddenly stops. And it really worked for me because I was enjoying the first 12, 15, 25, whatever minutes. So I pay for that. But there's a platform that has recently launched. Check this out for, like, disruptive but also really annoying if you are a podcaster.
• 16:19
  Nathan Wrigley: What they do is they download a copy of the podcast, listen to it. With AI, figure out where the ads are, and then cut the ads out and put it into their podcast platform. And because it's an RSS feed, they can do it. It's totally allowed. But it's also like, what a kick in the teeth for the people who made that content. Isn't that such a weird business? Such a weird business model? And so he, the person that developed that platform, he gets a fee for you to use his app.
• 16:53
  Nathan Wrigley: So that he can continue paying the AI fees to strip the ads out.
• 16:58
  Nathan Wrigley: It's kind of like, well, it happened with TVs. You know, we used to watch all of the ads. You have nowhere to run. And then these recorded thing. Yeah. That was the early days of it. The Tivo boxes. And you would wait 10 minutes, go and make a coffee, come in and then skip, skip, skip, skip right back. Exactly what it is.
• 17:18
  Michelle Frechette: I- I have to bet I haven't seen an ad in years because I do everything streaming and I pay for the services that I don't have to listen to them, yes.
• 17:29
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Well, that's probably the way that I think the podcast industry is going to go. I imagine there'll be a lot of that. Anyway, the point being show.fm, we've got an app if you are interested in that. Right. Okay. We ask our guests if they've got something they would like to mention. And in this case, we've got a couple of those bits. So let's start here. Let's start with pressingforward.co.uk. This is Andrew's contribution. Tell us a bit more, Andrew.
• 17:57
  Andrew: Well, you may know I had a marketplace called Overland Marketplace. That's closed down, which is fine. I sold it to InMotion. They've decided that's not now part of their business, which is all cool. Well, I really do think that there is a place, especially. Yeah. You know, I think we're going to mention Katie from Barn2 and also, you know, other plugin developers are saying we're not getting the sales, we're just not getting them at all. So this is going to be a mix of affiliates and also products that download with a license that you can buy directly from the platform and effectively it's a marketplace.
• 18:36
  Michelle Frechette: So any plugin developers that want to get an extra bit of exposure. And we know that Elegant Marketplace was particularly successful for Attering, particularly successful for Divi plugins. But this is literally for anyone that's got a digital product, whether it's AI generated, whether it's a plugin for WordPress or a plugin or extension for Shopify or any kind of proprietary system, then this is a platform that you would want to be on as a vendor.
• 19:08
  Michelle Frechette: Because I think with marketplaces, these,
• 19:14
  Michelle Frechette: They've got a little bit of a bad name, and I want this to be more of a community thing. So I'm going to be using Fluent across the board with it. I've built it with AI. Fluent has an MCP. So it's just, it's completely ready to launch today. But I want to just, you know, have people interested in it. And I'm still launching it, whether people are interested in it or not, because I'm quite bullish about it. But I think that we deserve another platform other than WordPress.org and other than Shopify app stores and all that kind of stuff to be able to promote and make sure that your products are seen somewhere, especially we'll be using, you know, AI situations on SEO, but we'll also use normal SEO as well.
• 20:02
  Michelle Frechette: And I think that, you know, having Bill Elegant Marketplace zero to a million revenue in total was... It's something that I could, you know, I've got a proven track record in being able to build out a marketplace and make it successful, help businesses like Atterin we did in the early days with WP Feedback, help businesses like Termageddon like we did back in the day and 250 vendors were on there with 1,200 products between them and they all earned a very decent living.
• 20:37
  Michelle Frechette: So let's hope that I can use that as a community platform, et cetera, et cetera. And I'll be using Fluent Community as well. I'll open it up so that we have a place where people can be nice to each other. I saw this week Fluent Community got something like 80,000 installs of which yours is going to be one of them. So I'll tell you what, the Fluent products are really awesome, you know. Oh, yeah.
• 21:02
  Michelle Frechette: And I'm using a little thing called WPOS.ai to build out this because Fluent have got an MCP and WPOS.ai. Connects to the WordPress MTP or, you know, connects in within WordPress. So this is still built on WordPress, which I 100% believe in, but it's also AI helping. And I've also got Atrium on there that is helping me manage the website.
• 21:29
  Michelle Frechette: So all the plugin updates, all of the backups, everything that's in there. So I'm really getting into WordPress plugins that really dive into the AI aspect of helping you run a WordPress website. So not an advert for Atrium. You know, I used to work for Atrium and I supported them in the early days and, you know, all the things. But without going too much into it, Atrium AI really does help you now manage your whole website situation, whether you've got one or many.
• 21:58
  Nathan Wrigley: So that's what I'm doing. And that's what I like. That's not an advert for Atrium. But this is...
• 22:05
  Andrew: Oh my God!
• 22:08
  Vito Peleg: Now we've got a segway. Thank you. So it's been absolutely ages, Vito, since we spoke. And obviously you're not going to be able to sum up like, I don't know what that is, five years or whatever. But I'll just quickly hand you the torch. And do you want to just tell us in a couple of minutes some of the more interesting stuff that you've been up to recently?
• 22:29
  Michelle Frechette: Or I don't know. Sure.
• 22:30
  Nathan Wrigley: What happened since?
• 22:31
  Vito Peleg: Quickly. Yeah. So, as you know, we started with a feedback solution to allow people to click any part of the website and leave comments where the request is. Very quickly, it became like a dashboard to manage all of your websites for all of your communications, basically the delivery process of your work, specifically built for agencies. And then we realized, actually, on the other side of these little chat bubbles, there could be...
• 22:59
  Vito Peleg: An AI team that does the work, that passes on the information, that finds more things that you maybe missed because you're joining too many clients at the same time. And this also came in after working with tens of thousands of freelancers, agencies, and learning from them that there is no way to get ahead of your clients unless you have a team. And so this chase, this constant chasing that we've all been a part of, I've been a part of this for years as well when I was running my agency, is extremely hard and you always feel like you're just like one step behind your clients.
• 23:38
  Vito Peleg: Oh, I need to reach out to this guy last week and I forgot and Marketing Tuesday gets rescheduled because this website went this and that website went this and basically only the squeaky wheels get your attention, gets the oil. And so you're just there trying to juggle all of them at the same time without having the team around us. This combined with an average 7% profit margin, which is what most Freelancers and agencies operate on, which is extremely low. It makes it extremely hard to get out of this concept, getting ahead of your clients. And after building an agency back then and doing it again with Andrews as well at our side over the past couple of years, we've learned that there is no way of doing this except for having a person dedicated to doing the follow-ups and the client communications and the project manager, if you will, and another person.
• 24:35
  Vito Peleg: That is in charge of going out and finding additional opportunities for expansion and customers and all of those kind of stuff. And of course, the team that does the work and someone that once a month goes and checks X, Y, Z and all of the things in between. So that's exactly what we built. An AI web agency that gets plugged into agencies and takes on them or their persona as the workspace. And so all you need to do is just drop in the URL.
• 25:03
  Vito Peleg: And that's it. No more chasing anymore. The AI works autonomously in the background. You set the plan, and you set all of the approvals, and then the AI just runs across all your clients. The one-liner that I really like out of this is on top of the top one here, but this one actually hits home for me, is treat all your clients like they're your only client. Nice. That is nice. Yeah.
• 25:32
  Vito Peleg: Because you set the plan and just let the AI run continuously across all the websites. And in order for us to be able to accomplish this, we built hundreds and hundreds of tools into our AI. Currently, I believe we have the deepest connection to WordPress, but it's not only because it can talk to WordPress, but because it has all of the other additional tools that professionals would have to not just do, but to make the decisions.
• 25:58
  Vito Peleg: Because, you know, any AI now can talk to Yoast SEO or something like this. But what should I put in there? You know, what is the route that you need to go off? Do keyword analysis, keyword research, SERPs analysis, GEO activities, and all those kind of stuff, just so that you don't just write an alt tag, but you write the right alt tag that will help the website advance to its goal. So apart from doing the connection to the website, we built a bunch of additional tools from accessibility to SEO, to performance, to security, to make sure that the AI agency's team is wrapped with all of the tools that professionals actually go and grab before they execute, before they make a decision.
• 26:46
  Nathan Wrigley: So it's all wrapped up around this. At the core, we help every team that is a freelancer or an agency basically operate like they have a team on their own, but with just one person. Nice. There you go. Slightly more than it was, right, Nathan?
• 27:05
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it was less than that. I'm now beginning as one of the founders of a new SaaS product. I get it. I see how this journey changes over time. Hey, here's something curious, right? Your platform, I think, does it differently because you are dealing with people you already know,
• 27:24
  Nathan Wrigley: so it's not like an outreach tool to find new clients.
• 27:28
  Nathan Wrigley: I was listening, I don't know where I got this this week, but somebody, it might have been Matt Medeiros, was saying, WordPress is, there's no problems for WordPress. You only have to look at my inbox. So this is Matt, my inbox of the way that he's being contacted by plugin developers who've got new and interesting products. I'm also noticing the same thing, but I've got this icky feeling that a lot of it is created with AI because they, a lot of the emails seem to be saying the exact same thing.
• 27:58
  Nathan Wrigley: And I'm sort of pushing this back to you a bit, Vito. I'm guessing the AI portion isn't just set it and forget it, you never speak to your client ever again. I'm presuming there's a bit where the human is still sort of in that loop, as we keep saying.
• 28:14
  Vito Peleg: And even exactly what you said, Nathan, this is the only AI platform that treats the professional as the escalation layer. And so anything that requires your approval, requires your guardwares comes back to you based on the definitions that it has, as opposed to just trying to hallucinate its way into a solution. So we recognize the professional as the top 20%, how you get to something of value.
• 28:41
  Nathan Wrigley: You know, that's such an interesting number. We're going to deal with that number in a minute, actually, curiously, in exactly the same context. So, yeah. Okay. But to tackle what you're describing, instead of like going off and doing like called outreach, which then becomes really spammy and this kind of stuff, the way that we're looking at this is we're helping you generate revenue from your own existing customers.
• 29:01
  Michelle Frechette: Yeah.
• 29:02
  Vito Peleg: So what AI does, it goes throughout your entire fleet of websites once a week or once a month. It knows their goals and then it finds things that they would be happy to have, quotes it out, scopes it out, and makes a proposal that you can just push to a client with like, hey, Michel, why not have a booking form on your website that is relevant because XYZ and it will give you da-da-da-da-da. So it just takes all of that out of the equation and creates what we call upsell opportunities for each one of your clients on a weekly basis.
• 29:35
  Vito Peleg: So we always know that the agents that succeed are not the ones that are going out there chasing the next client, are the ones that are treating their existing clients like they are made of gold, because they are.
• 29:49
  Nathan Wrigley: I'm going to say it out loud. Andrew, I've muted you because your microphone's really hot and we're getting all the keyboards and whenever you lay your mug down or whatever's going on. So you can unmute yourself at any moment. It's just whilst Vito was talking. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Thank you for that, Vito. That's great. So, this is a weird thing. About two years ago, I'd probably get two email a week from plugin developers. At the moment, I'm probably getting about 40 a day.
• 30:22
  Vito Peleg: Wow.
• 30:24
  Nathan Wrigley: And it makes it unreadable. You get to the point where there's a deluge which is so torrential that you can't even bear to open the ones which may be realistic. But there's a few tells. If the first line tells me what I already know about myself, hey, Nathan, you run a WordPress podcast. Oh, do I? Do I? Really? Is that what I do? Please change that algorithm because it's ridiculous. Anyway, the point being, there is a bit of me which worries about AI going in all the different places.
• 30:58
  Nathan Wrigley: So, it's nice to hear that you've got the human in the loop there.
• 31:02
  Vito Peleg: One hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
• 31:03
  Vito Peleg: I think that agencies have a place in the stack and they will always have the place. It's just not what it used to be. Yeah, right, right. This is the reality, right? Nothing is what it used to be. But I want a cat on this show. Look at that, just hanging out. That's so lovely. Michelle, we're going to go over to yours. It feels a little early, but it's Santa. Tell us what we're looking at.
• 31:33
  Michelle Frechette: Yeah, so I think it was a couple weeks ago, the SpaceFast website was launched. And it is, let's see, SpaceFast.com is the website. You can see part of it in the way the URL is on this one. But you can spin up a website just by describing what you want and using your AI. So I connected SpaceFast to ChatGPT, because that's the one I'm more versed in so far. And I told it what I wanted. And so it created a site. And then I said, I need a Santa picture on there if it's a Santa site. So it updated with a nice AI Santa photo, which will be replaced by my boyfriend in his Santa suit as soon as I can get out and take some pictures of him.
• 32:15
  Michelle Frechette: But yeah, and so I'm connecting the URL to a WNYSanta.com so that if people are looking. Or somebody for pet photos or parties, they can hire Nick.
• 32:28
  Nathan Wrigley: I think that we're at a real moment, aren't we, where I've never used SpaceFast, but I'm hearing some fairly gushing commentary coming out of people who've tried it and come out the other end, you know, and within something in the region of 20 minutes after you first log in, you've got yourself a pretty credible website.
• 32:48
  Michelle Frechette: Yeah. It's exciting times. It took me about 10 minutes. Right, right. Yeah. The thing is though, like, I don't, I still have to learn so much. I'm not, I'm probably going to remake the site in WordPress, if I'm being honest, because I understand it better and I know how to control it better. But with the fact that you can just spin something like this up, Kathy Zant has put, I want to say 10 sites up just in the SpaceFast part of things.
• 33:12
  Michelle Frechette: And she's got fortune cookies that open up and tell you why you're a great developer or what your developer is. She's was, she's got her new, um, I think she even used it for her new community. She's been having a ton of fun creating things and figuring out what the right prompts are to make the best sites.
• 33:35
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so slight fly in the ointment then. If we get to the point where everything's really easy, so this is not aimed at you, Michelle, this is for all the panelists and anybody listening. If we get to the point where everything's trivially easy, how much attention have we all got for this stuff? What is our capacity to consume? I'm going to use Cathy as the example because you mentioned that she just launched 10 different things.
• 34:01
  Michelle Frechette: So again, this is not directed towards Cathy, it's just that that came out of your mouth. If we're all launching like 10 different things in the space of a couple of days, How do we gain any sort of meaningful traction on it? You know, does everything become a bit of a hobby or, yeah, anyway. I have thoughts on it, right? So, if you were to look at the SpaceFest website, at the very top it says brought to you by the makers of Tumblr. It doesn't say brought to you by WordPress, right? So, it's actually going after a different crowd.
• 34:28
  Michelle Frechette: It's going after the microblogging people who are looking for fast ways to do things. Because Tumblr is a fast way to just get things out, right? It's different than Twitter. It's different than other social platforms, but it reaches a very distinct audience. And I think that's what SpaceFest is geared toward, people who need something fast that they can do really quickly, but not in-depth. You're not going to find, like, hotels setting up websites with SpaceFest. Is it disposable, then? Is it kind of, yeah.
• 34:54
  Michelle Frechette: I think it is, absolutely. I mean, you can take any website down in a heartbeat, right? But this was free. I wanted to play with it and see what happened. And it was ridiculously easy to, you know, bring up basically a brochure site that can do a few things.
• 35:12
  Nathan Wrigley: I'm sure I can do more than that, but that's all I've needed from it, and it seems to be fairly easy to get that done. I'm so conflicted. I'm really excited by what's possible. You know, that child in me is like, oh, look, everything, you can do all the things.
• 35:26
  Nathan Wrigley: Think of it another way, Nathan. What do we do if everybody's just launching a trillion things every week? But also, my attention was shattered before all of this anyway, and now it's going to be more shattered. Anyway, sorry, Vito, you carry on.
• 35:41
  Vito Peleg: Well, I see it more like the music industry, because it used to be very hard to get an album out there. It used to be expensive, and you had to have investment, which is like the record label, and only the top 0.0001% got to have an album. And then streaming came in and home recordings kind of became a thing and basically democratized the whole idea of producing music. Now, it just meant that it's exactly in a very similar way. You got flooded with artists releasing their indie. That's the rise of SoundCloud, if you remember SoundCloud, MySpace and all of those kind of stuff.
• 36:27
  Vito Peleg: It was all on the back of the ability of publishing your own music very easily as opposed to just a handful of years prior to that. That did not change a few decades in, did not change the end perspective that you still have the 0.001% that rise to the top, the Taylor Swift's. And even in this landscape, you still have the same type of, let's say, big stars or all of this kind of stuff, while still the 99% that before could not get an album out there, that could not make a living out of this thing, it's remained the same.
• 37:09
  Vito Peleg: You know, so there's a full skill set to actually getting your music not only published, but promoted and cited and sang in different places and, you know, like basically to make it a success, what is considered in that space a success. And I think that this is exactly what we're going to be seeing here as well. It's easier to make, so you're just going to have a whole bunch of it, but still, the ones that have the full rounded skill set to taking it more than just another thing that sits on MySpace and to becoming a thing that people use, observe, click on, you know.
• 37:49
  Michelle Frechette: That's where the ratio, I think, is just going to remain the same. And I think you can equate that to writing a book too, right? So I can self-publish through Amazon now. That's how I published my first book. Did I put any advertising behind it? No, I just wanted to write a book. I could have done something much more with it and had it driving traffic, but I chose not to. And I think your music example is perfect, just like writing a book or any of those other skills that we can put together.
• 38:21
  Michelle Frechette: If you need a quick website, you've got to know what you need as far as SEO. You've got to do all of those things on your own, and I don't see a way that Yoast ties into SpaceFast, for example. So you're really building these brochures, these quick sites that aren't necessarily going to feed your business long-term, but might get a startup up and going if you're starting up something non-technical, right? So it's something that you could start with. It's my starter website.
• 38:47
  Michelle Frechette: And then once I earn some money, I'm going to have somebody do something much bigger for me kind of thing.
• 38:51
  Andrew: Andrew? I think it's the way back in the day when I first started my agency, one of the things I spotted was distressed websites. Either a website got closed down for some reason, an announcement was needed to be made by one of the sites we did was Rerno. They had a break announcement. They didn't want to put it on their own website. They just emailed everybody and then pointed it to the distressed website that we built in a day. Andrew? So those kinds of things, because you can build a website in a day. But let's not forget that Spacefast is actually using WordPress as well. So it's kind of static WordPress instantaneously.
• 39:26
  Andrew: Andrew? And I think it's a move by WordPress.com or Automatic to say you can build a static website on the foundation of WordPress. So I think Yoast and the plugins may come into play later in the day. let's not forget that the guy that built space fast was on his own until three weeks ago now he's got a team behind him because it's kind of suddenly suddenly flown off and everybody everybody's kind of using and the url that But Michelle shared, that's a temporary URL. It's only up for a few weeks or something, so you can connect it to anything. You can connect it to a domain name. You can also export. You can decide how you built that. You can export it to WordPress. The way I use Spacefast is I don't connect it to my agent because I'm basically inherently lazy, you know, so I don't want to do too much.
• 40:23
  Andrew: So what I do is I create something in Claude and drop the zip file into Spacefast, and within four seconds flat, it's there, which is amazing, right? So I don't need to have an agent connected to it. If I want to make an amendment, I just make the amendment in Claude, then re-drop the zip on, and it overwrites what I've done. Not all of us know how to do that.
• 40:45
  Michelle Frechette: It says drop or connect, and I go, drop. Some of us went to school for administration.
• 40:52
  Andrew: But yeah, I think Spacefast is, and I think InstaWP have a similar situation. You're going to see things like Swarms out there. You're going to see things like Nova that is the, who owns them? Web Pros. Web Pros, you know, doing white label stuff. But nobody's actually doing it in WordPress, except for SpaceFast and maybe InstaWP are helping you build that.
• 41:20
  Andrew: Cadence, of course, has AI built in. That'll get better. WordPress.com has AI built in. That's phenomenal. I don't know if you've ever built a website like that. And also, plugins like Atrium, WordPress plugins, if you use the WordPress plugin. Atrium, you'll be able to build out pages already. You'll be able to build websites soon enough using that. The website you saw, our website is built 100% with Atrium. 100%.
• 41:47
  Vito Peleg: Amazing. It's just the strangest of times. It's like you said, Nathan. I've built our website nine times so far over the past years, you know. Once or twice a year, I take that opportunity to rebuild the website to stay. To stay in touch, you know what I mean? This is my kind of like exercise. So it went through a bunch of iterations over the years and I've rebuilt it from scratch, at least the design, every time.
• 42:13
  Vito Peleg: This time, I had complete freedom. And it's not about Adorama or anything, it's just the technology that was given to us. Whatever I wanted, I was not capped by my own design capabilities. I was capped by my own ability to articulate ideas.
• 42:33
  Vito Peleg: Whatever I could imagine, I could make. To me, I felt free. There's a whole lot of interpretations of that freedom throughout the website. It's like, oh, can I do that? Let me go down this rabbit hole. Is it something, you know? Yeah, it's such a curious time that we live in. So firstly, your point about the 0.000, let's just round that to 1%.
• 43:00
  Nathan Wrigley: Just because it's easier to say. That's a curious articulation of the argument, isn't it? Because if there is always a 1% that rise to the top. That kind of makes the whole thing seem, well, it makes me feel a bit more sanguine about it. You know, if you're in that 1%, whatever the reason for that is, there's still like safe harbor for you. You know, even if the AI sort of seems to take everything over everywhere else, 1% of us will rise to the top and be successful because we need people to be successful, otherwise the whole thing will collapse.
• 43:33
  Nathan Wrigley: If there's nobody being successful anywhere, then that industry will sort of just disappear. I had something else in the back of my mind, but it's gone whilst I was saying that sentence. So what I'll just quickly do is I'll go to the comments and see if it drops back in. So, apparently the previous time you were on, Vito, this show was May 17th, 2022.
• 43:55
  Nathan Wrigley: Wow. No, there must have been one more between. I think there was one more. That's incredible. That's amazing. At least it was post-COVID. It wasn't like, oh my gosh. Yeah, that's right, yeah. 2018.
• 44:07
  Michelle Frechette: Where else? Which I think is when you were on my podcast. Right, yeah, it was the very first few months. Yes. Taka also says he pays. Well, I need to come back and do another one. We're relaunching in January. Nice. Hopefully, on the Show.fm platform. Ever heard of that? Right, moving on.
• 44:26
  Nathan Wrigley: So, Taco says he does pay for stuff, you know, Video Land, which I've not heard of. Netflix, Spotify and so on, so that's interesting. Duolingo as well. Yeah, okay. That's an interesting way of describing it. Over 2,100 days. Hello, Paul. Nice to have you with us. WP Bakery joining us as well. Pay-to-play model still works for sure. Love it or hate it. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's going away at any point, is it?
• 44:51
  Nathan Wrigley: Any other comments that anybody's seen? Mark Westgard joining us from the airport. Me and Mark were having a conversation earlier.
• 45:00
  Nathan Wrigley: He's come to see somebody in the UK and he was on the plane and we were having a chat. And then about, I don't know, he revealed that he was on the plane. And I don't think I've ever chatted to anybody on the plane before. It was a bit of a moment for me. I thought it was a bit Star Trek.
• 45:19
  Nathan Wrigley: Elliot Richmond saying he's got a new product. And so, obviously, the negotiations have already begun in the background in the comments between Andrew. I do. And Elliot, which is really nice. What else have we got? There's a few more comments. I haven't got time to read the long ones, I'm afraid. But anyway, there we go. There's a good one from Elliot. Yeah, there's a long one about SpaceFast. Yeah, long one about SpaceFast from Elliot.
• 45:47
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, he says it's good for landing pages. Brian Kord's demoed this. Okay, thank you. You can use them for, yep. He says, so Elliot, thank you. SpaceFast is also really good for landing pages. I saw Brian Kord's demo this, a specific landing page that redirects the users back to a specific, it's got truncated product on your Woo store.
• 46:09
  Andrew: I was lucky enough to see Ivana a couple of weeks ago in Serbia. And we went to a lovely Balkan food thing, and it was awesome. She's awesome. So she, and very, very into this thing, still runs a web agency, still works with WP Bakery. Toki knows her stuff and that's the thing. I see all these tools as Linktree and just think of so much missed SEO and all. And she's right, is that we can't get, sorry to overshoot you there, we can't still get this AIO and GEO thing sussed in our brains because it's all new terminology, new acronyms for everything.
• 46:51
  Andrew: But if we can get our heads over that and make sure that Bugle can actually see it and ChatGPT see it and we get citations and things like that, I think something like SpaceFast or a number of tools like SpaceFast will just help us get to where we need to be.
• 47:09
  Michelle Frechette: All the way. Yeah, right. Jackson's Novermira. He says Novermira all the way. That's another of the products. They're one of the ones that have sponsored our page.
• 47:17
  Nathan Wrigley: And then Marcus Burnett says hello, coming a little bit late. Good to see everybody. He's building tools, you know. He is. I saw your latest tool, Marcus. Beautiful site and it's completely gone. I had COVID last week and my memory has absolutely been punctured. I have the memory of a very forgetful sieve. And so I'm so sorry, Marcus. It's there. I can imagine it. I know the font you used and the color palette and everything. I just can't remember what the heck it was. And I'm sorry for that. Okay. Whoever this is beautifully sums up my fear. So ATZ22, whoever that is, the winner of all of this new AI world is the AI companies, Anthropic and the like. That is the bit that really kind of frustrates me at the moment.
• 48:09
  Nathan Wrigley: We just seem to be piling all of our money and knowledge and expertise and everything into these seemingly limitless repositories of scooping it all up. And it does worry me that they are going to be able to scoop so much up that they'll just be beachheads drawn up around them so impenetrable that the three or four AI companies will be just absolutely untouchable. I hope that the local models... I'm pretty sure and I, you know, record this because, you know, I don't mind being an idiot.
• 48:41
  Nathan Wrigley: There's going to be pretty much one AI company. They can't. You can't sustain this kind of debt. It's just crazy what they're doing. I mean, Anthropocop. They're called Evil Corp.
• 48:53
  Nathan Wrigley: You can't sustain it. There's no there is. There's one of them. One big guy is going to go, you know, within 12 months, one will not be there anymore. Well, yeah, I'm kind of rooting for the local models. Let's see if that takes off. Look at all these lovely people, says Zachary. Hello. Zachary had a little car crash the other day. Nathan.
• 49:14
  Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Was that in his new car? Oh my goodness. I don't know. I think so. Yeah. What? This chap in the comments had a car crash? Zachary had a little car crash.
• 49:22
  Nathan Wrigley: I hope you're all right, Zachary. Zachary is one of the nicest people in WordPress. Can I say that? Vito, you agree, don't you? Zachary is such a sweetheart. Yeah. What a lovely person he is. I'll agree with that as well. I work with him. He's a lovely man. Zachary, you're getting all the love. Everybody loves Zachary. That's great. Zachary, come on as much as you like, because we love that positivity. That's great. Patricia is saying she got to test the new MCP plugin that connects all the core abilities and the many plugins. Not sure if I can add the name.
• 49:52
  Nathan Wrigley: Go on, add the name, because why not? Tell us. Tell us. We'd like to hear about it.
• 50:00
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. Okay. Let's move on. That's the comments that I've got for now. Right. Okay. Back to the screen. Let's pop this up. The time is moving on. So I'm going to very light touch on this. I'm just going to do the bits that have got like an H2 heading or something like that. So this is what's new in Gutenberg. Over the past few weeks, months, 14th of October, this was released. If you have been using notes, they are now, so notes is a bit like the Google docs commenting sort of system, that kind of thing.
• 50:31
  Nathan Wrigley: They've now been shifted into this little panel, which I think is really clever. So in the past, the UX for this wasn't particularly great. And now the comments have all been shoved into this. I don't know if you can see it on the screen there. There's this sort of like little sidebar here where all the comments drop. It means that it's going to get out of your way. Very sort of minor thing, but really, really nice. If you've been dropping links in in your navigation in the block editor, it's been quite difficult to discover where those links have been.
• 50:58
  Nathan Wrigley: So, I don't know, taxonomy or category links, that kind of thing, it's hard to find them. Now it's all going to be surfaced in this one search panel. And you can now sort galleries. Again, this is all in the Gutenberg plugin, A to Z, Z to A, recent, that kind of thing. And you can sort them and filter them in that way, which is quite nice. There's a load of other stuff, but because time is limited, that's what I'm going to mention there.
• 51:24
  Nathan Wrigley: I don't suppose anybody's got anything to add to that, have they?
• 51:27
  Andrew: No? Okay. I just want to add that Gutenberg plugin is different to Gutenberg blocks, right? It is. Yeah, Gutenberg plugin is the stuff. The bleeding edge. I know that this is dev-focused narrowing, but a lot of people miss that. So I've never installed Gutenberg, the plugin. It's really weird. I just use Dex. Most of the stuff that gets the high-level attention, like in this article. So the stuff which really gets to the top probably will ship fairly soon because it's mature. People have had their eyeballs on it.
• 52:01
  Nathan Wrigley: And so hopefully the three things that we just mentioned will come in a version very soon. Right. Okay. Next one then. DeVito mentioned 80 and 20. This is a site which was recently put up by Web Dev Studios. Maybe they've been feeling this sort of AI pinch a little bit as well. Maybe their roster of clients have been coming back expecting more or just sort of saying, Well, yeah, but we've got this chap over here that can build a site for $100 and he claims that you can do it in eight minutes. And you get the idea. I'm over-egging it.
• 52:34
  Nathan Wrigley: So they put this site together and it's called itlooksdon.com. And it's really good. I mean, basically, they're trying to make the case that All the bits that really matter in a WordPress website are not AI-able. Well, that's not true. 80% of the bits that matter are not AI-able, if you know what I mean. So this website is trying to paint the cause of that.
• 53:01
  Nathan Wrigley: So it says right at the top, here's two websites. They look the same. And on the left is the vibe-coded one, and on the right is the WordPress website. And you can see, we start off, they look literally the same. And then the idea is that you scroll and the timeline increases, blah, blah, blah. And then, so it's things like, by 9.02 on day one, once you've launched the website, Google shows up.
• 53:26
  Nathan Wrigley: Well, what did your AI system do in order to massage the Google search results? The human would have done a lot. Maybe your AI didn't. Then its CEO shares it on LinkedIn, but there's no preview. You get the idea. It goes on. Anyway, I just thought from a very, very, very big web development agency, they're obviously feeling the pinch and the need to sort of fight back on the AI from. I just thought this was a website worth looking at. I don't know if you panelists had a chance to look at it. If you do, comment. If not, I'll move on.
• 54:00
  Vito Peleg: I think that this is a really nice way to look at the things that these AI labs that we were talking about earlier do out of the box, but it is completely incorrect that you can't do all of these things with AI. That's exactly what I was talking about. You can't expect it to be able to do the work without the relevant tools given to it.
• 54:26
  Nathan Wrigley: Right, right. So if you actually look at the stuff that it says or that they say that it couldn't do, these are exactly the stuff that you would go to a third place to find information, make a decision and then execute. I think what they're, my guess is that they're trying to, they're trying to draw a strong line between people who know what they're doing. And people who just make the claim that they can throw out a website in eight minutes with no experience because they just don't have that back catalogue of, okay, SEO is a thing. Alt tags and image optimisation is a thing. And it goes on and on and on and on and on.
• 55:08
  Nathan Wrigley: And I think it's a really powerful way of doing it. So, yeah, the way that I phrased it maybe sounded like it was in contra to Atterim, but that wasn't the first time to say. I think that's what that's what is the difference between an AI solution built with purpose, but also built with knowledge of what it takes to actually build a website. So when you have that.
• 55:36
  Andrew: We have inherent knowledge of what needs to be in a website. You're an agency owner. You know exactly what needs to go onto a website. You're Vito, you're me, you're whoever. We know that we've got to do the SEO bit, the page optimization, the alternative text, the product descriptions perfectly well and all of the kind of stuff. But the people that are vibe coding who've come into vibe coding said, look, look, I've built an app. I've got a live example of this. Somebody built an app for a tire service company that's a friend of mine.
• 56:06
  Nathan Wrigley: I had to step in, you know, because it just wasn't right. It was just this guy just said, oh, no, I've built an app. It's great. And it's accessible by everybody, you know. An analogy that's in my head, and it came into my head because Vito's got a load of guitars. If I was to say to any human being who's got working hands, play me the note of C. And I point them to where they've got a press on the fretboard and then pluck the string. So you can play a C. Now do a D. D is this one. And now do an E. That's E. Okay, now play me Bohemian Rhapsody. No, no, no. Yeah, but you could do all the things. No, but you can't. Do you know what I mean? It's a bit like that. There's this whole industry and expertise. It will be so interesting seeing that case being made over and over.
• 56:57
  Nathan Wrigley: I really feel that we're at the beginning of people having to make that case. And it will also be really interesting to see how quickly people's wallets close in the next year or so. Like, how compelling will the argument be of, but I can do it for $100? How quickly will people be receptive to that? And how much business will they lose? And how much Google tanking will they have to endure?
• 57:26
  Vito Peleg: But this has been around for decades. I sold the website for $100 when I first started, and then for $300, and then for $500, and you know, that's how it starts. And believe me, it would have been way worse than these ones when I first built those sites, you know? You know, we don't need to believe it, you know.
• 57:49
  Nathan Wrigley: Marcus comes back with AI can do all of those things. So that's me sort of saying, I can play an E, I can play an F, I can play a D, but then you have to know what to ask for. That is the difference. Yeah, that's cool. It looks dumb. It's a great example, says Elliott Richmond, of where human intervention is needed versus Vibers.
• 58:11
  Vito Peleg: Let me try and frame this a little bit differently. The Vibers are us from 15 years ago. So eventually, this is the new blood coming into our industry. We need to actually encourage them to come in. There's been rounds of people joining the industry over the couple of decades. We were the ones in WordPress, unlocked it, and now amazing. A designer can do some of these kind of stuff. Then you learn about accessibility and security and SEO and all those kind of stuff throughout the years.
• 58:42
  Vito Peleg: Then website builders came in, or the drag-and-drop builders came in 10 years ago, and that brought another flood of professionals, or they were not professionals at the time. And this is the same cycle happening here, which I think exactly with that music analogy, you're going to get an explosion of professionals coming into the space.
• 59:07
  Vito Peleg: Because now, some people learned administration, and they don't want to copy-paste into a space thing that we saw there, but some will. And those folks will come in initially and do those crappy websites like we all did. Go! And next year they will learn that, okay, actually a static website is nothing. I need some sort of a CMS to carry this thing. And so let's figure that out and figure that out. So I think this is all a blessing to our space that it's still able to bring in talent into it with the new tools that are coming in, you know. So we should just embrace those people. They are us, you know.
• 59:55
  Vito Peleg: We looked down at the people that built, you know. People looked down at us because they were developers coding from scratch and we were using WordPress. Then we looked down at the Elemental folks or whatever because they were just drag and dropping. And now we're doing the same thing. So let's just all get along, you know. Yeah. Let's all get along. There's a few other comments in here. I'll leave those for now.
• 1:00:21
  Michelle Frechette: Can I just say one more thing about the AI stuff? Is that we also forget that not every person building a website is our client, because not every person can afford to hire somebody else to build a website. But tools like Wix and tools like Spacefast and tools like allow people to get on the web and start to build their company or their brand before they can afford to hire somebody. And so I think that this is a great way for people to actually start to stake some claim and start to make some moves with their own businesses.
• 1:00:50
  Nathan Wrigley: If you thought we'd done with AI, you're wrong, because we're not quite there yet. So we were talking about Cathy Zant earlier. Cathy, frequent appear on this show many, many times she's been on, and she's launched a community specifically for the people that we're talking about, the AI folk in the WordPress space. She's calling it, well, Zantastic Amplified. It's amplified.zant.com.
• 1:01:19
  Nathan Wrigley: I'll just be
• 1:01:22
  Nathan Wrigley: I haven't been through the onboarding or anything like that, but essentially she would like to have a community to share her resources, her courses, her learning materials, and her expertise and gather you together in things like Zoom calls, by the sounds of it, things like that. But it also is very much leaning into what we've just talked about. If you're using AI and you would like to hang around with a bunch of people who have that same approach to building websites, this is something that she's just launched.
• 1:01:53
  Andrew: She's trying to get 50 people at $49 a month. And so if any of that has sort of resonated with you, if you're using AI, but you're slightly modeled up in how it works and what the best tools are and you want to find out by hanging out with other people, then amplified.zant.com is where you can go. I know, Kathy, and I don't know anything about this. It's the first time I've heard of it, but I guarantee that anybody joins this will also have a business coach, which is such a good coach.
• 1:02:29
  Andrew: She's amazing. I know that the side benefit of this, doing it, is that it's not just about building products or building WordPress with AI or using AI. I'm tempted to join myself. It says you're going to get direct access to Kathy. There's courses and workshops, including anything that Kathy does in the future, and then also the bits and pieces, I think, that she's launched in the past, and then networking and office hours type content.
• 1:03:02
  Andrew: Yeah, you can get a coach. It's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not expensive.
• 1:03:09
  Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, Andrew, you broke up for me when you said that sentence. Same. It's- it's- It's- it's inexpensive. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, a good investment. So, once more, amplified, as you would expect it to be spelled, .zant.com. Go and check it out. Good luck with that, Cathy. I hope it goes well. Where are we moving to next? Okay, so this is Devin Walker. Devin, longtime person in the WordPress space. He was behind GiveWP, amongst many other things. He took over Jetpack a year ago, and this is just his sort of summary of what's happened.
• 1:03:48
  Nathan Wrigley: Firstly, I interviewed him about, I don't know, a couple of weeks after he'd started, and where did that year go? That's one thing. But the other thing is he's, it's a really nice article about somebody who's fairly honest with his audience. You know, he doesn't sort of hide things when things have been messed up. He mentions it. But boy, did he have a bit of a product to get his teeth into. I don't know if any of you use Jetpack.
• 1:04:15
  Nathan Wrigley: I think it's fair to say that it does a lot. But it was a bit of a hot mess of different UIs and different ways to access products. In some cases, there were UI notifications for products that you already had bought. And so it was a very confusing mess. So Devin has tried to wrangle that, tried to fix the UI, tried to update some of the products like Jetpack Forms and VideoPress and things like that.
• 1:04:43
  Nathan Wrigley: Some of it's worked. Some of it is still a work in progress. Some of it has been him running up against the way that they do things over at Automatic, which is different to the way he's done it. And he's very honest about that. So anyway, if you haven't used Jetpack in a while and you fancy giving it a go, it's probably worth another look. Because with a year under the belt, quite a lot has changed. There's security in it as well. You know, there's anti-spam, there's security, there's so much in Jetpack.
• 1:05:12
  Andrew: It's just amazing backups, the whole thing. And I think that the problem is in this world of ours that we've... Especially now, dived into over the last few months, couple of years, since, you know, Vita and I launched a thing in 2021 with AI, you know, and how much that has grown is crazy, right, since those days. And I think where we're in danger is that we're going to make these things that we use too complex.
• 1:05:42
  Andrew: So that they become almost unusable so that we have to be very careful as product owners or product promoters to make sure and Jetpack is a real perfect example of this is when it hit the market and they added all these things and it was one thing and you couldn't toggle things off and all that kind of stuff. They kind of learned by iteration, you know, you needed one dashboard to turn these things off. I don't want this. Yes, I want that and whatever. But it's still a very complex concept, right?
• 1:06:14
  Andrew: So we have to make sure that when we're developing products, whether it's SaaS or whether it's a plugin, Take the complexity out of it for the user. Make sure that your onboarding is so spot on that they don't miss anything, that they don't get confused. That cuts down your support bill. That cuts down all kinds of, oh, there's a bug. No, it isn't. You didn't turn this on. Oh, I didn't see it. You know, these kinds of things that you have to, when you're building a product, you have to make sure that your user experience from the off, from the second that somebody installs it, they know exactly what to do, where to go, and how to use your products. And that's the difficulty of launching products these days, because with AI, we can put so much in. It's crazy.
• 1:07:04
  Andrew: So, like music, if you use a music analogy, before we run over first starting up, you know, Dave Gilmore says, I learned to actually put silences in to make the music stand out.
• 1:07:18
  Nathan Wrigley: I think we should just end the show there. Now that we've had the Dave Gilmour quote, it's going to go downhill from here. That's great. It's great. Anyway, you can tell that I'm an old boy, but the point is, let's reduce the complexity. Let's keep the complexity to a level where we can all understand it. I think Devin was not lucky. What I was about to say there sounded wrong. He was the right person for that job because he's got loads of experience, but also there was so much to get your teeth into over with the Jetpack product.
• 1:07:51
  Nathan Wrigley: It felt to me as if over 10 years, all of the different bits of Jetpack had just gone off in their own direction with nobody to shepherd the whole thing. And actually, as a cohesive product, it does an awful lot of the things that you would wish to have on your WordPress website. It's just you didn't realize that they were from the same vendor because it's just like, oh, okay. Okay. I mean, in some cases, you click a link and you end up in a new tab on a completely different URL, like some automatic-owned property that could easily be iframed inside a URL. Anyway, I'll stop there.
• 1:08:27
  Andrew: Well, I think it is now. I think it is now. Just on Devon, because Rita knows him much better than I do, but I know him pretty well. Love Devon. He's UI UX expert. There's no doubt about it. He knows what the UX should be, a user experience should be for a person. He's also really quite technical, and he's not a bad designer. You know, I'm not taking anything away from him. He's a really good designer, so he knows what to do.
• 1:08:55
  Andrew: And I think Jetpack needed a leader like that that actually came from a commercial operation to go into things and say, right, this is the way we should do it. And if you read his article, he openly admits that he got kicked in the shin a couple of times by saying, we don't do it like that. You know, and all that kind of stuff. So that's the handle. But he's also a very good politician. He's very...
• 1:09:21
  Nathan Wrigley: Laid back and very but very positive at the same time so he can he's that he was the only person that was was appropriate for that job as far as I reckon that the Marvell franchise are probably after him to play the Thor character you know big blonde haired broad guy he'd be great yeah he's looking to he's looking to fit I think he's obviously got too much time on his hands you know it's not fair is it Andrew what the heck.
• 1:09:51
  Nathan Wrigley: Right okay so we were talking about Devin let's go to somebody else whose name begins with a D what about that for a segue this is Dave Foy oh Dave I love Dave I mean genuinely I really like Dave Foy and I think his character is not I don't know there's just an awful lot that I really like about him and a few weeks ago I don't know if you've been following Dave's story a few weeks ago decided to leave And he posted on all the places how he was going to go and go off. And he was going to teach children how to play music, play in bands.
• 1:10:30
  Nathan Wrigley: And it was like a real moment for him. And he'd apparently written down several months before, what would be your perfect job? And it was literally to teach children to play in bands. This job came up. He thought, screw it. I'm going to go for it. I'm going to put the web development stuff behind me and I'm going to leave the tech space. So he did it both feet all the way in the lot. Sadly, didn't turn out to be what he wanted.
• 1:10:57
  Nathan Wrigley: It would seem that the job that was advertised wasn't actually the job that it was. And so he's back. And so I suspect we're going to see more from the future. The bit that I want to commend him on, though, is I don't know. There's a bit of me, much as I would like to not admit that this is part of my personality. I think there's a bit of me that would have been... I'm going to use the word ashamed. Or there'd be some bit of me that felt, oh, I can't go back and do that. You know, that's so humiliating. Not Dave. Dave's got enough spine and enough intelligence to realize I messed up. Not messed up. That's the wrong word for it. I did a thing. It didn't work out. I'm going to go back and do the thing that I was doing all those weeks ago. And I commend you for that, Dave.
• 1:11:43
  Andrew: There's no shame in it. I was on a podcast and said on Out of WordPress. I was, you know, when I left after. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You were the same. That's right. I was retiring. You know, so it's like, before you'd retired. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It's just, the thing is, is that what drew me back and I think what draws Dave back is there are commercial aspects to drawing us back into the WordPress community. But let's not, let's, you know, I was in Serbia a few weeks ago.
• 1:12:11
  Andrew: No commerciality for me at all. It was just catching up people that I know in Serbia. I had a fantastic time in WordPress. Yes, we taught business. Yes, I talked to plugin developers, blah, blah, blah. But I had a great time with the community. And I think that what Dave is good at, he's a teacher. And he's a qualified teacher anyway. So he's got all the qualifications. That's right. When he teaches stuff like, you know, Divi or Elementor or Bricks or whatever course he's decided to do, he's also quite a technical guy. And I think being a musician, we've got a real musicians sort of thing going, but being a musician, he knows how to put things together.
• 1:12:51
  Andrew: Yeah. And I think part of his problem was that he, he, if he, he didn't have a roadie with him when he was having to do the teacher stuff because he had to take his speakers with him and emptying the car and filling the car up again and doing all the, all the boring bits that you forgot. Yeah, exactly. Things that are necessary to do. And he's, he's, and yes, welcoming back with open arms. I think anybody that misses. Or says goodbye to a community, like I have done three times now in the last five years, I've had enough of you, though I'm off.
• 1:13:21
  Andrew: How come it never sticks? What's going on? I just can't make it stick. I mean, it's basically boredom, Vito. I can't just keep on walking around the lake and playing golf. I just can't do it. I've got to do some work. Taco says, more often than all of us together ever will. Taco says, Andrew Barber's retired more often than all of us together ever will. But I am retirement age. You know, the point is, is that I am at retirement age. So, you know, I'm drawing a pension, which is pretty cool as far as I can sell. I've made it to draw a pension.
• 1:13:52
  Nathan Wrigley: That's great. He's glad that you're back, though, every time. So here we are. Look, it's turned into an honesty fest. Marcus Burnett is saying he's done the same thing. He said he quit the agency. I was out to work at a different one. I lasted two days before I was asked to come back. They were generous enough to give my job back. Do you know what, though? Like.
• 1:14:12
  Nathan Wrigley: Forgive me, Marcus. I didn't know that. Obviously, that was probably a really harrowing time at the time. I think for Dave, what was curious was that he did this big explanation to everybody that he was leaving. And he was like, I'm really leaving. I'm really, really, really leaving. All my courses are going up. The deadline's here. Blah, blah, blah. After that, I'm done. It was quite a, he drew a big line in the sand. And so I've got enormous respect for him to be able to sort of just say, actually, that didn't work out. Screw it. Because I know there's a bit of me that would be right in that thinking, oh, this is so humiliating. And I wouldn't, I don't wish for that to be a part of my character, but it definitely is. And so I'm glad that Dave clearly is a big issue.
• 1:14:55
  Nathan Wrigley: I'm open to doing this.
• 1:15:00
  Michelle Frechette: He also went into Webflow a couple of years ago for a little bit, then it came back to it. Yes. Yeah. When I retire, I'm just going to do the Irish goodbye. You're all going to go, wait, where did she go? Where did she go? Is that called the Irish goodbye? Is that what they do? The Irish goodbye is like you just silently... You just leave. You don't put the hose through any kind of, you know, whatever. You just slowly evaporate.
• 1:15:28
  Nathan Wrigley: Right. And on that bombshell... Oh, we've lost our eyes. I'm just evaporating. Very funny. Very funny.
• 1:15:38
  Nathan Wrigley: If only I could have followed through. That was easy. You've got to put up Taco. Taco is being particularly philosophical today. Look at this. Oh, his is harder. Still got a lot of humble pie eating. Yes. I wasn't trying to draw a comparison there, but Taco, the good thing about lines in the sand... Oh, that is very nicely done, Taco. I like that. The good thing about lines in the sand is they get swept away by the tide a few hours later. Are those your own words, Taco? Are you quoting somebody? That's lovely.
• 1:16:06
  Andrew: Yeah. Okay. Nick, Nick Diego did the same. No, he said he would be back. Nick Diego definitely said he would be back. He said he's taking a little rest. He's taking a rest and now he's back. But also, you know, there's a... ý We have a talent pool and they're quite well connected as well. So, you know, they can always be tempted to go, you know, Devin left Liquid Web. We didn't know what he was going to do after that. And then all of a sudden he's leading Jetpack, which is great because, and that's what we need. But the key is, is anybody can take a career break or do anything. And then hopefully with whatever community they're in, they're just welcomed back with open arms.
• 1:16:48
  Nathan Wrigley: You know what, though? I think, and I've droned on about this for decades, I think we are, as a whole, a fairly nice bunch. And I think that if, I don't mean the four of us, although, you know, I'm just saying as a community, I think we're quite nice. I think we're quite a nice, thoughtful bunch of people. And I do wonder if in a different industry, you know, let's say, I don't know, you're into merchant banking, for example, you know, as soon as you're out the door, ha, these guys.
• 1:17:18
  Andrew: Gone. Right. I'm going into your shoes. No, you're not coming back. No, no, no, no. You said your goodbyes. Clear off. We'd better off without you. That kind of thing. Dave, I think we've got an example within hosting, people move around and they come back and all the kind of things and that. And I think within this industry, because of the certain skill set that we all have, we get on with people, we kind of know the tech stuff, we kind of know the way people want to work within websites and stuff like that.
• 1:17:53
  Andrew: And when you lose someone from that talent pool, you kind of want them back because there's a little gap to fill. Right? So I think, you know, Courtney, you know, she left a very large company. Within weeks, she was employed again, you know, she's just right. I love that person. That's great. You know, so she was supposed to be on the show last week and I got COVID. I was really very rude of you to get COVID.
• 1:18:20
  Nathan Wrigley: She is. She's been put inside the Show.fm app as a team member of this podcast. Well, there you go. Right. Okay. We really are running out of time. I had so much that I wanted to say. We've got sort of hijacked on some different topics. It's fine, but we're not going to be able to delve into all of these as deeply as I thought. So we were talking earlier about SpaceFast and then there's an article over here. This is on the .com side of things and it's the new WordPress agent. Basically, it feels a bit like the same thing, only it spits out a WordPress site. I would encourage you if you're into AI and, you know, reliable text-based way of getting a website off the ground very, very quickly. It's probably worth checking that out. Let me just go through a few others. Oh, gosh. I was going to talk about Edge Images, which is Jono Alderson.
• 1:19:10
  Nathan Wrigley: He's got Jason's plug-in. He's had an update. I hadn't really played with this before. That's probably going to have to hit the back burner for now as well.
• 1:19:19
  Nathan Wrigley: Well, tell him I very much like his plug-in. Unfortunately, no time now. I do want to mention this quickly. Anshin LaRue and myself for many years have been doing the Page Builder Summit. I've decided that I'm stepping away. Anshin is going to carry on. She's going to be doing that on the 2nd to the 6th of November. So it's an entirely online event. It's Page Builder Summit. It sort of speaks for itself what it's all about. But if you go to pagebuildersummit.com, you can scroll down and you can see the great and the good that are on this time around.
• 1:19:59
  Nathan Wrigley: You know, there's lots of these familiar faces and what have you. Anyway, pagebuildersummit.com. Again, I'm sorry. Can't give it a lot of time. Sorry, Anshin. I'll mention it in the weeks to come as we lead up to that event. Well, actually, probably only another week or two to mention that. Another quick couple of ones. Press Conf is happening. In the next few, well, next week or so, so if you haven't got a ticket and you'd like to go, it's in Barcelona, 27th to the 30th of October. Raquel was on the podcast a couple of weeks back, so if you want to go check that out and you want to know what that event is about.
• 1:20:38
  Vito Peleg: And I've been to the U.S. one last year. It was awesome, a small group of people, which was a huge benefit, actually, because you got to speak to everyone. The talks were just completely open, transparent, more than any other event I've been to, and I go to about 14 a year, so this was really nice to see how she made it very clear.
• 1:21:04
  Vito Peleg: There's no cameras. There's no recordings. If you're in the room, you're in the room, so everyone can be like... Uber transparent. That made a whole lot of difference there. People breaking down and crying on stage and all kinds of things. For good reasons, I'm guessing.
• 1:21:25
  Nathan Wrigley: Sometimes, sometimes. Mostly, mostly. I told you, Vijay, you've got to be nicer to people. That's right. Don't take them out. No, it was me. I was crying. Oh, was it? Was it? Were you? Were you crying? Oh, I see. But I did shed a tear from the crowd looking at someone's... I did too. ...which was very emotional. More than once. Yeah. But anyway, that's happening. It's in Barcelona. So it's the first variant. There's been two in the U.S. and now one in Barcelona.
• 1:21:51
  Nathan Wrigley: That's coming up. And a couple of other quick mentions. This is CMS Conf, which is coming up in Poland, middle of December, sorry, middle of November, 12th, 13th and 14th of November. If you are... I don't know, CMS agnostic, or if you've got your eyes straining off in different directions and playing with different things, maybe this is for you. A lot of the WordPress people that I've met over the years are in attendance and speaking and things like that, so definitely worth looking at. CMSconf.com, and you can see the recently released agenda there.
• 1:22:29
  Nathan Wrigley: And then the last one on the events front is the... I've translated this from Portuguese into English, so I don't know if it scans perfectly, but WordPress and AI in... Do you say that as Faro? Is it Faro? Faro? I'm not sure. What is it?
• 1:22:47
  Nathan Wrigley: It's in Portugal. Okay, in Don Firmlin.
• 1:22:54
  Nathan Wrigley: As long as it's kind of spelt similar. Okay, yeah. The WordPress and AI in Faro. So this, I presume, is a conference which is going to be delivered in Portuguese. I don't really know an awful lot about that, but if you're in that neck of the woods... There's also Godfist Americas coming up. Oh, yeah. Do you have the dates for that? That one hasn't hit my inbox quite so much. It's next month, yeah. Is it? Okay.
• 1:23:20
  Nathan Wrigley: Is it called CloudFest U.S.? America's. It's CloudFest Americas. Okay.
• 1:23:27
  Vito Peleg: So there is that as well. Can I tease two upcoming events really quickly, too? Sure. Wait, let me make a... Sorry, Michelle, but I do have a couple of extra tickets. I'm an advisor to CloudFest Americas as the agency kind of advisor. So if someone wants some tickets, ping me on X or on Facebook, I guess.
• 1:23:53
  Vito Peleg: Yeah. I have three extra tickets and they're like 800 bucks each. So feel free. Yeah. Very good. That is nice. All right. Thank you. Saman Nasser, Cathy Zant, and June Liu and I are putting on a women's event on International Women's Day called SheSpeaks.Tech. There's no site for it yet, so please don't look it up because I haven't built it yet. SpaceFast, 12 minutes from now. It'll be a WordPress site, for sure, because we've got to do all the things. And then we're looking at a date, hopefully in June or July of next year, for WordCamp Northeast US. I've been given permission to have a regional WordCamp in the US, which should hopefully draw more people than just CityCamps alone. So I'm pulling together a team of people from the Northeast USA, and we will have an event, hopefully in Philadelphia, next summer.
• 1:24:45
  Andrew: Okay. Thank you. Keep me posted on those, Michelle, and we'll obviously... I will. I'm going to Manchester WordCamp. Oh, yeah. We mentioned that last week, actually. So WordCamp Manchester is now on. We had Rhys on as well. The date has gone out of my head. COVID, dear COVID, can I have my memories back? 6th of November. Apparently, when is it? 6th of November.
• 1:25:12
  Andrew: Thank you. Oh, just like next week? Yeah, a couple of weeks. Is this like a meetup or an actual? It's just a WordPress done on a different way. They're doing it. They've got one special speaker that they haven't announced yet. There's no after-party, but I'm thinking about doing an after-party. So, if you're the WordPress organizers there, I want to talk to you so that I don't want to step on anybody's toes. There's no lunch either. You go out and you get your own lunch, which I think is fine.
• 1:25:42
  Andrew: And you just meet people. And the attendee list is massive. There's lots of people going, so it's going to be great fun. I'm lucky enough to be able to stay up in Liverpool with my nephew, which is awesome. So, I just drive from Liverpool to Manchester, get there by 10 o'clock, and we'll all have a good time in Manchester. But I'm thinking with the outsourcing agency, we're thinking about doing a free drink and meetup afterwards as well.
• 1:26:10
  Nathan Wrigley: Because there is no after-party. So, if that's okay with the organizers, then we can talk to them about it and make sure that it happens. Taco says, you know, it's a great band. They're not doing one. I reached out to them. I offered my son's band and he said they're not doing live music, which is a bit of a shame. So I'm going to show up with my Bon Tempe organ, you know, and whack out hits from the 80s.
• 1:26:36
  Nathan Wrigley: I don't think there's an afterpart to use that. No, but I'm still showing up with my Bon Tempe organ. Good. And I'll see you there. Yeah, it is. Nobody's going to go now. I was going to do two more articles by Katie Keith. I'm sorry, Katie. We've kind of run out of time. But basically, it goes like this. Shopify is advancing. WooCommerce seems to be in retreat in terms of stats. That's not entirely true.
• 1:27:02
  Nathan Wrigley: It depends which segment of the market you look at. If you look at it through one eye, WooCommerce is still winning. If you look at it through the other eye, Shopify is winning. Read the article. You'll understand more. And the other one that Katie was mentioning basically can be boiled down to do not spend money on ChatGPT ads. At the moment, Katie sunk a few hundred quid into ChatGPT ads, and while she got a little bit of traffic, the determination she made is it was really unqualified traffic, and it led to absolutely no conversions.
• 1:27:40
  Nathan Wrigley: So go and read that article. As always, she puts all the data behind her arguments. It's not just hot air. Definitely worth looking at. And did someone say after-party? Yes. Yeah. But no after-party, although Andrew might be putting on an after-party. So there we go. So sorry, Katie, about that. We were going to get right into your pieces, but we've sort of run out of time. Out of time. I'll have you on the podcast instead, and we'll talk about it at length. I think that's it. We have used up our allotted 90 minutes.
• 1:28:11
  Michelle Frechette: Has that time gone already? Where? Where does that go? It goes so quickly. I know. I know. And I don't feel like I've got any extra wrinkles from today's episode as well. That went without a hitch. So it just remains for me to thank, firstly, my panelists, Andrew Palmer, Michelle Frechette. Hey, Andrew. Pakri Opelok. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much. Hopefully, you'll come back again soon. You'll get an automated reminder from the show.fm podcasting platform at some point in the next 24 hours.
• 1:28:42
  Nathan Wrigley: I'll be back next week with you. That's right. I'm unbidden by the platform. If you don't get a reminder, I want to know why. But for the rest of you, thank you if you came in and dropped in a comment. It really keeps the show going, and I really, really appreciate it. And Taco, although it hasn't come into the platform, he said he's glad his Monday is complete again. Thanks for bringing this week in WordPress. You are more than welcome. It was...
• 1:29:08
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I felt not quite right not doing it on a Monday, but yeah, things needed to be done. Right. We will see you all next week. Different panelists talking about WordPress. You know the drill. See you soon. And you three, if you want to... Hands.
• 1:29:25
  Nathan Wrigley: We need to do the hands. Everybody do that. It's just... This is my memory. This is what COVID has left me with. I appreciate it, Andrew. Thank you very much. Right. You three, stick around if you wish, and we'll have a natter, and I'll see you all soon. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.