Building Community and Driving Innovation with WordPress

Jonathan:
Welcome to another episode of Do the Woo. I am your co-host, Jonathan Wold. And with me again today is Tammie Lister. Tammie, how are you? I’m good, thank you. How are you? I’m excellent. And we have with us today, Moeez from Cloudways. Welcome, Moeez. How are you?

Moeez:
I’m good, I’m good. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on.

Jonathan:
It’s great to have you. So cloud ways we know well, they’re also a sponsor of Do the Woo, so always great to get to do this with a sponsor. Tell us what your role is at Cloudways. Where have you spent spending your time and energy?

Moeez:
Yeah, so I’m working as a head of community at Cloudways. So my job mostly revolves around building partnerships within the WordPress space mostly, although I do work with PHP and Magento and communities as well. But mostly my time is spent on WordPress because obviously it’s the biggest space out there and it contributes most towards our business as well. So we spend most of our time working within the WordPress community. My other job, obviously other roles include building relationships within WordPress, doing these sort of sessions and podcasts to build more and long-term relationships. And then I also worked towards making sure that we run all the community initiatives, sort of like online campaigns, webinars, like we did an online event last year called the Cloudways Hackathon. You must have heard about that. So we did that last year was also a community initiative that I was a huge part of.

And then we did the WordPress 20 year anniversary as well, where we onboarded a lot of WordPress contributors and interviewed them. That was also one of the initiatives that I was part of. So my job mostly includes working with people, working with people like you, working with people like Tammie, Michelle, Bob, and making sure that Cloudways is relevant, stays relevant within the space because you must have heard of this phrase that out of sight, out of mind when people know about Cloudways. But if you’re not within the community, you’re not active in the community, people may forget about how good Cloudways is. So my job is to make sure that our visibility remains within the community.

Jonathan:
Yeah, I appreciate that and I think what you guys have been doing as well, so having the different events, you’re right, especially in a decentralized space like ours, it’s hard for, if you’re not top of mind, people can forget that things move on. You continue working on things. You guys are going to be at WordCamp Europe again this year.

Moeez:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah,

Jonathan:
That’s fantastic. So Moeez, before we jump into this, I’d love for folks to just get a bit more context for you personally. When did WordPress and WooCommerce first come onto the radar for you personally? You’ve been doing this community role at Cloudways for a while. You have a lot of context, but when did WordPress first come into the picture for you?

Moeez:
Yeah, so WordPress first came in the picture around six years ago. I started off with a WordPress resource called WP Blog. So it was like a WordPress blog that was run by Cloudways. So it was like a lead magnet for Cloudways. And I was running that blog and my only job out there was to make sure that we get enough traffic on the blog’s, the purpose of having a blog. And now when I got into the, I knew nothing about WordPress, I knew nothing about posting. I have a business background, so I knew nothing about the space and I had to dig in and learn all of the things with myself and from my superiors. And when I started to learn about WordPress, I was astonished and amazed at how big this community is and what are the possibilities, right? I mean, this is just a small blog.

I mean there are so many big things happening within WordPress. So I saw that as an opportunity and as a challenge because at that moment there were a lot of different blogs that were running as well. You have all these resources that have been working from before. And I saw those resources and I saw them as inspiration and what they’re doing for the community. And then I expanded my horizon and I moved towards products like different resources, different products within the community that are working, making sure that businesses that are running and they keep on running. So it’s an open source, everyone can contribute, everyone can, it’s a community led product. So I had never seen a product like this before in my life, a WordPress product that is being run by the community and for the community. And that actually made me believe more in the workplace and its people.
So I started my journey from there, from WPBlog, and then I was moved to clouds and I started working with people. I started working with resources and then I started to understand, okay, so it’s not just plugins and themes, right? There is an entire space within workplace where people meet and they meet each other every year and then they talk about opportunities and challenges and they cater to different people. It’s inclusive, it doesn’t discriminate. I mean, I felt very at home because I felt belonged. I felt like I’ve been a part of this since a really long time, although it has just been two years, people started welcoming me more openly. So I thought that this is something that I need to do for a very long time. I mean, not me for the rest of my life, but for the next, at least for the next seveal years.

Because I wanted to experience this as a whole and I want to give credit to Cloudways for giving me this opportunity to make sure that I am present in the community. I, I’m going to these events and I’m representing Cloudways at WordCamp, Europe WordCamp, US WordCamp, Asia. So these opportunities broaden actually my horizon, my thinking and my capability to understand more about what workplace is. And each day I think I will never come at a stage where I can say that I know everything about WordPress because it’s a learning process. You learn every day and at every event that you go, you meet new people, you learn more about the opportunities. So I think six years ago I started off with this small resource and then now I am working as a head of community. And I think WordPress played a huge part in showing that I continue on this path, the community, the people, made sure that I stick with the community and that’s how it started.

Tammie:
I have a question I want to jump into about how Cloudways and product, but before you do that, you’ve kind of mentioned and specifically around your role community, I would love to know, and it’s a bit of a kind of side path, but what is the importance of community for products? I feel that this is a good question and perspective you could give. Sometimes I think we overlook it a little bit or we take it for granted. And I would really love to know your perspective on, I think I can guess that you might think it’s important, but I would love to just know people who are creating products. What do you think are the value of importance of community?

Moeez:
Okay, so I will answer this question by giving the example of Cloudways, right? When Cloudways started off, we had only two functions, content and community, right? Content and community are the foundations on which the brand has been built. The main role of community back then and still today is to gather feedback. I think community, if you have a strong community function, you get strong feedback whether it’s positive or negative. And I think that is extremely important if you want to learn true stuff about yourself. Because I think if you ask about the product internally within your team, is this product okay, is the feature is working properly, they will all say all the good things because they made the product. I mean, they will never say bad things about it. But if you want true perspective, if you want true things, if you want true feedback about your product, you need to deep dive in community and ask people what it looks like.

I mean this is just one thing, right? The importance of community starts from feedback. You get positive and negative, both sort of feedback from the community. No one else will tell you more truth about your product and brand other than the people who obviously either want to use the product or are using the product first off. Secondly, I think community builds brand loyalty. I mean, if you are present in the community, if you’re doing something for the community just to grow the community, you have no stake in it. You are doing it just for the sake of community. It builds an image where people think, okay, so this is a product that actually cares about the people in the community. It’s not doing something for its own sake, it’s doing for the nurturing of the community, for the community’s growth. So for example, if you are going to the events, if you’re doing sessions, if you’re doing this, these online events, I mean obviously we get exposure out of it, but one of the main reasons why we do it is to make sure that the community keeps prospering, right?

I mean, we truly want the community to prosper and grow and especially the WordPress community. Because it’s something, it’s an ecosystem in itself and obviously everyone within the community wants it to grow. So there are two ways where community, if you have a strong community function for a product, it benefits you first, it you, it tells you the true picture of where you stand. You may have very good things to say about yourself, but community may tell you otherwise. And secondly, it builds brand loyalty. I mean, even if people who do not use the fraud may have good things to say about you, why? Because you do things for the community, you are present there, you have a presence. And as John said in the beginning, you are in the people mind, you’re in the people’s minds and you will stay there forever if you are present in the community or working towards the detriment of the community. So these two things I think to answer you shortly in a brief manner, I think feedback and brand loyalty are the result of having a strong community.

Tammie:
How has that fueled what you’re creating today? I would love to know an example maybe of what you’re creating today at Cloudways that has come from that cycle of working. It feels like a very formed process of working, and I would love to know if you maybe have an example that you could share of how that product flow. Something we really love on this podcast is digging into product flows and how things are created. So how has something gone from that idea that maybe someone had in the community or that input and to release? Could you give an example of that?

Moeez:
Well, on the top of my head, I can think of five examples, but I will just stick to one.

Tammie:
You can have more than one if you need.

Moeez:
I think one of the main examples that I can give over here is that one of the biggest product releases we did of the last 10 years I think was community led and how, because in the community when we were talking to customers, one of our initiatives within community is to do customer calls on a daily basis, on a weekly basis. So what we do is we just jump on a call with a customer, a random customer, and then we talk to them about themselves. So what do you do in your free time? How do you use cloud? How has Cloud helped you scale your business? We don’t publish that internally anywhere. We don’t publish that session on Twitter or LinkedIn anywhere. It’s just for our sake and it’s just for feedback. And through those sessions and also through different community initiatives, we found out that people are changing their behavior.

For example, if it’s an ecommerce store, if it’s an agency, they’re moving towards more of a hands-off approach. So at Cloudways we still offer the flexible product, which is you can launch your own server and WordPress application through a few clicks, and then you can scale that server as well in a few clicks. Now when we talk to those customers, we found out that people don’t even want to do this. People don’t want to get their hands dirty and don’t even want to spend two, three minutes on the platform. They just want to focus on their business because the economy and the macroeconomic things have led people to spend more time on their business, spend more time on generating sales and revenue. So they want to go into the server specifications and scaling the server and scaling them down again and going into a first dedicated environment or a shared environment, or what are the technologies used in the backend?

So they bought a completely hands-off approach. So they don’t want to get their hands dirty, they don’t have the time, and they want a completely hands-off approach. So this feedback led us to believe that what we are offering right now may go obsolete in not now, but maybe in the next five years. So we need to change, we can’t just keep on offering the same platform for the next five years, six years earlier. So we need to make a change and we need to make it now. He came up with a new product, it’s called autonomous. What that product basically does is that it’s based on the autoscale Kubernetes technology. What it does is basically it autoscales your servers, it scales your server automatically. If you have a traffic spike on your site, you would have to go to the platform, scale your server, and then check if that scalability works.

It will scale your server automatically. You won’t have to do anything, right? So if you’re running a campaign, if you’re running an ecommerce campaign, or if you’re running a Black Friday campaign for example, you’re expecting a lot of traffic on your site in the next few days, you only have to focus on how to get that traffic on your site. You don’t have to focus or you don’t have to worry about if my site will go down, if my site will be crashed or my server will go down because of the traffic. You only have to focus on making sure that you’re getting this. And that was our aim, the top line from that research force that people want to spend time on their business and not on surface specifications hosting, and they don’t want to get their hands dirty on the platform. They want to make sure that they get scalability at a decent price point and that works automatically and they’re willing to pay that amount open.

I mean, we first thought that maybe people may not be able to pay the amount of money, but we found out through that feedback, through community feedback that people have the budget. We were wrong in that perception that people have the budget, they want to pay the money, but they want something that works, that works in their use cases. So autonomous has the use case for ecommerce, it has a use case for agencies. I mean it has multiple use cases. And we found those use cases through community feedback. We found those use cases by interviewing customers on a weekly basis, daily basis, and not just us, the product marketing team that we have used to interview people and finding out what they actually want within the product. And honestly, it wasn’t even our intention to find out if they want anything in a different product.
We just found that out from their feedback. We read between the lines. I mean, it’s not always, the feedback is not always very in indirect. I mean, they may tell you what they want to do and what they don’t want to do, but they won’t tell you exactly what they need. That is for us to find out. So that is for us to figure out what they want and how we can solve their problems. So we found out what their problems were through these feedback sessions, through these community interactions, and then we converted that into a product in a full fledged separate product. So we now have two products. We have the Cloudways Flexible, which is the old product, and now we have the new product, which is the completely hands off product called the Autonomous. So this was the process that we followed for our new product that we have. This recently launched, and it was, I think no one thought about that maybe six months ago or a year ago, but we did it because of the community feedback that we brought.

Jonathan:
So Moeez, I love this theme. So you’ve been listening, gathering feedback. I love that you made the point to, you have to read between the lines. Sometimes people will tell you the problem they’re having, they may have an idea of the solution, but your job as a product creator is to experiment, to hypothesize, to test things, to try. And it may look like it may be something very different than what they were describing, but if it solves the problem, that’s the key, what I’m interested in. So especially in a community role, in my experience, most people in community have a different view of competition. So you’re around a lot of different hosting companies as well. And I think it’s fair to say for a lot of us in the WordPress space that yes, you compete with the other hosts. The real competition though are the proprietary platforms where people aren’t using WordPress at all. And so what I’m curious about from your perspective is you’re gathering all this feedback, you’re seeing trends. What are some of the challenges that you’re noticing that are being faced in the WordPress hosting industry generally? I’d love if there’s any insights that you can share on that from your vantage point, because even though you want Cloudways to win, specifically we all though want WordPress to win as an ecosystem. And just based on the feedback that you’re gathering, what are some of the challenges that you’re noticing in the WordPress hosting space broadly?

Moeez:
Well, there are multiple, I mean, the first one is the emergence of different independent page builders. So we have vix for example. It offers something that is very appealing to users who again, doesn’t want to spend time learning about WordPress. I mean WordPress, we have to admit it does have a learning curve. It’s not something that you just start and it works. You have to learn about it. You have to go on YouTube and search for tutorials and learn to do stuff. Products like vix, they have made it very easy for these people, these sort of users, to create their website in a minute. You don’t have to search for a hosting provider, you don’t have to search for plugins, you don’t have to watch tutorials. You could just have to click a button, drag and drop, and your website is created. And a lot of people are moving towards, I mean, I have noticed this trend.

A lot of WordPress users, not the old ones. I mean there are WordPress fanatics who will never move out of WordPress, out of loyalty. And even though if they don’t like WordPress in its current state, they will still stay with it because they’re very comfortable using WordPress. Even if they have the alternatives, they won’t move. But there is another class, there is another category of users who have just started using WordPress for example, two, three years ago. And now they are coming across these products that are way easier. That may cost a little bit more, but again, as I mentioned, price is not the issue at the moment for V. They’re willing to pay the money if it gets the work done. They’re willing to pay if the product is making their life easier and saving them time. Time is everything at the moment. This is another feedback that I can give to you.

Time is everything for people. I mean, if any product is saving them time, they will move. And now one of the challenges that we are facing at the moment is people are sort of moving away from WordPress, and I can say this from WooCommerce as well. People are moving to Shopify and people are now realizing that. So WooCommerce is good. Again, there is a learning curve with WordPress. There is a learning curve in the long run. WordPress has a lot of benefits. But again, the second challenge is people are facing a difficulty to see the long-term effect of using WordPress. They are more inclined towards solutions that are beneficial in the short run. I just mentioned a few names. And these platforms offer you these platform basically save you time and people are moving towards, and they have their own hosting. So as hosting providers, it’s bad for us because they’re moving on products that have their own hosting, their users don’t search for hosting providers.

So it’s actually a challenge for us as well. Another challenge is, so I mentioned people who are willing to spend money. Now there are for example, agencies who were having the time of their lives during covid. So when Covid struck, a lot of physical stores went online because obviously there were lockdowns and people were sitting at home online shopping and things like that. So a lot of physical stores, they went digital and these agencies that were building their businesses were moving. And now after Covid and the Covid ended, all of these, the lockdowns ended and everything was over. People were moving, moving back to the regular stuff, the physical stores and the brick and mortar. And then these agencies, they started to go through a declining business. And because of that, because people were canceling their servers, they don’t want an online store anymore because they can have their physical stores.

Again, these agencies have reduce their spending. So because they don’t have the clients that they had before, they don’t want to spend that much money anymore on hosting. And because it’s no use, for example, if they had five servers before or 10 servers before and they had 200 clients, now they have a hundred client. So they can do that same thing on five servers. They can do that same thing on three servers or four servers. So there is no point in them spending a lot of money in hosting and they don’t have the users that they had before. So these are a few challenges that we are facing at the moment. The macro economic environment has forced these SMBs, the SMB category of people to reduce their spending because they are mostly home run based, home run businesses, family businesses, they don’t have a lot of investment on their back. They invest what they earn now they’re earning less, they’re investing less, especially they’re spending less on hosting because they don’t want to. There is no point in spending a lot on hosting providers because they don’t have the user base that they had before. And that is one of the few challenges that we are facing at the moment, is that there are products that are saving people’s time and then there is a macroeconomic environment that is forcing people to reduce their spending.

Jonathan:
Moeez, I’m curious because from a host perspective, so you have the learning curve of WordPress, you have people who are wanting to reduce time and you have the impact on the SMB space. What’s the responsibility of a host? Because part of it is if you take these proprietary platforms, they have the whole stack, they have the host and they also have the product teams, they’re tackling all parts of it where you have WordPress, it’s the biggest, but then you have a WooCommerce for instance, which is an entire ecosystem of itself. How do you think, how far should a host go into the product side of things? How do you think about that?

Moeez:
Well, I think there is only so much that you can control. I mean, as a product, if you start to control and if you start to cater to everyone, I mean, Cloudways is a product that we say that it’s for everyone, but there is still a category of people who do not use clouds because it’s too expensive for them. And we get that. I mean, we don’t want to reduce our fund to a level where everyone can afford cloud. So it’s our product and we want it to be used by people who can afford us. And that has been our ideology throughout our existence. And you mentioned that people are moving towards perks, as I mentioned before, and there’s referring to save time and it’s even spending more. And then as I mentioned before, I mean there is only so much that you can control.

I mean, you can’t make your product, you can’t change your product or you can can’t add or separate features from your product as you go. You have to make sure that whatever additions that you do in your product, whether it’s a feature, whether it’s an add-on you are increasing your price or decreasing your price. It has to have some logic behind it. I mean, for example, now people are moving towards the self hosted platforms. Now if they’re, for example, tomorrow moving back to workplace, will you change your offering again? I mean, you can’t do that, right? I mean, macro environments are changing almost on a monthly basis. So you can’t keep on changing your product based on the behaviors of a few. I mean, we added autonomous because we actually felt that this is what the majority of the people needed. And again, it’s not something that you can base off of on a few categories of people.

You have to make sure that there is a logic behind every move that you make as a host or any product can’t, it’s not possible to please everyone. It’s not possible for your product to be available or usable for everyone. Even if you look at hardware, you look at phones, you look at laptops, there are different categories for different people. And even at Cloudways, we have five different providers. We have digital lotion, world node, Google Cloud, and AWS. Google Cloud and AWS are on a higher price point. They start off with $32 per month. Digital Ocean starts off with $14 a month. So we have already made our product to be affordable by different people of different budgets. So we are already doing that. I mean, we can’t go further and beyond in making sure that it’s affordable for everyone because that will hurt our brand image as well. So it’s like you can’t be for everyone. You can’t please everyone. You can’t show that your product is being used by every single person in the community. So there are some things that you don’t have control over. That’s the entire point.

Tammie:
I’d love to expand more on that responsibility of products. One of the big points that’s often said around that is compatibility and the challenge of how does your product work between different plugins, different themes, different experiences, has it even they can work of itself or integrations open is really a benefit, but it can also be a challenge. I’d love to, if there are any advice or any experiences that you could share around that, I think your perspective could be super interesting.

Moeez:
Okay, so compatibility. I mean, we thought about compatibility a few years ago and we started doing bundle partnerships. And how that went was that we started picking the handpicked different products in the community that were most popularly used by builders, for example, by ecommerce store owners, by agencies. And we partnered with them and we offered those products in our stack. So we offered bundles, for example, we partnered with Astra, so we partnered with Astra, and even still we are offering Astra as a bundle. And what that does is that ensures that we are compatible not only with Astra, we are compatible with products, even if it’s not Astra, it’s not like we’re just compatible with just one product. We compatible with all the products that are like Astra. And then we did these bundle packages with a lot of different products throughout in the last four to five years.

And we ensured that our platform is compatible with these products. And it’s important because you won’t know what the new customer that you’re getting is used of using. So it’s not like you can partner with every other product that is there on the market, but it’s important that you identify the most common products and even if you’re not building it into your stack, but sort of run compatibility test runs that if your product is compatible internally, you don’t announce it, you don’t do partnerships with them, but just internally run tests with the popular products in the community. For example, if someone uses Elementor or not, for example, if someone is using NitroPack too much, for example, if someone is using WB Rocket tools. So internally we have done our testing to ensure that Cloudways is compatible with Elementor, NitroPack, WP Rocket, WPcache, and all these products that are commonly used within the community to ensure that whoever comes in and use Cloudways doesn’t run into any surprises because again, as I mentioned before, you can do partnerships, but just with a few of them, you can’t do partnerships with everyone.

And it’s more important than doing partnerships is to internally run benchmarks and test every product that is out there against your platform. If it’s compatible, it’s good. If it’s not, then spend more time on making sure that your product is compatible, at least with the top 10 or top 20 most used plugins, themes, extensions out there that will help you making sure that your product is compatible and you will get less complaints on your way of support. I mean that will help you with the support as well. Your support won’t spend time dealing with compatibility issues if you had already then your homework before. So your support will spend time on more productive things. And that’s basically basically how it is. And that’s how we do internally as well. Whatever product that launch. And with a Autonomous, we are running tests almost on a monthly basis with different extensions that are out there that people are using. So it helps us reduce complaints, it helps us reduce tickets and this is how it goes.

Tammie:
I would just love to skip a little bit back to when you mentioned your bundles as you’re so community focused and driven. Was that part of how you identified those bundles? How did you even get to deciding what should be in those? It seems like it was something that was quite successful for you. So I would love to unpack a little bit there. Sure. That that kind of customer and that kind of jobs to be done perspective is something that people really love insights in.

Moeez:
So apart from being community driven, we are also very data driven. We made most of our decisions based on solid data. So what we did was we research internally and we found out that most of our customers, for example, 30% of our customers use asra for example. I’m not saying that this is the case, but just an example, 30% of our users use. So we care to a confusion that it is more likely that a user who comes in is using asra for example. So we took that product and then we did more research. We found out that, okay, so 15% is using elementary for example. So then we came to, okay, this should be a product that we use. I mean we haven’t done any part with Elementor, I’m just using it as an example. So we came to this conclusion to answer your question by researching on what our customers are currently using commonly.

And then we picked those products and then we did partnerships with them. I mean, it’s not like we went to the community and we asked every person what product that do you like? We did our own research, we saved our time, and then we just researched our own customer base and then we got answers from there. We got a lot of answers from there that we use, for example, X product, X, Y, Z product and this is something that you should partner with. So we set probability, okay, so this is something that our customer is more likely to use if it comes on Cloudways. So this is something that we should have in our stack, so this is how we came to that solution.

Jonathan:
I like that a lot. And I think it’s nice to hear examples of how your emphasis on community engagement and feedback affects both your approach to product development and partnerships. So thinking about, we have a lot of folks listening are creating products, especially in the WooCommerce space. And one of the challenges that we have here in WordPress is distribution. We have this decentralized space, different hosting providers like yourself that are an important part of the stack, but it’s quite common to see products that do great work for a particular problem set but are struggling in WordPress to get in front of the right audience. Someone can create a great WooCommerce product, but even if they were to partner directly with Woo, that’s no guarantee that they’re going to be discovered by people using WooCommerce. So I’d love to hear any guidance that you have to offer. You gave some already products can be involved in community, community getting feedback and engagement for products that are trying to get distribution in the WordPress space. And let’s just focus on WooCommerce specifically for a moment because you guys have the ecommerce offering. What guidance would you have to offer because they could partner with cloud ways, they could work, but it’s just a piece of the broader puzzle if they want to have success in ecommerce and WordPress, how should a product be thinking about distribution?

Moeez:
So this is an excellent question and I think before answering this question, we should first admit that the WooCommerce space and also the WordPress space is pretty saturated. I mean, if you look at hosting, you look at plugins, you look at extensions, there are so many players at the moment and all of them want to obviously be ahead of everyone and all of them want to have the first place. Some of them want to be top of mind for every user, and it’s quite literally impossible to do that in the current space. But what we can do is as product, as I mentioned before, when Cloudways was built 10 years ago, community was the foundation of it. I mean, we made sure, I mean it looked spammy. I mean the people that we had at that moment, they were hunting for threads where people were just talking about hosting.

I mean, they had triggers of the word hosting on them. So whenever on Reddit, on Facebook, on Twitter, I mean wherever people talked about hosting, these guys were there and they talked about Cloudways, even if it looks spammy, they got banned from these communities. They talked about Cloudways day and night. This is how they spent their time in offices by talking about Cloudways in every community, in every relevant temo that they could find. Now I think the community feature of different platforms has announced, I mean if you look at Facebook, it has its own community feature. Reddit’s community features has announced, but Twitter has different community features now as well. So now it is more convenient for products to be present in different communities. And I think as you mentioned before, that products often underestimate the importance of being present in the community and not just physically, but virtually.

I mean, we just started attending WordCamps in 2018. I mean before that we didn’t attend any events and we were just present in the community virtually. We were in different groups, we were present in different cyber edits, and we made sure that we talked about Cloudways whenever we got the chance and we partnered up with, we never partnered up with any product before. We just partnered up with people who contributed to WordPress and WooCommerce and we made sure that we talked to them, we partnered up with them, we do co-marketing opportunities, we do co-marketing activities with them and that it’s actually built an image of Cloudways that is still there, that we are very community driven. I mean, we did not do any business delivery partnerships at that point. We just did community partnerships at that time and we are still doing it. And that has helped us develop an image that stays on top of people’s mind for a very long time. And I think when you talk about challenges, not just for hosting providers, for plugins, for extensions, for themes, I think it’s important that we realize we first search for relevant communities, whether it’s on Facebook, I’m giving very practical examples that people, examples and things that people can actually execute, search for communities, relevant communities on different platforms nowadays. Back then there was no Twitch back then.

There was even Twitter was not that popular in this region that I’m speaking from. But now all of these platforms, they are very enhanced. They have enhanced, enhanced community features. So find relevant communities within your space, use events. I mean, we just started using events and we are now reaping benefits. I mean, if we had started using events in the start, we would have been benefited more out of it. But I think events present an amazing opportunity for builders to talk to their potential customers. I mean, you don’t have to sponsor it. I mean, sponsoring is obviously offensive and new products cannot afford it, but just attending these events can help you understand and help you understand your audience and your potential users and you get to talk to them. You get to promote your product over there. No one’s stopping you to promote your product within the event.

So you can go to these events if you’re based in Europe, if you’re based in the us. I mean if you’re based in Pakistan, I mean to attend an event from Pakistans, it’s challenging Traveling, from this region to Europe or to us. It’s very challenging and it’s very costly. But if you’re based in the us, you have an amazing opportunity not just to attend the flexible events, but to attend the smaller meetups as well. And I’m coming to that point. Meetups I think are an excellent opportunity for you to present your product to a very niche audience, right? Because people who attend meetups are actually interested. I mean, people who attend events have their different priorities, but people who are attending meetups, I mean they have a genuine interest in that community. They contribute and they will listen to you if you tell them about the product.

If you’re based in the US there are community meetups happening almost every week or every month. There are regional WordCamps happening in US as well. So if you’re based in the us, make sure that you attend all these events and present your product to the people who are attending these events. If you’re based in the Europe, you can do the same as well. There are multiple events or meetups happening in Europe as well. So make sure that you utilize community towards fullest. I mean, it’s not just WordCamps. Community does not end at work camps. There are smaller meetups that are happening even in Karachi where I’m based. I mean there are meetups that happen in Pakistan in Karachi as well. And we attend those meetups and we talk, even though our audience is not based in Pakistan, we even attend these meetups just to make sure that we are present over there and people know about.
And that helps us in the long run. I mean, community will never give you an instant result. It’s a long-term approach. It has always been a long-term approach. People think that, okay, so if you’re president in the community, how many sales you will get, how many conversions you will get from attending an event? It’s not like that. I mean it’s like a long-term approach and it has always been like that. And so you have to make sure that you build your foundation with these community initiatives both virtually and physically. So meetups, regional events are the key. I mean, flagship events, people have different things to do at that point that the parties going on. People are meeting for different reasons, but for flagship, sorry, for regional events, people who have attend regional events are actually interested. People who attend meetups are actually interested in your product.

And then find relevant communities on different platforms on Twitch, on Facebook, on Telegraph, on Twitter, even on WhatsApp. There are communities on WhatsApp now as well. So you have to make sure that you’re present in all these communities. If you’re based on WordPress of WooCommerce, make sure that you’re on the Slack channel. People underestimate the power of the Slack channel. It’s amazing. It’s so engaging. You have to make sure that you’re there as well. So a lot of this I understand, may look like it will involve a lot of tying and a lot of money as well. But in the long run, this is what will separate you from others. This is what will differentiate you from people who are not investing their time in community related activities. I mean, we did that initially, but we were not even close to events. And we started doing that since 2018.

And now we are in a very different place. I just think that if we hadn’t even attended at these events back in 2018, we wouldn’t have the brand that we have right now. So we got our growth when we started attending events. I mean, it’s unfortunate that from here, traveling is very difficult for different reasons. I mean, we still find our way and make sure that we are there. So yes, I think what any new product in WordPress WooCommerce can do because it’s important that the space is so saturated because if you don’t do these things, I mean it’s very easy for you to be left behind. I mean, you have to make sure that you go the extra mile.

Tammie:
So you mentioned before about the saturated market and you mentioned as you were talking about ways that you can deal with events. And I want to be about to, in all these insights you’ve given all this community and all this, are there any areas of opportunity that you would see in products that you would like to share? Just if there was two or three areas that you’d be like, these are in this big saturated amount, this is what our data is telling us, is not as saturated or overlooked.

Moeez:
So when it comes to hosting, I think that area is, I think there is still a lot of space in hosting. I mean plugins and themes since got best WooCommerce open source, everyone can create a plugin and upload that on the repository and hope that it works. But when it comes to hosting, I think there is a lot of space where people can improve and provide a very hands-off approach. I think a lot of hosting providers at the moment are sort of doing that, but the product is not actually doing what it says on the outside. I mean it’s only when you start using the product, you come across that, okay, so this is not exactly what we were told. And it’s with a lot of, I’m obviously not going to name anything, but it’s the case with a lot of products that it’s not exactly hands off.

Products that are truly hands off are actually successful at the moment. If you look at all the hosting providers that are actually successful, not in terms of how many users they have, but in terms of the brand image they have, they’re truly hands off. They save people’s time. And I think within the hosting space, there is a lot of opportunity for builders to create a product that actually doesn’t let you do anything, right? I mean, just click a button and launch a server, launch your application and you’re good to go. And then you don’t have to look back. It’s set and forget right now, hosting provider are not set and forget, right? Hosting provider are set and then come back and check after a week and then come back and check after a month and everything’s working fine. And I think this is where hosting providers can really capitalize or anyone who wants to build a platform can really capitalize on ensuring, by ensuring that the platform is completely hands off.

I mean, you just set your server, you set your application, and then it just works. That doesn’t usually happen with hosting providers. There are a lot of things that doesn’t work and the customer don’t even know about it and the customer only gets to know about it when it affects their application or affects their the website. And that’s the bad part. I mean, it shouldn’t be like that. The product should work the way it is told. I’m talking about a hosting provider and it shouldn’t cause you any unpleasant surprises along the way. Right now there is a lot of space where people can create a product that is, as I mentioned before, it’s completely hands off, saves time, even if it’s a little bit expensive. I mean, I think can, people do have the capacity to pay for something that saves them time and other resources. So I think this is a space where people can dig their hands in and find out or really come up with an idea that can grow.

Jonathan:
Louise, thank you so much for sharing your insights and perspective and for all the work that you’ve been doing in the community cloud Ways is presence. It’s been great to have you and Cloud Ways be a recurring fixture in our community spaces. If someone wants to connect with you, what’s the best way for them to find you?

Moeez:
Well, I’m on Twitter. My handle is @MuhammedMoeez, so you can find me on Twitter, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Mohammed Moeez and you can find me over there.

Jonathan:
Awesome. And we’ll see you at the next WordCamp in WordCamp Europe in Italy coming up in just a couple of weeks. Absolutely. Moeez, thank you so much for sharing your time and insights with us and we’ll see you next time.

Tammie:
Thank you.

Moeez:
Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you Tammy. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. Thank you.