Community Engagement Strategies for Successful WordPress Plugins

Katie Keith:
Hello and welcome to Product Chat at Do the Woo. I’m Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barns Plugins, and today we’re talking about the role of community thinking in building successful WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. I’m here with my co host, James Kemp. Hey, James.

Jonathan Wold:
Hey.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I’m James. I’m a product manager at WooCommerce. Excited to talk about this specific topic. I think it will be an interesting one and we have a very special guest today which is Jonathan Wold. Hopefully I pronounced your surname correctly.

Jonathan Wold:
You nailed it.

James Kemp:
Awesome. And Jonathan is the co founder of Guildenberg and also one of our fellow do the Woo co hosts who hosts the open web conversation show. Jonathan, please introduce yourself.

Jonathan Wold:
Hey, James. Katie, it’s great to be here. I’ve had the privilege of being in this ecosystem for around 20 years now. In a previous lifetime, I served as a community manager at WooCommerce. So got to have a lot of context there for this particular conversation. And these days I spend most of my time as the co founder of Guildenberg, where we’re focused on working with product companies, hosts and agencies to grow within the WordPress ecosystem.

Katie Keith:
Cool. Yeah. And so we’ll talk about that because that’s so community based as part of the discussion. But to get started, let’s think about what we actually mean by community thinking so that we’re all on the same page and why it even matters. Why should we even bother talking about this?

James Kemp:
Yeah, it’s an interesting one, I think. I’d love to hear Jonathan’s thoughts on it. But to me, it’s the process of involving the community in your product decisions. And it’s something that you see come up quite a lot is to specifically talk to your customers and that’s the best way to understand their needs and your product and if you’re going in the right direction to actually serve those customers. But Jonathan, what does it mean to you and why does it matter?

Jonathan Wold:
So I’ve found this, historically at least, to be a difficult Question, because there are some ways of thinking about it and definitions. I had the privilege of considering Andrea Middleton, a personal mentor back from her time on.org and that and a lot of her work influenced pretty significantly my thinking about, like, what community means and how it works within the WordPress context. And she did a great job over the years pointing me to different resources. When I first stepped into the role of community at WooCommerce a number of years back, I remember feeling like pretty daunted with all the amounts of input and what do you do with a role like this? One of the things that really stood out to me in that experience was the importance of advocacy. And the idea of advocating on behalf of your community. And to do so responsibly meant doing the work of being curious and talking to a lot of people and listening, asking questions so that you could advocate for the things that mattered to them on their behalf and like, be a liaison. So there’s a lot to it, and from my experience, there wasn’t enough where it’s like, okay, it’s one particular thing. But advocacy in particular as a concept is what stood out to me. If you’re not actively engaging with your community and developing and investing in that, then you’re not able to listen and hear that input and then be able to advocate. So that’s where I tended to focus, is how do you best represent the interests and the needs of the people that are a part that make up the community around your product?

Katie Keith:
That makes a lot of sense, and that’s about meeting both your needs and the customers. Everybody wins because you’re providing products which benefit the user, so your product is more successful and the user gets what they want, their problem is solved. But I’m going to add to that the marketing perspective of community building, which is awareness raising. So for that you would need to define which community you’re going for. And we’ll get into this a bit later. But I sometimes get this wrong by marketing towards the community who aren’t necessarily the people who are going to buy my products. So is it your fellow product company people who do similar work to you? Is it developers, freelancers, agencies who are building sites for clients? Is it website owners and merchants who are building WordPress and WooCommerce websites? And what sort of community work can you do to raise awareness with them? Is that building your own communities, as you’ve done with Guildenberg? Is it going to existing communities such as joining, say, WooCommerce Facebook groups or Reddit threads or something like that so there are different ways to reach out to communities or create your own.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think it’s a massive challenge actually. And you mentioned like kind of reaching the wrong community or not necessarily reaching the right community. And I think that’s a big challenge in our space. I find the community that I reach personally and I utilize X and Twitter a lot for this is to build a community, the developer community. And occasionally you’ll get like a sprinkling of merchants that just happen to be maybe tech savvy and you know, following the right people. But I would say like 90 plus percent of the people who I directly communicate with in a community fashion are builders, agencies or freelancers. You know, the people making commerce sites in this scenario for the merchant, so that they’re not the end merchant in most cases. They’re just highly knowledgeable in what the merchant needs, which I think is very valuable still. And ultimately we’re serving the same end customer. But the hardest thing is building a community of that end customer, the merchants that probably aren’t as tech savvy or don’t have a desire to be as tech savvy and hang about, you know, in Facebook groups and online communities. I think the community there is less so like a group of people all with the same desires and more so like a one on one type scenario where you kind of have to go out of your way to arrange conversations with these merchants. I haven’t personally found like any one place where they all hang out and you know, want to talk about WooCommerce.

Jonathan Wold:
Thinking back, I was telling you guys just before the show started, but. And when I started my community role at WooCommerce, I had a lot of big ambitions to focus on the growing the meetups program. There was already a pretty healthy meetups program. But then this little thing called Covid happened and it led like one of the first things that I had to do in my role as community manager was to shut down all the in person meetups. And for me that led to. I’m like, okay, well that was a setback from what I was originally planning to do. So how do we. And what was interesting about that, the timing of it all is that this corresponded with a surge in interest in WooCommerce as people were, you got to get online. So I found something like that was pretty phenomenal. We ended up just pivoting to online only and I focused a lot of my energy into providing resources and guides like just supporting folks. And a lot of the people that were showing up to these like virtual meetups that were still tied to a locale were people who were trying to get online. So they were end users. So for a period of time there, I had a lot of exposure to people who were the end users. Right? There were certainly. And it was a beautiful thing because developers were also showing up to those things and there are people that were very much like helping each other. Hey, how do I get unstuck with this? And it corresponded to a lot of interest. But just looking back and listening to the two of you, this, it is quite complex because the needs of those different audiences are quite different. Right. What end users are looking for and needing and care about and find frustrating is quite different than what the developers. But the plugin creators, the agencies find and there is certainly overlap between them, but it’s quite different. And one of the things that I always considered to be the ideal and found occasionally is to try and find people who had influence, if you will, over various groups. Like, is there someone who. And it tended to be more regional. I found to find someone who’s focused on end users in a particular geography and understood the needs, especially within the context of commerce. Because, you know, the integrations you use can vary greatly because your shipping need, et cetera, can be quite different from one locale to the next. But it is quite hard. And my best take is, goes back to what’s important to the business at a current state and then just making sure, because that’s going to influence your limited resources and where you prioritize your time and efforts and like what you’re trying to do, but just making sure that the advocacy piece keeps coming back in. Like, even if you can’t address all the things that you’re hearing, are you listening to a wide group? Are you listening to what the developers need? Are you making sure that you’re, even if it’s one on one, like you said, James, that you’re making sure that you’re hearing like individual input and taking that in aggregate to help inform the decisions and trying to make sure that a particular group isn’t unintentionally ignored in the mix.

James Kemp:
Yeah, for sure. I, I definitely think it’s a hard thing to do and I think it’s important as well to be clear when you’re talking to the community and being open to, you know, their feedback, you’re not making promises to them, like, right, tell me all your problems and I’ll solve them. I think it’s a desire I have to like, be that person that can solve problems. But you also need to measure that against like, is this a problem that that one specific person has or is this a problem that solving this is going to solve it for multiple people.

Jonathan Wold:
If I may add to that, there’s like an inherent tension because I think it’s right in what you just described there, James. There’s an inherent tension in my view to doing it well, which is to ensure that people feel heard and like listened to and heard and also being upfront with them that you don’t know. It goes back to the advocacy. Just because you’re advocating doesn’t mean it’s actually going to get done. Because as a product you have to navigate the tension of limited resources and only so much that you can do. And if you’re doing a good job, there’s going to be a built in tension there where you will not be able to satisfy all the things that you’re hearing. Those things should be influencing you though. To me, when you’re doing community well, there’s a tension that’s maintained that has an appropriately weighted influence on the decisions that are happening at the product level. It’s not that because. And it’s tricky because you have to figure out how to appropriately wait and take it in aggregate. And how do you make sure that the input of one partner, for instance, doesn’t just like wipe the board in a way that disregards the what you’re hearing from others. It’s quite difficult though. And I think you have to figure out a way to just recognize and embrace and then maintain a healthy tension from what you’re hearing to what you’re actually deciding to do with it.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I think we all have to do that as product leads or whatever in terms of listening to our customers but not promising everything. But this is actually way more complex in James’s role because he’s core product lead and sort of in some ways unofficial community manager in that you’re the person asking for feedback. So people need to believe that you have the power to make things happen, otherwise they’ll get disillusioned. But you can’t just promise everything people say. So actually it’s quite an interesting role for you in that sentence, isn’t it?

James Kemp:
Yeah, it’s a challenge. I do think the people that I communicate with understands that, you know, the things they bring to me won’t necessarily just get, you know, fixed straight away. Yeah, it’s like you say, kind of balancing the, the feedback and I guess being aware of that feedback as it comes in and you begin to notice the Patterns and you can kind of relate feedback to, you know, multiple people saying similar things in some form or another. But yeah, I did. I joined WooCommerce with a following, another massive one. But you know, a group of people that were aware of my previous WooCommerce business and I think one of the things that my previous business thrived on was this sense of community. And you know, we were always well praised for being really good at support and you know, we probably over delivered in support, to be honest. And I think, you know, as coming from developing plugins on your own, where you’re kind of developing, you’re doing design, you’re also doing support. There’s like an inherent thing within you that you just want to please everyone that’s, you know, looking at your products and using your products.

Jonathan Wold:
James, if you don’t mind, what is the over delivering? What did that look like? Because I think there may be something key in there.

James Kemp:
Yeah, so I’m referring to Iconic, my plugging company prior to this. For us, over delivering would be a customer comes in and they have a very like specific use case for the plugin and maybe that’s an integration with some other system or they want this like little tweak of CSS that makes it display in a different way. And a lot of the time, you know, we would just do this for them.

Jonathan Wold:
Okay, okay.

James Kemp:
And honestly it was never, it never went like way too far where they just keep coming back with more and you eventually become like an agency that you’re, you’re working directly for this customer for free. But it was stuff that we would do that, that didn’t then make it into the product itself. It was like custom development essentially.

Jonathan Wold:
Okay, yep, that makes a lot of sense. I’m curious, Katie, how do you today manage that where like people may. I’m sure you get requests for specific things as well. How do you think about that when people from your community are asking for things that may seem easy or not that big of a deal, but it doesn’t necessarily make sense to build into the product.

Katie Keith:
I personally think it’s very helpful to keep a bit of distance between your developers and the customer in a support context. Because if you have. There’s so many people I know that are loan developers, they don’t have any support engineers. They do all the support. They do a lot of custom work for individual clients. Customers, rather than keeping a feature request list and do it based on evidence based. So by. Because I’ve got a support team of eight people now, they are the first line in most cases, so they are tracking demand and then it goes onto the feature request list and then I make a business decision about what to add. And we do have good support in the sense that we’ll do minor customizations like CSS changes or fixes for their theme or something like that, just within our tier 2, 3, 2 and 3 support. But in terms of the developer actually adding functionality because we have that separation, we’re less tempted to do things just for one customer and our developers do a few tickets a week. Now that’s something we introduced about a year ago to keep them a bit in touch. But overall I think some separation helps and I learned long ago when I was running the company on my own with my husband to keep him away from supply port because he would just end up doing hours and hours of work for free for one customer.

James Kemp:
I think that’s, that that’s a like the most common scenario for particularly WordPress products is that, you know, the product was built by a developer and then they take it to the level that we see these days of companies like Barn2 and Iconic got to that point as well. But just any product that is has been around for 10 plus years has kind of taken that route of coming from a developer into more of a company. And I think as well the majority of stories that I hear are these products come out of an agency, like out of the need of a specific.

Jonathan Wold:
Client, a service starting point.

James Kemp:
A service, yeah, a service level. And they’ve kind of evolved into this product space. And I think what you’ve done, Katie, is a good approach where you’ve taken the developers away from support to a degree to keep a slight disconnect there or a slight barrier to filling every desire which developers like problems they like to solve, you know, bugs and issues and just things that come up. So that’s hard to avoid.

Jonathan Wold:
I was just thinking a bit about support and I think there’s something that’s worth calling out that one of the things I’ve noticed is that there’s a difference in mentality and I’d argue approach in handling support within an open source context. Like, and this can be tricky because if people are coming into our space from a proprietary ecosystem, they can have a different expectation about the role of community and support. Because one of the things that stood out to me, I wasn’t too surprised to see this, but saw a lot of evidence in my time as in community at woo, of people helping each other. And in a sense it made my work easy because I was able to focus on, okay, what are the common threads here that I can then advocate for on their collective behalf to. And be more of just a liaison in the interface. And also looking at, okay, how do we help empower more people to do this? So that could be things like keeping an eye on who the moderators are. Like, they may be volunteer moderators and say, okay, what can you do to support them on like a subreddit or a Facebook group, etc. That was a fair amount of that work that I did early on where it was like, oh, cool, they’re doing some good stuff here. How do I just make sure that they feel appreciated and supported and but then kind of stay out of their way because. So that. And that’s different in open source where there’s more, I would argue this sense of shared ownership, that if I’m helping someone else with their problem, it’s also helping me. Whereas in a proprietary ecosystem at least, I haven’t observed much of that same behavior. So I think that’s important for our developers, for people in our space to be thinking about is that there is a higher willingness on the part of people within open source, I would argue more so if they’ve been in here longer than if they’re necessarily like coming in brand new. But there’s a higher willingness to support each other. And it’s. I think it’s important to recognize that and see. Focus on what can you do to empower that and support it, support that energy and like, provide resources and just help express appreciation to people because I think they’re willing to do that more so in open source because of this sense that when I help someone else, it’s also helping me. There’s this like shared sense of ownership of the solution. And I think that’s more unique to our space.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, that is definitely a big factor within the WordPress community. That reminds me of what I referred to earlier about which areas of the community you target. Because I’ve ended up kind of very part of the WordPress product community throughout podcasts like this, the other podcast I do, WP product talk, helping people on Twitter, either by asking questions, which leads to discussion about how to do certain things in a WordPress product business, or by answering other people’s questions. And that has built me a following amongst product people. Primarily, they are not the people buying my products. So I have got so much out of this because I learn from them. I get partnership opportunities, for example. There are tangible business benefits of this. If I ever want to sell the company then I’m sure that will be easy because of the links that I’ve built through this community work that I’m doing. But it rarely leads to direct sales. Whereas if I was building, helping people say with their WooCommerce sites or something in some of the Reddit forums or whatever, then that might get people to know me amongst people that are actually building sites rather than building products. So I always feel a bit weird about that. Have I built community in the right space?

Jonathan Wold:
And that’s, I think that’s actually, it’s a great question because it goes back to there’s benefits and trade offs to any choice that you make and as you suggested, what the work that you’ve done can influence the partnerships that you develop. It can influence like the long term of the business, the ideas that and the input that you’re getting like as a decision maker in the business. But you are by nature and even just by focusing on that missing like you could be, you could have just been developing for a community around end users this whole time, which would give you, I would argue that’s more short term benefit versus longer term benefit. And in context for our listeners, I think it’s important to just be making conscious decisions about this where it’s like so for instance I would be looking at are we hearing anything from our end users? Are we. Because if we’re just hearing from other product folks, if we’re just hearing from developers and builders, then I’d argue looping back to where we started, that there’s an advocacy problem like how much are your end users actually influencing? And support can be helpful but it’s going to be a biased like most of what you’re going to be hearing is from when people are having I guess typically problems with your product versus like what’s going on more generally. What are the trends? Well, what are the questions that people are asking more broadly? And I think for a lot of folks it may be if you want to hear from some of that, you need to find those community spaces to start one up, man. I mean that’s a, like, that’s a, it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work trying to get started.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, well, let’s talk about that a bit because a lot of WordPress products have done that successfully. I think the Kadence community is huge. James might know a bit about that. I think WP Fusion have a Facebook group. So there’s these product specific communities. And Jonathan, I’m sure that some of your Guildenberg experience about building a community of WordPress professionals or however you can describe it better than me. It’s relevant how you actually build a community and get people talking to each other.

James Kemp:
Think something we probably missed at the beginning was for Jonathan to kind of define what Guildenberg is and what that company looks like.

Jonathan Wold:
It’s a relevant question because one of the things that we’re currently doing is actually deciding not to focus on community. So because one of the things we looked at simply is like there’s already some great community spaces, right? Like there’s post status is a good example of one that caters to a particular audience. There are subreddits, there’s Facebook groups, there’s these different things. And we looked at that and said we see the value in community. We don’t think it’s. We’re not. We don’t want to ask our members to like just create like to spend time in like some new space because most of them are already involved in other spaces. And we were seeing that like we don’t want to try and solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist. So in practice. So for instance with Guildenberg we have a slack that we have all the members in. Most of the conversations that are happening are actually just between members and we’re in a lot of the channels. But they can also have so we’ll often set up way or a three way or even a four way channel between members who are working on a particular problem together and there’ll be a lot of discussion that happens there. But centric to the problem, we’ve chosen at least for now to not make any conscious investments into the community side of like trying to say hey, this is this because we feel like it’s currently well served. Like we would rather put that energy into saying like hey, like we’ll contribute as well to discussions that are happening on post status or, or on like the.org slack or in other spaces. If we see that there’s something that’s unmet there in the future, I think we would change our mind. But we decided to say like and there early on we thought of it more as like let’s build community. Let’s sort of develop a space where people get used to having discussions there. And there is some that happens as co founders. We decided to not make that a conscious focus because we don’t feel it’s underserved at the moment. And it’s also something that to do well requires a conscious investment and deliberate energy. So that may not have been quite where you were thinking with that, Katie, but I think it’s quite relevant because sometimes you just have to decide that it doesn’t like make sense for you as a product if your audience is already served. Because oftentimes you are asking for time on people’s behalf. Right. You’re asking for them if it’s going to have some life. To requires people being motivated and incentivized to contribute and keep that energy going. Otherwise it’s just a dead space.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I agree with you actually, because I’m in the Guildenberg Slack and it offers everything that you can already get elsewhere into because I’m already connected in the WordPress community. I’m on post status which I find quite overwhelming. I’m on Twitter, I recently discovered I’m going to have to learn LinkedIn finally. So there’s all these communities. I’m also on the Freemius one and it’s all the same people. So I think maybe there would be a space for a founders community for people who aren’t already well connected, like newer people or something. But because I was already in all those places then I didn’t see the need. So I do agree with that and I think it’s a wise point that you’ve made because we need to make a decision. Do we go out and create, do we create our own community and build it and you quite rightly said how much work that is to give it that momentum or do we go out into existing communities?

Jonathan Wold:
Yep. And it depends on your product. Right. But yeah. James, what are your thoughts?

James Kemp:
Yeah, I have many thoughts. I think like you said, Katie, that the communities now that we tend to find ourselves in are mostly like the same people, you know, that they’re product people that are within the WordPress space. And this has been true. I found on Twitter X, on LinkedIn in the Facebook groups, like you’ll see a lot of the same faces and I think like we touched on before. The challenge is finding the community of end users, of the people that aren’t. They don’t care that they’re in the WordPress space as such. You know, they’re just, they just want their site to work. They want the solution, not the tools. And I think that’s the hardest community to find. And something I wanted to pose to the group was what defines a community? Is a community like a group of people all in the same space and they can talk to each other, they can talk to you, and they can kind of group solve issues and share problems? Or can a community be, and we touched on this as well. Can it be more like of a one on one relationship where they’re a member of the community because they use the product, but they’re not necessarily contributing to the community without the interface to that community and you’re taking their input and utilizing that however you want to utilize it, is that still a community? Because the biggest challenge I found, not so much now. I think WooCommerce has a pretty vast community. But when I was, you know, building premium plugins that sit on top of WooCommerce, we tried a few times to create like a Facebook community, for example, and it just doesn’t work because there’s not that many people that really want to talk about very specific, like WooCommerce utility plugins that just doesn’t come up. And then if you go on Reddit and you want to share your solution to people’s issues over there, you get, you know, you get blocked, you get, you get denied because you’re sharing links to stuff that just looks like spam. So, yeah, quite a long winded question. But I guess the question is, what defines the community? Is it a group of people or is it.

Jonathan Wold:
So I have two thoughts to contribute to this. I think it’s a good and difficult question. The first is that I’ve had the unique experience, at least for me, of doing a lot more work over the past few years with newcomers entirely to our space. And so I’ve started to notice patterns and like, okay, if I’m like, if we at Guildenberg are some of their first contact with this, like broader community, what are the, what’s the work that makes sense. And I’ve noticed a couple of patterns. So for instance, one of the things that I’ll tell them is to say, hey, if you want to follow what’s going on, make sure that you subscribe to the Repositories newsletter. That’s a good, like, here’s what’s going on, like in our space. Like, if you wanted to just educate yourself, I’ll do things like point them to the WordPress book, a milestone. Here’s some history of the project so you have some broad context. I’ll encourage them to go to their first couple of word camps and I’ll give them specific guidance and like, here’s what to expect and here’s what not to expect, you know, et cetera. We’d encourage them to maybe not initially but eventually like sign up for places like post status and just to like kind of slowly layer things in and help them form their own connections. Right. And because we have places like that exist, it becomes pretty straightforward. Like if the repository didn’t exist, then I think that would be something that would need to be solved in a different way. So that’s part of it. The other thing, going back to what you were calling out, James, about what’s hard. I’ve had varying success with this over the years and I think it’s non trivial. It requires some curiosity and discovery work. But a starting point is to find, when it comes to the end users is to find the people and do the work to find the people that have influence on the end users. It can be surprising, like it might be someone who has a Facebook group focused on a particular type of small business. And I find that there’s not like a one size fits all approach. But if you make content conscious efforts to say, okay, who has influence on the end users that I’m after And to one of the points that you made, Katie too, like if you look at it through a partnership lens as well, like you might find that a particular vertical has a high interest in your product and like you may get some support requests or notice some patterns that could then lead you to say who has influence in this vertical and what can you do to start a relationship with them? And then look at it through the lens of advocacy like says, hey, this person, this group has influence with this particular segment of your customer base. You can create a relationship with them that’s focused on saying, hey, we want to hear in aggregate from the customers that you do like represent that you’re having this focus on. So I find that it’s not really clean. Which goes then, James, back to your definition of like, what, what is community? And at least for me, I think it just starts by recognizing that there are humans like people that are using your product that are going to have a wide range of backgrounds and interests. And the work as a product is to recognize Those that you’ve already got and do what you can to understand where they are and where they spend their time and what are the things that are influencing the decisions that they’re making. And through the lens of trying to acquire new customers, looking for clues in those who are purchasing from you that might lead you into other. Other like sub communities, if you will, that make up, combined this, like this community that you have as a product.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I think that’s an excellent point about influences. Basically, influences are influences because they have built community and people within the community respect them and listen to them. And that’s a particularly good idea. For example, the Soul founder, the sole developer who’s building a product that we talked about earlier, because they can use these influencers that may well involve giving away half your company and using them as the marketing side and that may well pay for itself. But if you’ve got somebody really big in those communities, for example WP crafters, anything that Adam talks about in that group, people will buy. They really respect him. You’ve also got Kevin Geary and his products and carry on.

James Kemp:
Just to touch on the Adam thing, you mentioned Cadence earlier. That’s why they have such a big community. Adam was involved early on and you know, he has a YouTube following and the audience of his YouTube channel is very relevant to, you know, building WordPress websites. Sorry, here I just wanted to mention.

Katie Keith:
No, I was thinking you would take over that point. Would you recommend people partnering with somebody like that to get that reach?

James Kemp:
For sure, yeah. I mean, I. So I have worked with Adam in the past on a product we made called Orderable and It was a 5050 partnership, you know, built the product, he put it out there on, in his group on YouTube. And that initial like engagement of putting that out there to, to the audience, you know, did wonders for the initial sales of that product. So for sure, I think it’s beneficial too. To connect with those people. And like you say, they already have this community where if you’re just starting to develop a product and perhaps solving an issue that a client of yours had or you’ve just experienced in the past, you might not know where to find these people who have the same issue. And influencers are a great kind of stepping stone to that community.

Jonathan Wold:
That makes sense. I would just add a. I don’t know Adam personally. I’ve seen like some of the work that he’s done in the space. I would argue, at least from my experience, that anything close to a 50, 50 is pretty atypical. I was surprised with how much that you can like, give and receive just by like building a relationship with someone where it’s like, hey, like, I want to like going to someone who has influence in a particular market and saying, hey, I just want to like, be a good liaison between your commute, like your, the people that you’re serving and the product that I’m building and have that be like it. I’m all for commercial alignment of interests. In my experience, I find that to be something that you work towards after you’ve got a good and so if it works out great from the onset, that’s awesome. But in terms of what I’ve seen, like, yeah, there certainly might be a revenue share or something that, that kicks in, but if it’s a knockout deal on 50 50, awesome. But I’ve also seen people do really well with just like saying, hey, what do you need? What helps you? Because sometimes, for instance, with someone who has influence on a particular community, they may actually care a lot about no sense of conflict of interest. They may not want any commercial connection to advocacy. And just knowing that they’ve got a great contact who can, like, be responsive may actually be something they value more than the commercial side of it. So it’s important, I would suggest, for those listening to. It’s the idea of finding people who have influence on the customers that you’re wanting to serve and then asking them, like, what do. What do they care about? Like, what’s going to be incentivizing and motivating for them? And sometimes it’ll be commercial, obviously, so other times it won’t be. And just being open to that as a founder and being curious.

James Kemp:
I think it’s kind of the benefit of building your own community as a product founder or product developer or whatever you are of people in a similar space. But maybe they do slightly different things, like because of the community that I had meant that I had this, you know, interaction with Adam for when I launched Orderable. So, yeah, I think, Katie, you mentioned right at the beginning the importance of, you know, building the right community or leaning into the right community. And I think there’s multiple different. Right. Communities that any one person or any one business could interact with.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, definitely, yeah. Before we finish, let’s talk a bit about the future because there’s been some changes in the WordPress community. I’m not going to go into the drama, but just say that it’s been a bit shaken. A lot of people are sort of opting out a bit, feeling less motivated. Others are acting business as usual. And the community will get through anything. But I suppose what I want to talk about is the bigger picture of where we see the community going in the future. Does anybody have any thoughts about that?

Jonathan Wold:
Oh, man. Well, I tend to look at things through a lens of optimism. I can’t really help it. I tend to have a more optimistic take. I think what certainly stands out to me is when I think about community, I think a lot about momentum. And like, how do you create and invest in sustained momentum over time if you care for it carefully? Controversy, pain, difficulty can all be things that actually contribute effectively to momentum. Like when, because things are going to come up and people aren’t going to agree, there’s going to be tension and there’s a lot to be said. I think about, like, how do you deal with that effectively? I think it’s important to recognize though that for people with products, things going. People care more about how you respond in general to the things that go wrong than that they went wrong. I think a great simple example that I’ve seen time and time again is like a negative review on your product. One of the worst things that you can do is respond publicly to it defensively and like in reverse. One of the best things that you can do is responding, you know, thoughtfully. Like, let me put it this way, because this can actually have a lot of influence on like the type of community you build. Some people like to see someone who like, has a snarky response back and you’ll attract a certain like, type of person who’s like, hey, good for you, like sticking up for yourself. And that can be part of your Persona and everything there. In general, though, people, I find, pay quite a bit of attention to how the products folks respond to the problems that come up. And I’ve seen situations in my own experience where a one star review is what led me to purchase the product. Because I saw how the founder, the product folks responded to it, where it’s like, cool, they cared if there was an issue, they acknowledged it, but they weren’t defensive. There’s all sorts of ways where controversy and conflict can serve the growth of the business. When you, like, embrace it, when you’re not just dismissive of it, when you. And in a situation where there’s nothing that you can really do about it, but to like, acknowledge that, like, hey, I hear you, like, I’m, we’re listening. We don’t know what the answer is. That can also be really refreshing for people. We’re like, okay, yeah, so you don’t have an answer but if you’re, if the folks in your community feel heard about it, that’s a good step in the right direction.

James Kemp:
Yeah, and it’s kind of contextual there as well, specifically with the review scenario where, you know, you’ve got 500 positive reviews and then 10 negative, but you’ve responded like in a great way to all of the negative ones and the positive ones. But if you had, you know, 500 negative reviews and you were responding positively, it still. It’s not the ideal scenario, but.

Jonathan Wold:
Right.

James Kemp:
Yeah. It’s a piece of data for someone making a decision as to whether to use your product to see that you respond even to negative reviews and not just defensively, but potentially even, you know, with a solution or willing to work towards a solution in terms of what’s next for the community. I think it’s a challenging thing to answer. I think we haven’t seen so much uncertainty, or at least I haven’t in my time in WordPress or so much division in the WordPress space. I think even like in the world, like the views are becoming very polarized and I think social media has a big impact on this. But I’m hoping that out of that comes decisions that benefit the majority and I do think it will rebuild into a stronger community of, of, you know, positive people. You’ve got a note here that says disagreements are a sign of people who care. And I think, Jonathan, you were touching on that. I think that’s true. I think it’s better to have disagreements than to just kind of coast along and a product to slowly, you know, lose engagement. But yeah, hopefully the resolution is that we kind of rebuild and come together and kind of heal what’s potentially a fractured community. And I think a lot of that’s going to come out of, you know, word camps and meetups and things like that and just actually connecting back to actual humans and not screens and words. But yeah, I do wonder how much the end user who isn’t, you know, as involved in these spaces is aware of any of the kind of drama or things that, that are going on within the actual, like, builder community and what their view on it is. I think that’s an interesting kind of position to put yourself into to think from their perspective. Do they even. Are they even aware that things are happening and what you guys think?

Jonathan Wold:
One thing I would just add to that, I think that’s an important question, like, what’s the awareness of end users? And I think in our context especially, it’s probably helpful to think through how did we grow here. Like, I would argue that a lot of the work, a lot of the ways that this community has grown is when I think back to my first experience like 18 plus years ago, almost like 19 now. I went on to the WordPress.org forum and I had a question about how to integrate WordPress with a project that I was working on. It was funny, actually. The first couple of responses were kind of dismissive because I was very new at the time. It’s. The threads are still there. The first couple of responses were pretty dismissive and I found it a little bit discouraging. But I was motivated and I asked a few more follow ups and then they started to become more helpful. Matt himself chimed in, like there were like folks who like helped me get the answer and they pointed me in the right direction and I got it unstuck. And then at the end of that I felt this like, appreciation and I decided to like write a tutorial about that experience and I credited the folks who helped me with it. I ended up sharing a link back on as a thank you on the thread. I was like, hey, thanks for all the help, guys. And here’s something I wrote that just sort of put it together. That tutorial ended up being the thing that kicked off my career because before too long people began to say like, hey, you wrote this tutorial, thanks. Could we just hire you to do this for us? And I was like, sure, I guess. And I started to like that just sort of kicked off a whole thing. And it began with a moment of community interaction where I felt a connection to this new piece of software that I’d heard about, but hadn’t really like done much with at the time. And that connection was what motivated me to get over the hump of the difficulty that I ran into. Because WordPress WooCommerce, like open source, it’s not easy. Like it’s, it doesn’t just, especially in comparison to these well capitalized proprietary platforms that can hire like the best people and they’ll work on these really slick like onboarding experiences and all these things. Yet I felt this sense of loyalty that grew out of that and that turned into a sense of shared ownership for me where I was like, hey, I’m going to now become, as I then did from that moment on, an advocate for this. And people would ask me like, what are you doing? I’m like, oh, WordPress WooCommerce. Like, this is what I do. So. And then I think I’d argue that a lot of our success has been that Many times over where someone’s had a positive experience. This is what I saw happen with meetups, where someone would show up to a meetup, you help them with something and then they become an advocate for it. And I think it’s important to think about that. You can’t control it, you can’t just sort of make it happen. But when people feel this, the sense of connection to it, which is why you’ll see people be so passionate when things like aren’t like when they’re frustrated because they’re like, they do care about this. But yeah, at least in my experience, those little investments back and those recognitions of effort when people put effort, even if it’s frustrating for you. We see this question over and over again. But each one of those moments is an opportunity to create an advocate, a thing that you’re building.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good example because you were reaching out in a way, a community based way. They had provided for support on the forum and then you went out and published something and you obviously tapped into a gap in the market, a problem that multiple people had, not just you. So by going out there and sharing, people actually came to you and wanted to use your services and that that helps things to grow. And I think that generally with business you just have to get something out into the world and then opportunities can start coming your way. And if you just keep everything within your head, never launch anything, whether it’s a blog post or a product or anything, then no opportunities are going to come to you. And I’m thinking that a lot at the moment because of some people that are choosing to withdraw a bit from the community because of recent events. The people who are continuing to push the community forwards and interact and share and take a positive approach. Those are the people that those opportunities are going to keep coming to. So I do think people are perhaps hurting themselves sometimes in withdrawing.

James Kemp:
I agree, it’s an interesting point. I think one of the things that stood out with your scenario there, Jonathan, was that the other side of that engagement you felt, you know, heard because the people helped you without. Well, the people eventually helped you without, you know, wanting anything in return necessarily. It became a more human interaction and not like a business transaction. And I think that’s probably one of the most important aspects of community, and you touched on it a bit, is that you can’t necessarily control it. And I think that ties into the advocacy side. You know, people connect with humans and I think that’s what’s going to build a good Community.

Jonathan Wold:
I would argue too that in a world where AI quote unquote will increasingly have the answers that people are going to value the connections more and yeah, and it’s going to be less about you as a human having like all the answers and being able to just give a solution for something, but more about someone like, hey, there’s someone else who spent some of their actual time not just like throwing an answer through chat GPT and pasting it to you. Right. There’s someone who spent actual time and that’s going to become more and more meaningful In a world where the answers are like that, you can find answers to the technical questions that you have and you probably need to double check those answers and validate them, etc. But I think in that world, especially as that gets better and better, people are going to find even more value whether they’re conscious of it or not in, in these moments of connection with another human. So that’s going to be interesting to see like how that develops. But I think that makes me optimistic about the increasing recognition of the importance of community. And to your point, Katie, I don’t hold it against someone because community, like the pain that comes from that can be really devastating. It can be really like to your core and sometimes people just need, they may leave for a while and they may come back and like it’s like, hey, it’s all good. If you need to like take space to protect yourself, that’s totally fine. It reminds me of some of the same things we can sometimes deal with in our family dynamics too where it’s like we may not get along well and there’s this, all this pain. But, but I find that it’s worth continuing to come back to for that the value of connection even with especially I’d say with people that I don’t agree with. Right. Like it helps me, it helps me. It’s good for me to have those connections and, and I think we humans are going to find even more value in that even as we seem to have less direct need for the answers to the problems that we’re having.

James Kemp:
Agreed. I think that’s a pretty good place to leave it. I feel like we’ve gone pretty deep on the topic. I’ve personally got a lot out of it. I think it’s been great to discuss. Jonathan, thank you very much for joining us. To discuss where can people find you online?

Jonathan Wold:
You can check out my website, Jonathan wold.com It’s running WordPress for a long time now and yeah, and I’m still fairly active on x Twitter, but yeah, in all the community spaces. So if you’re on post status or the.org slack or wherever else, always love.

James Kemp:
Hearing from folks and WordCamps you’ll be attending.

Jonathan Wold:
I won’t be at WordCamp Europe this time. Tammy, my co founder, will be there, but I will be at WordCamp US. So I look forward to anyone who’s making it out there and I’m excited about that.

James Kemp:
Awesome. Well, thank you very much. It’s been great.

Jonathan Wold:
Thanks for having me.