CRM Insights and the Future of WordPress

Adam:
Hey everybody. Welcome to Woo Biz Chat. My name is Adam Weeks, and today I am very happy to share with you that my guest for this episode of Woo BizChat is Adrian Tobey from Groundhogg. Hey, Adrian, tell me a little bit about yourself.

Adrian:
Hey, thanks for having me on. I am the CEO and founder of Groundhogg. We make a CRM and marketing automation plugin for WordPress. That’s our breadwinner. And we also got some other stuff going on in popups and email delivery, but mostly CRM and marketing automation.

Adam:
Very, very cool. We will definitely get to that. We’re going to uncover some interesting things and during this episode, I hope our guests, along with me, we can learn something about why do you need A CRM? And yeah, let’s just start with that question. Who needs A CRM? Adrian, what is this for? And tell me what does A CRM even stand for?

Adrian:
Well, CRM stands for customer relationship management platform. And I was at my local Chamber of Commerce meeting yesterday and someone asked me like, I don’t have a CRM, like why do I need one? And my answer last night was, at a certain point in your business, it stops being about sales tactics and your own personality and stuff. And eventually business just becomes about data and being able to leverage data in a way to make informed business decisions as well as informed marketing decisions. And you need typically somewhere to put that data. And CRM seems to be sort of the go-to answer for that. All your contact information, emails, activity and reports, and basically the CRM becomes the dashboard of your business. And without one, it becomes increasingly difficult to make informed decisions as well to truly understand how your business actually works. Do you know where your customers are coming from? Do you know what their customer journey looks like? Once you get out of the dozens of sales into the hundreds, if not the thousands of sales, it truly becomes essential to be able to group that data and be able to understand what it means so you can invest accordingly.

Adam:
Nice. That’s perfect. That’s a great intro into just kind of this us figuring out audience together what A CRM is, how we are going to use it. So let me come to this next question. When do you know that you need a CRM? And I’m going to follow that question up with and typically, and let’s just go WooCommerce WordPress, these are the people in our audience. So someone who is in WordPress who maybe has an agency, different reasons why people are in WordPress, product companies, hosting companies, of course. When do you know that you need A CRM and what’s going to be the first way that someone will successfully use one? Is it just sales or Yeah. Tell me a little bit about that.

Adrian:
I would recommend that if you’re in in WooCommerce, you start out with one immediately just from the get get-go if only as a place to actually just be able to contact and keep in touch with your customers and just have somewhere to put them. And then later on in your business, you’ll be able to leverage more of what CRM actually has to offer in terms of customer reports and automation stuff. A lot of that might not be useful from the get go, but if you start collecting data early, it’s going to make it easier to leverage it down the road. So if you’re just doing e-commerce, I just recommend from the get go, one of the first ways that I see e-commerce people specifically leverage it is in understanding where their customers are coming from. Exactly. And specifically we have analytics, we have analytics tools like Google Analytics, which you can connect to Monster Insights and that’ll give you a customer journey from where they came from to a specific order.

And you can go into each individual order, you can see that customer journey, but there’s not really a clear way in either the Monster Insights dashboard or the Google Analytics dashboard to identify that with a specific individual over time. And that’s what the CRM does. It’s like, okay, this specific individual, they have a name and an email address and you can go to this report and you can look at them and then you can market to that person individually, which is not possible. Otherwise you can’t go into WooCommerce and then select a list based on their customer journey and then market to those people or export them or do whatever you want. So that’s really the value is where I want to understand where these people are coming from, how they got there, and then I want to segment my list based on that information to either send new marketing or to upload them as a custom list to Facebook remarketing or something. That’s the immediate value. And then there’s also some automation value in terms of setting up cart abandonment or again, just being able to market to them. I want to select the list of people who abandoned their cart

And then I want to send those people an email and I want to send them what was in their cart. And there’s lots of tools that do this that are outside of CRM, but they’re more like one-off and they’re a lot less feature rich in terms of being able to then correlate that back to their entire customer journey as well. So a CRM just sort of ties all that information into one place and makes it super accessible.

Adam:
Got it. So I love the idea you’ve got this wealth of knowledge, you’re in the trenches, you’re right there with the people who are using this. I’d love to hear about maybe some examples or an example of someone that wasn’t using A CRM came on with Groundhogg and wow, they got it. They’re figuring out their business is growing. Do you have any examples like that that you could share?

Adrian:
I’m not going to share specific business names, but I can share example. Is that okay? Yeah,

Adam:
Example? Yeah, exactly. Anything you’re comfortable with.

Adrian:
Alright. Well, not WooCommerce specifically, but give WP a lot of the nonprofits that GiveWP is working with, I’ve been speaking with the co-founders of GiveWP and they think that there’s a lot of synergy between Groundhogg and GiveWP and we have a great integration with them and so GiveWP customers, they’re looking for a donor management system, which is basically just CRM, but instead of customer, it’s donor. And so they’ve been sending them to us and we’ve been working with a few of the nonprofits that they’ve sent to us. And at least for the nonprofit sector, what we have going on is much better than what they’re used to in terms of donor relation management. They can segment their list via people who’ve donated to specific campaigns that they run through, GiveWP and then send them emails to donate to other campaigns that they have going on.

They have donor abandonment, so if someone hasn’t made a donation in six months, they could be like, who hasn’t made a donation in six months? And then segment that list of people and then send those people an email or call them or export them or up the limit to the Facebook remarketing list. So a lot of the nonprofits that they’ve been working with are discovering that they’re businesses. They have an obligation to go and reach out and market to their list of donors in order to continue bringing in money because without money, nonprofits die and businesses die. So it’s like the old school way of collecting donations is still good, but there’s just so many more tools available now that there are learning that they can leverage to extract more value from their donors.

Adam:
Nice. Yeah, I think that obviously when you do business online, the business that you have, your WordPress website is really the home for your business. Having that interaction with your customers and how you manage your relationship with them beyond, I would imagine if you have more than 10 customers, you’re going to start needing to keep track of what’s actually happening.

Adrian:
In one case, one of these nonprofits out of Texas, they had a person on staff whose sole responsibility was to peruse through a CSV list that they’d export from, GiveWP and look at the dates of their last donations and then send them an email through their inbox manually being like, Hey, you haven’t donated. Then they’d have to do that and record their interactions in a Google spreadsheet.

And in this day and age, that’s insane. That is pushing a boulder up a hill insane. So now that’s completely automated. If someone hasn’t donated in six months, they just run that report in Groundhogg, they shoot ’em a broadcast, they add ’em to a funnel, and then it’s a recurring thing and then it tracks the conversion rate of those people to if they donated or not. So that’s all now been completely automated and that person is now freed up to do actual meaningful work like pounding the phones or knocking on doors or some of that groundwork that still works, but now they’re freed up to do that because what can be automated has been.

Adam:
Got it. I bet you’ve seen some rather large spreadsheets get uploaded to Groundhogg people. Is that what they’re oftentimes coming from is just like an Excel or Google sheet and then coming to you to Groundhogg?

Adrian:
The nonprofits? Yeah, they’re typically coming with a spreadsheet. With a spreadsheet. I mean nonprofits are poor.

Adam:
That’s the idea.

Adrian:
Some of them aren’t, but many of them are probably like 99% of nonprofits are poor and that’s not a dig against nonprofits. It’s they have different expectations and they have tighter budgets and a lot of people are volunteering and that’s just the name of the game sometimes. And so for a nonprofit, it can be a large expense to invest in. Some of the specific drms that are out there, like Nation Builder, those can get quite pricey quite quickly. They’re all contact list based pricing, so usage pricing. So the more context you have, the more expensive it is, the more users you have, the more expensive it is. And as your nonprofit, you get lists. If you’re collecting $5 per donor, that’s not enough to cover the expense of having a list of 60,000 people. It’s just not. So a lot of them are just coming with spreadsheets, they can’t afford it, and then they’re like, oh my God, this is great. We have all this feature rich data set now to actually go through the list that we have and actually make informed marketing and business decisions based on the data that we can see from our dashboard, from the customer journey that we can see. If we can go into the list and we can see that more people are coming from this referral partner or this other nonprofit, we might want to invest further in that relationship.

Adam:
What do you see as the biggest barrier for a company, a nonprofit or someone using Groundhogg? Maybe they’re still new to it, they’re figuring this all out, maybe they haven’t done much of this in the past. What is the biggest barrier for them to getting the most out of a CRM?

Adrian:
Traffic probably. Okay, so CRM is a solution to being overwhelmed by traffic, but if you have no traffic, then there’s no data. You got to have something to put in order to get something out. So a lot of people sometimes put the cart before the horse and they invest in CR and they get all their automation set up, but they don’t have any traffic. And then a bunch of traffic shows up and then nothing that’s set up actually works because I don’t know if you’re like a Basecamp guy or you look at any of their stuff or their literature, but they always make decisions when pain shows up. And CM is a solution to pain. So if you’re not experiencing pain, then maybe you’re not ready.

So what happens sometimes is people will invest in a bunch of automation, but they don’t actually know their customer that well. I see this with startups too. They haven’t identified product market fit or they haven’t identified their pricing correctly and they set up a bunch of stuff and a bunch of literature and write a bunch of emails and all this automation that they configure and then they end up in a month completely changing and then they have to do it all over again, or they have to change it, they have to do a bunch of copywriting. It’s like, I always like to do things that don’t scale first. I’ll start out doing something manually and then once sort of the kinks are worked out from that, then you can design a process around that and automate it. So that’s my preferred way to do it.

Adam:
So you would recommend someone that’s just getting started and that they maybe not worry about the CRM to begin with, maybe do it manually and once that becomes painful,

Adrian:
At least the automation stuff, I would recommend that everybody start building their list immediately. And a CRM is a great place to have a list. So at do that, right, and then you can start collecting data and you can identify which data is actually important to collect, and you can start building your list and send a broadcast every once in a while. And then as you experience pain in relation to you’re getting a bunch of traffic and you don’t know where it’s coming from or you don’t know what to do with it or you don’t know, or maybe you’re doing stuff manually that’s taking too much time, or if you have a stat member that’s wasting time doing menial labor, that’s when you identify, okay, we can solve that and that go look at the data, implement a solution, implement some automation, problem solved.

Adam:
Got it. Alright. So we’ve talked a little bit about the person just getting started. Maybe they haven’t had a CRM before. And really the indicator seems to be if you’re having a pain point, you’ve done stuff manually, that’s when we’re going to really start leaning into automation and A CRM and you need that traffic. Let’s switch to the other end of the spectrum and a company at some point, there’s a lot of different CRM solutions. Is there ever a point with which a company would outgrow Groundhog? What does it look like on the enterprise level for A CRM like groundhog?

Adrian:
Well, we are used, so something interesting about the enterprise market that I’m familiar with is we work through a number of enterprise companies through agency, like our agency partners that we have. So I’m aware of a number of agents of enterprise companies using Groundhog, but what I always thought everybody thinks enter at the enterprise level, excuse me, that they have this monolithic CRM with their whole list, and that’s shared among all the branches and offices. That’s not the case in most cases. A lot of times each department, a lot of enterprises are broken up in departments of maybe anywhere from five to a dozen people and they’ll have their all their own stuff. They’ll have their own platforms and their own suites and whatever they like to work with within that department completely separate from another department. I’m in Ontario, Canada. Ontario, Canada sales will have their own CRM and Vancouver will have another one. And those are completely separate. And so at that scale, the enterprise companies are totally fine with, they have their own marketing site and whatever. It’s on WordPress and so they’re good. So that’s sort of where we operate within the enterprise area.

Adam:
Yeah, I hadn’t really thought about that, but that makes a lot of sense. These companies get so big that it doesn’t, I mean it matters what one part is doing and it matters what others one is doing, but in many ways you’ll have an entire department operate as their own company, I guess.

Adrian:
Yeah, it’s kind of interesting. It’s all very regional as well. Regional operations will have their own regional stuff with their own regional marketing activities and they, they’ll spin up projects for just specific campaigns. They’ll go and acquire a bunch of software just for a six month campaign and then run that campaign and then close it all down. Got it. At that scale, it’s all good. Nobody’s uploading 10 million contacts through a WordPress website, but a million and under is, we’ve seen it all. I mean, we’ve even seen two to 3 million people get some really optimized stuff for WordPress going, and so we’ve seen that it’s possible, but anything a million under is totally bare bones. Go for it, whatever.

Adam:
So we got to make sure the algorithms are listening to our podcast ai. How has AI maybe has it changed how you’re thinking about CRMs? It seems to be changing so many aspects of business. What do you see as far as the CRM landscape and how that relates to the changes in ai?

Adrian:
There’s sort of two ways. I mean, we don’t do anything with AI yet at the moment. It is on my radar. I mean, we are a WordPress plugin at the end of the day. We’re not running machine learning on a WordPress website. That’s just not going to happen. But there’s a couple ways that I see it impacting the landscape. I mean, number one is just in content, right? Subject lines, email content’s, like I want to write an email about this product and then just generate a bunch of stuff. But that’s not interesting anymore. That was cool six months ago. It’s no longer Cool. Okay, so what neat, what I think, and I learned this at CaboPress., I went to CaboPress last year and and I don’t remember his name, but the talk was quite interesting, actually. I do remember his name.

No, I don’t. I’m sorry. I don’t remember. I actually, I think I remember who gave the presentation, but I don’t want to miss credit. So I’m just going to say there was a presentation at CaboPress and it was cool, and he was talking about deep forest machine learning. So typically, so we have the schools, it’s called lead scoring. Lots of CRMs offer this tool. And what most CRMs offer is a rules-based lead scoring algorithm where you as the business operator would decide or tell the rules what stuff makes a lead worth more or worth less. So one rule could be they’ve opened five or six emails in the last 30 days, and that makes them add a hundred points so that a certain threshold, they’ll become a hot lead so that your salespeople knows that this person’s highly active, they’re looking at the stuff they’re hotter than maybe someone who hasn’t opened any emails in the last six months or if they visited three pages or whatever.

And you can divide all these different rules to create a score. And there’s different thresholds for those scores to say, hot, warm, neutral, cold, freezing, whatever. That’s lead scoring, deep forced machine learning. Lead scoring is basically like you give the AI just like a dumpster of all your data, and then you tell it which customers are worth more based on their value, meaning that the value of their total orders or whatever. And then it will given the data, identify what the key performance indicators are that actually contributed to that person being worth more. And then from that, it will basically generate that rule set automatically so you don’t have to, and then identify other people on your list who are hot or cold based on the KPIs that it identified from the actual customers.

Adam:
Got it. So you could essentially be better at segmenting your list.

Adrian:
Yeah, and the AI basically says these are the people that you should be spending your time on and not these people. And that’s kind of what it does that is useful or becomes more useful based on the more data that you have. I probably wager 10K and under is just not enough to extract a meaningful amount of value. You’re just going to get a ton of false positives. I think you need more and more enterprise are definitely going to benefit from something like that, but I think most of us in the small business market,

Adam:
Yeah. What do you see the interface looking like between Groundhogg and that type of AI use? Is that something that you would go over to OpenAI and dump that data there or Bart .

Adrian:
I’ve got no idea.

Adam:
That’s going to be the interesting one is how do you then leverage the CRM with that information that you have?

Adrian:
Yeah, it would to you have to run it as a service then. So there have to be some sort of, I mean on a technical level, there have to be some sort of API connection that reads all the data that’s available and then dumps that into the AI and then it’s spits back a score. So there’s a three step process. You give it the data and then identifies the KPI, and then you’d send an individual contact to that and then with all their data, and then it’d be like, okay, here are the things that make this person valuable or non valuable, and then it’d spit back a number. Got it. That’s how it would work.

Adam:
One of the things that seems to me with ai, the promise, and it’s essentially what you’ve been saying, but we learn about our customer more, we get to know them better. And instead of just a b testing your A, B, C-D-E-F-G element, almost each person could essentially get their own customized email that is going to be more specific to them because of what we know about them. Are you seeing anybody getting really granular on the type of outreach that is being done to them, like email?

Adrian:
Oh, yeah. And again, that’s something that’s actively possible without ai, but it’s again, rules-based, right? So it would depend on you creating however many templates or conditions or dynamic content to create the different tone, NA or whatever in order to do that. And then again, it also relies on how much data you have access to about that person to make those decisions. Now, again, where AI could eventually come in, and so there’s some creepy stuff that marketers do. All right, so I’m going to take a little bit of tangent. There’s some creepy stuff that marketers do. I’m not sure how familiar you are with this. So there are just huge databases. My email address, my credit score, my address, my information is all in those databases. They’re out there. Yours is too. Everybody who’s listening to this podcast, their information that they didn’t even know people had is in a database somewhere and it’s identified by your IP address and your operating system and your MAC address and just a whole bunch of indicators that identify you with that row in a My SQL database somewhere. It exists. It’s very creepy. There’s probably 3, 4, 5, 6 of them out there. I know there’s a guy that I know he’s got a startup going and his whole business is that if someone visits your website based on your IP address, the device that you’re using, they can actually go to those databases and identify you and then give back to the person paying for that service, your email address, your name, your location and everything without you ever having to actually divulge or sign up on a form on that website.

Adam:
Your favorite color, your dog’s first name.

Adrian:
So there’s some creepy stuff out there, favorite color, everything. And also, like you were saying, their interests, their personality types. And so for example, let’s say you’re looking for a car loan. If you could just automatically have someone access to someone’s credit score, that completely changes how you would then cold call that person back. And that saves you a lot of time and ends up giving you a completely different conversation. And so eventually we’re going to get to a point where this information is just fed into an AI and you could just pass someone’s information and then it’s just going to content spin. The email that you send or the automated phone call, AI that you send now through Twilio does AI calling and stuff. We’re headed down a dark path because marketers are the worst. I know I am one and we ruin everything.

Adam:
Are people, I mean, I don’t know if you have obviously information about this, but are people bringing those kind of creepy lists into Groundhogg to be used in marketing? Is that what they’re doing with the lists?

Adrian:
I don’t know. Again, so Groundhogg is entirely self-hosted. People host it on the WordPress website. What they do is their business, not mine,

Adam:
Which when we talk about why groundhog over HubSpot or Salesforce or these different behemoths, do you think that’s probably one of your biggest differentiators? This is

Adrian:
Yours a hundred percent. I always mean Facebook and Instagram and whatever was down yesterday, if that’s your main content channel, it might not come back one day. That’s unlikely, but you have no control over it. And email is still the only most, I’m not going to say the only, it’s still the mostly decentralized method of communication. Everything else, you got to pay somebody or you got to acquiesce to somebody or there’s rules or limitations or restrictions. Email is still mostly a hundred percent decentralized. I mean, the main inbox is like Gmail’s market share is a problem because if Gmail doesn’t want people to see your emails, then they won’t. But if they don’t use Gmail and they use something else, then they can, right. Here’s another thing. If you don’t know Gmail reads your emails, it’s

Adam:
Terrifying.

Adrian:
All of them. All of them. It knows what emails you respond to, it knows what emails you like to read. It knows how much time you spend reading those emails. And then what it actually does with that information is it penalizes the marketers sending those emails. So if your email has a bad retention rate after open, it’s just going to stop delivering it to people. So there’s an incentive to send good email and then somehow spam still gets through.

Adam:
Yeah. I woke up this morning to a notification from Elon Musk that if you’re reading this, it’s because we’re back up. I was like, oh yeah. I mean, when you don’t have control when you’re on someone else’s platform, I think it’s a big reason why WordPress and W is so important is that you own your stuff and you’re not putting your business in the hands of someone else as much as possible. I mean,

Adrian:
You still have to pay for hosting, but I guess you don’t have to because you could always buy a tower. You could buy a tower, buy a tower, get an IP address. It’s doable. I mean, it’s a hassle and a headache, but if you truly wanted to, you could go a hundred percent. But I see not daily, but maybe once or twice a week, I’ll see an SOS from someone who got kicked off of HubSpot or Kajabi or Active campaign or for God knows what reason. It’s like we’re getting content restriction, policies are getting out of hand in my personal opinion, and they’re being sort of applied arbitrarily to legitimate businesses that maybe said more than they usually would have. And self-hosting prevents you from being put in that situation.

Adam:
Content creation when it comes to writing that perfect email, when it comes to that email that is going to resonate with your audience, are people building those primarily in Groundhog and sending ’em out that way? Or are they maybe creating something, maybe using Canva that is a beautiful looking email and then bringing that in? What do you see people’s typical workflows as far as creating good email campaigns?

Adrian:
Well, beauties in the eye of the beholder. Number one, Canva doesn’t have an export as HTML option. You can create an email in Canva, but you can’t actually send it. It’s just an image. I mean, you could send just an image if you want. It’s not accessible in any way. And usually what happens is you create an email in Canva and then you export that and you ship it to the developer team, and then they code the email from the design that you created is typically like that workflow at the enterprise level, at our level, our email editor, it’s drag and drop colors, backgrounds, borders, text, fonts. It’s the whole thing. It’s like elementary dumbed down to email because people, I always get an email. It’s like, can I design email in? No, you can’t because email HTML sucks. It’s just bad Outlook, which is still a significant percentage. The of the inbox, market share desktop Outlook still uses to process HTML, the 2013 word processor.

Adam:
Really?

Adrian:
It’s terrible. It’s awful. And so there, there’s no JavaScript. It’s still CSS three and H. It’s not HTML five, no SVG support. It’s terrible. It’s terrible. And people don’t know that, and I have to explain it to them, and it’s like, just use our editor and you can get really close to what you’re looking for.

Adam:
So be careful getting fancy, because if they’re opening it with Outlook, they may not actually see your email correctly.

Adrian:
Our editor is broad, but restricted enough that if you color within the lines, it’ll look good everywhere. You can add custom HTML and custom CSS, and that might jank things up a bit, but if you’re coloring within the wines, it’ll look good in every inbox.

Adam:
Got it. You’ve got some other projects that you’ve been working on, so Groundhog is kind the bread and butter. Anything else exciting that you’re working on?

Adrian:
Yeah, I mean, we got bought HollerBox from Scott Bollinger last, I dunno, a couple years ago I think. Yeah, I don’t even remember when we bought it, but we bought it and we gave it a huge facelift, and it’s just a really straightforward pop-up plugin that the emphasis on HollerBox was just speed and just getting stuff out the door. I was tired of designing popups in elementary or Opt-in Monster, and there’s templates and stuff, but then you got to change all the colors of the images, and I was just tired. Am working with an agency right now, retail, developing our website in Gutenberg with block templates and block theme, the whole thing, just because I’m tired of tweaking in elementary, I’m just tired, I’m busy. I just want it to be done. And so that was sort of the direction that we went with HollerBox.

It’s a bunch of predefined templates in different layouts, and that’s the layout. You can’t change the layout. What you can change is the color, the color and the image and the content. That’s what you can change. And there’s a custom CSS section if you want to play with that, whatever. But so I saw first name, email, phone number, or yes, no buttons, or there’s a cool survey one that we added where you can do survey questions like A, B, or C, and then it takes you through, and that’s pretty cool. But it’s like those are the templates and you can have a popup on a page in 25 seconds, and that was the idea. If you have to design everything and you’re super holler box is probably not for you, but if you’re absolutely frustrated with designing popups in the drag and drop and whatever, and you’re just looking for something I want to ship, I want it to look good, I want it to work, and I want reports associated with it, like conversion rates and which pages people convert from, and you want some analytics associated with that and you wanted to connect Groundhogg, use a HollerBox because it’s just, I use it for all of our popups.
I think it looks pretty good. It gets the job done and it’s really, really, really fast.

Adam:
Nice. Wow, that’s cool. So yeah, so you’ve got HollerBox. I know there’s some other kind of products and things that you’re doing that you’ve been in the industry long enough that you’ve gotten to the place where you’re growing, you’re purchasing other products to run for your own business. How long have you been doing this? How long have you been in WordPress?

Adrian:
I’ve been in WordPress since 2015.

Adam:
That’s a long time.

Adrian:
Yeah. Yeah. So going on nine years.

Adam:
Nine years,

Adrian:
Yeah, I’ve been in WordPress and then I’ve been doing this for since 2018.

Adam:
Okay. Now, you started out in WordPress and doing ground pretty young. I would imagine that you were one of the younger founders starting companies up in WordPress. How has that experience been that you, you’re no longer like the new kid on the block, you’ve been here for a while. How is that? I

Adrian:
Went to WordCamp Europe last year, and for the first time I met someone doing WordPress product that was a year younger than me, and that was a weird experience.

Adam:
Yeah, that’s awesome. So I bet that’s a gratifying because when you’re like the young kid, there’s probably this element of you got to prove yourself and now you’re kind of past that. You don’t have to prove yourself to anybody. You’re here.

Adrian:
Yeah, it been around for a while. Yeah, it’s always funny. I still get pre-sales questions. It’s like I’m concerned about the longevity of the product. Obviously it’s new, you’re a young guy or whatever. I’m like, we’ve been around since 2018, and they’re like, oh, oh, well okay then. And I’m like, we’re here for a long time, not a good time.

Adam:
So is WordPress, is this your lifelong passion? Do you see anything else on the horizon for you?

Adrian:
Well, I mean now we’re getting a little bit philosophical about WordPress and stuff, which I’m totally down for because I have opinions. They may not be right, but I have them, and I believe in the WordPress promise and the objective and the value proposition, and I truly do. I am not convinced that the state of information and data sharing that we have at the moment in terms of what we currently call the internet is going to be around forever. I just don’t know that. And so I’m hesitant to put all my eggs in the WordPress basket for that reason. I think what we look at as a website in 30 years is going to be a lot different than what we think of as a website now. I mean, 30 years ago, websites barely existed if they existed all 30 years ago. What is that? Yeah, they did. We had Netscape and shit. They weren’t great, but we had Netscape. But what we think of a website now is just totally different. I think 30 years are going to go by and we’re going to be like, what was WordPress again? I don’t know. I could be wrong. I’m open to being wrong. I mean, that’d be good for business, but what we’re all doing is providing solutions to the problems of today, and I’m totally fine with that, and I’ll ride that wave for as long as that wave is around.

Adam:
There you go.

Adrian:
Yeah. What I want to eventually end up doing is I live in wine country and I want to bottle of wine with my name on it. That’s where we’re going. That’s where we’re heading.

Adam:
All right. We’ll be sponsored by Groundhogg or just Adrian’s Red wine. White

Adrian:
Wine. Well, my wife actually runs a media company down here called Tipsy Theory, and it’s, she reviews a lot of the wineries and provides winery experiences, so probably that is what’s going to eventually evolve into the winery, and then I’m going to exit at some point and then help her sort of build that dream. But from a philosophical level, I’m not sure if WordPress is going to be around in the next 30 years.

Adam:
I think the problem that WordPress solves, I don’t see that intrinsically will the market support WordPress, who knows? But the idea of wanting to have control, having it yourself, like the open source, we’ll see if ideally WordPress is able to continue to be that thing for people where it’s their digital home.

Adrian:
One of my predictions is for the market is as we have this wonderful service, which I pay 1199 a month for, called Spotify, it’s great. It gives me access to all the music I could possibly hope for. We also have this other service called Audible, which you could get credits for. It gives you access to pretty much every book on planet Earth, and those are silos of a format, and there’s not really a silo format yet that’s been adopted at large by the market for the written word.

For digital published content, news articles, opinion pieces. I guess the closest we could get was maybe be medium, but that has a low level of adoption compared to the amount of content that’s out there. Now, my prediction is we are going to get a silo where the New York Times, all the major newspapers, all the independent publishers, they’re going to basically, rather than being podcasts, same thing of the Spotify podcast network. It’s just going to be the written word or the digital Content Publishing network silo. It’s going to be Spotify for blog posts, and I think that’s where we’re going to be. People are going to be able to monetize through that. People are going to be what, but again, that sort of depends on, again, how much people still consume, assume through that. I think consumption of blogging has dropped a lot with podcasts and just the absolute immense amount of information that’s available, but I think it’ll happen eventually. I think we’re just, that silo is going to eat at some of the market share, and

Adam:
That’ll be interesting to see how that comes about. We definitely consume in different ways. That’s obviously changing. Obviously the success of YouTube is that yep, people want to watch the videos, the success of these different platforms. Podcasting, people want to listen to different things, but people still want to read. And that’s the thing that in the conversation with even about AI is that yes, AI will change a lot of things, but there will still be things that we hold as true, and reading isn’t going away. It’s definitely here to say, but I like that idea of, yeah, I’d be curious to see how if as the algorithm gets to know me and it brings those articles to me, the those blog posts that I am interested in, what is good about Spotify is that all the music’s out there, but if it doesn’t suggest things to you, it’s not as helpful.

Adrian:
It’s hard to discover, and I think the person or the organization that sort of cracks the discovery algorithm for blog posts is going to win at the content silo, and we will see what kind of impact that has. I don’t know yet.

Adam:
Well, I mean, how many amazing blog posts are out there that I have never read? That would be perfect for me, but I just don’t know that they exist.

Adrian:
Yeah, just like RRS Feed aggregators are just not enough anymore.

Adam:
Yeah, that’s true. That is true.

Adrian:
There’s too much content and there’s so much content, and if you want access to good content, but it requires publishers being on board as well. But I’m looking at all the newspapers and they’re all struggling, and I think they’d probably jump at the bit, especially if there’s compensation.

Adam:
Right? Yeah, you’ve got to, absolutely. Well, Adrian, we’re kind of wrapping up towards the end. I’ve got a couple last questions. This has been really, really interesting. I do have to ask Groundhog two Gs, what was the origin story of Groundhogg? The name, and I’ve just been curious.

Adrian:
My favorite movie is Groundhog Day. I do Bill Murray. Love that movie.

Adam:
Oh, such a good movie.

Adrian:
GoI think that has a great message. It’s both funny and philosophical, and the inspiration was that people with problems that are causing pain in their business, once they make a change, problems start to go away and GroundHogg’s the change.

Adam:
I love it. I absolutely love it. That was a perfect way to end this episode. Before we go Adrian mind, if people want to learn more about what you do and where you’re at, where do you hang out online?

Adrian:
Yeah, find me on Twitter at Adrian Toby, T-O-B-E-Y. You can also just go to the website Groundhogg with two gs.io, adrian toby.com, or you can just Google us and you’ll find us. I’m a pretty available guy. I don’t hide behind a large tower. I don’t hide in a tall tower. I keep my ear pretty close to the ground. So if anybody wants to chat, reach out and we’ll talk.

Adam:
Adrian, thank you so much for informing us and I love that our conversation kind of went to some really interesting places. That is what I think this is all about. So as we wrap up, my name is Adam Weeks Cirrius Influence here helping out with do the woo woo biz chat. Next week when we come back, Emma Young I hope will be here. I hope that I held down the fort without her, but everything is always better with Emma. But thank you all. I hope you guys have a wonderful week and we’ll hear from you soon. Alright, take care. Bye.