Making Money with Open Source Tools

BobWP: Hey, I’m here with Rob. Rob, how are you doing?

Rob: I’m doing good today, Bob. Thanks for having me again.

BobWP: What’s on your mind, Rob? Let’s talk about it.

Rob: I sat down on the Atarim Summit last week, and I listened to Josepha, who I absolutely love. We are blessed to have somebody like her as the executive director of the WordPress project. And she’s been on this binge, as I have and many other people have in the community, that just because we’re all using open-source free software, we need to make money in the ecosystem, and not everything is free. So I’ve been in that. And then I’m going to extend it, which I didn’t tell you ahead of time because I can’t. A little bit to this whole bit about Elon, our friend on Twitter, and how the blue check marks are now you have to basically pay for them. So that’s where I’m at. We need to stop just doing things, thinking everything’s free.

BobWP: Right. Exactly. Yeah. And I agree, of course, in the WordPress space, we’ve seen this for some time, and I know we both talked about it. And then the Twitter, I mean, I bought the blue check mark, whether people like me or not for buying it. I despise the guy. I despise what he’s doing to the platform. But at the time, it’s what’s best for my business. Of course, he had to do it weirdly and get everybody freaked out and do weird, whatever. But it is time even for these, I think, social platform that I think somebody else was… Maybe it was Matt Monroy. Did he tweet about that? Somebody tweeted about maybe it’s time that these social platforms start charging. If they have a value to me, I will pay. If they’re not, then I don’t mess with them.

Rob: Yep. And where it’s gone lately is it started with Twitter. Let’s go there first and we’ll circle back to the WordPress thing just because we’re there. Twitter started with the API, and then they basically said, “We’re going to charge for the API more.” And many people probably don’t realize it because they’re so caught in the Twitter storm. Reddit, which is just as popular, it’s now charging for their API as well. So it’s no longer free, and they did that very quietly. I actually picked that up listening to another podcast this week, and I hadn’t even heard that one. So you’ve got those two.

And then you’ve got Twitter Blue, which includes the blue check mark, and everybody is complaining, these celebs, about $8 a month. Well, sorry, Bob. Give me a break. A celebrity can afford $8 a month to protect his brand. A government agency in Canada, that’s where we saw the outcry, said they can protect their brand for $8 a month on the account. Whether they choose to or not, that’s okay because if we don’t get some money into Twitter, and I still think Twitter’s the dominant microblogging platform out there, even with the advent of Mastodon and now Bluesky, these guys got to make some money somewhere. What do people want, everything for free? It’s got to stop, honestly.

BobWP: Yeah. And it really is. I think with Twitter, it’s that craziness of… He doesn’t make things easy for people’s decisions. It’s like if he would keep his mouth shut or quit saying incredibly stupid things or trying incredibly stupid stuff, then he might actually have more success and maybe that’s not his endgame, who knows what it is. Whatever it is, it’s like, “I’m playing it out on Twitter. I’ll see where it goes.” I was just talking because of Twitter stopping, people can’t schedule shares anymore. I use CoSchedule. And so Twitter just, they basically can’t do it with their… And I feel bad for them because even if they want to pay for it, they can’t do it. He’s not allowing that.

And I just had a talk with their support saying, “I’m looking at doing some stuff with LinkedIn. I may still find value in my subscription, so I’m still thinking this through whether this is what I want to do.” But yeah, it’s that. I mean, despite his craziness and whatever, even going back to WordPress and the people that are… Us, it’s been endless. I don’t know how long this goes back with plugins, and services, and charging enough money for sites.

Rob: Yeah, it’s true. And you look at I’m going to sneak his name in here because we’re both good friends with him. It’s our good friend, Mark Westguard. And he has probably one of the best formed plugins on the web, the one you and I both use, and WS Forms, and his pricing’s not that unreasonable for the support he gives. And then when you look at what he’s putting into that plugin and all the hard work going on, personally, I’d rather pay for a premium plugin and get a bit of support, and know that plugin’s going to be around, than build a site with some freebie piece of you know what, and then the developer drops off the face of the Earth, or worse, ends up in the weekly iThemes list of security bugs and not patching them. And then we got a problem. So there’s some of that.

There’s some of this, “Oh, well, websites are easy, so we don’t have to pay designers and developers.” Well, if that was the case, you would go and do it yourself. And I’m sure there’s going to be some of this, and I wasn’t planning to throw it in there, here, but I will, because of AI, saying, “Oh, well you can produce all your copywriter content with AI, so you don’t need a copywriter.” I would humbly disagree on that one too. So we got to start paying it forward and not selling our community short, so to speak.

BobWP: Yeah. Sometimes we look at certain options coming into the space or new things like we had on this show. Beau Lebens from WooCommerce talk about Woo Express, their new hosting. And as long as companies put these efforts, of course, they’re doing this, they’re making money, and so is every other hosting company, doing this to bring more affordable value to certain people that just want to put up a site, then that is great to have that option. Then there’s the people that want to invest into a site and should pay a designer or developer, an agency, freelancer, whoever it is, the right amount of money to make it happen. Then we have all that in between stuff that you’re talking about. That’s it. Like, “Do I lower my costs so much that I grab some of that good whatever, or how do I value myself as far as being able to have certain tools and say, ‘I can do this at a much cheaper rate because I just use these tools and plug and play.’?”
So there’s something that I… Like you said, people got to quit, I don’t want to say complaining about it and find the right sweet spot for them to make the money they need to make and not offer something or go down a route that will basically send them to a race to the bottom.

Rob: So true. And there’s a really good book out there, Bob, called The Inside Advantage. It was written in 2009. The author’s name is Robert Bloom. And I would encourage anybody who’s thinking about fighting the race to the bottom, maybe they should read that book. It talks about how to make your company and your product different from your competitors and not fight this forever race to the bottom. And the only thing that works in a race to the bottom frankly is dollar store chains. Nothing else ever seems to know. If you fight that deal, you might as well pack up your business and go home tomorrow. So that’s what I would suggest.

BobWP: Yeah. And I think also sometimes when people look at this and they may criticize somebody of what they’re charging, they’re not taking into consideration, and I’ve always known this, but it become more prominent to me since I’ve moved out of the US is that all these different cultures and all of them that have pricing, what their economy’s like, how much they make per year. If we’re looking at somebody and saying, “How can you offer this on Fiverr for X amount of dollars?” Well, a lot of these people that is creating a living for them, even though we may look at it and think it’s ridiculous because the way their economy’s built, it’s a much lower average income per year or something. So those kind of things.

I think what everybody needs to do is, and also maybe not so much criticize other people, but get everybody thinking themselves, “Am I charging what I should be charging? Am I getting the value of what I give to my clients or give to my customers, to my products? Is that really meeting my expectations?” And if it’s not, then yeah, you need to really think about this and rework it.

Rob: Yeah. And realize too, just because we have tools, page builders, AI, Gutenberg, we shouldn’t devalue our knowledge. And that’s a big one for me is if you’re smart enough to go and use a tool to streamline your business, all for it. I’m all in with AI, I’m all in, as you know, with Gutenberg. And those two have streamlined my business. I turned around last week, I sold an email sequence I built with ChatGPT for $3,000, by the way. So the point is, if I’m smart enough to go do it and somebody else isn’t, then the smarts are with me. And I’m not going to devalue my technical knowledge because somebody thinks I should.

BobWP: Yeah. On my side, I have Beaver Builder and I have, I believe, this theme… See, I can’t even… I’m drawing to blank Astra. Anyway, that is what my new side was built on a couple years ago, and I’m fairly comfortable going in the back end and doing things. And if we think, “Oh, somebody just uses a page builder to throw this side up, or somebody just uses blocks to throw this side up,” like you said, there’s skill to this. These things are not like always… Yeah. If you want to do the basics, they can be maybe viewed as simple tools, but there’s a lot of moving parts in all of this stuff that somebody has to learn. And if they become competent with it and can produce something that is effective and what you expect from the product, then they should be able to charge enough to use the experience, the skills they’ve learned over the years or however long they’ve done that.

Rob: Yeah. I agree with you. And so the argument I’d go further would be the same people who say, “Oh, you shouldn’t charge for using a page builder,” but they’re using 10 plugins instead of writing native code, right? Again, they’re using skills, and knowledge, and tools to run their business.

BobWP: Mm-hmm. Yep, exactly. So what was the gist of what Josepha… I mean, gee, obviously. What does she perceive as, I don’t want to say solution because that may be a little too simplistic, especially what you heard recently, where was she leading with it?

Rob: So I just sat in on the wrap-up panel with her, which is where this conversation came out. And it came out earlier in the panel. She was on the talk about CMSs, and it was basically because we’re using open-source free software doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be an ecosystem, and it doesn’t mean we all don’t need to eat. Free software doesn’t put food on the table, lights on, a bad rent, and fun activities in our lives. So we all need to do that and we need to put ourselves at a spot or a price point that’s comfortable for us. But there’s nothing wrong with charging for maintaining open-source software.

BobWP: Yeah, yeah. Just because you’re using WordPress doesn’t mean you have to charge little or no money.

Rob: I thank Josepha for leading that conversation because it’s been on my mind for a long time, and I know you and I have talked about it for a long time off and on. So, kudos to her.

BobWP: Yeah. And it’s an ongoing thing and it’s something some people have to learn. I’m sure both you and I have learned along the way somewhere in the past. I mean, I know I have even before WordPress with my business and stuff, so yeah. And it’s great to bring up here because it’s not for cut the entire solution or laid it out for you step by step, but it’s something to start thinking about or revisit or continue to think about if you are in the space or a spot where you’re thinking, “I’m struggling, I’m working my tail off and I’m just not making it.”

Rob: Yeah. So true.

BobWP: Cool. Well, so before we end the show, is there anything you want to share? Anything exciting in your world you want to share that you might be doing or-

Rob: The big thing is I’ve moved my podcast to StreamYard, so I’m having some fun with that right now. And my tip shows, which I do typically on Tuesdays, I’m doing live on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at 1:00 PM on Tuesday. So if you want a quick five-minute or six-minute marketing tip, join us. And then you can go on to… It’ll be in the podcast feed afterwards. So that’s about the big thing right now. And just plugging away on the security side. Hopefully, when iThemes comes out with their big list today, it’s not 160 plugins and themes again because… I said to Robert Rowley over a Patchstack, I said, in January, this is going to be the year of the vulnerability. And I think we’re seeing exactly that. So protect your websites and lock them down. That’s all.

BobWP: Words of wisdom. So, all right, well another Friday show and where can people connect with you?

Rob: Easy places on Twitter at RobCairns, and if you go to stunningdigitalmarketing.info, it’s got links to my website and all my social platform. So feel free, reach out, say hi.

BobWP: Cool. Okay. Thanks again, Rob.

Rob: Thank you, Bob.