From a Full Stack Developer to a WordPress Product Developer

Jonathan:
Welcome to another episode of Do the Woo. I’m your co-host, Jonathan Wold, and with me today is your other co-host, Tammie Lister. Tammie, how are you?

Tammie:
I’m good, thank you. How are you?

Jonathan
I’m fantastic. It’s nice to be stable after a month of traveling, and we’ve got a fantastic guest today who joined us in part of those travels. Alexander, welcome to the podcast.

Alexander:
Thank you for having me.

Jonathan:
It’s great to have you. And where in the world are you joining us from today?

Alexander:
I’m in Belgrade, Serbia.

Jonathan:
Excellent. You have a long background in the WordPress space and we’ve been excited for a while to have you on. When did WordPress first come on your radar?

Alexander:
Yeah, I think first time was back in, I don’t remember the exact year, but probably around 2006, something like that. It was still early days, still some other CMS systems were popular and I was building websites, some websites for the company I worked for at the moment. And also I was doing some freelancing and I was looking for a CMS that could help me. And yeah, WordPress was on the radar as one of the easiest to set up and five minute install. And you remember how it used to be back then.

Jonathan:
And what about WooCommerce? So you had WordPress from an early day, and then when did WooCommerce first come into the picture for you?

Alexander:
WooCommerce? I don’t also remember the exact year, and it also happened during my freelance years. I think it was around 2012, maybe 2013, I was doing freelance work through one of the platforms and one of the requests was to build an online store. And of course WooCommerce was the logical solution back then already.

Jonathan:
Now today we’re going to be talking about product and we’ve got questions about the products that you work on. Before we jump into that, would you mind just giving us an overview of what you do in the WordPress and WooCommerce space as a company? Just give us just a high level overview for folks who don’t know yet.

Alexander:
We run a company called TMS that most people don’t know us by that brand. Most people know us by one of the products. We develop and maintain three products at the moment. Two of those are in the WordPress space. One is called wpDataTables. It’s tables and charts management tool, but also a powerful data interaction tool. It works with databases, it can build charts in multiple engines. It can work with very large tables of millions of rows. And this is actually the tool that helped us kickoff the company. It was first my own pet project, which developed into a script that I could sell, then developed into a plugin that I could sell and support, and it was the first product. The other one, which is probably the most popular and that has the most to do with WooCommerce is called Amelia. It’s a booking plugin.

It automates appointment bookings and event bookings, and it integrates deeply with WooCommerce for all things, checkout payments, invoices, and many other things that we don’t support natively in the booking engine, but that WooCommerce can do. And the third product is a standalone SaaS platform. It’s called Trafft. It was initially meant to be Amelia SaaS, but for a number of reasons, we decided to rebrand it and to launch it as a separate product with a different design, with a different engine, completely revamped for the time being. It does have WordPress integration, but WooCommerce integration is among the next step things for us to develop. But we do plan that. And with WooCommerce, I mostly already mentioned we rely on it for so many things that we wouldn’t have enough time to cover internally, like so many different payment providers for different parts of the world, for Asia, for Middle East, for North America as well, different taxation systems integrations. WooCommerce already has all the infrastructure developed for that. So what we do is we try to focus on building the very best booking engine. And then when people come to check checkout, if they have the online payments, we hand this over to WooCommerce and to WooCommerce checkout. I

Tammie:
Sounds like you’ve had probably quite a journey in scaling in particular from a product perspective. So I would really love you to share how you created your company both now and how has your product process also changed as you have scaled?

Alexander:
I think the main change came around two, three years after we launched the first product. And I’m saying we, but back then it was only myself because I’m a full stack developer myself, I didn’t touch code already for a few years now, but my education, and initially I was a full stack developer and that’s how I developed wpDataTables. It was a solution for my own problem because almost every project I had needed some kind of interactive table and I just created a reusable module and then I built a plugin as a wrapper of this module and kept developing it. But what I found out few years down the line is that product that’s built like that, a very technical product, it’s a very niche solution on one hand because it’s always very technical. Tables, databases, charts. On the other hand, it’s very hard to promote and market.

It’s very hard to identify the target audience. We could say we promote to developers, but by that we narrow down all the other people that can maybe find our product helpful. For example, we have financial companies, crypto investors or traditional investors that also need real time tables. And if you would market it as a developers first product, they would probably not even pay attention to that and what it’s all about with such a product that it’s hard to build marketing funnel around this way and for the next product. I was constantly thinking about a niche that first of all is interesting to me because it’s hard to develop something that doesn’t excite me, but also something related to e-commerce or some kind of business and which is some kind of an evergreen niche. And this is how I came up with bookings because this is one of the things that seems very simple when you just think about it on the first site.

On the first site you think it’s just a form you feel in the data peak, the time and dates and that’s it. There’s not much to code around it. But when you go deeper, there are so many combinations, so many things that you can do wrong or not think about on the first side. So it’s very interesting from the coding perspective, but also very interesting from the marketing perspective. Because we can identify verticals, we can create different messages. Also, we can start from the end value that people in these verticals really want with this product. So what beauty salons really want, what the owners want, want the website builders want when they create a website for salon. So this was I think the biggest changes in mindset from thinking as a developer from thinking code first to thinking and value first and marketing first, but not in a sense that I also see some products that have very cool advertising, but then they don’t deliver.
For me, good marketing is when it does exactly what it advertises. I think this was the biggest change. But also, sorry, just had another thought. I think another biggest change was the transition from a solopreneur kind of company and from, I was going to ask about that please. Two or people kind of company to a full cycle team and to establishing at least first process, first cycle, because there is cycle interacting with customers, testing developing. When you do it for the first one or two times, you’re improvise, but then you figure out there’s a process that can optimize that, how you can use the feedback from customers, how you can set up meetings, what roles in the team do you need. So this was also a big mind shift and I think maybe many developers will find this relevant because while back then when I was a developer, I really didn’t understand what’s the importance of the role of a product manager or a project manager. And it took me a few years to realize because when I kicked off the company, I thought we will only have developers. We don’t need those guys who do nothing, just have meetings.
And it took me a couple of years to see that actually now it’s not going to work this way. At least not it won’t be optimal.

Jonathan:
Can you tell us more about, I’m just curious because there’s more things we want to get into. I want to talk about the ecosystem, but that particular insight, I mean you share that so nonchalantly, but I think that’s deeply significant and a lot of people don’t make that transition. So you went from a full stack developer with this idea of we just need developers to, it sounds like you have a positive view of the role of product managers and project managers, et cetera. How was that transition for you? How did you get there? Was it just a, oh, this is what other people do we need to do it as well? Did it come from a place of pain of realizing we need to do it, or how did you make that transition?

Alexander:
It wasn’t a shift or a click or switch overnight, I would say it was a little bit of all of that that you mentioned. So first I tried to do it the way I thought it works because when you are a solopreneur developer and you are so passionate about your own product, your baby, that was just your idea. And now there is code, there’s people using it, they’re sending tickets and they have questions and they’re engaged. And you expect from new people you are going to hire that they’re going to have the same level of understanding of everything that you understand and that they are going to have the same level of passion and that they will work small clones of yourself. And it was the first lesson that even the very good developers said, it doesn’t work this way. And you need to have some kind of instructions for what they do and how they do it, at least some basic level of it, but also on a daily basis you need someone to coordinate, to sync them, to also, when design kicks in, when the UX design UI design kicks in and when support kicks in and new feature requests kick in, they’re getting more and more of different pipelines, different cues, different requests.
And in the beginning I was doing all of that myself, but as someone who started the company, I also have accounting, buying chairs for the office, payroll and all that. And yeah, first two years were quite exciting. I think I had 12 hours per day workday and still there were months early on that I had to share everything on payroll and didn’t generate any profits for first couple of months. But yeah, this I think little by little it pushed me into looking like how do other people do this and what is agile process? What’s scrum? At first it sounded like it’s fluff and something, people just keep talking every day. What’s the use of that? But the more you start learning about this, the more you go from hard skills of coding, developing into the more soft skills of interacting with people and trying to make five people work as single unit as a single team, the more you realize the significance of it. And it wasn’t easy. I’d say it took us maybe three, four years to build the foundation, the core team. It took also a little bit of back and forth. We had to try a few people for the role.
Every hire wasn’t immediately a success. So I’d say it was a journey.

Jonathan:
Wow. I love the, we’ve met with a lot of folks and I find it curious. There’s a certain calm that you’re bringing to these. You’re describing a very tumultuous process for most people. Very. You have a particular way of viewing things. Some people get the benefit of just starting out knowing, okay, this is what we’re going to need to do. Maybe they came from a product company, but if you came up as a developer, it’s great to hear, but I feel like there’s an understatement of just the amount of change and difficulty that comes with this process that you’re describing. I’m really curious for, you’ve been in this ecosystem for a long time and you started out on the service side of things, doing development, saw a need for product, created that product, and it sounds like you’ve given a lot, you gave a lot of time and space. You’ve guys have been at this for a while now. You’ve gone from solopreneur to a company. As you look at the ecosystem broadly, both WordPress and the WooCommerce space, for you as a product company, what are some of the biggest challenges that you see in the ecosystem today?

Alexander:
Speaking about today, I would say that the ecosystem really matured and it’s going through different stage of cycle. When I compare it to 10 years ago when we started, so 10 years ago, it was more like forums of hackers that share information with each other, this open source freedom atmosphere. And it wasn’t really like, it felt a little bit like a game more. It still has this feeling. And back then you couldn’t really create, I think a level of business that you can create today. And over the years it was more people were coming to our press community, their CMS is growing and it’s projected to grow for at least few years, and I hope it’ll continue. It’s up to all of us. But today I think it’s much, much harder to come up with an idea if I’m talking about beginners, someone who’s just thinking to join, it’s harder to break through the threshold of creating an open source tool just to share the value and creating a real self-sustainable business out of that.

I think it’s much more challenging because most niches already have a variety of different tools for everything, for booking, for e-commerce, for creating pages, for all things that are related to WordPress. What else I’d say is a challenge and also it’s, I would say it applies to other areas because for my very first product, I didn’t even think much about UX UI design. I just solved this problem creating tables, and then overnight I came up with the interface I could come up with in one night and I just pushed it and people started using it because most of them were also quite technical, and for them it was easy to learn it. But today I think people expect much more work to be put into the ux, into the whole funnel and to how easy it’s download to download, install, and start using it and to build an MVP in today’s world, in the WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem, I think back then you could create an MVP in maybe two months, three months.

Today, I’d say you need more than a year, especially if you do it on your own. These are the challenges I can say. I can mention from the top of my head also, there is a challenge, but I would say it’s mostly a frustration of many of product companies. I heard it many times at the different WordPress events is the gbl L and the open source nature. It’s a great thing, and I’m a believer in the open source model. At the same time, some people try to abuse it and sometimes you’ll see people trying to just not be inspired from your product, but physically copy pasting at least parts of the product and renaming it. And this is maybe not so much of a challenge because you still need a team and in the process, and it’s not just about the code, but it can cause a lot of frustration to the product.

Tammie:
I wonder if you were going to give any bit of advice. If you were going to stand here and give one piece of advice, just one piece of advice to someone who’s going to create something today, what would that be?

Alexander:
I would say that the only way to succeed in this today is to first focus on the value and on creating very, very useful free tool. I think that’s the way to go. First of all, if you start trying to create a monetized product right away, a business right away, I think it might be hard to get it published and sold and it might create a frustration for you. And while when you create it as a free tool, you will see people using it, you will see how excited they are, you’ll see the positive feedback and it’ll first of all drive your motivation and also it’ll fuel your growth because for first year or two, I think that’s the only way to get started now. And I also think, and that’s the difference of the ecosystem based how I see the WordPress ecosystem today and WooCommerce ecosystem, that the community is really open-minded, really open.

And I think that one of the key things is to end meetings online and offline, to attend events, to network with people, to exchange ideas. Because some of the best ideas and some of the best changes in my mindset came through discussions on WordCamps, on local meetups with some guys who are just active in the WooCommerce or WordPress ecosystem, but maybe they do something different. Maybe they develop a team and they have some insights that we don’t have while we work on the bookings. So these are maybe the top two things I’d recommend.

Tammie:
That’s great advice. It hasn’t gone without noticing, particularly for me with my background that you mentioned UX a few times. So I would really love from your perspective, you are in a really good position to take the advice and the lens that you have and pass that on. So what do you really think is the role of UX and how should people really understand that now?

Alexander:
Yeah, UX, I think it’s one of the pain points I’d say of the whole ecosystem, partially because today’s WordPress WooCommerce architecture historically how it turned out to be today, because there are so many different interfaces, you need to learn so many settings, WordPress global settings, WooCommerce settings, team settings, plugin settings and caching server. And then for someone who just started this just today, it’s too much. Even for me, it’s too much when I try something new. So this is the key thing that I think all of us as a community need to work on. UX is a very simple concept. You really need to focus on the user’s experience. For us, what we do is we proactively reach out to users when they do allow for some of our products. For example, for our online platform, when they do give consent, we record their behaviors and then it helps to figure us out when they get confused because we look at our product every day.

For us, everything is super logical. We don’t look for the save button for different sections, how different things are done, but people can get completely lost in the easiest things. Like I saw that someone filled in settings for three times, then didn’t even realize, not intentionally, but they clicked the cancellation not saving the changes, and they didn’t realize that they do that because it wasn’t obvious enough that this message says that. And UX is really about, I’d say it’s about major things like putting the larger components where they should be. It’s maybe even more about the details. Look how they interact at the moment, what different things we can tweak and help them. And no one can tell us this better than users. Designers really love fancy designs. They love minimalistic designs. They love something looking very neat and tidy, and it does look nice when we look at it at their portfolios. But one of our biggest customer’s frustrations was when we replaced good old looking calendar in the booking with this neat, minimalistic, polished new calendar and it had so many flaws for the end user. They don’t care about the design at this point, about the fanciness of the design. So yeah, we had to take a step back and to revert to one that was really functional and that was the one where they know where to look for things. And not only old customers but new customers.

Jonathan:
That’s quite the tension too, because one of the values in WordPress that we’ve had from the beginning is this idea of utility, which has never been disconnected from things also looking good, but there’s an interesting tension there when you have someone who doesn’t think about the utility of something, they might design something good without thinking through. I have so much respect for the work that Tammy and the team had worked. Like Tammy spent five years on the Gutenberg project where it’s like you have to maintain that tension of utility because this is going to be used every day by people creating the project and also caring about the user experience. It’s really hard and it’s something that takes years often of cycling through it. You can’t just say a designer, at least I’ve worked with some folks who they’d love the idea of coming with a clean slate and just make it look good from the beginning. And it’s like if it’s an actively used product, there’s so much utility you have to think about and yes, you can change behavior and make updates. A lot of the Gutenberg project was at the heart of changing paradigms from text to blocks, but it’s a lot of work. And it sounds like you’ve been right at the heart of that and you’ve experienced it firsthand. You can’t just release a new thing and take away something people are expecting.

Alexander:
Yeah, I think this is one of the things where there are no easy ways, easy solutions. We are working on redesign right now and it’s constantly on our minds and we released a major redesign of the prompt end, which was we all thought it’s objectively better than the old one because old one was like five years old and it was already outdated at, yeah, whenever we do such things, at least for the first few months, we don’t hear praises and positive feedback so often, but we very often we hear, why did you do that? Everything worked perfectly. I didn’t want to touch this now. I don’t need to get used to it. My customers need to get used to it and care about the beauty of the design. Eventually they get used to it and we are trying to find er ways, and I see that it’s not only our pain. I saw that some major Google for example, if you can mention them, they had this warning for two months that they’re going to change the sign up and sign in experience. This is such a small thing. For example, I don’t care how the fields in this form, what’s the order, how it looks because it’s just sign up. But it seems that for them and for their user base as a whole, it’s a big change. So they had to give a warning two months in advance, we will change this in two months.

Tammie:
Oh, there were a lot of feelings about that.

Jonathan:
I remember when the change launched, I was really all that for this, at least for me as a user. I asked a little bit of that question. I was in that same space. I’ve been using that login for years and years and years. I’m like, was this better? All I really saw was my screen got wider and now it’s a little and who knows?

Alexander:
Or device compatibility or unification throughout platforms or something like that there might be. And when we built a signup for Trafft, we also thought it’s just login, but then there’s so many things around it forgot password logins.

Tammie:
It’s never just, you never say that word, right?

Alexander:
Yeah. And generally with UX, it’s the example that our designer uses on interviews to see how the designers really think about it because while the inputs, if they say it’s all straightforward, just design the input, then probably they don’t take everything into consideration, like empty states validation, all the different cases.

Jonathan:
Well, and especially when you get into something complex like booking, you need to know that you’re hiring people who are thinking about all the different possibilities, including things that you can’t foresee, right? Especially if you’re building the WordPress WooCommerce space, people are going to use your software in ways that you probably did not anticipate.

Alexander:
Exactly.

Jonathan:
And obviously you can’t count for everything, but the more that you can think about that Alexander, as you look ahead at the next year, you’ve got this wide range of product experience. You have the WordPress focused product with WP data tables, with Amelia, you have that booking the commerce side of things and with Trafft, you’ve got this SaaS experience. Is there anything in particular that you are looking forward to as a business over just, let’s just take the next year first, anything that you’re looking ahead for that you’re excited about?

Alexander:
We are pretty excited about. For us, it was a big say revelation, how powerful partnerships can be because we used to be so isolated. We don’t have a very large market here in Serbia, so we are used to being our own shell and doing everything remotely and now through different communities, through meeting people, through creating different integrations, we feel that we found one additional distribution channel, which may be more powerful than many of our other distribution channels that we used and built before. And we are looking into partnering more with agencies because in the WordPress space, but also for the SAS space where we are active, this is the key, how can we reach the end customers without reaching them manually one by one we can rely on the agency partnerships, also integrations with different SaaS solutions, WordPress solutions. Last events with WordCamps and the CloudFest, we’re very productive in the sense we have a lot of agreed partnerships and integrations and we now need to figure out with the team how are we going to prioritize that and how we will build our roadmap without stopping the features, but also with rolling out all these different integrations. I think these are the key things I am excited about because this is something pretty new to me still. We did have integrations before that, but we never paid so much attention. I didn’t realize how powerful this can be.

Tammie:
So with that, it sounds like there probably are quite a few things that you could build or create within your product. How do you decide what to focus on next within your product.

Alexander:
We have a few ways for doing this. We have a feature voting system where our users can suggest features and vote for features. So if they like a feature someone else suggested they can vote for it and it became a standard in the industry more or less. I think we were one of the first back then to start using it. It’s a great way to get feedback from customers. Also the support system, we can always measure what’s more or less desired, but to be honest, it doesn’t dictate the roadmap. And sometimes users seem very upset by that because they say this feature here has a thousand volts, why didn’t you start building it yet? It’s been a year. We still keep the decision within the team. There is a core team that’s been here, someone has been for seven, eight years, someone has been for five years.

But there’s a core team, technical leads, the product leads we take into consideration user feedback state in the market. Of course we also look at what others do including competitors and platforms we like that are not necessarily our competitors, but maybe that figured out nice way to do things. One of the areas is obviously AI because not because it’s a buzzword, because with the current state of the evolution, it can really bring a lot of value. And in the booking field, we are now finalizing some experiments with building the booking process through a chatbot that can learn on a website. And once we are satisfied with this, we want to connect it also to social media messengers, all the different mobile messengers because we feel that today customers want to stay in the ecosystems they prefer. And if they are constantly on some social network and they find a barbershop they like, it’s very nice for them if they can book an appointment with them in a chat like discussion and they don’t even care if it’s a bot. I think. So this for example, one of the things we prioritize for our internal r and d, even though it wasn’t in the feature about system. So yeah, we take everything into consideration. We rely on our own internal compass.

Jonathan:
, I want to expand on that a bit because I think there’s something very, I think deeply significant. First you talked about the developer at first with WP data tables, you had the developer audience in mind. Then you realized that you didn’t want to just focus on that, right? And with that broader focus, it introduces attention because how you message and how you speak to a broader audience is different than if you’re focusing. Because if you just talked about if you just talk to developers, then you miss out on people who are interested in just the finance side. Now I think some folks will end up in the situation, maybe they introduce the customer feedback feature in voting, and there are people who quite literally that is how they determine that becomes the highest weighted input, right? Customers said that we want this, so we do this.

And I think you hear this idea that the customers, I guess you hear both the customer’s not always right or the customer is always right. Or you hear people like Steve Jobs, this idea that they don’t know what they want until you give it to ’em, right? And it’s not trivial to navigate all these different things because it’s like there’s not a right or wrong. And I’m hearing a consistent pattern in your experience of it feels like you guys have figured out ways to do that. And what I’m hearing from you is it’s a combination of different inputs, right? So it’s like, yes, you were early to that customer feature vote and you obviously care about that. Yet for some reason it became clear to you that can’t be the dominant input that you have to take other things into consideration. How did you, as a company, how do you feel like you got to that point? It feels like you have a pretty balanced view. That also includes how you think about events. You weren’t really doing that before, but now you are. How do you think you got there where you’re able to sort of take that balance, maintain a tension between the inputs to, it sounds like pretty consistently make the right call.

Alexander:
I’m glad it sounds this way. I would say we don’t always necessarily do the right call. And maybe for me this is one of the important things. One of the things I needed to learn is to allow yourself to make mistakes. Just to give a proper measure to that. Not allow yourself to fail completely, but to experiment in a range where you can make mistakes. We did try multiple ways of measuring the epics or large features. We use agile Scrum as the main methodology, but we adjusted it to our team. And I think this is the right way to do this because the whole agile idea is to be flexible and to serve the team and the end purpose, not to slave the team to the ways of doing agile. We tried Moscow like must could have this way of prioritization. We also did different games when we get all these different epics because whenever we collect all the things we want and all the things user wants and all the things that market starts dictating, like maybe the design trends changed or something like that.

We put it all in one big room in one wall and we tried to put a value on everything like technical complexity, value for end user, how will we promote and market this? And we did all that. And I think by doing this, we don’t do this every time now, but it gave us, because the core team is staying the same throughout the years and this is the big, I’m quite happy about that and really, really grateful to the team for the loyalty. This gives us the kind of gut feel that is right. Most of the times we cannot claim to be right all of the time. And yeah, there were multiple instances where we didn’t do the right thing or we didn’t do the right thing the right way or we confused our customers. It just happens and it’ll happen to everybody and you just need to accept it in a certain way.

Jonathan:
It sounds like what I would infer from what you’re describing is that you’ve worked hard to create a, what I’ll just describe as a safe space for your company where A, you have continuity, people are wanting to stay there over time. So that means you’re doing something right and B, you’re able to make mistakes and learn from those and iterate, which to me that’s what I’m hearing. It’s like how do you do it? Yes, you take in a range of different input. You stay open and curious, take in more, and then ultimately you just have to try things and then when it doesn’t work, as inevitably will you learn from that. And if you’re creating a culture where it’s safe to do so, then you get the maximum benefit. Those mistakes and people. And that seems like it seems like a key to what I’m hearing that has worked well in the company that you’ve built so far.

Alexander:
I agree. And I like how you put this, of course, I think the prerequisite is the right people. You can’t just get any people and try this. So you will also make mistakes with the people. The first few iterations probably. And I’m not saying that there are wrong the bad people or good people, but in the combination that you’re building, someone will be a match. Someone will be a match.

Jonathan:
I love it. Last question from me and then back over to Tammie. When I think about, so you mentioned events, I’d just love to hear more. So we have some of the big events in WordPress. We have the word camps, of course the big ones. You were at CloudFest this year. Do the Woo was there as well, which was awesome. I guess would you just touch on how important do you feel these events are? How do you think about ROI, your return on investment for investing in events like this in our ecosystem?

Alexander:
Yeah. Well my first advice if someone didn’t attend yet or didn’t get a booth yet, but thinking about this is first, yes, you definitely should do this and that. Second is don’t think about the ROI because it’s not going to happen in the literal way. You will not going to close X number of deals there. But this is not the value of the event. For me, honestly, I was positively shocked first time when I attended WordCamp, it was here in Belgrade. I knew that word camps are happening, that it’s a thing, but I thought it’s more or less saying that other IT conferences. And I attended many before that and I was positively shocked to see it’s much more like party or festival. And the core team of organizers and people who attend every WordCamp, they all know each other and there’s such a positive atmosphere and people share knowledge.

I met Sujay for example, the first time in Belgrade. And this WordCamp was such a breakthrough moment for me. He shared so many advice that I never would, it would take me years to realize those things by myself. And he showed me, he opened his internal system, the CRM, he showed how they sell products. In most of other industries, people would hide everything. They will not share data with you. They would think you will abuse this, it’ll cannibalize their own sale or something. And it didn’t happen in WordCamp. Every WordCamp, I learned so many things that are not necessarily commercial or exact knowledge, but it changes the mindset in certain way. You start looking broader things, you understand the ecosystem better and this kind of thing. It doesn’t have a literal ROI, but at the same time it’s huge other thing for us because we’ve always attended work camps as a team.

While we were still relatively small, the whole team would go when it was in Belgrade we rented. We didn’t have a lot of budget for that, but we rented hostel for all of the team. They were all packed there, different very small rooms, but they were all together, this kind of thing for product company, ours, the overall experience of the traveling, having internal parties, then meeting other teams, having parties with them. It’s first of all such a great team building, forming our team and the unity on the other hand, it helps so much to build team members. How they see the WordPress ecosystem understand better what they are due for, what kind of market. It’s exciting for them. It’s also changes their mindset in similar way as I described for myself. So these things you can’t really do anywhere else. You can pay for online courses for education, you can do internal team buildings, but it’s just not the same. So this is the real ROI for me in the events.

Tammie:
I a hundred percent agree with that. I think it’s really, I agree that you have that life experience of that as well. We talked so much about work and creating products as well. You need to recharge though and you need to have energy to create. So what recharge is you, what do you dealing in your off time, how do you have the energy to keep going with what you do?

Alexander:
It’s a very good question. And there were periods when I was feeling I’m running out of energy. Well, first of all, I really had to work on my lifestyle. I quit drinking. I’m doing a lot of sports. So it’s more or less classical ways of keeping the internal energy for myself. Also, I see our team and the atmosphere and the team as the source of energy, not as a source of wasting energy. You know what I mean? Because I also use work in different environments and if it’s always attention to explain things to people to make sure on the same page, if there is always kind of culture mismatch, you need to think about, it’ll drain the energy. But for us, I’m really lucky and we are all really lucky that we created a team, a company that doesn’t even feel like a company. And because of that, when we were looking for an office, I rented a family house and we are working from this family house.

We have a pool, we have a pool party tomorrow. Not all of the people are coming to the office every day, but we try to get together and when I look at that, we can spend time together. It gives me a lot of energy to keep going. And also last but not least is the feedback I get from the customers. It’s been 10 years from the first and it is actually been even 11 years so long ago from the first release of WP tables. But today, same as the first day. When I look at it, when I see that the code that I was writing in a dark room somewhere 12 years ago is now for example, showing currency exchange rates in a central bank website of one African country or that some person in California is using the plugin. That was just an idea in my had not so long ago.

And they are sometimes frustrated or excited, but they’re so engaged. So this feeling is something that is more valuable than the revenue and that financial side of things. And it keeps me going as well because before products, we used to have an agency, we provided software development services and it was also a nice business, but it didn’t click with me so well. It didn’t recharge me as much as products. When we, a new version, when we worked so hard on it and when we release, we push the change lock and this is the feeling of pride and somebody finished something big. It’s also recharging the better.

Jonathan:
Alexander, this has been fantastic. Really enjoy you, really appreciate you taking the time with us and have enjoyed hearing about your experience and your journey. Looking forward to seeing how this evolves over the next couple of years. If someone wants to get in contact with you, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

Alexander:
You can find me on LinkedIn, Alexander Gilmanov. I’m trying to read through my inbox. It’s not some automated sales sequence I’m answering to everybody. So I think that’s the best way because the email is just overloaded with all the automated sequences.

Jonathan:
Excellent. So Alexander, thank you for joining us. We’ll look forward to seeing you at the next WordCamp.

Alexander:
Yeah, hope to see you soon in Torino. Thank you so much

Jonathan:
Torino. We’ll see you there.

Tammie:
Thank you.