The Money Behind Funding Open Source

BobWP:
Hey there. I am here today with Joost from Emilia Capital and Tom from Human Made. Why we are here. It all started with a post that Joost wrote. I’m here with both of them to just touch on what inspired this, but we’re going to really be looking at a bigger picture, and it was a post that was done on post status. But first, for those of you that don’t know these two illustrious celebrities in the open source WordPress space, maybe we can have a quick intro for those few people that have just returned from 20 years in the cave, in the deepest, darkest jungles. So how about we start with, we’ll start with you, Tom.

Tom:
Sure. Well, so I’m Tom Willmot. I co-founded a company called Human Made in the WordPress space back in 2010. Prior to doing that, I was a freelance WordPress developer for several years. Human Made is now 70 something people with distributed globally across the globe, and primarily focused on WordPress in WordPress in big complex enterprise settings. So a bunch of big brand name clients that listeners will probably know the likes of Sony and Disney and Siemens and Harvard University folks like that who are wanting to use WordPress. They love WordPress. They love how flexible and easy to use it is, but they’ve got somewhat complex environments, perhaps technically, perhaps from a workflow, perhaps from a legal, perhaps from a compliance point of view.

And so they need some help to integrate WordPress into that environment and enable them to use all of the things that they love about WordPress.

I’m based in France with my wife and two kids. I’ve been here for about five years and having kids kind of coincided somewhat with Covid, so I didn’t travel as much this last few years as I used to. And so I’ve been enjoying getting back into that now that we’re seeing Word camps popping up across the world, very much enjoying getting back into traveling and hanging out in the WordPress community, which is one of the things that was very attractive to me right back at the beginning when this all started. There must’ve been something in the water. I think Yos probably found it. I think you found it.

Joost:
I started the company Yoast in 2010. So yeah, it’s exactly the same time. I think it was, well, it’s not in the water, it was in the ecosystem. We were all starting companies at the time as starting to figure out how to make money with WordPress. Slightly different journey. I founded that Yost became the CEO of Yoast because I founded it after a while. That role went to my wife who was far better at it, so well, we continued it in 2021. We sold Toast. At that time we had 150 employees and wow, it was quite a big company. So we were done with it.

We sold it to a new digital. Then we started building our own investment fund called Emilia Capital. We now invest in on lots of different things actually, but only in companies that we think make the world better in some way, be it big or small. But basically we’re trying to do some good with the money that we made. And a lot of that is going back into the WordPress world because we love the WordPress world. So you might know some of our portfolio companies as we then call them now, we’re trying to be grown up investors as Terri Cast Ossify, equalize Digital, recently launched personalized wp. So there’s quite a few of them now. And we’re partners at post status where I did this post that we’re going to talk about.

BobWP:
Very cool. Well, let’s get into that. So the project is called PHP Code Sniffer. Now let’s get in with a little context around what that is a situation and what brought you to write this post.

Joost:
So PHP Code Sniffer is a tool that I think every serious WordPress developer uses to check their code for commonly occurring errors that everybody makes anyway, all the time. On top of that, we have a library in the WordPress world called WPCS, which might be a bit more known to people in some cases, which is the WordPress code style, which enforces the way that WordPress core code needs to look. But that WordPress code style has been adopted by, well, I think almost all of the bigger companies in the space as the thing that they use to check their code for code style, but also for well, for things that you can improve in lots of different ways. So sometimes it’ll recommend you to use another function when you’re using a particular function because WordPress core has a better function for the thing you’re doing. Or sometimes it will tell you, Hey, this form have here that’s all nice and fun, but you don’t have any security checking on it.

Or, Hey, this string you have here is not translatable. It does a lot of checking like that. And I think that no serious WordPress developer should live without it and should just run it. And most bigger companies run it on pretty much every commit. So it’s a tool that developers use and use a lot. I’m not kidding. I probably broaden P-H-P-C-S automate it in some way about 20 times a day, if not more. And I’m not alone. Many, many companies do that. I know that a Yoast, they do that. I think Human Made uses P-H-P-C-S, so all of their developers will run it every day as well. So it’s a tool that we very often use, and it’s not just a WordPress world. P-H-P-C-S is also used by Drupal, by jula, by media wiki, by doctrine, by a lot of these big PHP projects. And what happened was that the developer was billing.

P-H-P-C-S was doing that on a company account and decided to quit. And that company decided also to not hand over P-H-P-C-S to someone else. So it became a bit of a problematic thing. Now, luckily, that’s all been solved, Juliet, for those of you who don’t know her, you should look her up. She’s one of the heroes of the unsung heroes of the WordPress space in that she keeps the PHP of WordPress nice and clean and helps running us on newer PHP versions every time. And again, she stood up and she has now taken over that project and she said, it’s all fine, but I’ve been running WPCS and I’m now also going to be running this for so long and nobody’s paying for it. This needs to change. And I think that that is a very fair question. Hey, y’all pay up for what I’m doing for you here for free.

But it also opens up a wider discussion about how do we support the tools that we use that are not like the tools that end users may be using, but the tools that we use to build those. It’s this whole ecosystem. And are we even aware of the fact that we’re using this code and Well, I think it’s a problematic thing, and I have my opinions on how we should solve this in an ideal world. Unfortunately, I’m not the one who gets to decide that, but you get to share that on the show.

So in my ideal world, we would have a WordPress app store where WordPress plugins, the plugin repository would not just be for free plugins, but would also be for commercial plugins. And we take a percentage of sales there and put that money to work on stuff like this and lots of other things. I think that would make WordPress better for everyone. We could how we want plugins to sell their things, and we couldn’t enforce all the proper legalities there that are needed, and we could fund the companies and the projects that we need that we all need to, well, to sustain our work.

Human Made was the first sponsor of P-H-P-C-S. When they opened it up, they actually sponsored quite generously. I think it’s quite a lot of money. Tom can talk to that, but it’s also in reality, if PPCS wasn’t there and WPCS wasn’t there, it probably would be worth it to Tom on a yearly basis to build something.

BobWP:
Tom, I’m curious with what Joost just said, the idea of the App Store, what I like about that is that, like you said, how do we get this in front of everybody? How do people know about, how does an agency like Human Made know that there is this need until something happens like this and then Joost writes an article and then everybody makes this move and gets this fundraiser going? Do you agree that instead of individually worrying about our projects being supported, that an effort where something is being done and money is being funneled to these projects, is that a value to you? And how did you as an agency decide once you saw this, was it kind of like a no-brainer, hey, we’re going to support this, but again, how do you find them? And there could be so many of them, you could get buried in hundreds of these projects.

Tom:
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the fear or the complexity, the unknown here that I think stops a lot of companies from jumping in and supporting even things that probably are no-brainers for ’em, to some degree, human made is very aligned with contributing to open source. We’ve really grown the business alongside the WordPress project. We’ve contributed a lot to the WordPress project. There is no idea. There’s nothing in terms of our approach or values that is misaligned at all. And yet even for us, essentially takes me making that decision and to make it happen. And so I think demonstrates the reality that there is no systematic way for this kind of stuff to happen. It’s true. I think that there are some large number of companies in the world who don’t care about this and aren’t really looking for a solution. But even amongst those of us that do and do recognize that we get a lot of value from PP codes different and OPCS, we use it in all our client work. It’s part of the tool set that we use to build part of the tools that we provide to customers who host on Altas to help them enterprise quality code. And if we did have to build all that ourselves, it would certainly cost us a lot more than the amount we’re putting in.

And so that really was a no-brainer, but it took this project getting to crisis and essentially somewhat, someone DMing me and a few of us were able to hustle and make something happen. And I wanted to use Human Made’s position in that moment. I think we put in a thousand dollars a month for a year as a kind of commitment to start. And then we were kind of vocal about that in the hope that that would encourage others to do the same, which I think it did. I think that there were others then who stepped in as well. So that was great to see.
But that’s just like one project, that’s just one situation. What about all the others is not sustainable for that to work this way every time, or that’s only really appropriate for a crisis situation. And ideally, these things don’t need to get to crisis before something’s done about ’em. So I guess I think in some ways the WordPress project itself, we have some solution to this. We have the five for the Future initiative, which is structurally tied into the project. There are quite a lot of companies that gives companies a way to sign up and some structure around how they can contribute. I think all of that could be much better. There’s many ways in which that could be better, but at least it’s something. And the reality is actually all of us in the WordPress space are using and relying on many more open source projects than just WordPress.

And yet most of us are, even if we’re committed to giving 5% back to WordPress, it’s probably closer to zero everywhere else. And that’s also not particularly sustainable. So I think think some questions around, well, how do we make it easier for even the businesses who recognize the value of supporting Open Source and want to do it, how do we make it so that they can say yes and do it? Because the reality is as a business, most businesses beyond a certain size just have fairly complicated internal processes around signing off spend and what’s that spent for and tracking that and managing it. And there’s probably this sweet spot around human made side where we’re still small enough that I as the CEO can just go and swipe the credit card, credit card card and it doesn’t need to get wrapped up in all of internal process. So I’m kind of hopeful, I guess, of some of these projects that we’ve seen. I think
I forget the name of it now, the community kind of contribution piece that I think is it Courtney Robertson is behind? I think there’s a few things like that that I’ve seen, which I guess are somewhat attempting to be that middleman layer of we’ll help pull together the people who need money and put governance and structure around that such that companies can click a button to support and don’t need to build that governance and structure themselves. And so as much as an store would give us that, which I think it that is the necessary piece, that there needs to be some middleman layer between companies who’ve got money and are happy to give it and the projects that need it. But we’ve got a coordination and a governance and a structure piece that’s missing in the middle.

Joost:
It’s also a bit, because you guys, Tom are happy to give it, which I’m very happy to see, but there’s two other companies that have stepped up. One is Automatic who have similar, they can easily do that. But I think the WordPress world looks at automatic a bit too simply to fund everything and everything all the time. And GoDaddy, which is a bit more surprising because I think the bigger problem with these things is that there is no tangible outcome. So it is maintaining the project, which is a lot of work, but it doesn’t provide them with something that they wouldn’t have if they didn’t put that money in, which is exactly the problem when you get to stock market size because how do you tell your investors that you’ve put 50 KA year into something that didn’t bring direct value to your business or that would’ve not had the same value to your business if you put in zero? And that’s hard. In a way, we should probably look at this more, and that’s something that Git always is talking about as insurance,

We need this to be there, otherwise stuff breaks. I think especially the larger hosts need this to be there because if we all stopped checking our plugins with this stuff, they’d go absolutely nuts. And they are the ones making the most money. I think there’s this, in the WordPress world especially this, well, this almost situation where large plugin companies and Yoast, which was I think arguably one of the largest still on their own at that point, plugin companies, we made like 15 million in revenue a year. And that’s a lot of money, but it’s nothing compared to the hosts. I mean, the hosts are in the billions, and we really as an ecosystem or have not been good at having the hosts pay up for this sort of stuff, but we also need to make it easier for them. And my preference would be an app store because then it’s funded by the people using all the software all the time, and that’s easier.

But we could also do it by having a WordPress support foundation or whatever we want to call it, that they could put money into. And I would then distribute it to all the projects underneath it. Because no, PP CoSN is not at all. There are quite a few more of these, not all of them necessarily as important to us as WPCS and PP Code sniff, but there are quite a few. And I think that we need to figure this out now and we need to stop figuring this out on a one by one basis when there’s a crisis and really need to start managing it. And yeah, I think that that is the problem with the WordPress ecosystem right now is that I don’t know where to put that responsibility. We can ask Josepha to do yet again, that work too. But there’s so much that she’s already doing.

And this is a bit like, and that’s where that other work that we don’t talk about that much because it’s very unhealthy to talk about it in the WordPress ecosystem, but governance and then I’m not talking about the governance be above met, but more below met actually. How do we treat all of this and how do we get all of this handled? And I would love for there to be a bit more of a person that runs stuff like this and manages this and supports all these people doing fantastic work because the work that Juliet is doing in this project is superb. It makes the project better every time she does an update. And I think that that is something that we as a project need to reward better. And it shouldn’t be her work to then also go out and get funding. It’s actually a waste of her time. And yeah, I have ideas, but it’s also like, okay, who’s going to do this and how from where can we start this? And it’s actually hard. I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I don’t have the real good solutions yet, but I do think that attacking at piecemeal is probably the wrong way.

Tom:
Do you think that could be scope for, I guess a broadening of the five for the future program such that it could also support to the broader ecosystem of open source projects that WordPress also relies on, I guess?

Joost:
Yeah, but under the five footer future program, nobody sends a check anywhere.

Tom:
No, sure. Yeah, that definitely is an aspect of it.

Joost:
And it’s also like the five for the Future program sounds very good, but every corporate executive who you explain that program to will just laugh at you because there’s no way on earth that GoDaddy or New Fold or one of the other big hosts out there, and these are big companies, they have millions of sites running WordPress. They’re not going to get 5% of their revenue to that project, even though I think that they should. It’s not a story that they could sell to anyone.

Tom:
Yeah, I do see that challenge. I mean, I think the framing of insurance is true. I think in practice that is what it is. And some of us can think long-term enough, I suppose, to be able to make decisions around insurance. I think the strongest motivator is more repetitional, and I think this is probably where the project could wield more of a carrot and a stick in terms of rewarding those who do commit through five for the future or whatever else, and making it so that there is a cost for those who don’t. And I think there is some of that that’s part of Human MA’s motivation.

Our reputation and brand in some ways is built around the fact that we are close to the WordPress project, that we heavily support it. We can use that as a one of the advantages that we then sell to clients that differentiate us from those that aren’t. It does actually bring some real advantages. Part of me sharing it on Twitter and calling for others is more about triggering that reputation response or we want to be seen as a company in the WordPress space that cares. So I think that, and especially through five for the future, I think that there, there’s more that program could do to reward participating companies and introduce costs for those who aren’t, which I think could motivate even some of those larger companies who ultimately are getting a lot of value and the cost of exclusion would be fairly high.

Joost:
Yeah, no, I agree to a degree. I think the only thing where we’re asking a lot of money from these people is in sponsoring our flagship events. That’s when you really see that companies are paying upwards of a hundred grand to sponsor a single event. And people go, but nobody’s going to pay that. And then all the slots are sold and it’s clear that that value is there for them. Otherwise they wouldn’t do that. It’s that simple. I mean, really with the economy in the current state, it really is. If they didn’t think that that would make the money and they wouldn’t spend that money there, but that’s also the problem. Everyone’s cutting costs. So we need to make sure that this is not a cost that they would cut if they look at their spendings because they realize the value of what they’re doing there.

And that’s very hard when this is basically a free rider society. You cannot pay and have all the benefits of the tool even when you’re making billions of dollars. And that goes for WordPress core for so many other things. If I look at the WordPress core project now as well, there’s such a large percentage of contributors there that is paid for by automatic, it’s insane. And we can’t really blame automatic for that. We can only blame the large hosts who very often also have their own page builders, that they have teams of people running and then they have no one working on WordPress or a few people.

And I think that there’s a lot of these things where we need to change it. And I agree with you, a carrot stick approach is probably better here than trying to sell it in other ways. But there is something we need to do here. It is a problem. I think it’s not just a problem with P-H-P-C-S, I think it’s a problem with more of what we do and we need to figure out together as a community, how do we sustain these things. If you start looking at the JavaScript libraries that all of us are using to do things, you’ll find similar painful areas. You’ll get a headache anyway because there’s a lot more. And it’s incredibly hard to actually look at that.

And that goes for Composer and for other things that so many of us use that none of us pay for. I think that we need to figure this out rather quickly before we run the risk of some of these things breaking underneath our noses. And the problem is we’ll always solve it when it breaks right there, but then we have broken yet another developer who we didn’t want to break.

Tom:
So there’s the kind of, I guess, how you sell the benefit of participating, contributing, supporting these kinds of projects. I think another important aspect of this is just how that governance works in terms of deciding which projects are worth supporting, how much each project should get. I think in some ways that is the, we to some degree leave that to the market at the moment, which is that the projects that everyone uses and which don’t have enough people to contribute eventually do get to crisis, and then some people do step in, and that somewhat works by definition. That is what’s happening.

And that is a kind of market driven approach, I suppose, to solving that problem of which projects deserve what support. And I think that that’s the main thing that puts even a company like Human Madoff from who want to support the projects that we’re using. But if I was to try and spin up a process internally by where we were identifying the projects that we used, making decisions around how much we should give to each of them, that just becomes a pretty large and complicated process.

Joost:
I fully agree part, I’m asking for this because I want someone to pick this up and go do it so that I don’t have to.

BobWP:
That’s exactly it. Yeah. I was going to ask you, and I think I kind of said a little bit earlier how you make those decisions, and there was a point where we had thought of through our sponsorships, taking a certain part, creating this fund and all this. And anyway, I pushed it aside because there were a lot of people already trying to do this, whether it’s supporting projects like this, sending people to board camps. I thought, why reinvent the wheel? But even as many smaller businesses, and I know it’s just a minuscule amount, but there’s enough of them, and I don’t know how many are like me, I want to do this, but I go to this project and I think, okay, well what can I give here? But I wanted to support this person over in GitHub because I know they’re doing really cool work and they’re doing all this for free.
And then there’s this person here that wants to go to WordCamp that has never been and wants to speak. And so like you said, yeah, I’m looking at all this, this would be great, but how can I decide? I would like to be able to give one flap amount of money and say somebody else has done all that work for me and they disseminated out there. But yeah, I don’t spend a lot of time in GitHub, but when I do, I end up start looking at all the, can you donate? Can you donate? And I just get depressed because I think I can’t just keep going from one to the other.

Joost:
It is hard. And we ran the Toast Care Fund, which where we try to at least reward contributors to some degree everywhere across the world. And that takes a lot of time because you actually have to get in submissions and you have to look at those people and then decide who you’re going to do that. And they still run that, which I’m very proud of because I think it’s a very nice thing to have out there. And there’s a couple more funds that we did at Yoast, but we had the number of people to support that. It’s just a lot of work. The thing is, we did that because we cared and because we felt we were in some way a bit noble oblige in that, well, we were there. We were the ones making money in the workforce world. We needed to arrange this and give back.

I don’t think enough companies do that in many different ways. I mean, for the longest time, Coast was the second biggest contributor to WordPress, and it was by no means the second biggest company in the space, not even close. And only when we got acquired, I realized just how small we actually were. I thought we’d be acquired by a company and we’d be like 10% of our revenue, maybe 20. And then we were acquired by no fold. And I was like, oh, wait, we’re actually a lot less than that. And that makes you feel very tiny, but it’s also, it makes you realize that this world is very different than I thought it was.

And I think that the people in the WordPress world don’t always realize just how big that market is and how much money is going around in that market. And that probably also means that if you start looking at that and who’s making the money into such, you also should be looking a bit more at the people making that money to actually fund these things a bit more because well, that’s a logical thing to do.

And then we need to start thinking about, okay, but if we decide that we want that, if we want more hosts, for instance, to step in and start paying for some of these things, then how do we structure it in such a way that they can actually step in and that this is a story that they can tell their boss? Because it’s not like these people, these companies don’t have people that work there that are very willing to do that. They are, I mean, Courtney is a great example and she got a GoDaddy to sponsor this, but you need someone who actually understands what’s happening. And that’s a big ask.

I think that that is something that where we as a community have to figure out how we do that in a way. It’s also that we as a community have to talk more about what makes Open Source great and what open source actually is. It’s funny, we talk a lot at Work camps about how WordPress changed our lives, but we never, or as much as I think about it, don’t talk enough about, Hey, but what does open source actually mean and how often do you contribute back to something that is not yours?

And I mean, a lot of people contribute to WordPress core and that’s great, but if I can count the number of good pull requests on yo CEO over the 10 years that I ran that company, I can count the number of people doing those. Juliett was one of them, but probably two hands. And some of those people were very active and were great. But it is like open source is more than just throwing it on GitHub.

Tom:
I have this conversation with a lot of founders and a lot of CEOs of even just all the other WordPress companies or other agencies been in this long enough now that I know most of them, and unlike none of them are like, don’t want to do this. They all to some degree want to do it, but it’s like, okay, I want to do it. But then, and mostly there isn’t anything. It’s structured in terms of then what? And so then they’re busy and the companies are busy, and so it doesn’t get followed through. Even this PHP codes, number one, I had that conversation with five other enterprise agency founders, all of whom were like, that’s great, but then it’s like, well, where do I contribute? Who is that? What about if they’ve got questions? There’s no answers to those questions and there’s just no system or process around that.

And so again, some of us are just take the leap and are like, I’ll just swipe the credit card and see what happens. But not many people are in that position. And so I think that there is actually quite a lot more people in the wings who could, if there was just enough structure to answer the questions that they have, why this project and not another one, what happens if, I mean, a common one I hear is like, oh, I’m happy to sign up to contribute monthly, but how long does that last for? Or what about if the project goes away? Or what about if the project gets enough money and doesn’t need it anymore? There’s quite a burden you’re taking on, you’ve got to keep up to date now with that project to some degree because maybe that money isn’t necessary in the future or something else needs it more, or just all of those things just start to turn the whole already half an hour into that conversation, you’re too exhausted to swipe the credit card. And

Joost:
The thing is that to some degree, you don’t want people to think about that. And that’s why we need something that takes care of this and looks at more and more than just P-H-P-C-S because it’s too hard to think about. And it’s also something that maybe you and I have the time to do, but if you run an agency with 10 people, then the chance of you having the time to do this is zero.

Tom:
Yeah, a hundred percent.

Joost:
And you still might want to contribute a couple hundred bucks a month to supporting those tools, but you don’t want to spend the hat space to think about how is this working and where is it going? And I mean, PHP codes need a bit more money still, I think to actually be where it’s at. They have the Open Collective that they have now. It estimates that their annual budget is 95,000 Euro dollars, which sounds like a lot, but it needs to pay for Juliet. But ideally it also needs to pay for her training a few other people so that the bus factor of this thing doesn’t become a bit bigger than one.

And that’s the problem for a whole lot of these projects. There’s so many of these projects that we rely on actually have a bus factor of one where if one person gets under the bus, the entire project dies. And that’s where the insurance part of it is real. You need to take care of these projects because they go away if someone goes under a bus and you can fix that by paying some money. So in that case, it is insurance, but I do think that we need to make it easier to make these decisions, and we can’t rely on people having to do that for themselves.

Tom:
Well mean we just, there’s the classic problem in open source, which I think is nicely visualized by, I think maybe it’s an XKCD or something like that, where you’ve got the kind of one tiny domino piece right at the bottom that’s holding up some huge platform. And that’s true for the individuals who are maintaining these projects. But we also end up with the kind of corporate version of that where there is actually, like you say, Yoast is actually very small, and yet it was the second largest contributor to the open source project that also is the corporate version of the same problem almost or the same visualization. And so how we spread that out across many more people. I mean, I feel like things like the WordPress Community Collective, which I couldn’t remember the name of earlier, but I’ve remembered it since. I think they do go that they do solve some of this problem.

They solve the aggregation problem to some degree, and they do make it easy to say as a company, okay, we are just going to put X amount per month in and they will worry about where it goes and make that easy. And so it’s good to see some of those things popping up. Even like the scale consortium, which is this kind of enterprise WordPress kind of trade body that we’ve been experimenting with this past year.
I think there’s a role that these kind of industry bodies could play to help aggregate together the projects maybe that we are relying on as the enterprise WordPress space and help with some of the governance and the kind of collection and coordination. I think that the carrot and the stick piece, it’s hard to see. For me, it’s hard to see where that comes from other than something like a five for the future where the WordPress project has the power to reward and introduce costs to incentivize the behaviors that we want in our open source ecosystem. And so, yeah, I don’t see where that piece comes from other than from something like a fight for the Future program that’s run by the project.

Joost:
I agree.

BobWP:
Well, I think there’s a lot of work to be done, and like you said, it has to be done soon.

Joost:
Well, the thing is, if these projects break, we’ll fix it if we really need it, which is true in what Tom’s said, there’s a bit of a let the market decide approach. The problem is that we burn people who are doing really good work in the process and there’s not an endless supply does.

BobWP:
Exactly. Well, this has been great. I knew it would be great, and you didn’t even have to worry about having anything or nothing to talk. Think that’s true.

Tom:
Thats true. Alright, fair point. You’re right.

Joost:
It’s xkcd.com/ 23 4 7 because by heart. Yeah.

BobWP:
Nice. Yeah, right. That’s it.

Tom:
Well, if you’re listening to this and you run any kind of WordPress company, go to that look at it and feel guilty and then do something about take some action to do something about that.

Joost:
Yeah. If I can do one more shout out, that is, it’s still open opencollective.com/php_codesniffer there. Okay.

BobWP:
Go there.

Joost:
If you use it, pay some money.

BobWP:
Cool. And if anybody ever wants to talk to you, either one of you about this or you’ve put a little bit of flame under ’em through this discussion, what’s the best way for them to reach out to you?

Tom:
Yeah, I’m more than happy to chat about this, especially to business owners chatting through why we have taken the approach we’ve taken. It’s common when I’m talking to other founders or CEO, they kind of have this framed backwards that they have maybe some point in the future once we are successful and we’re making enough money that then we’ll be able to contribute back.

And they think to some degree that human made is doing it from that position that we’ve been very fortunate and therefore we’ve got better margins than them and therefore we are giving some back. But I tend to think the opposite. There really is an opportunity, especially because not many people are doing it to use this as a competitive advantage, and it becomes actually the reason why Human Made has been as successful as it has in the space. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. And so I’m definitely happy to share what we’ve done and how I think about that. Twitter is probably the best way to get in touch with me at Tom Willmot on Twitter or the WordPress Slack. I’m also the same on there.

Joost:
For me. Also Twitter, J-D-E-V-A-L-K, on Twitter, Joost de Valk on the WordPress core Slack or in Post Status Slack. Just reach out, happy to chat to pretty much everyone who wants to chat about this.