When Open Source Meets Urgency and Purpose

Transcript

Dave:
Hello everyone. Welcome to the emerging tech flavor of Do the Woo. I am Dave Locke. And with me this time we have Noel Tock from Human Made and also Noel from Rescuing Dogs in Ukraine. So why don’t we start where you are? No, which is in Kharkiv. Tell us when you got there, what you’ve been up to and what it’s like, and then maybe we can fit some WordPress stuff in at the end.

Noel:
Yeah, absolutely. That sounds good. So yeah, I’m on mid sabbatical at the moment from Human Made just because there’s a bit of an emergency sort of crisis out here with the stuff we’re doing and the work we’re doing. But to go back to the beginning, let’s go way back. I was at WordCamp Norway and met this guy called Espin at the first one, and he was building the largest fitness blog website in Norway, massive duties twice my size, and I meet him first year, I meet him the second year, meet him the third year, and we’re at this after party and the after party music’s down, it’s kind of very quiet and he’s like, Hey, you want to go club? And I’m like, hell yeah, I want to go club. And we go straight to the club, literally he’s got the table set up and everything.

He’s got his friends there, his business partners, and at the time these guys were like five, six guys or so. And they turned that into a 650 person WooCommerce business being the largest sports supplements distributor retail store or whatever online in Norway during that evening. Somewhere at one or 2:00 AM I talked to one of the other guys called Fred, and we hit it off within two hours. And then he says, Hey, do you want to crash at my place for a couple months? And I’m like, yeah. And that’s just a nomadic way of things. And before you know it, we’re coworking, we’re doing things, they’re on WordPress and Woo. Anyway, so all these things work together, but fast forward to the beginning of the full scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine. Fred, he’s watching TV and he’s seeing distraught animals on tv, running around, not knowing what to do, whatever.

So long story short, he jumps in a car and drives down here, not really knowing anybody, a few contacts here and there, but builds up a charity, which is amazing. And I joined I’d say nine months after or something on the eight months after on the tech side, just doing a website and everything. And then last March I was supposed to have hip surgery, doctor canceled that. I called Fred. I’m like, where are you? He’s like, I’m in Norway leaving to go to Ukraine. I’m like, okay, pick me up in Warsaw. I’ll fly there. And yeah, haven’t looked back since. Been in and out a few times. I’ve spent half my time, I’d say all in once March comes up. And yeah, it’s been an incredibly humbling experience. It’s been very inspiring because people are obviously working together between military civilian volunteers to keep this whole country afloat.

And our little part of this world is that we’ve produced 245,000 kilos of dog food last year and distributed that to the occupied areas. The occupied areas were areas that were occupied by Russia and then won back by Ukraine. And these areas are pretty messed up. Everything is broken, supply chain’s gone, all that kind of stuff. So we help out there with dog and cat food. And then we also do evacuations from the front lines and other kind of hostile environments where the larger charities certainly won’t go. So on Sunday we were two kilometers away from the Russian border, so that’s definitely a no man’s land kind of area, but the dogs there had had no real social contact in two years or whatever now. So some pretty important cases I guess. And last year we evacuated and re-homed 500 dogs. And it’s nice because the website’s on WordPress obviously.
But yeah, I think what it highlights for me is in many ways WordPress is necessary technology in this world. We live in a quite ugly time right now between highly polarizing politics, a lot of conflicts going on around the world. We had the kind of boom and bust post covid stock markets, so we’re seeing SaaS companies shut down and then maybe your data’s locked in a weird way and all that kind of stuff. So I think there’s a lot of arguments right now where WordPress has its place in a very large way and also shows you how it’s withstood time over 20 years to still be reliable and be larger than ever.

Dave:
Yeah, I mean first thanks for going over and doing that work because is doing what I can to support you makes me feel like I’m doing at least something about all the awful stuff that’s happening over there. And I’m not as mobile as you are, and I also don’t think I could deal with the weather, although like super trivial point, it sounds bitter.

Noel:
Well, it makes two of us because I have rain arts, so as soon as I’m anywhere minus two, minus three, my hands are white and I have two toe warmers on either side of my foot warmers in my pocket. It’s a battle to say the least. I’ve seen my hands all colors at this point being here the last couple of weeks.

Dave:
So I want to pick up that point about there being a place for WordPress still and it being such, I guess longstanding technology. And you’re right, there’s a lot of change in the world and people do need a way that they can communicate in a way that doesn’t require asking people for permission to do that. So no terms of service to stand up a WordPress site. Obviously there are a few particular hosting, but it’s permissionless technology, so domain names, so you can do the innovation at the edges without hitting corporate terms of service or privacy policies or de platforming or whatever. Something that I’ve been thinking a lot about though is that for the majority of people, the majority of time that don’t hit those safeguards and what WordPress offers is WordPress and WooCommerce offer creators the ability to put their stuff online to create and curate experiences for people to go to, but they don’t actually do that much in terms of putting that content in front of an audience.

And obviously with the audience comes monetization. So once you’ve got somebody on your WordPress site or your Woo store, you can monetize them, but you kind of have to build all that stuff together. Now you know that I spend a lot of time with crypto stuff and I know that you also have at least historically spent a bunch of time with crypto stuff. One of the things I’m spending a lot of time thinking about at the moment is if and how WordPress can back into those crypto networks in order to reconnect this permissionless publishing and creation with audiences. I dunno if you saw GoDaddy have just done this partnership with ENS domains. So you can have a

Noel:
Oh nice

Dave:
Noel, which is your ENS name, but you can also connect that to null talk.com. So somebody can just send you crypto to nulltalk.com and it’ll go into your wallet address.

Noel:
My number EAFs addresses are finally worth something.

Dave:
Maybe

Noel:
$10 maybe. Cool.

Dave:
I dunno whether you’ve thought much about how the worlds of WordPress and crypto collide. Do you share the belief that I have, which is that we can kind of make WordPress competitive with these canned corporate networks where you have got audience, you have got addressability, and you can build the monetization around your content in a way that is still permissionless and open and allows for this innovation at the edges? Or are you just totally focused on keeping your feet warm and rescuing dogs at this point?

Noel:
No, it’s a good question. So I love the theoretical aspirations and direction of crypto, and a lot of the time it doesn’t necessarily play out that way. It’s almost, it’s like bigger marketing schemes and everything than let’s take publishing platforms. We had Medium that kind of came and went, Cora came and went, and obviously these platforms are still around, but in terms of their hype, now we have Substack, which was supposed to be all and all that kind of good stuff, and ultimately just fading now because of sort of Nazi undertones or whatever it is. And then there’s the 10% platform fee and God knows what else. And so maybe that’s on its way out to sooner than later and maybe it’ll be something else that comes or whatever. But can Crypto as a technology change that I think it can augment it, but is the underlying technology going to provide a new business model?
Unlikely not in my opinion. I think when you look at traditional media, it was best when investigative journalism was paid for, it was open, it was free. You’d go on the website and it’s like, Hey, wow, that’s an insane case. And now you have all these paywalls and everything, so maybe media needs a different business model, but is the transaction method itself and the benefit of permissionless and all that actually going to be the big game changer? I don’t know. I am certainly in crypto, but from a seed investment perspective and happy to ride the waves and trade the volatility, but I’m not beyond Bitcoin, I’m not going to bet anything large. I guess long term longterm,

Dave:
I see at the moment the most important thing that crypto is doing is connecting people, creating that graph. And I have this meme that’s living in my mind about being the last audience that you ever need to build because you’re talking about the fact that you’ve got a medium experience or a Substack experience or whatever experience. And with each of these, you build up the content, you build up your audience, and then inevitably it downturns because the world changes or the team changes or the investors sell or whatever it is. Apps and experiences are ephemeral by their nature. Some persist longer than others, but the social graph underneath I don’t think should or there’s an opportunity for it not to be ephemeral. And when you look at, I’m not sure if you’ve played with forecaster at all, but it’s that sort of idea where because I have my wallet has a connection with yours, anyone can build on top of that.

So you can build messaging, you can be email, you can build push notifications, you can build a whole full-fledged social network and we can sort of see with the connection of domain names through to crypto wallets as well, you could see how that kind of extends out. So once you’ve got those connections, so it doesn’t matter whether you’re building a TikTok type experience or a SUBSTACK type experience or a Shopify type experience on top of it because you’ve already got that social graph in place. And in fact, there’s a lady called Legion who I think she’s part of Variant, which is a VC based out of New York, and she wrote something recently about the emergence of these sort of short lifespan social apps where something comes along with a friend tech or maybe it’s just a kind of overnight success with some TikTok variant or whatever.
We’ve seen a bunch of these social networks come and go, and even the longstanding ones have had to evolve over time. So Facebook’s just sort of rubs every good idea that everyone else comes along with. But what if that ephemerality of the experiences isn’t a bug, but it’s a feature. So that’s the thing that I’m kind of interested in is if we can connect at a level that kind of underpins everyone that’s using WordPress and WooCommerce and you’ve got that audience, then you can distribute, can create audience, and you can kind of be assured that you own that audience as long as you own the wallet that they’re all connected to, that seems like a really resilient way for people to create a living, whatever is changing in the world around them.

Noel:
If I understand you correctly, the amount of metadata associated with the wallet at that point is quite large. You have followers following some sort of foundational social mechanics in that way, I assume.

Dave:
Yeah, and there’s a big spectrum of these things. So you can look at something like Lens. So Lens is a social protocol where everything’s much on chain. So if I follow you and I have collected your follower, NFT, and every piece of content I create is like a content NFT. So the accounts, the content, the relationships between them are all NFTs and then you’re obviously kind of extract the graph from all of that. And then you’ve got something like Farcaster, which is actually hybridized. So you have an element of on chain, but you have a lot of off chain as well. And their aim is to be sufficiently decentralized, to be resilient and allow the wallet to wallet connection stuff, but it’s not all on chain. So you’re not building this sort of very expensive inefficient database to power what needs to be like a high performance social network, but however you kind of then execute on top of it. I think the principle is that as these experiences emerge and die off over time, and as more and more time elapses, people are going to increasingly see a need to have an identity that they can own, which is prior to any of those. So it’s not Facebook’s account that I can log into. It’s my identity that I can attach to a Facebook account and if I decide to stop using Facebook, I can walk on.

Noel:
So how is this all different from Mastodon?

Dave:
It’s a good question. So Mastodon relies on, so you can run your own Mastodon server, but you have an identity that is federated through whichever MA on server you want to be a part of. But if that server goes away, then your identity goes away as well. This is what I’m talking about here is as long as the cryptographic network is up, so as long as Ethereum NS or Bitcoin Ns or whichever network it is, then your identity persists.

Noel:
So would it make more sense for Mastodon to have E or Solana or whatever under it?

Dave:
I think I definitely see a world where those two intersect so that you connect your crypto identity into Mastodon, right? You’re a creator. So you start off on YouTube, you build up an audience, you start monetizing, and then you decide that actually YouTube’s not the right place because you want to start exploring some content which is not aligned with their terms of service. So you need to go somewhere else. How do you take that audience with you? Currently this concept is about being able to take your audience from platform to platform without needed to rebuild it from scratch over again and over a long enough time, very much just saying that becomes necessary. Are we all just going to live with?

Noel:
I like that a lot because this means that someone who’s innovative can build SaaS application that’s interesting, gamified whatever, has great mechanics and then doesn’t own the customer data, but is able to monetize transactions or some kind of value exchange on the platform itself for as long as they live without creating that kind of lock-in. Obviously I feel like it really depends on how far the metadata goes and how much of that do you store at the core of your profile, and then how much of that is stored on layer twos or whatever somewhere else.

Dave:
And I think that sort of stuff sorts itself out, but the core tenant there, you own that identity and I get if you zoom out and go, do you want your identity to be owned by a corporation? Do you want your work relationships and your friends, your ability to contact your friends to be totally reliant on a corporation that just seems really dystopian to me. So anyway, we kind of came here because we were talking about the importance of WordPress and WooCommerce, but also their limitations. So anyway, that’s my take on how one way that we could fix that limitation. So you’re free to create, but you are also then connected with an audience and you can build, if you launch a new WooCommerce store or you start being active on another social app, whether it’s centralized or not, you can still reach that same audience. So anyway, that’s just to close the loop on that one.

Noel:
I guess my final thought there is, as much as I like it, I feel that even with substack, you can export your email list, but you’re going to have to do a bit of work to recreate that and get the same mechanic going. Now Substack does weird things like, Hey, you’re signing up for this. Do you also want to be part of these? And it’s selected by default or whatever. So you probably get an inflated number of subscribers, which are not really true subscribers, so you’re not losing that per se. But yeah, I think people worry then if take LinkedIn for example, or in any of these platforms, there’s always an edge. If you’re able to post something where your audience likes it, literally just likes it and that’s all they do, their audience will see that or there’s a good chance some cohort or sample of their audience will see that. Similar to how Edge ranked, I think it was EdgeRank on Facebook work back in the day, and you want those benefits, so you don’t necessarily want to leave the platform regardless of how permissionless everything is and how fancy everything is under the hood.

Again, I think for me it comes a lot back to metadata. It’s not only about exporting your just the names and emails and a couple of other opt-in metrics, when did they sign your opt-in whatever else kind of critical information. But how rich of metadata can be stored in, I guess the equivalent. There is some layer two setups where you might have a very highly social metadata layer that captures a thousand different data points and that’s the open standard of that sort of data, which I like a lot similar to how a restaurant can store it in an open standard around their food menu and then their nutritional value and where is their food source from and other weird stuff. So I think that opportunity exists and I like that a lot.

Dave:
Nice. Well let’s move on because I know that when you’re not on sabbatical and working Human Made, you guys are very focused on a couple of things. You’re focused on the enterprise market for WordPress and you have been for a long time and you’re very focused on the applicability of this latest generation of AI technologies to WordPress as well. So to the extent that your head is still in those spaces, what have you been working on? What is there that we can dig into more there

Noel:
Personally, and I feel that this has trickled into the marketing because I direct I guess a lot of the high level direction around marketing and what do we put out there if you learn anything from crypto and NFTs is that attention is the scarcest commodity currency or whatever that is out there and everybody’s just fighting like crazy about it. And something like WordPress the struggle, the insane struggle is that you’re having to re-explain yourself every time because people think the software is outdated, insecure, obsolete, whatever keyword they can fill the hole of because WordPress doesn’t do it for itself, not at the various niche levels. So it doesn’t necessarily do that at a hardcore consumer level. It doesn’t compete in terms of product marketing with Webflow at the enterprise level, we don’t have any organized product marketing to compete with AM and Sitecore and these other companies.

It’s slowly coming together. We have the SCALE consortium, which is that association of enterprise agencies at the moment. And then there’s other companies such as Pantheon, Josh at Pantheon especially, is really trying to push the right narratives forward. My biggest challenge I think in many ways is how do you keep WordPress relevant in this day and age when there’s massive budgets spewing left, right, and center? Good example is we have a great rest, API, we have custom post types, we have anything, and we had that for years already. And then something like Contentful comes around, it’s expensive, it’s nowhere near as good, and then captures a massive chunk of the market in terms of revenue and we’re left behind having zero product marketing. You can’t go on any sort of centralized WordPress page and see cool stuff like next JS integration, integration of Algolia and this and that. We don’t have this Mac Alliance type. It’s almost like a cartel of cool, best of breed, headless, semi open source or open source companies that have come together to put a really great narrative in place that helps a buyer that’s in the mood for best of breed to slip into that stack, which is great because there’s some really great technologies in there, but WordPress hasn’t done any of that. So we’re left having other companies, industry analysts, whoever fill that narrative for us

Dave:
And often not in a way that is fully representative and Correct.

Noel:
Yeah, it’s unfortunate. We often repeat ourselves and have to do almost like a double sale because the champion of WordPress inside a large organization may come around and be really hyped about WordPress, which is great. We’re really happy, but they’ll be like, Hey, help me sell this to the board. Help me sell this to the stakeholders. Oh, I’m getting pushback. It’s insecure, this, that, and just selling the same thing twice and doing that every single time.

Dave:
And you’re selling yourself as an agency as well.

Noel:
Exactly. So that’s the double sell.

Dave:
Yeah, I guess it’s the challenge of being a bazaar rather than a cathedral in some ways, cathedral or big suppliers, one place opening as Cafe religion Bizarre is like, well, yeah, exactly. How do you see that being fixed? What’s your master plan for how to address that? How would you describe it? It is just a very diffuse and bottom up messaging space. So lots of contradictory, even within WordPress. It’s like use Elementor or use Gutenberg, use divvy, whatever it is. There are lots of competing sub narratives within the WordPress space that are challenging. Have you got a vision for how we solve this?

Noel:
I think the easiest is probably if it comes from the top and the foundation or Matt put their foot down and say, Hey, we need to hire a chief growth officer or a CMO for consumer for enterprise. That’s my gut feeling. It’s in terms of how you get there in quickest, because these people obviously bring wealth of experience and then are hyper-focused on matching the solution WordPress with the problems of a given space, enterprise or consumer or e-commerce. Commerce is a great example. You have Shopify, you have BigCommerce, you have other headless e-commerce tools coming out that are even open source and doing very well, and their marketing is amazing. And Woo’s marketing is actually quite good compared to I think WordPress. And that’s not to say that the WordPress marketing was always bad or anything like that. That’s not the case at all. Anything, it’s remained the same, but the market has changed.

So 10 years ago, the website was the solution. So WordPress in itself was the solution. And nowadays we have a very diversified MarTech stack. We have a lot of different pieces running around. There’s you need an integrative landscape, you need to be able to tell a coherent story around these things and that product marketing needs a lot of work. MarTech has come a very long way in terms of doing great product marketing. I think even if you look at Stripe coming out or Intercom coming out, some of these companies just redefined the game in some ways. And we haven’t done that for WordPress in this new world. We haven’t done this for WordPress where it’s not one size fits all anymore. It was one size fits all before, but now it’s so much different. WordPress is not the solution. It’s the underlying very stable platform that we want to keep around for decades to come potentially. And what we do on top of that is the exciting thing, but it starts from a position of open source and has to be enticing enough that these various niches or segments or verticals are attracted to starting from that position as opposed to getting hooked into a Contentful, an AM, Sitecore, Webflow, whatever else.

Dave:
I remember what you took at WordCamp Europe, I can’t remember which one it was now, but this was your message back then.

Noel:
Still is 2018 and it was in 2015 at WordCamp Tokyo too. We haven’t, I’m not calling anything. I’m just saying we were a solution before. We’re a tool now. And it’s much harder to tell these stories and you have to be surgical about how you approach the market. I think.

Dave:
Yeah, it’s a challenge to have such a broad product. I think the counterpoint to that is that by staying broad, you keep possibilities open and opportunities open and that gives you product longevity. But what you sacrifice is the focus and therefore the ability to evolve the product to be the best possible fit for a merchant or a user at any particular point because your messaging has to be pulled. It’s like a Swiss army knife compared to a pairing knife. And if you’ve got no knife at all, then you might be happy with a Swiss Army knife. As you become more specialized as a chef, you’re like, this is no good anymore. I need a particular type of knives. And I think that’s definitely happened with our digital toolkits.

I also feel like the nature of the web has evolved away from websites towards content and away from search to the suggestion algorithms. And that’s something that is difficult for WordPress, which is ultimately a website building tool as it’s most commonly used to compete with. Because a lot of businesses now don’t even care about a website until they’ve got to a certain volume they’re selling through social or messaging groups or whatever it is. So one of the things I spend my time thinking about is how do you, because WordPress is like a content management system, that’s how we describe it, but there’s actually a whole bunch of smaller requirements all lumped together. So it’s content creation, it’s content curation, it’s content display, it’s like content storage, all of these different things. What if you just used WordPress to create content which then went out into the world and it was experienced in a social type setting or a

Noel:
Tumblr?

Dave:
Like Tumblr? Yeah.

Noel:
But I thought that was great because Matt took WordPress and went off and did something on the external side of WordPress, and I thought that was really great that he went out and did that. And now he’s coming back with that experience of it was hard for me to, or whatever to or very challenging experience to try and build a social network and then use WordPress. But I’ve learned a lot. You probably, you’re exposed to end users a lot more to having to reconfigure something for a particular outcome. And I think that’s a really great experience. And maybe part of why we have this data liberation project, which is again an external project. It’s not an internal one. We’re not arguing about are we going to build a Gutenberg cover block first or a feature block or whatever. I personally couldn’t care less what we build next in WordPress because I think it’s a great piece of software as it is.

We’ve hit not 80 20, but 90 10. And I think the message, what we have to come together on as a community is how do we market WordPress in the coming years? Because WordPress, when it was competing against other software 10 years ago, and it was in one category, it was this one powerful thing against whatever the competitor was. And now you’re taking WordPress, which is not the largest competitor, well, I mean will be by installs, sure. But it’s not necessarily the largest in terms of conversation at whatever the niche or vertical is. So if it’s landing pages with signup and stuff, you have HubSpot, CMS probably takes more Unbounce, whatever. There’s a lot of conversation in these various niches and they have excellent product marketing, which when you compare WordPress in that setting without having done the product marketing exercises for WordPress at that niche or vertical level, the conversation and these feature lists look wildly different.

And that’s exactly what happened with Contentful and WordPress because Contentful was saying, well, WordPress is this. It’s that kind of sucks and it’s old and all these things, and we didn’t even have a single page to even enter that conversation. So in these micro conversations or these micro niches or verticals, whatever you want to call them, none of them are we actually loud? So we’re loud overall. And people may lie to themselves and say we power 43% of the web. But when it comes down to the real deal and what’s actually happening on the ground, I think you need a much realer take in terms of where does the market go? And it’s important that we use WordPress because it’s a technology that’s fundamental to humanity, especially during such trying times. I want us to be able to market really well, if anything.

Dave:
So for me, AI can help a lot with this because you can have a conversation about exactly what you need and an AI can go out and assemble all the different components, the theme, the plugins, the patterns, the whatever you need to create exactly the experience you’re looking for on top of WordPress. So we go from, I guess this challenge that WordPress is like a broad church. And so it’s hard to compete on an individual kind of niche by niche basis to potentially leapfrogging like let’s paint a rosy picture, being able to leap these SaaS platforms that have harder constraints that AI can’t just come in and orchestrate because the AI is always going to be living within that particular platform. Is there an opportunity here for an AI powered WordPress to outcompete out niche, these platforms that are not modular, that are not open source and have the harder constraints that they need in order to be focused? Can we lean on that?

Noel:
I think yes, but at the same time you have to look at the success a platform like Ghost had in terms of self-publishing and being that sort of platform and having and building this great niche. And John Nolan has been very successful coming out day one of Ghost. I don’t know how many people are like, oh yeah, he’s totally going to make it and still have this business years later. And here he is doing very well. And I think again, that comes back to the fundamentals of product marketing and understanding your audience. Now, AI is great, and because in absence of amazing product marketing, one of the things you can do is attach yourself to the most amazing, innovative technology that is out there. And then not necessarily a bait and switch, but you’re saying, Hey, here’s ai and then bring it back to WordPress. And so you can do all these things together and it gives people, it sort of busts their potential frame because all of a sudden they’re associating WordPress with this top tier innovative technology that’s coming out.

And the beauty of WordPress in scenarios like this is that it’s probably the one CMS in the space that can move faster than any other in terms of raw output with functionalities and capabilities from various authors that is unmatched on parallel. So I’m assuming you can find OpenAI integrations, clawed integrations, maybe just a stable diffusion integration. And then on top of that you have these other things and then maybe Elementor or whoever else or Sujay over at Astra, they’re maybe working on various agents for each particular block. So you might have an agent for a forum, you might have an agent for a hero block, then you might have an agent for pages and posts. You might have an agent for APIs, and then you have agents that orchestrate these and everything comes together and you might be moving quite quickly. And that’s exciting. But yeah, it is nice from a marketing perspective, but is it the long-term solution? Unlikely.

Dave:
Interesting. Okay. Is there anything else that you want to talk about while we’ve, we’ve got the pleasure of each other now because far away and in this crazy world, who knows when it’s going to be a chance to catch up again? I hope it’s not too long, but is there more that you’d like to talk about that NGO work or more about what’s on your mind from a human made or just general WordPress perspective?

Noel:
I’d say what I talked about now is probably the thing that bugs me the most or lives rent free in my mind is that amazing effort and energy that everyone puts into WordPress, but then is trying to fit through a pipe that’s way too small in terms of product marketing is never really displayed in its full glory to the rest of the market in a very specialized way. And it’s a struggle to you start thinking, are you delusional because you’re talking to an enterprise client, they’re like, ah, WordPress doesn’t do this, doesn’t do that. And you’re sitting there thinking, am I just like a WordPress maxi or do I actually know what I’m talking about? So I think in many ways, when Matt, years ago, 2015, what was it 2015 when he said Learn JavaScript deeply, I think now it’s learn marketing deeply. That’s what I think should be WordPress’s mission for the next two years because we are coming, we are in a time when we’ve gone boom bust and we have an opportunity to seize right now as companies are looking at down rounds, they’re laying off staff.

One of the first places they cut is R&D and innovation, and we have an opportunity to catch up on that ground. Not that we have to necessarily build a lot of stuff at all. I don’t even think we have to build that stuff, but I think we have to just do a much better job of product marketing at three, four or five levels of niches. And to me, it doesn’t mean that those couple niches define what WordPress is. There are just merely abstractions and narratives that sit on top of the WordPress we know today. It’s not trying to change what WordPress is.

Dave:
Concrete illustrations of what you can do. Yeah, and I guess if I was going to do a callback, like some sort of competent podcaster, it would be the beginning of the episode you were talking about how in the chaotic physical world you find yourself in, you have military civilian, NGO, everyone working together, and it was those words, right? Everyone working together towards a common goal. That was the straight, that was how things were getting done. So I wonder how we apply that same directionality or synergy in the WordPress ecosystem, everyone working together towards common mission. That seems to be the thing that would help here.

Noel:
I think we do it by and large when it comes to code, but people fear what they don’t understand. And sometimes I think this 43% of the web crap gets to our head and makes us think that we’re unbeatable and it’s a nice number, but we don’t power 43% of the web. Maybe that statement was true 10 years ago.

Dave:
It’s of domains, isn’t it?

Noel:
It’s not even domains. We can be the secondary or tertiary CMS on a given platform. It doesn’t Facebook have a WordPress blog. Do you, all of a sudden, and I’m sure facebook.com then shows up in this 43% metric. So is that technically right? The much more accurate value, if there would be one is what percentage of page views do we power? What’s the weighted page views that we power globally?

Dave:
Yeah, interesting.

Noel:
And even then for WooCommerce it would be how much revenue does WooCommerce generate compared to other platforms? There’s a lot questions here. Where I think we’re using the map is not the terrain and we’re abusing this map versus terrain difference at a way too large of a scale. And I don’t see enough red team, blue team internal debate to try and figure out what are we maybe doing? What are we missing when we go to market? Because there certainly must be something wrong if almost every agency in this industry or community has to sell WordPress every time they go sell.

Dave:
Well, this has been a more reflective and somewhat solemn episode than that. I thought it would be not.

Noel:
Well, it’s important times.

Dave:
Usually we spend much more time laughing. It is important and I appreciate it. We can have fun and we can also take things seriously sometimes too. Yeah. And is there any way that anyone that’s still listening can support the work that you’re doing in Ukraine, helping animals who can’t help themselves?

Noel:
Yeah, absolutely. So come to my Instagram profile, Noel Tock. I have a couple of explainer videos, like our annual review of the charity last year. I have how we do evacuations and what all happens at our charity. A whole sequence of events, even just those two videos alone will give you very deep insights, I’d say, in terms of what we do. And if that aligns with your values and what you’re willing to support, then by all means reach out or make a donation. This money literally goes into gas costs and shelter costs and food costs and everything. I pay for all my own stuff out here. I’ve never taken a dollar out of donations. So I’m fully self-funded. And Fred is too. We only pay for our Ukrainian staff because they obviously need it, but we try to run as lean as we can. So every donation goes a very long way in helping the little ferries.

Dave:
Okay, so that’s NoelTock as your Instagram username. Dude, stay safe out there and thank you for your time. Thanks for making time from today.

Noel:
I appreciate it too. Thanks.