Mark Westguard Joins the Hosting Team

BobWP:
Well, I’m here with some very exciting news. I mean, I’m so excited that I couldn’t even sleep last night because I was lying there thinking about announcing this. We have a new host joining our team. I think that’ll bring us up to, I don’t know, 25 or something, but many of you know him in this WordPress space, and we have an idea for our new show that we’ll be doing once a month. I’m going to welcome Mark Westguard.

Mark:
Hello, Bob. Hello. 25 hosts in and we finally get around.

BobWP:
Yeah, isn’t that something though? But everybody that knows you will only wonder how you can possibly even do this once a month.

Mark:
That’s why it’s taking 25 hosts to get here. Yeah, too busy. Well, it’s December, so it calms down, so I feel like I can fit things in, and then January comes around. Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Thank you for inviting me on. I’ve been gate-crashing your co-host photos for many years, so I’ve got a lot to earn.

BobWP:
Yeah. Well, I know that a lot of people that listen either know you well or they’ve met you at a WordCamp or somewhere else, but why don’t you give a short intro just for those that don’t know who you are?

Mark:
Sure. Short intro is Mark Westguard, and I’ve been in the WordPress space for probably about 10 years, but actually a product developer for about six, seven years. So I run the WordPress form plugin WS Form and try to be deep into the community as much as I can. You often see me and Bob at WordCamps getting up to mischief, and so yeah, I’ve been in the web game for about 20, I don’t know how long now. I’ve lost track—20 odd years.

BobWP:
Oh, that’s scary.

Mark:
28 years. So just a veteran and still love it to this day. So yeah, that’s me.

BobWP:
Yeah, and you’re pretty much a one-person shop, right?

Mark:
Yeah, yeah. I used to employ 40 people in an agency and am quite enjoying having a little bit of a relaxing time being a plugin developer for the moment and going well. So yeah, I’ve managed to keep it going with just me and avoiding any HR issues, but hopefully we’ll grow into a team again one day.

BobWP:
And that leads into the fact that we didn’t really know what we were going to be doing a show on. We don’t usually, do we? And we haven’t even come up with the name yet, but we at least figured out what we’re going to do with the show. Before we started, Mark had a good idea. It’s a take on some of the stuff we’re doing, but it’s our audience and the type of guests we’ve had on. So I’ll let you tell everybody a little bit about the general idea.

Mark:
Sure. You and I are often at WordCamps, and we’re often talking to smaller businesses as well as the big companies that are out there, and I’ve always had a passion for wanting to raise awareness of smaller businesses and help small businesses out. So we’ve decided that we’re going to invite some small businesses onto the show and just have a chat with ’em, just learn their story, hear where their struggles are, where they’ve had successes, and hopefully their stories, concerns, and wins will help other people.

And also, interestingly, I always love talking to another small business owner and seeing how they’ve gotten on, and sometimes listening to those stories can be reassuring to yourself that you’re doing okay. In the WordPress space, it’s very saturated, and it can be a bit of a struggle getting going and gaining some momentum. So yes, that’s basically what we’ve decided to do—have a chat with some small businesses, and we’re going to be starting that in the new year.

BobWP:
Yeah, I think it’s a great idea because we don’t often have questions prepared for our guests on any of our shows, as some of the hosts might do, but most of the conversation is organic. You learn things, and sometimes they might share things they never thought they would share—not because they’re private, but it’s just never come up in the conversation. Suddenly it’s like, wow, yeah, I can relate to this. And so I’m looking forward to it. You’re a very good conversationalist. People get along with you, especially when you’re buying at WordCamp.

Mark:
Well, it’s my round again.

BobWP:
Yeah, seriously.

Mark:
That’s why at WordCamp US, I did the small get-together, and we had 40, 50 people just from all walks of life, but mostly small businesses there, and it was really nice just to get together and chat. I think those face-to-face interactions are valuable. So being able to do this on the show and share it with everybody, share those conversations—people can come in and hear conversations that we would have at those types of events—I think would be really valuable.

BobWP:
And originally we were trying to think—I’m not even going to get into some of the topics we thought about or I thought about because they all, they basically really sucked, all of them. Every time I moved to something else. But originally we were going to be co-hosting it, and the more I think about this, I’ll be there to jump in as co-host, but I think at the same time there’ll be a lot more value because of what you’re doing if you have one-on-one conversations with somebody and just take it from there. Or even if you decide to invite a couple of different guests from a couple of different businesses, we’ll see how it goes. There are plenty of people out there that we can approach and talk to, and I’m sure that they’ll jump on the opportunity to be on your show.

Mark:
Yeah.

BobWP:
Cool. So yeah, looking forward to it. It’s going to be good.

Mark:
Yeah, sounds good.

BobWP:
So yeah, that’s basically it in a nutshell. That’s it. I know we have kind of a day planned to record, but we don’t have a day that it’ll be coming out that we can say, “Regularly expect it then,” but it will start in January sometime—probably around mid-January. And yeah, like you said, we often, if you go to a WordCamp, one of the flagships, if we’re both sponsoring, we’re usually next to each other. In fact, sometimes people probably wonder or something, but it’s always fun. It’s always fun.

Mark:
It is great that all your co-hosts come to your booth there, and I’ll be right next to it, so I won’t have to walk far.

BobWP:
No. And I was thinking in February at WordCamp Asia, we’ll have to do a show. We can just ask different people that are coming to both our booths about some of this stuff—just do a short one.

Mark:
Well, we can just be lazy because all the small businesses will be around us, so we can just go and ask them if they want to be on the show and we can prerecord the entire year.

BobWP:
Yeah.

Mark:
Now there’s an idea.

BobWP:
So you never know what will come out of WordCamp Asia. So thanks again, Mark.

Mark:
Yeah, thank you. Take care.