How Should WordPress Professionals Make and Own Their Content?

Episode 1×23 – Edited Transcript

Teaser

Matt Medeiros: Just like I defend WordPress from a pure blogging platform, I also look at podcasting in the defense of RSS in that same light.

Jesse Friedman: You have to provide great support or the customer’s just not going to have a great experience. They’re going to churn, they’re going to go somewhere else. That’s bad for your hosting company. That’s bad for the ecosystem as a whole.

Matt Medeiros: My content has always been based around a trusted opinion and sharing real human stories, which doesn’t do good for SEO and the algorithm.

Jesse Friedman: This is why building a website, having something on open source, having something to fall back on is always going to be the best way to do it.

Introduction

Jesse Friedman: Welcome to Impressive Hosting, where we uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. I’m your host, Jesse Friedman. Before we dive in, remember to check out impressive.host. It’s where you can comment on episodes, ask follow-up questions, and submit questions for upcoming guests. You’ll also find all our links to follow, like, and subscribe wherever you listen.

With me today is Matt Medeiros back for part two. We were having such a great conversation talking about the WordPress community, hosting, the empowerment of agencies, aligning ourselves with success. It was a great episode and we wanted to keep it going, so welcome back, Matt.

Matt Medeiros: Jesse, it’s great to be back. As I mentioned in part one, hot off the heels of WordCamp where I shared the stage with Jake Goldman, who I also shared—we had an agency panel and I talked about how Jake and yourself, John Delos, Jeff Galinsky, Jay Tripp, we were all like an all-star cast in the Providence WordPress Meetup many, many years ago. And it was great to talk to Jake again and relive that stuff. So happy to be here.

Jesse Friedman: All those Js, huh?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: Jesse, Jeff, John, Jay Tripp. And you didn’t have a J.

Matt Medeiros: No, no J.

Jesse Friedman: Your initials with another famous Matt. MM.

Matt Medeiros: Yes. I’m actually three M’s. So there’s that.

Jesse Friedman: Oh, no kidding. Yeah.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: You win that one.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: The local WordPress community in Rhode Island was absolutely amazing. We had some real rock stars in the area. Unfortunately a lot of them have moved out. I think I’m still, maybe one of the last, still here in Rhode Island. But yeah.

Jake Goldman actually came up in one of our previous episodes too, because 10up is one of those companies that continues to always just give back. And that was one of the things that we had talked about is how an agency like them can continue to write code for their own clients to help improve their progress. But then they just give it away for free. They often make those improvements available to the rest of the community. And that kind of speaks to what we were talking about in the last episode, which is that you have this opportunity in open source communities, not only to build relationships and to strengthen those relationships, but you also have the opportunity to network in a way to get people to come together around an issue and to improve the product yourself. Something that you don’t get with closed-source systems. So that’s cool.

Yeah. Things that we touched on very briefly in the last episode that I wanted to pick back up on is that you run a podcast. It’s very successful. It’s been around for quite a while. You have a lot of episodes in that show. You had mentioned the idea of an ROI behind a podcast episode. It’s funny because we started this podcast out of conversations I was having with Cory Miller at the time he was with Post Status.

And, you know, we were talking about how every time that we went to an event, we were just chatting and sitting around and talking about what the WordPress community needed, especially around what hosts needed to be doing. And we just said, you know, maybe it’s an opportunity for us to have a voice and to really start things up that way. And so Cory and I actually recorded an episode or two just to kind of bang some ideas off the wall on the Post Status side. Then at the same time, I started things with WP Cloud and launching things over there. And so one of the things that really made sense for the WP Cloud side was that what we care about more than anything is making sure that people have a great WordPress experience because, and we say this on the show all the time, when someone signs up for a hosting company and has a poor experience, whether that’s because of the infrastructure, the user experience, or whatever, that customer typically doesn’t just decide to choose another host for WordPress if they’re not experienced enough and in love enough with WordPress to know that they can get a better experience anywhere else. That first experience can often be the last experience. And so what we said to ourselves is like, how can we help the hosting industry, how can we help agencies or whomever offer hosting in a way that would make sure that the infrastructure is going to be superior, set a higher standard, whatever it might be. But then what evolved from this podcast was like, if that’s all we really care about and whether or not you’re a WP Cloud customer or not, then we can start to explore the way in which other people are improving the WordPress hosting industry.

And we can really start to think about, you know, who’s doing it really well and highlight that. And so that’s why we went to launch this whole podcast is because instead of pointing our fingers at the people who might be doing things wrong or could be making improvements, we just want to elevate everybody in the community who’s doing it right. And so to us, the first set of ROI, like the things that we’d want to see on the return on this investment is just the community, helping to improve the way in which you think about hosting to help you make a little bit smarter of a decision so that way you can have a better choice. And then of course there’s added benefit of being able to talk about our products, talk about Automattic, talk about the WordPress community. But I’m curious from your perspective, when you start to talk to and coach people who are looking to run a podcast, especially in this industry, what is it that they’re trying to do? Do they define their goals, and what is it that you’re trying to do to help them understand what they can actually get out of a podcast?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, I mean, I try to—so people come at me for podcast questions at like two different angles. Like one, it’s like they just want to be a star. Like, they just see it as like, oh, this is a way for me to make money. Maybe, maybe if you were like jumping off a building while you’re recording a podcast and a helicopter comes by and you grab it and it’s like this amazing thing.

But the challenge is trying to find like that amazing thing, like that combustion to like really, really excel, doesn’t happen for everyone. So we put our celebrity dreams on the backseat for just a little bit. And just like I was saying in part one, I think when people lead into it, especially if they’re a freelancer or small agency, it’s like increasing that surface luck area.

Like you said, I want to be able to have these conversations and help reinvest that back into the community so that all ships rise.

I think that’s like number one is like understanding where you want to be with this podcast. Like, okay, well we take the celebrity side and the big money side out of it, at least in the early days, then, you know, what’s next for you.

Like, how can you be satisfied with this thing? Because what quickly happens is while a podcast becomes work, like, you know, you have your first—and just like you and I, Jesse, like as I was mentioning in part one of our show, you were my first guest. You were the only person I knew. And then after that I had to knock on doors.

Curtis McHale was my second and I think maybe Brian Castle was my third. And these were people that I just saw at WordCamps. And I just like, I didn’t have any friends—air quotes—in WordPress. Now, nowadays, like a lot of businesses are much more keen to be doing a podcast. So whatever they have there, you know, six to a dozen close business friends and like, “Hey, come on the podcast.”

And then after that they’re like, “Oh my God, now I have to find more people.” So it’s very important, like when you’re starting the podcast to understand what you’re going to do with this show, to be satisfied with it and understand that it’s going to be some work after episodes, you know, 10 to 20.

So have a plan for that, as well.

Premise, show design, like all of this stuff is important, but it comes over time. That I think for me anyway, it’s an evolving process. You know, you try to stand out, you try to be different. Highly competitive space. But you know, if you’re creating that valuable content and you’re spending time promoting it and making sure people are engaged with it, then you’ll find some success.

But at the end of the day, if it’s not a monetary thing that you’re measuring, I feel truly that if you don’t give up, you will eventually have something happen in your business where that podcast was super impactful. In my agency days, this is why I started my podcast when I saw Jake start 10up and he was just like, excelling in one direction of growth and finding customers.

I realized like, oh, Jake knows everybody in the WordPress community, you know, and back then, like every brand was like, just give me WordPress, get me out of like Microsoft or Adobe, you know, back then. And I was like, how? I’m like, I’m not a developer. How am I going to find out? How am I going to find these kinds of clients?

And I realized he just knew everybody in the WordPress space and how valuable that was. So that’s why I started my, at the time Matt Report, to have those conversations with folks so that I could find my way, you know, in WordPress and in agency life.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. That’s really great. So, if you’re an agency at home or someone who works in the hosting industry or whatever, other than this podcast, which are your favorite podcasts out there, which ones should people be listening to?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s going to depend on where people are at in their business. You know, shameless plug, the WP Minute and the Breakdown podcast by Gravity Forms, for WordPress stuff.

But I think there’s like, there’s so much stuff and I’ve been finding lately just a bunch of new AI podcasts so that I can stay up to date on what’s happening with AI.

And I don’t even have a favorite one there ’cause I’ve just been subscribing to all of them so that I can just consume everything. And it depends on where you’re at and where you’re thinking of your business. I know from a pure agency perspective, our good buddy Troy Dean is still at it with Agency Mavericks and Troy has been putting out amazing content for as long as I have. He used to be WP Elevation and sort of matured into Agency Mavericks. That’s a fantastic one if you’re learning how to be an agency. Another one at sort of like the top of agency world would be Chris Do from The Futur, he puts out really good stuff.

I remember him starting out with, I forget the name of his first podcast, but now he’s like over a million subscribers on YouTube. Like he does a lot of fantastic stuff on branding and selling. Those are the areas I would look in if you were an agency owner.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. I’ll also throw out there too, one of my favorites is Do the Woo with Bob Dunn.

Matt Medeiros: Oh yeah, sure thing.

Jesse Friedman: That is another good one too. Yeah. So I, you know, I don’t think there’s any reason to have it be a shameless plug. So you have the WP Minute, which is yours, and then you also have the Gravity Forms one, and what was the name of that one again?

Matt Medeiros: That one’s Breakdown.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Yeah. And so what is the main topic on that podcast? What are you, what are you guys covering?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, so on Breakdown as a Gravity Forms customer, we’re covering, you know, any of the big updates happening with Gravity Forms, new feature releases. We do monthly webinars too, so we’re taking snippets of content from that and sharing that on the podcast, you know, to entice folks to go listen and join our next webinars.

And then Gravity Forms has been around for 15 years, so there’s just a ton of community developers and there’s what we call certified developers who build add-ons that Gravity Forms recommends. So we spend a lot of time co-marketing with them, talking about all the cool stuff that they’re building, and generally sharing as many use cases as possible, because Gravity Forms can do so much and it’s been around for so long, we’re always trying to curate those blueprints or recipes, if you will, to say, “Hey, look, if you use these add-ons with WordPress, you can achieve this.” That’s what I spend a lot of time with on the Breakdown podcast.

And WP Minute is just like I was doing with Matt Report—interviews, talking to other WordPress entrepreneurs, what they’re building, and then there’s a short form podcast about five to eight minutes, which is freelancer and agency tips that happen as well.

Jesse Friedman: Cool. And so if I was going to start another podcast and I didn’t have WP Cloud to fall back on, where would I want to host it? What, what do I want to look for when it comes to podcast hosting?

Matt Medeiros: Ooh, this is a great question. And one that you’ll be pleasantly surprised that I can tie back into Automattic.

Jesse Friedman: I love it.

Matt Medeiros: It wasn’t, it wasn’t planned, so, you know, I guess you won’t get in trouble. I’ll name three of my favorite podcast hosting companies: Transistor, RSS.com, and Buzzsprout. And these three podcast hosting companies all offer their own sort of spin on things.

Transistor, very easy, owned by Justin Jackson, prolific entrepreneur. RSS.com, also owned by two individuals, great company. And then Buzzsprout, a little bit larger, bigger than both of those, traditional but very easy to use. One thread follows all three of them: they all work with Podcasting 2.0 standards, which is just like in WordPress. It’s an open-source collaboration of folks that come together to enhance the RSS feed. And that’s all they do is they focus on enhancing the RSS feed.

Sort of just like if there were things in the WordPress database and a theme never showed it, you would never know it’s there.

That’s what these folks do. They enhance the RSS feed for podcast hosting companies to pull things out like transcripts, person tags, where you can have like a little avatar and little bio about the person who’s hosting the show or the guest on the show, the funding tag, which allows you to put in a little link that says, you know, “Give me a tip on PayPal,” or “Go to my Stripe checkout and pay me.”

There’s all these really, really cool features that Podcasting 2.0 is enhancing podcasting and these hosting companies support it. Now, the tie-back to Automattic is PocketCasts, which is an Automattic company, is doing some amazing work finally. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean, just like finally a big app is finally looking at Podcasting 2.0 as a benefit. So PocketCasts recently rolled out transcripts, the funding tag, they support chapters as well. And that’s all Podcasting 2.0 stuff. This is like open-source stuff that random folks around the web have built for the betterment of podcasting, just like WordPress. And it’s great to see PocketCasts in there.

’Cause now if you look for the WP Minute, I have a little funding button in there and now you can, if you like my content, you can press it and buy me a coffee for five bucks or whatever. And those things, you, those things don’t exist unless all of the partners come together. That’s me as a podcaster to say, “I want this functionality.” It’s Transistor saying, “Yes, we’ll support the funding tag” and then it’s folks like PocketCasts that will then expose that to the end user because Apple and Spotify will never touch that stuff. It’s not on their radar. And it’s great to see PocketCasts investing in the Podcasting 2.0 stuff.

And yeah, it’s, it’s for me, those three hosts are the ones that do it, do it the best and support Podcasting 2.0. That’s a long answer to your question, but I’m so passionate about podcasting.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. No, but that’s a really great answer because when we do publish this and we do put it on the website and we have it on the PocketCasts episode and stuff, it’s one of those things that you’re like, what you’re talking about is that we can expose that bit of this content of this episode and answer that question for someone. So they may not be necessarily interested in learning the core tenets of WordPress hosting, but maybe somebody wants the answer to the question, where to host a podcast. And the thing that’s interesting that you, you know, you mentioned PocketCasts, which I use exclusively, not just because it’s an Automattic product, but because it really is a phenomenal podcast consuming experience.

And so you get so many tools, like you can bucket things into different folders. You can bookmark things. Some of the things I love doing now is that PocketCasts makes it easy for you to share a clip of the show. So you can say between—

Matt Medeiros: Yes.

Jesse Friedman: Five minutes and 10 seconds and six minutes and eight seconds or whatever, you can clip that up and you can just share that by itself. Yeah, so PocketCasts, I definitely think is one of those things that’s just far superior. And actually I just complimented the team internally because they do something that’s even better than what I’ve seen from major streaming companies, which is that when you’re watching a show on Netflix and you’re watching it on your TV, and you’re like, “All right, I’m going to bed and I’m moving to my phone.” It never seems to know where to pick up where you left off.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: It’s frustrating. Netflix, Paramount Plus, the rest of these, they drive me absolutely nuts. But PocketCasts, I’ll listen to the desktop app on my computer, hit pause and open it up on my phone and just hit play as I’m moving towards the car to go home for the day. And it will literally pick up from the moment that I left off and it’s, for whatever reason they were able to solve this better than some of the largest streaming companies in the world. It just works. And thanks for the shout-out for PocketCasts. You know, what’s also interesting too, is to kind of expose some of my own ignorance, when I started this podcast, there was something I didn’t actually even understand about the podcasting industry.

And Spotify’s, the Apple’s of the world, they don’t actually host the audio files for your podcast. All they really are is a conduit to the actual source file that’s hosted somewhere else. And it blew my mind. I don’t know why, but I had it in my mind that these are actually streaming companies, but they’re not, they’re really player companies.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, it was, it was kind of mind-boggling. But, you know, one thing that I did learn is that WordPress.com actually has a podcasting setting and there’s a custom post type that’s built right into it so that when you build your page, it actually does host the audio files as well.

So that way it’s all in one place, but then it pushes it to Spotify and Apple Music and all that as well. So maybe—

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: A slightly cheaper option if you’re looking for something really just bare bones trying to get things going.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, I mean, we are—it’s like, I’m in huge, you know, just like I defend like WordPress from a pure blogging platform, like to have your own content, you can move it to different hosts and like the independence of publishing and writing. I also look at podcasting in the defense of RSS in that same light. And for years, Spotify was trying to take over that experience and they were trying to say things like they were the home for podcasters and all this stuff, but it wasn’t an open ecosystem. It was a closed ecosystem. It still remains to be, although they’ll ingest from an RSS feed, you know, there are, they do hosting for video files now.

It’s a whole thing. But it’s like just on their, in their environment. And, you know what’s funny is that Google last year killed off Google Podcast apps from showing up. Well, it just killed it off altogether, right? So it’s not on Android devices anymore. And they shifted it over to YouTube Music as the way to listen to podcasts, which now forces creators to create a YouTube channel, right?

So this is a thing happening in the industry now where it’s just like, do I, you know, it’s like, “Well, I should just start a YouTube channel.” But if you just do a YouTube channel, then you never get the essence of a podcast. And the most important part is that RSS feed so that you can publish and be consumed in places like PocketCasts.

’Cause that’s open publishing, just like WordPress is open publishing, you know? In my opinion.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And this show in particular actually has like a basically a bifurcated uploading experience where we create the podcast and we upload it. I think it’s Transistor actually. And then it gets distributed to all these podcast episodes and then the video aspect of it obviously goes to YouTube and gets posted there.

So it’s, I mean, it’s just adding a lot of extra legwork to kind of put the same files in the same places. But that’s, yeah, that’s a really interesting insight into the background of podcasting. I didn’t know a lot of that stuff. Thanks for—

Matt Medeiros: It’s, it plus it’s like portability too. Like at the end of the day, you know, one of the, not to make this a podcast tangent, but at the end of the day, like there’s always like, “Well, YouTube is great for search and comments and all this stuff.” And it’s like, yeah, I, I totally get it. I totally agree. It is a social network with video as the primary piece of content.

But if you own your RSS feed, just like if you own your WordPress site, if there’s ever an issue with YouTube, they change the algorithm. They change the way that you upload, and you’re not happy with that. The RSS feed gives you that portability. So it’s a constant battle to like all like the ad tech companies and all like the new money coming into podcasting and they’re just like “RSS—that’s old technology.”

Like we’re onto like building our API endpoints with AI. Now you’re like, great, but I, you know, now I can just, I can, I can move my RSS feed anywhere and people can still tune in at the most with the most basic technology. And I think that’s so important.

Jesse Friedman: And it empowers people to create new apps all the time without having to do some complex technology.

Matt Medeiros: Correct.

Jesse Friedman: Because you’re talking about owning your RSS feed. One thing that I’ve been talking about for quite a while, and I keep bringing up over and over again is this idea that people don’t own their influence, right?

They talk—

Matt Medeiros: Hmm.

Jesse Friedman: Is they talk about being on social media and all these other things. And then you watch these horror stories of people who’ve built up businesses and launched brands on top of Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or whatever it might be. And then all of a sudden they’re demonetized or they’re dropped from the algorithm for one of a million reasons, and they’re losing their full, they lose their audience.

They lose everything overnight, and it’s because they have absolutely no control. And then what happens in that moment? How do you get your audience, how do you get them to follow you? Like, let’s say your channel just gets dropped for some reason. It doesn’t even have to be as malicious as like you actually get banned from the social media platform.

It could just be that you no longer show up in people’s algorithms, and so then all of a sudden your ability to broadcast to them is no longer being received and you’re just talking in a small little echo chamber with yourself. How do you actually reconnect with those people? You have to start all over again, and you have to build it back up and adjust for the algorithm. The thing that I keep trying to tell people is that you need a backbone on something that’s open source. It doesn’t even have to be WordPress, but it—

Matt Medeiros: Correct.

Jesse Friedman: Has to be on open source so that you own it. Push every one of your social media followers to a website where they can subscribe, they can comment, they can have more direct integrative interactions with you. And in that way, with that backbone, if anything, any one of those other peripheral social media platforms were to screw you, then you can still fall back on a way to communicate with them and continue your work.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. There, I mean, it’s a lot of folks lean to like, talk about, I don’t know, brand safety. And it’s like, oh, you know, you get flagged on your content and they kick you off, and now where do you go? And that, and that’s fine. That’s like, that’s an argument. But then there’s all like the false flags, right?

Where all of a sudden they just shut your account off because they thought you were doing something. And it’s like, it wasn’t me. Like why did, why did I get flagged for this? I, a friend who’s an author, actually she’s in Rhode Island and she’s a, you know, she’s actually a really big author in her topic.

And she distributes her books on Amazon. And there was a, she went through like a whole month of her books not being available because somebody uploaded a Russian translation of her books and it was flagged as somebody else just flagged it, said, “Oh, that’s not, this is a,” what’s the word I’m looking for? Pirated. So this is like a pirated version of this. So they shut down her store and the pirated store, and it’s, since it’s all automated, she literally had nobody to talk to. And it was like during her whole book sale, and it’s just like no one’s able to buy the book on Kindle or on Amazon, and it’s like a huge distribution point for her.

And it was just all automated and no one to talk to. And, that’s the side of it. That’s tough.

Jesse Friedman: That is so tough. I mean, when you think about it from this perspective that social media company is telling you to come and build a business and build a brand around them, and that’s the most vile thing too, is those malicious flags when someone can just go on your account and flag something for, you know, being adult or something like, self-harm seems to be the one that’s the fastest way to flag something and get it taken down.

And it could be absolutely in no way related to it in any way, but these AI algorithms not even really testing it, it’s easier for them to just remove the content than it is for them to evaluate it and actually put human eyeballs on it. And then, you—

Matt Medeiros: Right.

Jesse Friedman: ’Cause my daughter, who, and her generation consume so much content on YouTube over what we’re used to, TV and these streaming services, she actually got into the actual economy that exists in YouTube and she showed me this great video where someone, you know, they’re building, they’re creating these videos. It can take them months, and they’re doing the research and they’re creating these video diaries or video journalistic videos, and they’re investing all this time into it on the bet that the return for them is the ad revenue that they’re going to make off of it.

And then they plan it out, you know, I had this misconception that a lot of the times that people were building things on YouTube were doing it as a hobby, as a side business, or trying to just make some extra cash. But there are these people who are, you know, doing this stuff full time and running entire companies behind it with employees and salary and everything else. All it takes is a little flag to demonetize a video that you invested—

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: Months in and you’re expecting, you know, a million dollars of revenue over the next three years on it, and now you’re getting nothing and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: It’s unbelievably frustrating. That’s—anyways, to kind of loop that back like this is why building a website, having something on open source, having something to fall back on is always going to be the best way to do it. Obviously, social media can accelerate your path to getting, you know, views and building a community and everything else, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be the only way in which you interact with people.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Go ahead.

Jesse Friedman: Go for it, Matt.

Matt Medeiros: I was just, I was just going to quickly say, even in the WP Minute and the content that I produce, like I have never been the one who has written like a blog post that’s the 12 best contact form plugins or the six best restaurant themes. I know a lot of people who have done that over the years who have made a considerable amount of money on affiliate and SEO traffic, which cool, kudos to them.

But my content has always been based around a trusted opinion and sharing real human stories, which doesn’t do good for SEO and the algorithm. But what it has built is that trust factor in the community. And I think we’re going to start going to a world where a lot of that thin content is going to be answered by AI really quickly.

And it’s the human interaction stuff, like the stuff that you and I are doing right now, which will be the one that people will crave because they’ll just get it quickly from AI and, you know, some recipe or whatever. I’m like, okay, cool. But now I want to hear Jesse and Matt talk about stuff because AI isn’t able to do that for me.

So, not yet anyway.

Jesse Friedman: That’s a great point. So we’re getting close to the end of episode two. It’s crazy how fast this stuff blows by. There is something from the first episode that we touched on that I want to circle back to before we run out of time here, which is that you were talking about agencies who were using hosting, reselling to add some revenue to their books. And it’s actually in alignment with what we’re working on with WP Cloud. Actually, last month we released WP Cloud Self-Serve. So there’s an opportunity now for you to go to WP Cloud. You can sign up, you can go through the whole process.

We even provide a panel UI and you can build out your own white-labeled hosting company. And the reason we wanted to do this is because not only do we want to accelerate more hosting companies having access to something like WP Cloud, but we also identify that agencies have something unique that they can get done in this realm, which is that they can host websites and build a passive book of business, passive income from bringing in customers and all that.

WP Cloud manages the actual stack, the infrastructure, all that stuff. So the only thing they really have to do is launch a website and provide support to those customers. But then they actually get to sell into that book of business and provide their agency services to those people. So when they run into a stumbling block with WordPress and they can’t build something, or they need something really bespoke, they’re not trying to piece the puzzle together from going outside of their hosting company to another agency.

Their agency is actually an agency first. And so we saw this as a way that not only can it benefit the agency, but it can benefit the end consumer experience because those customers then get a fully integrated agency support system into that WordPress. So it’s more likely they’re going to succeed, more likely they’re going to launch all that. Anyways, what I’m curious about is if you’re an agency out there thinking about getting into that book of business and trying to do that, what advice would you have for them? What would you tell them to look for? You know what programs exist out there. We talked actually too, about agency programs are coming out of the woodwork, you know, I know this firsthand. Automattic launched 4A, the Automattic for Agencies program.

Bluehost launched an agency one. It seems like that’s coming out of the woodwork too. So I’m just curious in the last minute or two, what advice would you give to an agency out there who wants to get into this?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, I mean, I think that, well, it’s fantastic that you launch the self-serve thing. I would be cautious to, the only cautious that I would give to an agency is to not think that it’s going to be so easy to support your customers.

Jesse Friedman: Support is the key feature there.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Support is the key feature there.

And like, that’s what you need to remember. And you know, I don’t know what your SLAs are for agencies who sign up for this, you know, do-it-yourself service on how you support them on the backend, but they should definitely use that as a frame of reference when they’re talking to their clients.

Hopefully what they’re doing is with their client base that they’re focused on. I don’t know, they, they only build membership websites or they only build e-commerce for car dealerships or something like that. They know their customers so well that when they do the hosting side of it, like they kind of know what they’re going to expect when they have to support that business. If they’re all over the place and they’re a brand new agency slash freelancer, all right. You know, I’d say be a little cautious before you just start telling people you are a web host now. Really, really punch into your core competencies as an agency. So that, you know, when it comes time to support, it’s going to be a little bit easier on the backend.

Jesse Friedman: That’s great. The support element is something that continually comes up as a theme on the show that recurring over and over again. You have to provide great support or the customer’s just not going to have a great experience. They’re going to churn, they’re going to go somewhere else. That’s bad for your hosting company.

That’s bad for the ecosystem as a whole. Matt, thanks so much for joining the show. It was actually, quite amazing to kind of come all the way back full circle, 17 years later, sharing time on a podcast. It was an excellent conversation and you have so much to share. I hope someday, you know, you’ll be back on the show and we’ll do this all over again.

Matt Medeiros: Thanks for having me, Jesse. Appreciate it.

Jesse Friedman: Thank you.

Conclusion

Thanks for joining us on another episode of Impressive Hosting, where we uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. Do you have a follow-up question for today’s guest, thought or comment on anything we talked about, a future guest suggestion, a hosting horror story? What do you think makes great WordPress hosting? All your comments shape the show. Drop them on impressive.host. We also appreciate you following us on social media and subscribing to the podcast on your favorite platform. Finally, do check out our list of open-source projects that need support at impressive.host. Whether it’s code, community, or cash, you can make a difference.

See you next time.