Mike Demo Riding the Woo Train

Bob: Hey, Bob WP here and I’m on the train still, but I’m finally out of Montana, which is good because I don’t know where… I’m not even sure where we’re at right now. I have my guest Mike Demo here. Do you know where we are, Mike?

Mike: Yeah, so we just entered Wisconsin.

Bob: Great. We’re in Wisconsin. Okay, cool. Anyway, another podcast on the fly here. You’re probably wondering how I got two people on the podcast on the train, which is kind of bizarre. The last time you heard Susan tell her story, which was very serendipity. So first of all, Mike Demo. Hello, and wow. We’re here on the train. What can I say?

Mike: We’re on the empire builder, Amtrak route, which goes right through my home in Minnesota. I asked you if I could just hop on for a leg and hang out. So it’s really cool to see you, I haven’t seen you since before the panini, so it’s been a while. So I just hopped on when I came over to the St. Paul Union Depot.

Bob: Well, he’s a very brave person to hop on with me, so that’s cool. There will be somebody, maybe one person that listens to this and say, “Who the heck is Mike demo?” Just tell us a little bit about what you do before we get into anything else.

Mike: I’m probably most known in the WordPress community. As you know, I started at Bolt Grid, and helping In Motion for their plugin brands. Things like W3 total cash fraud, invoices, et cetera. But I’ve recently… Well, June, so it’s not that recently, joined Codeable as the expert community development lead. So Codeable, if you don’t know what it is, it’s a two sided marketplace like Upwork or Fiverr or Toptal, and we have 600, 700 WordPress developers that work for our 25,000 plus clients. And I help the community side of that for our developers. So I’m working on the community team.

Bob: Cool. Let’s go back to this getting on the train thing. I don’t want to keep rehashing that, but it’s.. when Mike actually asked me about it, I thought… I never thought I’d ask anybody, “Hey, I’m passing through your city, you want to get on the train with me?” I mean, that sounds kind of weird.

Mike: Compared to all the normal ideas you have.

Bob: All those other normal ideas. But was it just a last minute, just a spur of the moment, inspiration? I mean, it’s something that I doubt if very few people would even want to basically do or make the time to do.

Mike: Well, you were telling me about your cross country train ride to go to New York for state of the word. And I know that route pretty well, and I’m like, “I’m pretty sure…” It just came to me instantly. I’m like, “I think you’re coming through Minnesota.” And then you said, “Yes, I am.” And you’re like, “I’m thinking of doing a dinner in Chicago,” and I’m like, “Well, maybe we can help with that.” And I said, “Would do you mind if I just hop on and I can fly back after we have the dinner in Chicago with the group of some wonderful WordPress people?” And I was happy you agreed. And honestly, it was just fun to see you and it’s going to be cool to hang out with people. And I’ve always wanted to do this train ride from Minnesota, Chicago, but it’s usually cost more than flights, so I just never have, so it kind of a selfish reason too, because I wanted to try it.

Bob: Well, that’s good. Yes, we’re having a dinner, Codeable will be taking care of it. I think we have nine people showing up. And it’s really funny because we’ve had to… Since we’ve been on the train, we’ve changed the time two times because of the schedule and Mike keeps having to check the app to make sure, just see how close we get to it. But we do have somebody Robert Jacoby who a lot of, he’s going to hold down the fort for us, begrudgingly, but…

Mike: So funny thing about Robert… I first met Robert at the Joomla Developer Conference in Chicago and he never went been to a Hard Rock before. So I said, “Hey, I’m going to go to Hard Rock. Do you want to join me for dinner?” And that’s the first time I actually hung out with Robert, was at the Hard Rock Cafe in Chicago, which is actually where we’re having dinner with our group tonight. So it’s kind of all full circle that I met, basically Robert at a Hard Rock Cafe, really. And now he’s with Cloud Waves obviously, and they’re one of the sponsors of your train journey. So it’s just kind of funny that over a decade ago I met Robert and hung out with him for the first time at the same place that we’re having dinner tonight, so that’s kind of neat.

Bob: That is. So I’m wondering, is there an engraved plaque in the floor that said, “This is where Mike met Robert.”?

Mike: No plaque, but I do have status at Hard Rock. I do have status at Hard Rock. I get offers and things. And it was funny because Robert was like, “There’s a huge wait and I just showed my card and we didn’t have to wait.” He’s like, “How did you do that?” I was flexing my Hard Rock status before him and I were even traveling hardly at all. And now we have Delta status and hotel status and all the stuff that actually matters. Robert has reluctantly joined me in probably over 15 to 20 Hard Rock’s around the world, including once in India. And that was a very interesting time. The Hard Rock actually had dirt floors and just little string lights. It hardly had power. It was in a Bangalore door. It’s just kind of funny. We’re kind of going full circle.

Bob: Maybe we can talk about a couple other little things, but since I’m going to say the word and I’ve asked… Well, I’ve had a couple podcasts since that. Is there anything that… It’s state of the word, I mean, it’s the yearly thing. Anything that you hope that’s talked about or anything that… something you want hear or… I don’t know what I want to say. Just, what’s your feel for it? If you could say, “This is the thing I hope Matt Mullenweg covers or talks about or dresses or whatever.”?

Mike: The thing I hope to hear more about… And Josepha’s been doing an amazing time, since she’s been leading the project is I would like to see some new initiatives on how to get new blood into the WordPress project. And every open source project has this issue. We just saw it when the top contributor for PHP decided to step away, now there’s the PHP Foundation had just got formed. That so much of the code is done by such a small subset of the community. And I do talk to people that want to get involved in the WordPress community and there is make.wordpress.org, but it’s a little bit daunting because you don’t know what team to join, you might not know anyone. I would love to see some initiatives that way. As far as the product itself, some accessibility, focus and talk would be interesting. That’s something that’s always a priority.

Mike: I think the blog editor, obviously we’re going to probably see some improvements on that and it’s going to be interesting to see how it compares to some of these other website as a service offerings and how WordPress is going to be to compete with those more because it’s a thing, love it or hate it. Wix, we believe in Squarespace. The user experience is not bad. Us as developers, we can hate it all day long. But they’re not selling to us, they’re selling to somebody who just needs a website and that’s why blog editor is the step in that direction. We know it’s going to affect themes and all this other stuff and templating, so it’ll be interesting to see how it compares on that. I do think we’ll see some more entry level-ish features that developers will be annoyed with at first. But again, developers were annoyed when we switch it to the content management systems in the first place. It’ll be interesting to see where the future goes there because it’s not going away. And WordPress is for everybody, not just for people that build websites.

Bob: You can listen to the announcement now. I could be quiet and you could actually listen. Last call for lunch. We had our lunch. Anyway, little sound effect there and I didn’t even have to force it in. What just occurred to me is you have 600 developers. And I know you’re new to Codeable. I mean, you haven’t been like… years and years and years, but I just wonder, if something was announced there, if it’s 600 developers, you feel the earth shake or there’s a massive shutter or… Do they really take this apt word or are they listening to it or… I’m just wondering if there’s any kind of an effect when… You’re all developers. I mean, that’s all, so if something specifically was announced, “We’re going to do this,” and they cheer or they all go, “Hmm.” I don’t know. I’m just…

Mike: We do. Our community is very active, so we have an expert Slack. And so when things get announced or whenever a new plugin gets acquired, or whenever there’s any big news in the community, it does get discussed. For example, the security breach at GoDaddy, and some of their related brands. There was a lot of discussion in our expert community. And you had everything from all sides, same thing that you done on Twitter, like saying, “Well, I’m happy that it happened because I hate GoDaddy,” to other people being like, “The problem’s not unique to GoDaddy. It just so happened that it happened, but there’s bigger problems that we have to solve in relation to security and users and things.” So we kind of get all stripes on these discussions.

Mike: We just sent out a survey about WooCommerce and hosting products. And it had a list of 500 hosting products out there from the big guys to the ones you haven’t heard of. And it’s interesting to see the discussion that’s happening about specific products, because some people like the big players, some people like the niche players, some people don’t really care where their clients are hosted. So what’s unique about us is that we promise our clients that wherever they came from, we’re going to keep them on that stack. So if they came from one of our plug-in partners or hosting partners, we promise to those partners that they’ll stay on that. And then the client doesn’t need to learn something new and our experts can evolve. So there will be some feedback I’m sure after Tuesday, we did include in our weekly expert newsletter to watch it. We share that feedback to our partners when it relates to them and to other people in the community as it makes sense.

Bob: Okay, cool. I don’t want to just ramble and kill time because I’m really good at doing that, especially when I do podcasts by myself, but… Okay, so you have this opportunity right now and yes, Mike pointed out, this is the first time he’s been on my podcast and I felt really bad, but no… You got an audience of developers right now. Is there some wisdom or little bit of thought you want to just share on anything, anywhere WordPress? And if you want to talk WooCommerce you can, but it’s not necessary.

Mike: So, on WooCommerce specifically, one of the best things you can do to help conversions… I had a Shopify client, but the same rules apply, is offer paying for via either PayPal or Sezzle or CARMA or any one of the other payment provider. There was a New York toy store. You’re going to New York, but it was a Manhattan toy store. And I helped them five or six X their year to day revenue just by installing Sezzle paying for. People are now used to monthly payments. They like seeing this thing’s only $20 a month versus $20 for four payments versus $80 or something, so that’s a very simple thing you can do on WooCommerce and get some conversions very easily and help your clients close more. Now that’s only works for physical goods, not so much on digital goods, but that’s an easy thing to do on WooCommerce. Definitely highly recommend that.

Mike: As far as developers, if you’re freelancing, think about how much you’re really worth, don’t compare yourself to other developers or other parts of the world, because no matter where you’re located, US, Southeast Asia, South America, North America, western Europe, eastern Europe. At Codeable, we pay all of our experts the same range, the same minimum, 70 to $120 an hour. And we do that because good code is good code. And yes, I know it’s disheartening when you’re looking online and you might get outbid by someone who’s offering to do something way cheaper. But those people probably aren’t your clients anyway, so just remember that. Remember what you’re worth and focus on what makes sense and what’s happy for you. Nathan Ingram has a great book called Building Fences Around Friendly Monsters. That talks about how to set rules with your clients that I highly recommend.

Mike: And if you’re newer on the freelancing game, it only takes… If you do one $500 project every business day, that’s $120,000 your first year. Now I know that seems crazy like, “How am I to get one project every day?” But the same people that are going to Wix believe in square space for those simple 3, 4, 5 paid sites, they’re at your local chamber of commerce, your local BNI group, your local rotary club and the bakeries, the laundry mats, and those people would be perfectly happy to pay you 500 bucks to spin up a basic three or four paid site. They only catch is you just have to make sure you’re very clear on what you’re offering. And if you do offer WooCommerce, make sure that it’s limited in scope, because you can lose a lot of money and time if you’re building a 500 product store or something. But I know many people that, that’s how they get started and then they increase from there. There’s a lot of money to be made in the freelance space.

Bob: Cool. Alrighty. Well, I’m going to just… I think we’ll close out making these nice, short and sweet. We’re going to be getting ready, but we’re hoping we’re not delayed and we actually make it to our dinner. I got to mention my sponsors just real quick. CloudWays, it’s excellent WooCommerce hosting. You can head over to GoDaddy Pro and check out their hub, manage all your client sites. Mindsize, if you need a huge WooCommerce site or somebody needs it, go to them. They also offer some really cool maintenance plans. And then post status, best way to do that is join as business member and stay on top of WordPress. In fact, you can go in there and DM me and bug me and annoy me to your heart’s content, and it won’t bother me one bit. So, anyway, thanks Mike.

Bob: And do visit Codeable. Yes, do check out Codeable. I’ve referred that many times just because it’s hard to find somebody… Especially when you have… You don’t need a big thing done, but you need something done and you need to have it done by somebody that you can trust and… Check it out for sure if you haven’t because… Good stuff. Well, Mike, thanks for sponsoring the dinner tonight. Thanks for jumping on the train. He actually jumped on the train. I didn’t get a video of it. He did jump. And thanks for the podcast. I’m just thanking you all over the place. Glad you did. This was fun.

Mike: It’s my pleasure. If you want to learn more about Codeable, codeable.io. If you are a WordPress expert or developer and you want to earn some side cloudable.oi/apply, we’re looking to hire a lot more experts. So like I said, make $120 US an hour, you pick your own projects. And you can follow me on Twitter @mpmike. Thanks so much.

Bob: Cool. All right. You’ll be hearing from me and some other cool guests here in NYC here real shortly, so that’s it. Take care.