Billable Hours

In this episode, I talk to Nico Martin about progressive web apps. Nico is the founder of say hello, a Switzerland based web agency focused on modern WordPress development. Nico knows a lot about progressive web apps and in this episode, he shares a lot of his knowledge.

Links

• Nico's website
• say hello
• Nico on Twitter

Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress
Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast get twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget!

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In this episode, I talk to Rian Rietveld about accessibility on the web. Rian works as an accesibility specialist at Level Level, a full-service agency based in Rotterdam in The Netherlands. Rian also teaches accessibility with the A11y Collective.

Links

• Rian's website
• Rian on Twitter
• A11y Collective
• Level Level

Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress
Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast get twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget!

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In this episode, I talk to Zuzana Kunckova of Larabelles about moving from WordPress to Laravel. Zuzana is doing some really amazing community work with underrepresented developers in Laravel. Listen in to hear about some of the differences between WordPress and Laravel.

Links

• Zuzana on Twitter
• Zuzana's website
• Larabelles on Twitter
• Larabelles website
• Onramp

Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress
Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast get twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget!

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Transcript of this episode (automatically generated)

Today, I'm really excited to welcome Zuzana Kunckova onto the show. Zuzana is most known for her incredible work with underrepresented developers within the Laravel community through Larabelles. However, she does have a background in WordPress development and today Zuzana and I are going to talk about what it's like to move from WordPress and into Laravel.
You can find Zuzana on Twitter at zuzana_kunckova. And I strongly encourage you to check out Zuzana's project larabelles.com. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about branch. Branch is my business, and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites.
We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that WordPress developers need making it super easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines. It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve. And it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments on your account. 
Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying. You can sign up for free on branchci.com. I started this episode by asking Zuzana to take us back to when she first discovered Laravel. Okay. So that was about two years ago. So back then I was working for a digital agency and it was mainly WordPress jobs, but they also had, I think, a couple of bigger Laravel based projects.
So I was doing my, the WordPress side of things, but I got a chance to look into another little project at that point. I knew nothing about Laravel. I mean, I only knew WordPress and I knew it's a bit of JavaScript, but I didn't even know what a lot of it was. So I bought the Laravel up and running book and I started reading that and I watched a few YouTube tutorials.
I knew about Lara cars, but for me back then, it assumed too much previous knowledge for me, Lara, because at the beginning it just wasn't the right fit. So that's how I found out about a lot of it. Like I was taught. Larva is a framework is PHP framework, and this is our project. And do you want to try to.
Do this feature for us. I was like, well, okay. I can try. And yeah. Took it from there. I mean, it wasn't easy because it was so different than anything I knew because I didn't know any other, I don't even know chelas good frameworks or personal frame. I didn't know any backend frameworks, so I didn't learn well.
So for me, everything was. That's really interesting, actually. So I'm created a poll on Twitter or recently where I asked among like my followers that are WordPress agencies or freelancers. How many of them also do other kinds of projects besides WordPress? And one of the options were larval and almost 50% of the people who answered that survey.
And I think it was about 200 people answered that they were also doing level projects. So I think. It's a really big trend. I'm seeing where agencies aren't exclusive WordPress agencies, like they're taking advantage of some of the other newer frameworks that are around. Do you have any sort of idea about why some projects were liable and not WordPress?
Like what was the difference between those projects? I think it was the size. I mean, you can build anything with WordPress pretty much, but if you do want to go. Baker gala, you use a lot more plugins and you will have to do so much customization that at that point, you might as well just do it in Laravel instead of trying to use WordPress for something that was not intended to in the first place.
I mean, you can do, I think pretty much everything in WordPress, but. The question is, should you use WordPress? So I think, uh, once you have a bigger project, when you want some sort of dashboard for the client admin, I mean, yes, we also have WordPress, but WordPress has a look. It has a certain style and the way they do things, and yes, you can customize it slightly, but not too much, not enough.
So if you want to have anything more custom, but you might want to reconsider whether using WordPress sister, right. Choice. Yeah. One of the things I've kind of like experienced, if you would try to do a really big project with WordPress, either, as you said, like you're just stringing it together with a lot of plugins and like, you just hope that they are good plugins.
They're maintained well kind of like crafted, but then like it ends up at as almost like a vanilla PHP project then like, if you really try to customize stuff, like you have to go really bare bones anyway. And it's kind of like start from scratch. You have to see that different tools are right for different kinds of projects, especially with WordPress.
It's important to keep that in mind, because I think work best became known as the tool to do everything with, but good to sometimes stop and thing. Should you really use it? Yeah. Okay. So you, you discovered Laravel and you mentioned Matt Stauffer's book, right? Laravel up and running. What was your firsthand experience?
How did you think about it? Like once you kind of like started getting your feet wet and tried adding some features. And I was like, Oh, it's so many files and folders. What do I do for that? I still remember the first time I got Laravel running on my back then windows machine. So I installed valet, which again, wasn't straightforward to use on windows and what's Valley ballet is the local development for level.
So that's up. So it's quite, once you have it installed, it's really easy. You just install, you know, a lot of a project and then it just works. You can have like a local security, so you can run negative BS websites locally. You can share your mess a lot to do with Valley. I didn't do it the easy way. I just thought, Oh, everyone's using valet.
Let me try to that too. What? I didn't realize that while I was meant for Mac OS while I was a windows computer. So yeah, but I've got it working at the end. First thing was like, Where does everything go? There's so many directories and I didn't understand what they meant. And that was still me looking at the vanilla Laravel installation with no changes to it.
So my initial feeling was like, there's so much, I don't know what to do. Kind of the philosophy behind. Laravel and WordPress are quite different. Like WordPress is a CMS and Laravel is I think most people call it an MVP framework, like model view controller. So it's just a different architecture. So did you have to like step back and kind of like understand the idea behind it or the architecture, or it was so different from WordPress because WordPress, you don't have to.
Think about some of the things because they are done for you. I mean, you can, if he wants to, but a lot of the things like authentication, you don't have to worry about it and routes, you don't have to worry about it in Laravel. You still don't have to worry about it, but you are more involved. Like you need to make the decisions yourself.
And yeah. So when I started reading about  and VC came up, I was like, what is MV? So then I there's a lot of rabbit holes you can go down through when it comes to learning something like Laravel like a backend framework. I knew PHP, but I knew WordPress PHP. So while I knew what classes I would objects, where I didn't necessarily have to write a lot of it myself, I would.
Customize a lot of things, but, and I was making my own custom themes in Iowa. So I wasn't just like customizing existing theme. So I did do some PHP work, but in Laravel it was, you know, it's all PHP. So I had to learn what is object-oriented programming? What are the solid principles? What is interface and factories and single sentence and all these things that he didn't need to know about WordPress work.
And especially for me, when I learned something, I need to know it well enough. To move on. I don't like to have just like the bank idea. I need to be able to explain it to myself at least. So yeah. I spend a lot of time looking into these fundamentals of PHB. The more I think about it. It's quite insane actually.
How many things you need to learn about like dependency, injection containers and serverless containers and like all of these concepts, like the more I think about it, like the more jargon and terminology there is, was all that covered in that book MedStar for road. I think most of it is, but I didn't read it from the beginning to the end.
So I started, but then the thing with reading a book, it's all very theoretical. And until you actually need something, need to implement something. At least in my case, I woul

In this episode, I chat with David Vogelpohl, Vice President of Growth at WP Engine. Before joining WP Engine, David founded and ran his own agency Marketing Clique. Through his role at WP Engine, David is connected to thousands of agencies around the world and in this episode, he shares his thoughts on growing and scaling a successful agency.

Links

• David on Twitter
• WP Engine
• Flywheel Growth Suite

Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress
Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast get twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget!

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Transcript of this episode (automatically generated)

Today I am really excited to have David Vogelpohl as my guest. David is the vice president of growth at WP Engine. Before joining WP Engine, David ran his own agency marketing clique. Through his role at WP Engine, David is connected to thousands of agencies around the world, and I can't wait to dive into today's episode where we'll be talking about growing and scaling an agency. By the way,
this is not the first time David and I talk on a podcast. One of David's many involvements in the WordPress community is as the host off the Press This podcast where I've previously been a guest, you can find David on Twitter at WP David V. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about branch. Branch is my business, and the sponsor of this podcast.
It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your work per sites. We've got your back with recipes for all the common workflows that WordPress developers need making it super easy, and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines, it's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve and it's free to get started.
So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments on your account. Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free on branchci.com. I started this episode by diving into David's own experience, running an agency, David, in your work WP Engine.
You work with thousands of different agencies nowadays. Um, but your background is also an agency and you had your own agency marketing click before you started working with WP engine with all. The things that you're seeing now, Adobe engine and all the thousands of agencies that you interact with at different levels, like, is there something you would have done differently at your own agency?
Kind of in hindsight, if you could. Yes. Hindsight's always 20, 20 Peter. So it's funny, actually, my agents. See, it was a vendor of WP engine. So before I actually joined WP engine directly, a WP engine was a client for actually many years since nearly the beginning of the company. But you know, when I started the agency, I didn't know anything about running an agency.
I guess I freelance, I guess you would say on my own for probably about three to six months and then hired my first employee within that six month period. And then eventually grew it to 22 employees. When I felt it was time to exit the agency world. After about five years, I decided to kind of shop my agency if you will, to see what sort of acquisition offers I could get.
And I would say the biggest thing I learned in retrospect probably was from that event. I think there's other like operational sides. Um, but what ended up happening is I did have an asset acquisition of the, kind of. Value of the business, if you will. But the multiples I got wasn't very high and the reason was because I didn't have established like long-term contracts with customers or like a recurring revenue stream baked into the business.
So that was kind of a nice little surprise on, I decided it was time to move into something else and looking back, I wish I had baked. Those elements into my business. We did have long-term customers who spend a lot of money each month, but they weren't locked into contracts. So that at the end of the day actually undervalued the business.
In my view, that's super interesting. And it really ties into, you know, the whole title of this podcast. I guess that's just a great lesson. And I think, you know, there's a book John Warrillow built to sell is. Exactly about this whole thing. Like basically, and we have a few of the episodes on this podcast as well about basically how to think about recurring revenue, maybe even stuff like productized services.
I don't know if that's something you've ever come across a productizing where you basically offer your services as moral, you package it as a product with different pricing plans and tears and stuff like that. Yeah, the maintenance packages, um, or a care packages, uh, site maintenance, like these kinds of offerings, this product is , it's interesting.
In my agency, we would have like big ticket customers, you know, like for us, we really wouldn't want to mess with anything, unless it was at least $5,000 of work. And then many of our clients were, you know, 10 or $20,000 a month. Worth of work. And so I often viewed those care packages as kind of not super helpful for the business.
In reality, though, productizing your services in that way, one can help you have higher margins, right? So you're not always having to do, you know, that amount of money's worth of hourly work to keep that customer in good shape. You can also leverage your technology and your systems to kind of scale that kind of work to further increase your margins, but also by having that kind of long-term value in your business that builds up over time.
I'm a little bit of a science nerd. One of my favorite topics are things called solar sales and the way solar sales work is they collect sunlight. And there's very little pressure of the sun's solar wind, if you will on the sale, but because there's no friction in space, each little push gets the spacecraft going faster and faster and faster, and you go to like insane speeds using this method.
Well, I think of that same thing within an agency business, as we think about these monthly recurring revenue care packages or maintenance packages or productized services, if you will, because each one of those, you add adds a little bit of pressure forward pressure, upward pressure for your business.
And so I think from the business strategy perspective, they actually make a lot of sense. And even though you may not make a lot. Per customer in that way over time, you can build that base up and have a lot more reliability in your business. I'm a big fan of them from a business strategy perspective, for sure.
Yeah, I love that metaphor. I think, you know, it just a good thing to remember about recurring revenue is you also have to provide recurring value, right. To justify the recurring ness of it. So it's just also is a good way to just keep in contact with your customers and, you know, keep the relationship going.
Yeah, I think so. I kind of shied away. It's it's funny. Cause like I ran the agency for five years and you know, tried a lot of different approaches, a lot of different billing models, hourly rates and so on and so forth. And when I realized at that time, which would have been 2010 to 2015, you know, even still today, there's this push around like, well, don't charge by the hour, like charged by the value, right.
Charge based on the value you're delivering to the customers, not just like break it down into the hours and a lot of other different approaches similar to that. And what I found was that, yes, I could do that, but if I didn't do any work, of course, which I didn't like try to do, I didn't try to cheat my customers, but I was just saying at the end of the day, it really did get down to like, what did you deliver?
And then how did it perform? And you have to account for the, what did you deliver it part because a customer's not going to keep writing you $10,000 checks or even a $200 check or credit card charge if you're doing nothing. And so, as you think about these automated systems that set customers up for success, I think it's important.
That helps. Of course you gain margin by not having to spend so much time doing the things, but if you're automating it, it's helpful to let the customer know this is happening. You know, if you're patching plugins, if you're, you know, doing other maintenance type activity, even in an automated way, it's important to keep like nudging them to like, say, Hey, look, I got your back this month.
And these ways. If you are patching plugins and particularly patches that include security patches, that's absolutely something to bring up to a customer to let them know, Hey, look, I had your back, there was a vulnerability in your plugin. We got the update that it was patched and we applied the patch and you're safe.
Um, so yeah, these are challenges as you have these kinds of maintenance packages, which is like, how do you keep proving that ongoing value? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think we'll talk more about that in our conversation as well. I'm curious at your agency, you've touched on this a bit already, but what was your role in the beginning and kind of, what did your role involve into and kind of, how did it look in the end when you finally sold the business?
Oh, well it was a journey. It was my first business that I

In this episode, I talk to Jason Bahl, the creator of the WP GraphQL plugin. Last year, Jason and his plugin joined Gatsby to work full time on making GraphQL more accessible to WordPress developers. Jason has a lot of knowledge to share about static and headless sites and, of course, GraphQL.

Links

• WP GraphQL
• Jason on Twitter
• Gatsby

Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress
Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast get twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget!

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Transcript of this episode (automatically generated)

Today I'm excited to  welcome Jason Bahl onto the show. Jason is the creator and maintainer of the GraphQL for WordPress plugin. Last year, Jason and his plugin joined Gatsby. I'm really looking forward to talking to Jason about everything, static, headless, and GraphQL. You can find Jason on Twitter at JasonBahl and the plugin on WPGraphQL.com.
Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about branch. Branch is my business and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites. We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that the WordPress developers need making it super easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines.
It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve and it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast. We'll double the amount of free deployments on your account. Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free on branchci.com.
Jason, what makes a WordPress site headles?  Uh, headless WordPress site, uh, would be, we use WordPress to manage your content. So you use the admin interface that WordPress provides to manage your content, but then you use something other than the WordPress theme layer. To render the data. So that could be an iOS application.
For example, that may be used as react native or Swift or something like that to pull data from WordPress, but uses some other rendering mechanism other than the WordPress theme, API and commonly lately, we've been seeing a lot of JavaScript frameworks using their rendering mechanisms, whether it's react or Vue or Ember even, or angular or anything like that, then they'll communicate to WordPress.
Via an API and render the data with the JavaScript framework instead of the WordPress PHP theme API. So does that mean people are mostly interested in the workers, admin and not so much, like they wouldn't be using a theme for example, right? Yeah. I mean, there's obviously still a huge market that wants to use WordPress that quote unquote classic way, but yeah, there is a Ryzen.
Tooling and things specifically in the JavaScript ecosystem where you can build component-based architectures much faster, potentially scalable with a lot of benefits, like tree shaking and whatever. So like your front end performance ends up being faster, but you still need to manage data somewhere.
And instead of reinventing the wheel and building a whole CMS, It to existing stuff like WordPress, WordPress powers, what is it? Something like 38 ish percent of the web today, the top 2 million sites or whatever. And it's still, you know, a lot of content editors, a lot of teams that are writing content and posting content are familiar with it.
And they just want fast websites. Developers have been using WordPress because it's existed in people like to write content in it and there's plugins and all sorts of stuff, big ecosystem. But a lot of developers don't love the experience of developing for WordPress, right? Like stack exchange or whoever it is, does a survey every year.
And WordPress is almost always at the top of most dreaded software for developers. So, if we can give the users the experience of writing content in a system, they like, but also give developers and experience of using tools. They like the decoupled architecture can be a win for both parties and ideally a win for the users, the end users, because you have a really fast site as well.
So wait until you're basically saying if we're using headless WordPress, we won't really have to be WordPress developers. We won't really be doing WordPress development so much. Depends. So I maintain WP graph QL, which is a graph kill API for WordPress. So that does, is it exposes much of your WordPress data in an API.
So if you can get by with a lot of the core data that WordPress provides and that's all you need, uh, you can start right away consuming that data into whatever front end technology want, whether it's Gatsby or next or anything like that, or an iOS app. Oftentimes, you're going to run into points where you're at go shoot.
Like we have this certain custom data that we manage also. So depends like right now, Yoast SEO, for example, is a really popular WordPress plugin. There is an extension for Yoast that exposes Yoast data to the WP graph, kill API as well. So in that case, if there is a way to make your data that you're managing and WordPress exposed to the API, then you can start consuming data right away without having to write any PHP in WordPress.
If you're doing something with custom data and maybe there's no max for that data to the graph API, then in that case, you yourself were a developer, you know, or whoever might have to write some code to expose the data to an API. Currently I'm supporting like best custom fields, which is a very popular WordPress plugin to manage custom fields in WordPress.
So you can add metadata to posts and taxonomy terms and users and things like that. And so I have a plugin that maps all that data. You can build your forms, however you want, and maps that data to the graph API. And then there's like plugins, like custom post type UI, for example, where you can register post types and taxonomies.
So I have an extension that just adds like a little check and a couple of fields that allows you to register those to the GraphQL API as well. So we're working on all sorts of extensions. We've got WP graph kill for woo commerce. For example, maintained by Jeff Taylor WP graph kill for gravity forms maintained by Kellen mace.
So we've got a lot of community members that are bridging some popular WordPress plugins to graph QL. So that, yeah, you can be a purely react or Vue, JavaScript developer or iOS developer, for example, or Android or whatever it might be. And you can start using WordPress in many cases, without writing any PHP or any history of WordPress development.
That was pretty fascinating. Actually, when I first heard about graph QL, it wasn't immediately obvious to me what it was. Do you have maybe a simple way that you're explained to folks what graph QL is? If they've never. Work with it before then maybe they've heard it mentioned, but they don't know much about what it is or what it does.
Uh, yeah. Uh, I'll do my best. So graph QL is a query language specification for writing queries to an API and getting data returned to you in the exact shape that you asked for it in. It has some similarities to rest API, and I can get Jason responses, uh, when he asked for data. But the difference is you have one end point.
And you specify yourself, the client, whoever's asking for the data specifies down to the field, what data they want, where rest API, you specify the endpoint and the server specifies what data you'll get in response. So you have limited control or graph QL. You have to explicitly express what exactly you want.
And you'll get that in response. And you can follow relationships as well in a graph QL API with WordPress, for example. You could ask for a list of posts, but then you can also ask for the author of the post, which isn't a different entity. And then in a restful API, that would be a different endpoint.
You'd have to hit an endpoint for posts, and then you'd get an ID for the author. And then you'd have to hit an end point for the author or in graph QL. You can follow those relationships, uh, in a single request. And then you can specify the exact fields on every object type. Uh, that you want in response.
So it actually, it feels more like a SQL or something like that, where you can find ways to pull out, you know, you could join tables and do stuff like that. Yeah. There was some inspiration from SQL. So GraphQL was created by Facebook back in 2012, they use it an internally for few years, open sourced it in 2015.
And they, they were heavily inspired by SQL and some other data languages. It's also quite a bit different than SQL, but yeah, it's a, there are some similarities in that we can get multiple types of data, individual requests. So when you're using, and that we already mentioned this, like you have a plugin that helps people use graph kill with WordPress.
And when you're using your plugin, how deeply do you need to understand graph QL to benefit from using your plugin? It depends how you want to use it. I think a lot of people that use it today are JavaScript engineers. JavaScript developers are the primary users right now. Uh, so understanding how to consume graph QL would probably be important.
In my opinion, that's pretty easy to get going with there's amazing tooling to start tinkering with it. Uh, you might not k

In this episode, I talk to Birgit Pauli-Haack about the WordPress block editor, Gutenberg. Birgit is the self appointed cheerleader for the Gutenberg project, she runs the Gutenberg Times website and is the host of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In this episodes we talk about how agencies should think about Gutenberg and what the future of the project looks like.

Links

• Birgit on Twitter
• Gutenberg Times
• Gutenberg Changelog podcast

Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress
Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast gets twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget!

➡️ Create a free Branch account

Transcript of this episode (automatically generated)

Today I'm really excited to have Birgit Pauli-Haack on the show. Birgit runs her own podcast called Gutenberg Changelog. Gutenberg is of course the code name for the WordPress block editor. And I thought Birgit would be the perfect person to bring on, to talk about blocks. Birgit is also the  founder of Pauli systems.
And you can find her on Twitter at BPH. That's the three-letter Twitter handle right there. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about Branch. Branch is my business and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites. We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that the WordPress developers need making it super easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines.
It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve and it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments on your account. Yep. Twice as many deployments without pain, you can sign up for free on branchci.com.
We started this episode by talking about Birgits involvement with Gutenberg. Okay, Birgit, so do you want to tell us how you got involved with Gutenberg? Well, after three years, I'm pretty much the self appointed cheerleader for the product. It seems, but I'm not alone anymore, but in June, 2017, that was the first time I saw the first demo video at WordCamp Europe in Paris.
And I thought this was the biggest innovation since, um, yeah, I have a battle. What you see is what you get editor as developer, as, as content creator and try to teach people things so Gutenberg or the block editors it's called now has been a real revelation for me as that. So I wanted to learn everything I could about it.
And also see what the people in the community did with it. So I collected all the updates that went up many at the first, but then coming closer to what came to us 2017, there were quite a few people experimenting with the block. Editor was building blocks, was making the seams work and all that. My updates were on Storify and Adobe, the owner of story five announced in December, 2017, that they will discontinue story five in may of 2018.
And I said, Oh man. Yeah, again, never build on rented land. Um, so sooner or later, so it turned out. I also have many requests to actually. Build a newsletter around the updates on good Morgan block editor. So it was time to build a website and in January, 2018, couldn't work times came about. And then where I update things, I have a weekly newsletter that goes out on Saturday and noon.
Most of the time, sometimes it's an hour later, sometimes a day later, depending how my weekend goes. And, um, but it's in the 140. Four edition comes out next Saturday. Wow. We also have live Q and A's with people who have a workforce. Yeah. Mostly practitioners or from the Gutenberg team that have worked as good and work and have done new websites or are a publisher that uses it, or it's the block directory team telling us how that came about or it's the theme developers that.
All working on the block-based theme. And once in awhile, update us how this all works. So the video is all, most of the time have a transcript on our website, including also the resources that we mentioned in the conversation. So that's definitely a very good source for someone starting out to just go back and look at those videos.
And then in June, or may. 2019, I was in contact quite a bit with a Maki reign, who is a designer on the team, and I've just flat out, asked him, do you know, every two weeks we have this wonderful updates on a Gutenberg plugin, and we only scratched the surface on, or what's published, but not going deeper into what are the bug fixes?
What are the enhancements? What are the documentation updates and the change log. Came up out the Gutenberg changelog podcast we have now recorded 30 episodes and 9.2, we will record the 31st one, which also will have updates. What will be in replace 5.6 and what we'll be in public beta. We're still on the plugin.
So that's, um, what couldn't work times. Nice. Yeah, that's a lot right there. We shouldn't really call it good and Berg really these days. Right? Or what do you think about that? That was the code name in the beginning. It is the Lakota name. Yeah, kind of because the block editor is actually the official name.
Now, as soon as it's in court, that's the stuff that's emerged into WordPress right now. In WordPress, we don't have to install a plugin that you can use out of the box. And the Gutenberg plugin is where all the development happens and is released. Um, and people who have the plugin installed are pretty much using that to also test new features and give feedback, actually, some of.
The more braver people actually have the Gutenberg plugin on production sites to have the newest features actually tested in production, which is the ultimate test of your risk-taking measures. And it has been pretty stable. Yeah. What comes out and. It wouldn't look plugin unless you go to the experiments, which is a subsection.
So there is a plugin with all the new things that come to the block editor with your posts and pages, and then they'll the experiments in the plugin that you have to turn on. And that's really the place where you can get yourself in trouble. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, I think it would be awesome if we took a step back maybe, and just in a few sentences, just explained what Gutenberg is and how it's different from what was already there.
Because it worked for has already had an editor for adding posts and pages, but now we have Gutenberg or the block editor and maybe the name implies what it is maybe. But, uh, do you want to briefly just explain to people. Just the core differences. Sure. The core difference between the classic editor and the block editor, the classic editor, when you open it up is a white canvas and you have a toolbar on top and you can do any additional magic layouts.
I call them. So if you want to do a cover section on your. Post or page, you would need a plugin. If you want to do a media next to texts, you need a plugin. And if you want a gallery, you could either use the build in gallery from cool or a plugin. So you know where this was going. So the block editor, the tool set for content creators just exploded.
You get blocks. So you have a paragraph blocks. You have a list block, you have a media block, an image block, a video block. Audio blog. Yeah. All kinds of blogs that all help you display your content in a more attractive way than just a white wall of text. And we have found when we migrated some sites over to Gutenberg and kind of gave him a new theme for that.
We eliminated it. The number of plugins from maybe 32 to 14. Um, just because there was so much already built into WordPress. So that's the stage in 2018, when it came in 19, there were additional features coming to pass. One of them was block variations and then block patterns. And the block parents just came out with the last version, but they are a combination of.
Core blocks with us certain attractive design that can be used over and over again. So theme developers now can actually create the design and then create a design system where they can have a section of very special color blocks that has all the different things that I content create and needs. But it's already built into the block pattern.
You don't have to use all the tools to make it over and over again. Yeah. It's like a reusable block, but just in a pattern way, there are some features like the reusable blocks that were never possible. Well, I don't even think there was a plugin where you could use this. Maybe a text snippet, one. We use reusable blocks for the branch website because we do guides for how to use branch with different hosting companies.
And. A large percentage of the content and those guides are actually the same. So basically most of the stuff you'll have to do on the brain side. Like one example is there's a section on how to sign up for branch. That's the same, even if you're using three P engine or Pantheon or whatever you're using.
So we actually use the reusable block for that part. So we can just go to one of the pages and edit that were usable block. And then it changes in all the different guides at one point or at one time. So. It's a really effective way to manage your content. Yeah. And that opens up a lot of possibilities, for instance, for affiliate marketing or for call to actions that need to be consistent overall, your website now,

In this episode I talk to Tracy Levesque about her agency YIKES, Inc. We cover a lot of important and interesting topics, such as diversity and inclusion. YIKES truly stands out by being a deeply ethics-based business, by being a certified B corp, a certified Womens' Business Enterprise and a certified LGBT Business Enterprise amongst other things. We can all learn a lot from YIKES and I'm excited to publish my interview with Tracy.

Links

• YIKES, Inc.
• Tracy on Twitter
• A Diverse WordPress Twitter list

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Transcript of this episode (automatically generated)

Today, I'm really excited to welcome Tracy Levesque onto the show. Tracy is the co-founder of YIKES, a web design and development agency out of Philadelphia. YIKED truly stands out by being a deeply ethics based business, and we'll unpack what that means, by being a certified B Corp, a certified women's business enterprise and a certified LGBT business enterprise amongst other things, we can all learn a lot from YIKES.
And I'm excited to dive into today's interview with Tracy. You can find Tracy on Twitter at LilJimmi and YIKES on yikesinc.com. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about Branch. Branch is my business, and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites.
We've got your back with recipes for all the common workflows that WordPress developers need. Making it super easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines. It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve and it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast will double the amount of free deployments on your account.
Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free on branchci.com. We started this episode with the history of YIKES. Back in the nineties. I started this company with my wife at the time and a friend of ours named Vicky. And so the three of us, we always did computer stuff for free, usually for non-profit organizations or groups that we're involved with.
And then we really bonded because really like computer stuff. And we all had a different skillset. And one day we were like, Hey, why don't we charge money for this? And that was it. Then when you started in the agency, you know, since that was a really long time ago, we went through a lot of different web technologies.
And in 2006 I had a baby and my wife Mia started a blog for the baby on WordPress. And also during that time, we were trying out different CMS and we didn't really like any of them. And then I started to hack away at WordPress for the baby blog. And realized that I really liked it. I probably did everything really, really wrong.
Cause it was the first time using WordPress, but in 2010 around, we became a exclusively, a WordPress. So we only do WordPress. Now, what were you doing before? Word press? Do you remember? We've tried everything from like OS commerce, Mambo, Joomla expression engine. All the different PHP, frameworks and stuff called fusion.
We did a lot of cold fusion work and we made custom CMS. So everything under the sun. Really? Yeah. That's cool. It's rare to see like an agency with this seniority or like the age of your agency, I think from your website, you started the same year that I started in school. So quite a long time ago, when you think about it through a couple of recessions, a couple of.com collapses.
Yeah, that's cool. So what the company looked like today, we are a WordPress VIP agency partner. So we do a lot of enterprise work, which is really super fun, but we've always stayed with our non-profit roots, probably over half. Our clients are non-profits and our biggest client is a nonprofit they're out a client.
That's been with us since the very beginning, since the nineties. And so we're, you know, a very mission-based company or a triple bottom line company, meaning. Planet people and profit, not just profit. So while we've been doing more work in the enterprise space, we still committed ourselves towards doing really good work for nonprofits.
That's really cool. Yeah. I kind of wanted to talk a bit about the business. So you mentioned already, like the kind of customers that you have. So what I would love to know is more about what services you offer to them, or is it all like one-off projects or do you have. Any sort of recurring revenue or just kind of like a little bit about like the business model or like how the business works.
First. We do mostly agency work, see like 90% of our income comes from agency work and we also do some plugins. So we have about nine plugins in the directory. Combined or plugins tab over 200,000 active installs to those plugins, the most popular ones we have either pro versions of those or paid add-ons.
So that's fun. I was nervous to get into the plugin world is I just imagine like lots of angry people sending mean tickets, but it's really fun actually. So a former employee talked me into it cause he was really into plugins. I'm like, okay. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, you have to do all this infrastructure.
We have to become knowledge base. We have to make platform. People buy the plugins and licensing and all this stuff and pay sales tax, which you don't have to do, you know, for an agency. And it's really fun. It's like there is way more people that are happy for your plugin and happy that your plugin helps them do their job or accomplish whatever it is then.
I mean people out there and they're going to be super mean in the forums or mean, and tickets. And it's just really satisfying. It is different, like selling a $30 plugin versus a hundred thousand dollars website. But I don't know, I guess the volume of customers and the positive feedback you get back.
And also when you go to work camp and people are like, Oh, I use your plugin. I love it. You know, I don't know. It's nice. It's fun. Um, so that's one, but it's a really tiny part of our business, but it's just a nice recurring revenue. It pays the rent, you know, and like utilities and things like that. I mean, that's awesome.
If you get it to that point, is it connected to the business in any other way? Like, did you use the plugins for customers websites or is it just slowly like another side thing? Or like, how do you think about it? I think about it as I'm not a side thing because it's part of the business, but it's something I definitely want to grow, you know, and develop more plugins.
And every year, you know, that recurring revenue goes up because people then renew their licenses. So that's a nice part. It, I love seeing this upward line of recurring revenue. So if it can pay for itself in that way or even make a profit, that's good. That's one leg of the business. And then the rest of it is like a traditional agency.
So we do projects. So client will come to us and like, we'll do a project for them from beginning to end, beginning to development launch. Sometimes they have like, you know, recurring services with us. Um, our biggest client, they pay us monthly on retainer to do everything for them. At any time they have like a direct line to ping us whenever they need something.
So that's, you know, one side spectrum and the other, one's like, you know, a smaller project like Guinea. And then once we've done, we're done and we filter it for them. They're kind of finished. Don't have more projects for us, but maybe they will in the future. And we could do that, like in a, you know, an hourly rate or maybe a new scope of work for something small, but.
That's kind of the range. And we do have like a monitoring service. So clients will pay us like a monthly fee to keep all of their plugins up to date for up to date and we'll fix it. If something goes wrong because of a plugin update. And we also like monitors their site prep time and malware and security and all those good things.
So that's recurring revenue as well, right? Yeah. It sounds like when you have a client on a retainer, it's not like it's something you try to force them into when you sell a project, it sounds like more like something organically. That's kind of like you've grown into with these clients because you have such a long working relationship with them.
Yes. Or we understand that they're going to need our help after launch. Yeah. You know, they have a lot of projects going on. They have a lot of content they're like constantly like generating and new features and new ideas, or, you know, during the discovery phase of the initial project, you realize, Oh, there's going to be a phase two and phase three and all these other ideas with features.
So those are the folks that during the time of signing the first contract, we'll put in like some sort of recurring hours for like the future for like up to a year. I'm kind of curious, going back a little bit, because I think the way you started your agency, it sounds very similar to, I think how a lot of agencies start, like, you start doing some work, you start doing it for free, then you're really, you could charge for it and you star

On this episode I talk to Joe Howard, the founder of WP Buffs, a productized service offering WordPress care plans. He's also the co-host of the WPMRR podcast and runs the WPMRR Summit. Joe is all about recurring revenue and if you're interested in how you can start to implement recurring revenue into your business you should listen to this episode.

Links

• Joe on Twitter
• WP Buffs
• WPMRR Summit
• WPMRR Podcast

Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress
Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast gets twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget!

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Transcript of this episode (automatically generated)

This week, I'm super excited to talk to Joe Howard about MRR or monthly recurring revenue. Joe knows a lot about MRR. He's the host of the WP MRR podcast. He also runs WP MRR summit, and he's the founder of WP buffs at productized services business that brings in you guessed it monthly recurring revenue.
You can find Joe on Twitter at. Joseph H. Howard and his business on WP buffs.com. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about Branch. Branch is my business, and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites. We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that the WordPress developers need making it super easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines.
It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve. And it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments in your account. Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free on branchci.com.
I started this episode by asking Joe what comes to mind when he hears the phrase billable hours. Joe, what comes to mind when you think about the word billable hours? Ooh. It makes me think about how I need more billable hours. It makes me think that I'm trying to get billable hours somewhere. Man. I got to keep getting more billable hours to keep powering what I'm doing.
Recurring pain. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It makes me think like, okay. If I'm focused on getting. Billable hours. Like there's a lot of pieces of my business. I got to focus on too. It's like, I gotta get more billable hours and then I actually have to execute those billable hours. So it's like, I kind of do some sales and I have to like actually do the operations of my business and then I have to, Oh, there's all the admin behind it.
How do I invoice them? Like, do I have to like follow up on the invoice? Is that all automated, like kind of makes me think about like freelance work and how there's a ton of stuff to do around being a freelancer. You have to wear a lot of hats. It's not a fan. I wouldn't say I'm not a fan. I'd say, I think there are a lot of challenges around being a freelancer.
I know a ton of freelancers who do great work, who run super scalable businesses by themselves. You know, maybe you'd call them like solo preneurs or like just, I don't know if they'd probably call themselves just freelancers and they run super successful businesses just by themselves. Maybe a couple of contractors.
I'd probably know a lot of people who run those freelancers and very, very small businesses that are more profitable than businesses with say like 10 employees that. Maybe the media would say like, Oh, they've got 10 employees or 20 employees. Like, they're a bigger, better company now. It's not really how it works.
You know, if someone else who runs a small business, you know, as well as I do, that's not really true, but I'm definitely a big fan of focusing more on a monthly recurring revenue and like subscription models. Pricing models, business models, as opposed to focusing on billable hours. I think if you can run a business where you can, you know, charge $500 an hour and easily get, you know, a ton of hours every month, that's great model, nothing wrong with that.
But I think it's a little bit less stressful, a little bit more. Scalable. If you were trying to like grow your business, or if you're just trying to like want a small, comfortable business to set up a product, or maybe a productized service package plans, whatever that provides ongoing value for people.
So it's something you're doing kind of month over month, so you can say, Hey, charge them every month. Now you're providing value over the long-term for people, which is good for you and good for them. And you're able to jump into the subscription model, which makes it a little less stressful to run a business.
When you kind of can predict your revenue a little bit, as opposed to the billable hours thing where it's like, all right, I got this many billable hours. Okay. I got to get 20% more mobile hours next month. Like, how am I going to do that? Well, if you're a subscription model, you know, your churn. You know, your growth trajectory.
So you kind of have an idea how much money you're going to make the next month. So you can predict who can I hire? What's my profit margin going to be mixed a little less stressful. I think. Yeah. I talked to Brian castle about productized services on this podcast and it sounded to me like, You know, the recurring revenue part of it is a really key to basically why it allows you to just focus more on the business side of things.
And like, once you're kind of close to sale, you can focus more on the delivery and you don't have to sell new people every month. Yeah. Shout out to Brian. Brian's one of those productized service guys and just like startup guys who I follow online. I love all this stuff. Productized course stuff that I followed for a long time, as someone who kind of like started doing this stuff after him, he was kind of, and those people who was that kind of, one of those people who I was like, I got to follow this guy.
Cause he knows a ton of stuff. Um, runs a few successful, small businesses doing this kind of work. I would say this subscription model is super helpful. In terms of, especially like a productized service. So like my business does WordPress care plans, you know, branch, you know, you do WordPress work as well.
This subscription model for me is easier than the website building. We do WordPress care plans. So we're managing WordPress websites and we have a white label program. So we work with some agencies and freelancers as well to help them. Make one monthly recurring revenue too. And I used to build websites.
That was tough for me to kind of scale that and grow that as a business, people have done it before very successfully, right. There are a lot of agencies that do website builds and are super successful, but I just kind of couldn't crack it. So I figured it out. Let's do management instead, and that actually worked way better for me in a way better for us as a company.
So I'd say focusing on that, it can be easier than a lot of ways. Yeah. So you were touching on it there, but like, I'd be curious to know a little bit more about your background and kind of your journey into recurring revenue because you guys, you mentioned you started out with more of like a traditional freelance or agency route.
Yeah, definitely did the business model. Yeah. I've been at WordPress for like eight or nine years. Something like that. And, you know, I used to be a freelancer and most people start off in WordPress. You kind of learn WordPress, what is this open source software? And they learned to like put websites together.
Oh, there's page builder. Oh, here's some themes I can use. Uh, what hosting should I use? And you know, most of that stuff for someone who has like basic tech skills is pretty straightforward. I consider myself a non-technical co-founder like, don't ask me to be a dev, like don't ask me to be an engineer.
You don't want me to break your website? That's not my bag. Um, but I know basics of WordPress and how to get around the dashboard hosting basics. I know XML, CSS, basics. I know the foundational stuff. Um, and so I was able to put websites together for folks and that's where most people in WordPress start, they're like, Oh, let me find some clients to build websites for.
And yeah, I mean, we talked about it a little bit in my other answer, but it was just like, And I have to like find new people to build websites for, and they got to build the websites and I have to do all of the admin for my business. I mean, it's just a lot to do as a freelancer. And I found that I was trying to think of a different model.
I was like, what else could I do besides just the bills? And I kind of searched around, do some Google searching and found some other companies that were doing like website management through these like kind of website care plans and subscriptions. And I was like, Oh, that's what I want to do. Like, cause that's a much more scalable model for me.
Like the maintenance and ongoing support. I can build a 24 seven team. It works perfectly into like me wanting to build a remote team. Cause I can like use 24, seven support as an excuse to like work from home myself. Like, Oh, we're a remote team. I want to work from home too. So perfect. Well I'll work from home and also build a team that'

In this episode I talk to Vito Peleg, the founder of WP Feedback. Vito and his team launched WP Feedback in the summer of 2019 and it was one of the most spectacular and well executed product launches I've seen in the WordPress space. This was manifested in more than $100,000 in sales in the first month. Listen to Vito unpack the journey from freelancer, to agency, to successful product business.

Links

• WP Feedback
• Vito on Twitter
• Vito's band Chase the Ace

Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress
Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast gets twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget!

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Transcript of this episode (automatically generated)

Today on the show. I'm excited to bring on a Vito Peleg to tell the story of how he went from client work to one of the most eye catching product launches in the WordPress ecosystem that I remember at least Vito is the founder of WP feedback, a product that helps you systematize your website, project delivery process from start to finish.
From what I recall from my conversation with Vito at the hallway track at WordCamp Brighton, he started out busking in the streets of London, and I can't wait to unpack his journey on this episode. You can find Vito on Twitter at feedback WP. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about Branch.
Branch is my business and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your work for science. We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that the WordPress developers need, making it simple for easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines.
It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve. And it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments in your account. Yep. Why is this many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free and branch cei.com.
I started this episode by asking Vito to explain what his business looked like before he launched WP feedback. Vito, you want to try to explain how your business looked before you launched WP feedback, and then two weeks after you launched it. Like how did it look before and how did it look after?
Before WP Feedback I had an agency and we're working at 12 guys, a few was in London, but the rest were abroad, you know, like all around the world. And we were basically building websites for clients that was the day-to-day every day, full few years. And then having a few hundreds of projects that throughout this time. I was looking for a way to get out of the agency model for a while.
You know, when I was looking at all kinds of different aspects, maybe creating even a course. Or, you know, all of these kinds of channels that people look to scale up while I was doing my research and how I can actually do this. The problem with communicating with clients is always been there. Um, and you always jump around between a thousand tools and they, you know, they, you just don't get on the same page as they did.
But while I was trying to focus on finding a way to scale, this was actually really hurting our business and profitability on the other side. So I came up with the idea of how it should be laid out, and I asked the dev team to build it for us. You know, not even thinking about this as it's going to be the product, but actually thinking about, okay, let them fix this problem while I actually focused on what I want to build as a way to scale up, but it worked like magic.
And then it just kind of dawned on me that it's probably not a problem that only I am experiencing. We went on the market research and as soon as we launched it, we had a pretty nice explosion right at the beginning. We managed to generate six figures in revenue within the first 30 days as a new product in this space, this was groundbreaking.
Like no one did that before. And yeah. And so as soon as this happened, I was like, okay, no more client work. That's it. It was clear. Cut like that. You were just telling me before we hit record. That you're working on V2 of WP feedback and it felt like the way you described it, like, it feels like there's quite a big difference between mean doing client work and being product business.
So like what's the day to day difference between your old business and the business you're running now. Right. So in my previous business, I was the business. So I was in the middle of everything and I was the biggest bottleneck of the company. Everything had to land on my table. Well, it was distributed out to other people.
So my day to day was very much influenced by that. I was actually, yeah, talking to clients and sending out invoices and making sure that this task has been done. And following up with my team. Doing all of those, uh, repetitive tasks that are mind numbing. I even compare this. If you remember it back in the fifties, there was this lady is that the call centers, where they were just like redirecting the calls from one place to another.
And that was my day, you know, looking back, it's such a devaluation of my time. Doing this three hours out of every day, uh, that it's crazy compared to what I'm focusing on right now. So now I'm a lot calmer to be honest, but I was back then, you know, I delegate a lot more. So I'm totally aware that the way that this product has developed as evolved over the past year and a half, it brings it to a point where I am no longer the thing, you know, I don't matter.
In the grand scheme of things, it's all about understanding the client's needs, our user's needs. And trying to implement that. And when you're working as an agency, you only get to build the first version of the product. In most cases, you know, you build a website and then you send off to the client to figure things out on his own.
Of course you do care plans and stuff, but there's no continuous development in. Most of the projects, you know, which means that, um, for us, the client is the client, you know, is the guy that bought the website. But now the client is actually the user, which I think is a much more healthy, uh, way of looking at things.
So of course we were doing market research with our clients and asking them, who is your target audience and all of that. But, you know, you can't be as tuned into the end. Clients wants and needs as when you are the guy in charge of the product itself.
So we definitely going to talk a lot more about dopey feedback. I tease this in the intro, but you, your background is as a musician and it's kind of funny. Like, I feel like every time I talk to someone in Europe, the way they started making websites is because they built a band website. And when I talk to people in the U S it's always the church website.
So I don't know what that tells you about people, but it's just interesting. So you got started in music. I found your band on YouTube. JC ACE, right? It's the band. So people can go and check that out. We'll link that in the show notes as well. And somehow you ended up running WordPress agency. How did that happen?
I always want to, you know, since I was a teenager, I wanted to be a rock star. That was my kind of dream as a teenager. And that was my focus. So we were actually building a band back home in Tel Aviv in Israel and, you know, doing the rounds for a few years, trying to make it right while this was happening.
Of course, you have to make some kind of a living. So I started getting into digital just a little bit more from the point of view of, I had a pretty nice success with my space, with a band. And I built our first website in a four when I was in high school with geo cities. If you remember back in the day, we got it.
Then megabytes to build the site for free. And so I already had a bit of experience with HTML CSS and all that kind of stuff. But, uh, when we actually got signed and we all moved to the UK, started touring around the world from our base was here in London. That's when I needed to create some revenue while I was on the road.
So I was literally living in a van and I was looking for a way to make money cause the band wasn't cutting it. And so. I started building websites for clients. You know, they just came from the experience that they saw, how I'm marketing the band. And I built our kind of, uh, resources and stuff like that.
So we start with friends and family, and that was my first freelancing. This, you know, stealing wifi for McDonald's as we pass by on the Autobahn. After that ended, you know, we finished kind of our twenties and that we put the bands to rest. I said, all right, let's see what I can do to actually grow this business.
Within the first year, I got to six figures in revenue as a freelancer, they said, all right, let's scale this up and see what we can do in year three. I already had a team of 12. And then by year four, we were already doing WP feedback. So I feel that it's kind of a continuous evolution, you know, from being a freelancer.
And I would even say from being a musician, like you're saying, eh, there's a lot of creativity involved, a lot of manifestation of something out of nothing. This very much relates to how people build websites. You know, you have that pictu

In this episode of Billable Hours, I talk to Brian Casel. Brian is the founder of ProcessKit, a software tool that helps agencies document their processes and also helps them actually follow those processes. He's also the creator of the Productized online course and he runs his own productized service AudienceOps. Listen to hear Brian's advice on how to move from billable hours and into the world of productizing.

Links

• Brian's website
• ProcessKit
• Productize & Scale
• AudienceOps
• Brian's podcast BootstrappedWeb
• Brian on Twitter

Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress
Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast gets twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget!

➡️ Create a free Branch account

Transcript of this episode (automatically generated)

Today on the show I'm excited to talk to Brian Casel, a true legend when it comes to productizing. Brian is the founder of quite a few different businesses and products, but two of them are especially relevant to you as a listener of this podcast. The first one is ProcessKit, a software as a service product that helps you document your processes and also helps you actually follow those processes.
The other one is Productized an online course and community that teaches you how to productize your client work. Brian is also the co-host of the BootstrappedWeb podcast, and you can find him on Twitter at CasJam. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about Branch. Branch is my business and the sponsor of this podcast.
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So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments in your account. Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free on branchci.com. I start out this episode by asking Brian a pressing question, Brian, what's so bad about billable hours.
I love that first question. Billable hours is obviously charging money for your time. And you know, you're, you're calling out like the headline on my productize and scale website. And the thing is like, that's sort of just a way to speak to what most agencies end up running against it for a lot of freelancers and consultants as well.
Which is at a certain point, you know, you get to this point where it's like is my entire business reliant on me, sitting here at my computer, doing the work, delivering the services. And, and even if you start to, you know, hire people to do some of your tasks, if you're still billing by the hour, Still relies on you to be there and, and to drive every single project, you start to see the ceiling insight.
I mean, I definitely ran into that early in my career. I was a freelance web designer, web developer. I was doing a lot of work with WordPress and I didn't even bill by the hour, either as a freelancer, but I built by the project. So what would you say is the alternative to build by the hour? Is that value based pricing?
Yes. So like a lot of people say that the alternative is to do, do a project based. Some people call it value based pricing and that's one way to look at it. And I also went that way when I was a freelancer, I would just talk to a potential client, figure out what the project scope is, and then just give them a flat price.
And if there's scope creep, then we deal with that later. But I think that's a good start, but what I tried to get across when I talk about productized services, is that that too still doesn't solve all of your problems, all, all of your stresses as a freelancer or as an agency. Because what I ran into was, even though I was doing project based pricing, maybe value-based pricing still, every single project was completely different.
You know, I was, I was doing websites, but I was doing websites for universities and then websites for doctors and then websites for restaurants and websites for a blog. Like that's still a completely different project, but that's also a completely different customer each time when you're doing a project based.
Pricing strategy in the background is still based on the amount of hours that you expect to use on it. Like, is it still in theory, billable hours, but they just, basically, you try to guess how many hours that's going to be, and then you make an offer based on that. I know that a lot of agencies do it that way, but I never did.
I honestly, I just never really cared so much about, um, the hours that I spent. I only just sort of cared about like, does this project basically seem profitable to me? Yeah. When I was, uh, when I was a freelancer, it all that mattered. Was that I made X thousand of dollars a month. I'm doing my work to keep the bills paid, basically.
And you know, a lot of times, like as, as you grow as a freelancer or an agency, you start to raise your rates. So like the same project, the same scope, the same requirements that you might do in year one, you can start to charge five X for that. In year three. And that's also where you get into like the misaligned incentives of like billable hours.
Because as you get better at your job, your skill set, or as your team gets better and better, they become faster and more efficient. That doesn't mean that they should charge less and less really. They should be charging more and more, but that's the opposite of, you know, if you're, if you're charging by the billable hours, but even if you're billing by the project, you still run into the ceiling of like the number of simultaneous projects that you can take on.
But more importantly, If you're doing projects for anyone and everyone and all different types of projects, scopes. You're still in this treadmill of, Oh, we have to create a new custom proposal. We've got to do this whole discovery process. We've got a hope and rely on referrals. You know, we can't really do any sort of real marketing because we don't have a target customer.
We don't, we don't have one person that we're speaking to. And that's where I get it to productize services is because like, you know, eventually you want to figure out like how can this become a, an actual business and an actual brand. That I can go market actively.
Yeah. So, so let's talk about productized services because it sounds like that's basically the answer to all of these issues. Like basically with, you know, like traditional client work, it sounds like you started from scratch. Every time you start a project because you have to figure out everything and come up with everything or reinvent the wheel basically for this customer.
Um, but it sounds like part-time services is a very good answer to this. Um, so let's talk a bit about basically what a prioritize service is and, um, And how it solves some of these issues that you just mentioned. Yeah. So with productized services, you know, a lot of people like to sort of like compare it to freelancing and, or, you know, just agency services in general.
And one way that I like to differentiate it is that yes, it's still done by people. Largely, uh, you know, manually delivered services. And in many cases you can combine some software, some, some techniques, whether it's somebody else's software product or your own, but there's always an element of personally done for you or done with you services.
But the real difference is that your. Targeting one ideal type of customer you're solving the same problem again and again, and you're doing it in a very consistent way. Like even if you dial in one problem to solve, we all know there's a thousand different ways to build the same type of website. So your product has service business.
Should. Basically settle on your ideal methodology, your tool set your process, um, the systems that the roles on your team who need to deliver that, the timeline of how it gets delivered, all of that can become highly, highly standardized so that it can run very, very predictably. That's the goal of doing a productized services that you can literally 10 X and 20 X, the number of customers that you bring on every month and your team, the way that you're able to do that is because you know, that.
Your processes run very predictably because typically with an agency, even as you start to grow, you still start to hit that friction of like all, but even just hiring another person. That's, that's a lot of work to get them trained up and to figure out, you know, who the right person is. Um, with a productized service, everything becomes more predictable.
It sounds like potentially with a part-time service, you have to say no a lot, because you only want to work on like a very specific type of projects, basically the type of work that you have sort of productized and are offering in the marketplace. So I'm imagining, like if you start out as a kind of like local WordPress agency, are you moving to.
Uh, more like productized philosophy, potenti