Streamlining Agencies From Fragmented and Disconnected Tools ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/24y0ueTg910/maxresdefault.jpg) Joke for you, but it's not funny. Uh, you might have heard it before. How many tools does it take to run a website? So what's hiding behind every simple WordPress site, uh, an agency manages, uh, is a ton of tools, a ton of functionality. The website itself, the hosting, hosting, security backups, reporting. It is so many tools. Every one of those tools is a seam where things can break. So in this episode, we're going to be pulling back the curtain on the real operational chaos Inside WordPress agencies sh with hidden costs, slower delivery, stressed teams, clients who can never really know what's going on. We're talking about what happens when agencies stop duct taping their tech stacks together. And start consolidating. And that is an opportunity for WordPress product builders. So this shows for you. This is WP Product Talk, a place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing, business management, and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. It's your go-to podcast for WordPress product owners. Buy WordPress product owners and now enjoy the show. Hello everybody and welcome to WP Product Talk. Uh, before we get started, if you benefit from WP Product Talk, if you like the show, we would love your support. The easiest way to show your support is to hit that like and subscribe button down. Uh, just hit it right now. It only takes one second. It makes a huge difference. Thank you so much. And if you're listening in on a podcast player, check out our YouTube channel and please subscribe. Yep, absolutely, and huge thanks to Freemius for being our exclusive growth partner. Freemius helps software makers grow, monetize, and succeed. It's a merchant of record platform, so they handle everything to do with selling software, including the checkout payments, subscriptions, licensing updates, the dreaded global tax compliance, so that leaves you more free to focus on building amazing products. Yeah. Thank you Freemius. Uh, and uh, for this topic, this this really important topic on tools. We've invited the guy for tools. Uh, we've invited Emmanuel Khoury to the show. Welcome Emmanuel. Uh, thanks for coming on. Please introduce yourself, uh, and tell everybody a little bit about yourself. Hi Zack. Hi Katie. Thank you so much for having me. So my name's Emmanuel. Um, as you can tell from my silly accent, I'm from Australia. Um, I can see the sun is slightly rising up here where I'm based in Adelaide. And, um, and like you said, I'm from WPStaq and yeah, we're all about, uh, reducing fragmented tools for digital agencies so that there's one source of truth that they can manage, manage, and run their digital agency at scale. So tell like, thanks, thanks again for coming on. Um, for anybody watching live on YouTube, please feel free to leave a comment, ask questions. We're, we're gonna be addressing the comments as they happen. Um, tooling. Emmanuel, what do, what are we talking about here? What does this even mean? So the best way to put it is WordPress started as a blog, and so infrastructure was the afterthought. So when WordPress was having issues, then they introduced caching plugins, and then security, and then management and all these other tools that have just been the afterthought of, um, WordPress essentially. And so what we have done is we look at, uh, from an infrastructure level, how can we deliver better caching experience? How can we allow agencies to manage more efficiently? Not on the WordPress level, but on the infrastructure level. And yeah, it, it is just turned into security eventually. Uh, eventually, sorry, turned into security. How we look at billing systems, how we looked at processes internally, how can we take advantage of the infrastructure and automate things. So yeah, we've just looked at it from. From that aspect, from an infrastructure and automation level, and just put the two together and, and, and created. You know what our product is today, right? And I, when I, when I think about tooling, uh, I think about every single thing. So if you were to, uh, quit today and leave your company, each one of you listening, uh, think of all the things that people wouldn't know. How they work. And if you don't have that documented, please get that documented. We have another episode of WP Product Talk and on transition plans and things like that. Um, but CloudFlare, that's a whole lot of functionality, uh, every single plugin. What does it do? Um, uh, where is, where is something hosted? What domains are registered? Where, uh, what's your mailing provider? Amazon. SESI just gave my lead developer today. My lead developer, Amazon, SES, access. 'cause I realized I was the only one that had, that had it in the company and that terrified me. Like, oh geez, I was the only one with access. Each one of these things could go terribly wrong and people need to know about. Um, and each one of them is an opportunity for businesses in the WordPress space to, to really help with this, um, chaos. What do you think, Katie? Yeah, I think this is a really great example of scratching your own itch because a lot of WordPress product people. Have previously done either freelance work as an individual or an agency so you know what the pain points are. This could be a really good market for you. And I think it's also a good market in terms of marketing because we've seen a lot of changes in the WordPress space with, um, marketing channels like Google Organic going down massively. Targeting agencies with a product can be really smart because that's more of a one-to-one kind of partnership type play, rather than expecting people to find you on Google, which doesn't work as well as it used to. Yeah, and I think a lot of our listeners, I know, me personally, I have never worked at an agency. I have only worked with agencies. Uh, I was. An agency, but it was just myself working. You know, I, I don't know. Uh, I, I don't really know how things work. So when, when, when we're talking tooling, Emanuel, what does that look like for an agency? Yeah, no, that's a good question. So I used to operate a digital agency. And what, uh, so for example. As you start to scale, you would need a management plug in. And, and you know, there are respective brands in the industry from like, manage WP Main, WP, and, and there's many others. And so as you start to scale, you're like, okay, yes, I need this, this service. And then you're like, okay, I need to do reporting. And then you're like, okay, I've got a separate backup system. So using a separate. Backup system, and then you're like, okay, I need to offload this backup somewhere. And then it's usually like, then you get to a point where someone has a DDoS attack or some form of attack, and they're like, oh, okay, security's the afterthought. So they start to add in something like Wordfence or any other security plugin, and then two FA became a thing. And so it's either you. To a FA plugin or, um, you're using Wordfence, for example. And then it came down to, then after that it's like, okay, um, this server doesn't accept, um, I need to install an SMTP plugin and then have an SMTP service. And then before you know it, I don't know, you need to introduce cloud flow. So you want to try use their proxy and, and the caching rules and it's just little processes that are so manual. And so imagine when you try to do that at scale. Imagine if you've got a hundred websites under management, 500 websites under management. Like the whole thing just comes down like a, a deck of cards. And I haven't scratched the surface yet. There's, there's all these processes, like you speak to agencies, it's like they've got a brand new client, they've gotta spin up an environment and it varies. Some, some will say it can take them 10 minutes to do, sometimes it takes one hour to do. And it just the whole. Process is just not streamlined. It's not consistent across all the agencies I speak to. And so yeah, that's, it's like I haven't scratched the surface. There's a lot more than that. Hmm. Yeah, definitely. And I think one key thing for agencies is even if they are, they're selling their time on a project they're quoting for a project is always more profitable to. Do some element of productizing your service, even if that just means creating a template website, which you clone as a starter for each project, or a custom theme that you're always gonna use and modify or anything like that. It's all about that, um, efficiency that you can get in order to get more profit or less time on each project while still providing the same quality of. Work to your clients. So I think that anything that can help agencies with that, uh, can only be useful. Oh, a hundred percent. And even we see, um, for example, um, different server environments, op operate and do different things. So like you could be, you've gotta brief for a, um, from a client say, Hey, please go up, uh, improve my core web vital scores. And then usually again, it's a whole tech of. Plugins to just optimize the site, and then you might apply the same settings to the same website on different server environments and you're getting different results. And so yeah, it, it's just, yeah. So sometimes even just using too many services can just be a distraction to the business and the agency. And again, if it's coming down to charging a fixed price, um, they're gonna be losing money. And if they're doing it on an hourly basis, they're not competitive. In the market where another agency that has, you know, a great set of tech, tech, uh, techs, like a great tech stack, can actually do it much more efficiently and cheaper. So it's definitely not a win-win situation for an agency. Yeah. So how, one of the things that is a question that product owners have a lot is how do you break into agency flows, processes? We all know that it's tough to change routines. Um, is. Do you have any advice on that? Because like, uh, one of the, I I do think that now is a good moment for this revolution of AI to, to, to come in and say like, okay, now is the time to leave your old stack behind, and now is the time to move to a different thing that works better. Like, and if you sprinkle a little AI sauce on there and just say like, AI, ai, they, that might, that might lubricate the, the process. But like, how, how do you recommend, uh, doing that? I've got the benefit because I work with many cultures around the world with different agencies. If you asked me how to do that with an Australian agency, I would say take it one step at a time. Uhhuh, I find American agencies are a lot more. Where they would say, just rip the bandaid off and let's just do it. And if we need to rip the whole process, we'll just do it now and deal with whatever comes next. And so Emmanuel, I love that. I've never heard this before and it makes total sense. It does. And the British, they wanna like have tea or something, I don't know. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, that's, I, I mean if you wanna do it slow, if you wanna do it the Australian way, I would say one step at a time. Hmm, interesting. Do you think that that, uh, would that suggest that different marketing site copy would be, uh, an extension of that for different regions potentially? Yeah. Um, or in the case, what we do is we just, we start off with the, the pain point. So the thing is that we've recently discovered, um, is that. Selling the problem of fragmented tools isn't a good thing when the, when the market knows that there isn't a problem. So if you think about it, the way a digital agency would operate is that if they've got a problem, they use a plugin to solve that problem. Right? But we're coming back and saying, no, no, no, don't do a plugin solution. Where we're the infrastructure? Um, can fix that. And so if they're not educated to know that, then they will not know what we're talking about. So we've gotta go from the very first step. Why did they reach out to a different host? It's usually because of speed and security reasons, and it's, and then they can start to see the benefits after. Hmm. Yeah, it's really getting my gears turning in terms of, um. I am Gravity Kit. We are always talking to like. The generic customer. We've talked a lot on WP product. Talk about how talking to the customer is the same as talking to the agency. Uh, in, in, in a lot of ways because if your agency, the person at the agency investigating your product is often somebody who's looking at it through the eyes of their customer or their client. But what I'm hearing you say is like, that's not really the case. You have to address the agency's needs separately. Yeah, correct. Well, we've been talking largely about internal tools for agencies so far, but, so that makes sense. The other side of that is agencies buying products on behalf of their customers, so that typically would be themes or plugins. Or hosting services or something, but something that's gonna enhance their customer's websites. So I think that's when that dual lens comes in, where they're thinking through their customer's eyes. But as Zack says, it is not just thinking about what's best for the customer, because for the agency, it needs to be profitable so they can add a significant markup. It needs to be easy to use. It needs to be. Really good quality and something that they can put their name behind, not necessarily white label or they, that sometimes a factor, but there's a lot of priorities about what will benefit the agency in choosing what products they use for their client sites. Yeah. Emmanuel, what do you, what do you think makes a product good for agencies where it's just a walk in the park? It's gotta be frictionless. So from a client's expectation, they want the outcome. So say for example, let's talk where a client comes to an agency says, I need a great page speed insight score for core word vitals purposes, they just expect the outcome. How they get to the outcome is not their problem. It's the agency's problem. So they need the solution that's gonna deliver, deliver that score to that client efficiently. Frictionless as possible. And that's where a great tool will come in, or a great product will come in. And in terms of like, uh, WordPress product owners, when they're thinking about trying to make these tools that, that simplify and, uh, and hide the complexity for the client and make it easy for the, for the agency to, to deliver. Um, w what, what, what would you say to somebody who has, uh, a suite of plugins? Katie and I both have plugin suites, uh, that each plugin has a lot of different settings, a lot of different configuration options. Like a lot of our listeners, I think, are plugin developers are, are, are also small, small site builders as well, but like theme builders. What, what, what takeaways are there from thinking about the simplifying thing and uh, are there Yeah. Got it. That's a good question. So the way we see it is what infrastructure can do. That's what we have built. And so in other words, whatever works above the WordPress layer, that's what we do mm-hmm. In our process and features function. And then. When it comes to building a website, could be a theme builder come, could come, you know, could be another plugin that works with that theme, then that's obviously where that's WordPress level. That's where we don't get involved from an infrastructure level. So what we do is, um, to, so to give you specific examples is that a caching plugin on WordPress works on the PHP level. There are much more efficient lays above that in the server that can handle caching or, or caching. And so actually we had that joke into before, but, um, so when it comes to caching, we can allow the engine X level and the server level to do, to handle that, and that's more efficient on the WordPress level. Or if you look at a firewall system, um, there are many points that a firewall can, uh. A a, um, a hacker can try to attack, and it can also be above the WordPress level. It could be that P-H-P-F-P-M, it could be try to, to, uh, attack the Apache or engine X level, or it could be something else in the server. And if Wordfence, for example, is on the WordPress application level, it can't see beyond that. It can't see above that. It can only see below that. And so you're really leaving. Um, plugins to do critical things can also cause issues because it can't capture the whole, the whole issue, if that makes sense. And it's just, yeah. Beyond that, there's, and then you've got workflow issues that just take time. So, yeah. So again, when you look from an infrastructure level, um, you, you let the infrastructure do what's more efficient, and then when it comes to what. Building inside WordPress, then you've got the plugins that can actually do what's supposed to do on the WordPress level. Right. And how do you, uh, Katie, how do you talk to agency owners who, like, do you talk to agency owners at Barn too? Like, uh, how do you, uh, how do you talk to them about their experience? Um, I aspire to talk, to talk to them more. Um. But, uh, yeah, there a lot of, we had a really good episode of this show last year with a guy, um, who has a Shopify app company, and he shared a lot about what he does. He, he has entered a really crowded market for Shopify apps, but he gets loads of sales because he partners with agencies. And I learned a lot in that episode that I think most WordPress companies haven't quite mastered yet because you can really make those connections. Um, you'd need a product that an agency is going to use regularly. I think that's a bit difficult for me and Zack particularly because our plugins do quite specific tasks that may not be relevant on every project, but if you have a more wide appeal product, then that could work really well. So I thought that was very interesting. Thing, but I know it's something that we should do more largely to protect ourselves against the drop that we're having because of the decline in things like Google Organic and website traffic and all of the things that are the result of the way AI has turned everything, uh, upside down. Um, so that was interesting. But another thing I always. Think of is that, um, at Press Con last year, um, Zack and I and some other people had dinner with some age owners of a major WordPress agency who told us that they practically never used plugins on their client sites. They just build everything bespoke. And they were a particularly large agency. But it made me realize you really need to know who you're targeting because. Some agencies, particularly the small and medium ones, do source products that will meet the requirements of each project. Others just build everything themselves and there's literally no point. So that was a bit of an eyeopener for me, and that was before AI really had taken off. So if that was a problem before then, that I can only imagine now. So they must be building for the enterprise market then, I assume. Yeah, they're, yeah. They were a, A major agency, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the, you know, one of the problems with and opportunities of WordPress is the, the boundary gap between who your customer is. Um, you know, Emmanuel. Do you, does WPStaq only target agencies or is it, yeah, correct. Yeah, so we only work with digital agencies and we do have like publicly listed companies and government. That use our platform, but it all comes via the digital agency. And so there are times where we'll go directly to that enterprise or directly to that, uh, government department. And then, uh, but we will say, we would like to work with your developer. And so that's how we. Um, we, we don't un, we don't wanna undercut anyone. We just go, yeah, straight to the dev development because they're usually the gatekeeper of the website if they're, and what is that like to, to only work, to be so removed from the, like, the cu the person who's actually interfacing with your product. I mean, not that you are removed from your customer, but it, it's just a different relationship. Well, for us, we build a, we build a digital agency. And, uh, and so technically and contractually, they're our client, not their client, if that makes sense, Uhhuh. And so the market that we operate is typically the digital agency that manages and pays for the hosting. And they could be providing care plan services essentially. And so how it is to deal with 'em, it's amazing because it's, we get to see their issues. We can solve that issue in our products. Mm-hmm. And so that means that we, we've got a true lens that we only focus on their needs, and so then our product becomes relevant to their needs only. One of the things that I've experienced with, with dealing with agencies in our customer support is that they rarely reach out to customer support, which makes them, you know, a great customer, uh, because the costs are low, but it also means that we don't have visibility into their needs. Uh, how do you go about that, Katie? Like, uh, finding out what agencies need. Yeah, it is much harder because as you say, they're not providing, um, support requests to you. They're not giving you that feedback in the same way we've, we've tried this a couple of times where we've started a project to reach out to agencies that are using our products. Generally, they don't receive. Yeah. Uh, we've recently discovered that one of our plugins is particularly popular with a very specific industry sector. So we've now started a new project to target agencies who specialize in that sector. And we started, we've had a higher response rate, which still early days in terms of what we can learn from them. Um, we are also hoping to feature them as case. And you know, studies, there could be multiple benefits as well as learning from them, but it is not easy because they just want tools that they can get on with and they don't necessarily want to be your partner directly in that sense. They just want the tool to do the job. And you are right. It's, I find that once you are in the door with an agency, it is that they are much easier to deal with. And we're typically not working with the solo agency. They, they've got teams behind them and, um, and yeah, it, once you rent it, it's fine. I've, I've, I've found the opposite once I'm in, but, but that's not saying that if I reach out to everyone, they're gonna all respond to me. It just depends. Yeah. If it's important to them or not really. I think so. And how do you find new agency clients, customers? Uh, uh, we, we, we do paid ads, so they find us via that and referrals and, and, and chat, CPT and, and, uh, AI models now, so, and Reddit as well. Um, so yeah, so they, they typically find us, um. When they come to us, it's because of specific issues relating to speed and security and AI bots. AI bots has become a massive thing. And uh, and I guess because we've built our own firewall system, um, that has, um, helped us to pitch that and to win that. And so yeah, we, we typically see that they come for very specific reasons. And issues and, and that it's typically urgent and, uh, and that's it. Whereas, as you probably know with an agency, if it's not urgent, they won't deal with, it's, I think human nature for me, like the client's gotta be on their back. They must be like they're trying to put out a fire. And that's what typically agencies do. They, they put out fires and that's, and so that's, yeah. So you've gotta understand. The psychology and what the agency has to deal with in order to then attract them with the right message. And how do you decide, like how do you find the decision maker in agencies? Like how do you know who the person is to talk to? Uh, sometimes what I found in the past was if I really wanted to work with an agency, you'll send them an email. They don't respond. I just pick up my phone and just call 'em and. Um, I use a polo, I, uh, I use LinkedIn and I can essentially find a decision maker and typically the digi, the a, the decision maker In an agency, it's either, they're gonna say that they're the director, a CEO, but if I do see that the ti that the team is minimum 15 employees, I will not go directly to the CEO. I will then try to find a, a, like a. Um, a delivery manager of some kind, or a project manager or a, um, or head of digital or head of someone, and that's where I typically start from there. Hmm. Yeah, I think that's sensible. That shows an understanding of the structure of different agencies because we are talking about them like they're one category, but actually it's incredibly varied. It could be one person that calls themselves an agency, like as Zack was saying, or it could be a huge agency with even certainly dozens, maybe even hundreds of people. For the larger ones, they're actually completely different things to deal with, and so we need to adapt. But for me, we've referred to AI a few times in this conversation, but really the elephant in the room is whether any of this conversation is relevant given the agencies can just build their own stuff so easily. With AI these days, agencies clearly have developers, um, well, you don't necessarily need to be a developer. They can get on with these things, and they're probably very. Uh, advanced power users of ai. So do we even have any hope of attracting them into the future, do you think? I think certain things, yes. I think we have been, when we started Stack, we said to ourselves, between my co-founder and I, what if AI does become that thing and. We've pinpointed that for AI to work, whether it's in the WordPress ecosystem or not, you need infrastructure. Yeah, you're fine. Everybody needs hosting infrastructure point of view. Um, but then yet again, uh, you see a lot, you hear a lot of horror cases with custom plugins that AI has developed and security leaks and security flaws. So it's. AI just accelerates things, but I don't think it's gonna kill everything, if that makes sense. It's just gonna change the dynamics of the market and no one really knows how it's going to change, but we just definitely know that it is going to change. Right. You know, as agencies are shifting, um, and not just agencies, but like large plugin shops, like Stellar WPS had another round of layoffs like. These, these businesses that Amazon, you know, 30% of its workforce, uh, block 30% or 40% of its workforce, which is, uh, the owner of Square and other platforms, like, there's, there's so much disruption in terms of the work, uh, the workforce itself. The people working and the people working are likely more likely to use ai. So I do think that the, the way that agencies work right now is shifting. Um, how do we connect to these agencies like Emmanuel? You, you said you were, you used Chachi Peti to find the agencies themselves and you pick up the phone and call. Um, I'm also wondering, you know, uh, we're going to press comp. Katie and I, uh. Emmanuel. I, I hope you're there. But, uh, it's also half the world away. Um, I mean, you never know, but are there, uh, are there places where people congregate that, that agencies like, share their deepest, darkest, uh, workflows, I guess Word camp, but mm-hmm. We haven't, but there's no word camp here in Australia, so maybe I'm, I might need to. That's weird. The us Yeah. That is weird. There was one. You must feel so left out all the time. You're on that long time zone. No big events. Oh no, there's no word camp this year. There was one last year in the year before, but, uh, not this year, but, uh, but yeah, it's ums. You did say something and I was, I I I was, I forgot what I was gonna say, but actually now, now I remember. I think there's always gonna be a digital agency. I think the teams will be just get smaller, so it should be easier to get in reach with the, with the decision maker then, um, because yeah, AI is just gonna empower them to do a lot more with a lot less people. And typically what people do when they get laid off. They will have an idea in the WordPress ecosystem. They'll start up a new idea and yeah, ideas will always flourish and whether there's AI or not. So one of the things that AI is allowing right now is, uh, consolidating tools and, uh, people who have smaller plugins are finding those smaller plugins are not. They don't have a moat around the AI development space. Katie wrote a great write up on this, that the, she's found that smaller plugins don't fare as well when compared to bigger plugins. Um, those is there What do, what, what do, what do we think about how AI are, are looking at, sorry. How agencies are looking at the tools they're using and, and determining whether or not something's worth keeping around. It is gonna come down to the biggest value that the the service provides. Really. If it's gonna be such a simple thing, then yeah, it, it could potentially be disrupted by ai, but if it's such an integral part of their business and workflows, then you would assume that it wouldn't be touched first or not touched at all. Yeah. One of the things we're, we're trying to do at Gravity Kit, we have got a product in the works. Uh, that's, that we're trying to really have good product market fit. So one of the things that, and that we have great episodes on product market fit and WP product talk, uh, check our backup back episodes. Um, but I'm normally the guy who builds something and then tries to fit the product. Uh, tr tries to find product market fit after. Um. One of the bigger questions I've had is how do I propose to an agency how this would work for them? Like if I'm building a tool that builds dashboards. 'cause that's what it is, you know, spoiler alert. Um, there's like reselling the dashboard to your, their clients is, is like a second level of functionality beyond like. Building a dashboard easily. Cool. Having a whole nother level of functionality where you re, you're able to build a dashboard for your client that you sell. Um, I don't, I don't have a question, but I'm just trying to describe the different thought process that I have in terms of selling to agencies. It, the way the agency mindset is, is that they're juggling many things. So they're always putting out fires. And so the best way to look at it is what can you show them that's gonna solve an issue for them today? And if they magnitude that to a factor of whatever, over weeks, days, months, years to, to the time that they're gonna save, that's probably the best way to do it. They're very time poor. Right. Just like lawyers, if you're selling to lawyers or accountants. Uh, again, if you know how to sell to, to that group, yeah. You, you'll find, how do you sell the lawyers and accountants? Well, you probably send them a bottle of whiskey, to be honest, but. Well, I happen to know Emmanuel, that you might have a background that that touches on, uh, lawyers and accountants. Yes, yes. I, I did study law and I did work at a law firm as well, so, um, while I was having my di while I was operating my digital agency as well, so. It's, uh, yeah. Is there a difference between having like a a between marketing to an agency and marketing to like an internal house, uh, web team that like a, a large law firm might have? Um, I, we've traditionally never gone down that path. Mm-hmm. We've always just gone directly to the, to the agency. Um, but typically those teams do engage a third party. Service provider, which is typically a digital agency, and they're the ones that are typically managing the hosting anyways, so, yeah. So to answer that question, yeah, I, I think they're just an extension of what they can do on a daily basis and then leave the digital agency to do typically more of the, the big picture stuff. Right. I've, uh, recently been consolidating the tools that we use at Gravity Kit, uh, and bringing things more into WordPress, and I think that that kind of reflects an opportunity that we all have. Um, where I've been using drip.com and now we're migrating to, we have migrated to, um, uh. Come on. Uh, fluent, the CRM fusion. CRM, what's it called? Fluent. Fluent. Thank you. My brain freeze fluent, CRM. Uh, and then we also have, we're about to release a new product at Gravity that allows you to have a essentially, uh, front end Kanban voting for features. So we are going to be moving away from user voice and moving our feature request board. Onto our own dogfooding product of, of Gravity Board. So we are about to save between the two of those, you know, 500, $400 a month. Uh, and that's, that's why bringing everything into WordPress, so I think that if Gravity Kit, we have a, we're a team of like seven people. If we're saving that much money, that means that there's that much money to have for each one of the Gravity kits out there. So I think there's a lot of money on the table if, if the migration's easy with ai, right? Um, if there are the, the APIs available for developers to make the migration easy. Um, and the functionality obviously. But like, uh, I think that there's, there's a huge shift away from costs and, and I think WordPress, Matt Berg talks about WordPress as like the home of AI in the future. Uh, that's how he envisions it. And I do think that having a single place where all your information lives is a huge benefit. A hundred percent. Like the way we're seeing things, um, from an AI perspective is that, this is my prediction on the WordPress side of things, is that there's gonna be a lot of. Usage in AI and going to static websites. And so you might, you are already starting to see that slight decline of WordPress, but then it's just gonna take that realization that again, everything is scattered all over the place. Today And you need a database for like, databases are good. Exactly. Then for everything to be brought back into WordPress again. And that's where I think what, you know, WordPress being the hub of ai. Hmm. I think it's, yeah. Something I actually Yeah. Agree with. Yeah, I'm finding, uh, building AI stuff on WordPress a lot easier than doing it out of WordPress because WordPress has so much functionality already built into core. For example, scheduling through Theron side of things and sending emails, which is not that great at, but it for internal purposes, it can send emails. As it comes. And if try and do that in Claude, then it gets stuck. It doesn't wanna send an email in Gmail. It doesn't. The scheduling is rubbish 'cause you've gotta have your computer on. Uh, so actually building stuff on WordPress with AI is working well. Hmm. But don't forget, because the WordPress ecosystem is so huge, the AI language models can learn from WordPress quite easily. So when it can deliver a solution for you in WordPress, it's gonna be. Pretty much on point because it's got so much data behind it. How are you, uh, adjusting your marketing, if at all, to, uh, to market to agencies on AI channels? Like how, how are you approaching agencies using AI at all? Yeah, so that's a good question. So you probably heard last year, and there's many facets of AI that we're, we're we're touching, but one particular pressing one that we're seeing as of late is that last year you probably remember, there was a segment in the news about CloudFlare complaining about AI bots. Yeah. And how they're just, yeah. Essentially, um, uh, abusing hosting services. And they're, and then, and they're getting for nothing. Like for example, the hosting companies are footing the bill and the end users also fitting footing the bill. So. Because we've built our own firewall system, we can stop a lot of the AI traffic. Not a hundred percent, but we're stopping a lot of it. And so we are getting a lot of agencies that are coming to us and saying, Hey, we're being affected by these AI bots, so we're, we've been able to help them with that, and we can e eventually mitigate it with the. Advice. And then from an another AI point of view is that we're looking at the AI side of things, of how workflow's gonna change when it comes to a client briefing an agency, and how to build a website. So one thing that we're building internally is a AI website builder for WordPress, where we are building websites into the page builder of their selection. And for example. It's also built in the workflow of an agency. So you get briefed from a client, you then create the mockup or the website, show the client, they get approved, and then you start building that website. We're, we're maintaining that entire flow. And then you click deploy, it deploys that website inside WPStaq. And then we're also taking all the design elements into the correct module of say, elemental or Divvy or, or, or that page builder. So it's not just A-H-T-M-L block. In the HTML module. So we're doing that. Um, we've also introduced a lot of AI that helps debugging a lot more effectively. So for example, we've built our own debug solution inside our panel. And if you see an error, it looks ugly, but you, there's a button that says debug with ai, and then it. Allows you to debug it within our interface. So it's not a generic answer, like what you would get from chat GPT, but I also see a future where, um, like we do automated plugin updates and we do with regression testing, which checks the code base to see if there's no critical errors and et et cetera. But I also see a future where, um, and this is on our roadmap, where we will build out. Um, AI agents that you can upload how this particular plugin works, and that plugin could be installed on a hundred websites, 500 websites. And then you have that AI agent checking every 500 websites that has that particular plugin to make sure that the user flow or the user experience or the user interface has a broken as, as an AI agent navigates that website. So I see a lot of stuff that, um, what agencies do. Can be automated with AI and it will solve a lot of their issues and the pain points that they have with WordPress. Hmm. While hearing you talk, I realize that you, you're talking about your pa, your website builder, that agencies want to be left in the loop. So much of the conversation is like, do it yourself. Uh, just, you know, uh, all of a sudden I have, uh, a website with ai, but agencies want to be needed and need to be needed. So, like, I love your handoff thing where the agencies get the brief, make the website and show the client. And that made me think of, uh, you know, one of the things we haven't done, uh, I don't know why it's pretty darn easy, is like white labeling. Making, making it easy for the agencies to say, this is ours. We did this and here you go. As opposed to us trying to, uh, maintain ownership over it. Uh, yeah, it's kind of a shift of mindset. I agree. You have any demand for white labeling? 'cause we get almost none ever in 10 years, so that's why we haven't done it. No, but I think that it's a shift in mindset. Right. Um, so if an agency creates a, a view or like a, a product table, like don't they wanna say that that was something they did or something that only they could do as well as they did it with the tools that you provide them? It depends on the agency. They're also different, but some, I'm sure that's the case. It depends on the service that they're offering and how they're selling to their client. For example, we offer white label tools in our system where you will never see the word stack or WPStaq in in anything in in a hosted website unless. It is by default. It does show that, but it depends if the agency's selling care plan services, and so that might tell their client that they're offering hosting and management and all these services. Then we've got a white label feature that it, it hides stack hosting to then the digital agency's name right inside WordPress. So it really depends on the agency and and, and how they've sold it really. It's worth sending out a survey. Um, uh, we have a, a viewer from Twitter or x I'm, I'm old apparently saying I've seen this before. People rush into cheap solutions, then they realize later they've lost flexibility. Control plug in, freedom room to grow a fast AI build site is not the same as a real business assay. WordPress will not die. Weak providers will. Uh, that's an interesting, uh, angle. Um. So we, we are, unfortunately, we're running outta time. Uh, but before we go, we always wrap with our best advice, uh, that we have. If, if you had one thing to say to somebody who asked you, okay, Emmanuel, what are we gonna say? Uh, what's the be single best thing that you could do to think about tooling as a product owner? Um, when it comes to agencies, what is your best advice? If it's a frictionless experience, that's the only way to scale your business. If it's costing you too much time and it's repetitive, you can never grow a business or an agency. That should be like, tattooed on my forehead. That's good. Uh, Katie, what, what about you? Um, for product people. My advice on building products that would attract agencies is to really think about the agency's pain points and also think about the threat of ai, which means. Build big comprehensive solutions that will be an integral part of their workflow so that once they start using it, it would be very difficult for them to stop and they have no motivation to, um, building small tools that just take you a small amount of time, uh, is not gonna work in the future in the way it used to. So think big and. Satisfy real pain points. A lot of tattoo as well. Everybody gets a tattoo. Um, mine is, uh, manel. You have inspired me on this call, uh, to really again, return to the idea of agency outreach and like talking to agencies one-on-one. If you are watching or listening in advance of press comp, buy a press comp ticket. Emmanuel buy a press con fly across the world. Come on. Um. It's, it's, it's worth developing these relationships because like Katie's saying, uh, agencies are, uh, if you have an agency relationship, that's different than having to, uh, rank well for Google. So that, that type of relationship is, is very valuable. Even more so now. So that's, that's my best advice. Uh, Emmanuel, that's a wrap. Thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you online? Appreciate you having me. Um, LinkedIn, so you can find me on LinkedIn. Um, if you wanna have a, a chat with me, um, there's a book call, uh, button on our website, WPStaq.com and um, and it's wps TA q.com. WPS TA q.com. Correct. Sorry. Please continue. And yeah, more than happy to have a chat with anyone. Nice. Well, if you are enjoying these shows, do us a favor and hit that subscribe button on YouTube. It's literally free, easy, and it helps to support our work. And special thanks to free us again and, uh, join us next week where we have special guests, Matt Schwartz, to discuss how market fit matters more than product when moving from services to SaaS. That's gonna be a good one. I'm excited to talk, uh, to match Schwarz, uh, as well. So thank you so much again, Emmanuel. This was awesome. I, I'm fired up to talk to agencies and, uh, uh, thanks for joining us, everybody, and see y'all next week., Streamlining Agencies From Fragmented and Disconnected Tools, YouTube, 01kmn7w4ce8230bbtbdte8q087.