Episode 9
In this episode Michelle and Jeff speak with Corey Maass, just as he’s about to launch his new plugin OMGIMG. It’s a plugin for editing images on your WordPress website, solving the problem of sourcing images for posts and pages, and making the whole process seamless.
Mentioned in this episode:
Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Michelle: Welcome to WP Constellations, a podcast exploration of the WordPress universe, brought to you by StellarWP.
Welcome back to WP Constellations. I am here today joined by my cohost. Once again had a couple episodes where Jeff was not he wasn’t at WordCamp US, so he wasn’t hey you could have been my voice, Jeff, in all those ten interviews I did with no voice at WordCamp US. But it’s good to see you again. How are you?
[00:00:33] Jeff: Hello, everybody. Very excited to be here and I listened to that episode and your dedication to the craft is admirable. But as I was listening to that show, I kept yelling at my earphones saying, Michelle, stop it, stop it. Rest, you cannot do this.
But you did all ten interviews with that voice and holy smokes, it was very impressive. And I’m so glad that your voice is back. It took a whole week.
[00:00:58] Michelle: Thank goodness for good microphones that pick up even the worst of voices. But I am joined today by somebody I actually did see at WordCamp US. Corey Maass. Corey, how are you today? Thanks for joining us.
[00:01:10] Corey: Good. I’m very good. Thank you for having me. And I’m proud to say that I was part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Part of her shouting and losing her voice was at me.
That sounded bad. In conversation over loud conversations.
[00:01:27] Michelle: This is correct.
[00:01:28] Corey: Yeah. Was fun. So it was great getting to see you in person again.
[00:01:33] Michelle: Yes, likewise. Thank you so much. And thank you for joining us today.
I’ve been watching and following along what you’re doing with that OMGIMG plugin, mostly because I work at Post Status as well on the side, and that plugin suddenly showed up on our dashboard. And every single thing I was writing at Post status, I’m like, at the very top. It’s like OMGIMG. I’m like, OMG, I’m such a good writer. I love that, but you’re doing such amazing things with it. And I was like, hey, we need to have you on the show. So I told Jeff, I’m like, we’re going to get you on the show and we’re going to talk about it. We’re going to kind of see what it is and what it’s all about. So my first question is tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do with WordPress.
[00:02:19] Corey: Sure. I’m Corey Maass, I currently live in New Hampshire in the northeast of the United States. I’ve been building for the web since ‘96, ‘97. So a long, long time. WordPress, I published a plugin in 2011, so that’s the first proof I have that I was involved.
It’s all gray before that, but I had a long history of building websites for clients. But then in the early two thousands, I caught the SaaS bug, like a lot of people inspired by Rob Walling and Joel Spolsky and 37 Signals and all that. And so I long pursued an entrepreneurial track alongside of building for the web but doing client work, some day jobs throughout and then most of my client work I think leading up to 2011. So for a couple of years was WordPress.
And so yeah, I’ve been building client sites almost primarily with WordPress since then.
And then in 2000 I don’t know, later than that ‘15, no, it can’t be that late. Somewhere in the middle there. I went to WordCamp Atlanta because I was living down in Nashville and met the guys from Ninja Forms and a bunch of other inspiring folks who were successfully doing and had successful product businesses based on WordPress, specifically plugins. And a light bulb went off for me and that was the first time that I was like, oh, I don’t need to build a SaaS app in some other framework at night and then be in WordPress during the day. Like I could combine all this stuff because I had been learning more and more about developing inside.
Yeah, for the last, I don’t know, eight years or more, I’ve been at least always cursorily pursuing side hustles of WordPress plugins. And then I also am a big advocate for using WordPress as a backend for SAS apps and games and other things. So some of my other side projects, even if they’re not a product that people buy, software product that people buy, still use WordPress in the background. So that kind of brought me into going to lots of WordCamps, which is where I meet all these awesome people, getting more involved with the community and then becoming more of an advocate for using WordPress in lots of different ways.
[00:04:58] Michelle: I love it. And I was in Tennessee last year and went down to Chattanooga and got to meet up with the guys from Ninja Farms. They actually own a coffee shop there that makes really good coffee. I got to see them all there in person and shake some hands and do some hugs and that was pretty cool. That’s a great group of people for sure. So we did invite you in here to talk about OMGIMG. I mean, of course we would want to talk to you anyway, but we really want to hear about this OMGIMG. So tell us about your newest plugin, what it does, how does it work, what’s going on?
[00:05:31] Corey: Yeah, so should I do the historical version? Should I just go like features first and then we can get into the history?
[00:05:39] Michelle: Whatever you want to do.
[00:05:40] Corey: Okay, well, the plugin itself is still in development, we should be launching in the next couple of weeks. It’s a Featured Image Editor and an open graph image generator. So the idea being that you write a blog post, you go and you find a featured image or you have one sourced or you don’t have one at all. This lets you either upload sort of a boring stock photo, but then put lots of extra value into it. The title of the post, the link to the post, drop quotes if there’s something really compelling and the option to make that your featured image or generate one and then use that but sized correctly and or tweaked slightly to become the open graph image, which I’ll talk about in a second. And then the feature we’re not really talking about, but it’s kind of in parallel, is that you can then also generate images that are correctly sized for sharing on Twitter, sharing on Facebook, sharing on Instagram, whatever. So the idea being that instead of writing a post and uploading a picture of a landscape, or if you want something more compelling, having to open up photoshop or go into Canva or something like that, you can take a non photo or a boring photo and make it compelling for all uses around. And it doesn’t have to be a blog post. It could be a WooCommerce product, it could be an EDD plugin, it could be anything, right? So it’s all the images associated with a thing inside WordPress.
Open graph images is an interesting space to step into.
Everybody knows what it is, but a lot of people don’t really know what it is, right? So if you share a post out of the box, if you’ve got an SEO plugin installed, if you share it on Twitter, usually a little preview comes up, right? Or if you share it on Facebook, a little preview comes up and that is the open graph image. It was a thing sort of invented by Facebook and most people just assume that it’s the featured image because most of the time it is, but it doesn’t have to be. You can have a shareable image that’s different from the featured image that’s at the top of your blog post or are, and it’s generally meant to be a specific size. But again, that size, because it was defined by Facebook, is different than what Twitter wants when you actually post an image to Twitter, or as we all know, Instagram wants squares and that’s different from everybody else’s. So we’re kind of trying to solve all those image problems and also do better with images. So I have some good examples on OMGIMG.co. Unfortunately the.com was taken, but what can you do? Modern internet hooray.
But yeah, that shows the difference of like if you just upload a boring stock photo, which is what a lot of us have done for years, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Images are compelling, but you get this big picture of people looking productive or a pretty landscape or some code that looks dynamic because you’ve shifted it slightly. But what is the blog post about? No idea. Right? And so the idea being that you can impose more info, more value onto that photo. Again, by including anything, by including I mean even just at a base level, your logo in the lower right, so at least if somebody sees an image and hasn’t yet skimmed the text that Facebook might or might not deign to show you have some context, right? Or a title or again, a quote or whatever you want. So that’s kind of the big problem that we’re trying to solve.
[00:09:40] Jeff: I need your plugin. I need it now. I need it today. So I recently launched a new website called WPFoodies.com, and the problem I’m running into now is it’s heavily influenced around images of food. We got food pics and stuff like that, but I don’t run an SEO plugin. And the issue I’m running into now is when I post a link to an article, it doesn’t show, like on Twitter, I don’t get anything. Nothing shows up. No image, no featured image. So I definitely need something like your plugin, like right now, because being able to see that big, nice foodie picture to go with the post on X, I need that. So people click on it instead of just exactly.
[00:10:26] Corey: And that’s the pattern that has kind of been established, right, is that we spend a lot of time working on content, but we’re kind of stuck.
You’re in a slightly better situation because you’re like, I know that a compelling image of food is what’s going to sell this. People are going to click, but a lot of people, it’s an afterthought. Go sign up. Now we have a beta list you get in early pricing. Yada, yada, yada. There’s my hard sell.
But I sent an email, first email to the people who have signed up so far. Like, we’re coming soon. But just to start the conversation, what made you join this list? What piqued your interest in the first place?
And one of the immediate responses I got was, OMG. I think they were being cute. OMG, I hate images. I spent hours writing a blog post and then, oh my God, I have to go find a GD image FML.
And this was the response. It was like, you’ve done all this hard work, you’ve written this beautiful article, you’ve sussed out your recipe, all these things, and then you’re like, then now I have to go find an image and think totally differently.
And we can’t totally get away from that, right? Like, we are not yet tied into AI or stock photo searching. So you’re still going to need your compelling image of the cookies that your article talks about. But once you have that, one, yes, we will serve it for all socials. Two, we will resize it so that it works great when you share it on all socials. And three, you can go put the name of the recipe over it. You can put WP Foodies on it so that when somebody sees a nice big image, they’re not looking at the tiny little text down below to see where it came from. It’s big. Front and center. It’s in your brand colors. It’s in your brand font, all that kind of stuff.
And you’re right, almost everybody. Go ahead.
[00:12:30] Jeff: No, I was just going to say I agree with most of the people on your list, because when I used to write for WP Tavern, one of my pet peeves was that every single article had to have a featured image. So I’d get done writing the article, and then I’d have to go find a place that has CC0 images I can use and find one that was relative to the article. And sometimes that was the hardest part. The most difficult part of writing and publishing the piece was finding that image.
[00:12:57] Corey: Yeah, again, I want to solve that problem as soon as I can. It’s definitely highest on the list, and we’ve got options. Now. Not only do we have stock photo repos that have APIs so we can talk to them, but now we’ve actually got AI. So of course, that’s the first or second thing that everybody has asked me about. And I’m like, yeah, we will get there as soon as we can.
But yeah, solving all these image issues, and it’s funny, like you said, I need it right now. And that’s what I’m hearing from so many people. Which is why it’s a little surprising that almost everybody says, how does this not already exist?
Because people have sort of worked around it. Or again, I think people have written articles and then said, okay, now I have to slog through ten minutes of finding the perfect photo. Or the truth is a photo that’s good enough?
And then I have to resize it, or I have to bring it into Canva, or I’ve got to dot, dot, dot. We actually started our journey building up to coming up with this idea and building this product by first building a little utility site and plugin Crop Express, because the first problem we were trying to solve was just specifically for me, for clients. I have one client website that uses squares whenever there’s an archive page. So the grid, but then the featured image is a rectangle so that it doesn’t take up so much vertical space. So every article that gets posted, they have to have a rectangle version that’s 16 nine. Don’t try to explain 16 nine to nontechnical people already.
And then square squares. At least people understand, like, okay, it’s a square, but how do you make a square out of a rectangle? Again, and I’m not faulting anybody. These are writers. These are not visual people.
They paint pictures with words.
It’s hard enough to go find a photo, and then they’re like, how do I crop it? So it’s like trying to make that solve that problem first, and we sort of did, and it’s dying on the vine, and we might revisit it, but Crop Express does work and does exist, and my clients go there every day to manipulate photos, but it kind of started us down this journey and these conversations about like, wow, it’s not just resizing images that is the problem. But there’s so much more to images.
WordPress is all about publishing and I think people for so long have mostly associated not incorrectly publishing with words. But this is the, even if we went from words like Facebook to images on Instagram. It’s supposed to be just images to now just videos on TikTok, right? Like we’re more and more just visual. Just visual.
Which isn’t to say there isn’t a place for words and long form content, but images are a key part of the web and we’re arguably neglecting them or at least not utilizing them as best as we could.
[00:16:08] Michelle: With microblogging, the images become even more important because it literally is what’s catching people’s eye in a microblog type situation. And in social, I mean, social really is microblogging, right? But you want to generate from your own content first. You keep saying we want, we want. So I want to put this out. It’s not the royal we, you actually are them.
And you spell your names differently, which is interesting. But you and Cory Miller have been working on this and building it in public. So you’ve been doing live streaming some of the work that you’re doing on this. What has that been like, kind of building in public? What’s the expectation of people? What’s the engagement? How’s the engagement been? And then how did you decide to build this and work together on it in the first place?
[00:16:58] Corey: Sure. So last fall, I assume most anybody listening to this is already involved with Post Status. If you’re not, you should be. What the heck are you waiting for? Post Status to me is the most valuable WordPress community specifically because it focuses on business and there’s an undercurrent of there’s people who use WordPress every day.
These are not mutually exclusive, right? The concentric circles overlap, but there’s people who are really passionate about open source and then there’s people who are I mean, most of us make our living off of WordPress in one way or another and that often includes usually or frequently involves graduating from client work or agency work to product work. When you’re like, oh, I could build a plugin and then, oh, maybe other people want this plugin and then I’ll sell this plugin. So Post Status, amazing community.
And I’ve been involved there for a while. Cory, spelled C-O-R-Y who currently runs it, has with a bunch of other people. It’s not just him, but he and I have crossed paths a few times. And last year in one of the Post Status meetups, all done through Zoom, there were conversations about problems that we were solving with plugins and tech and whatnot. And I started talking about Crop Express and Corey said, oh my God, that solves a key problem that I have. Let’s talk about that. So we had a call, just the two of us outside of the meetup and sort of chatted about it and said, well, for me, I said, Corey with an E, C-O-R-E-Y said, I think there might be a product here.
And Cory without an E spelled incorrectly, said that maybe I’d like to get involved. I’ve been looking for more things to get involved in. Great, so let’s start talking about this. And then he said, I don’t know why he was off the meds. He was on the meds, whatever.
No, his commitment to helping people really is where I think this came from. But he suggested the wild and crazy idea like, let’s do this live. And I didn’t hesitate about making it all public. I love speaking publicly. I love sharing my journey.
The only hesitation I had was he said, no editing. We’re literally going to just say, broadcast to YouTube, record live, and off we go.
And that made me actually feel better. I think a lot of people would go, what the heck? Because I’ve done podcasts in the past. I’m a musician and DJ and I’m passionate about dance music. And so I used to have a podcast specifically for that and the amount of editing was just endless. So it’s like, I can either work on this product or I can edit the podcast where we talk about working on this product.
We started January 11 or something of this year and literally we just throw it to YouTube. So I apologize to everybody who has sat through any of our videos.
There is no intro. There is no outro there’s all the ohs and, ums, the awkward pauses, the weird rephrasing, the backtracking. It’s definitely the messy history of Corey and Cory start a WordPress product.
But yeah, we started by addressing the small issue, the utility issue. We kind of talked about how images are the wrong size, so built a little plugin and have the Crop Express website. But it pretty quickly led to there’s nothing more to this from a product standpoint. And a lot of people are going to roll their eyes at me in my capitalism, but that’s the way I think, right? Even if a product isn’t sold for a million dollars, there’s got to be value in it, inherent value anyway. And then ideally, to incentivize me to keep working on it and support it, ideally it makes me some money. It doesn’t have to be a lot of money.
But we looked at this and we said there’s really not much more to it. And so this might just be a simple plugin that sits in the repo and is just a utility.
And so support is minimal, but if it works, it works great. And that’s kind of where we left that. But we realized we were having more and more conversations again about social images, about featured images that don’t have all the value they could have.
When you share them, they don’t look as good as they should. And for me, again, as part of me being a musician and then also being a person who likes to give back to the community, I have a music blog that’s where the podcast is hosted, but I write reviews, and I have people who write reviews. And I was having to go into Canva every time we wanted to publish something, copy the last image, put in the album artwork, tweak it slightly, put in the title. So I had to do all this editing. I was like, this is very repetitive. Why can’t it just be repeatable? And then also, if I want to create a campaign on Twitter, so it’s like when the article gets published, the featured image that has that I just described goes out to socials. Okay, great. They’re the wrong size because they’re square, but they technically work. But then two days later, a week later, two weeks later, I want to create a little campaign, a little arc of posts on all these platforms. And I use Buffer, but there’s a whole bunch of other social scheduling tools out there. But I upload these graphics, and so it’s like I would pull quotes from the article anyway. It’s all this work. It’s like, why are we having to do all this work? And Corey, same thing with post status and other projects.
There’s all this work that has to get done, and it’s never going to be a one button solution, but we could get a lot closer than opening a whole different website, going to Canva or going to Photoshop, or going to affinity Design or whatever your tool you’re using. And then also for again, non visual. I’ve been using Photoshop since the 90s, so I almost feel lucky, like I’ve never needed it.
I’ve never been a photo person or really a graphic designer, but I’ve just used it because back in the day, you designed in Photoshop and then sliced it up, and that was your website.
[00:24:02] Michelle: Or MS Paint. Remember MS?
[00:24:03] Corey: Paint or MS Paint? Yep.
[00:24:06] Jeff: Paint Shop Pro.
[00:24:07] Corey: There you go. Yep.
[00:24:10] Jeff: Is there any history or background towards the name OMGIMG?
[00:24:16] Corey: Absolutely. So, yeah, we started brainstorming, and we said, we want this fun. Why isn’t working with images fun? Forget that. It’s a chore.
Yes. Ideally, we bring it up to it’s acceptable, it’s part of the workflow. But what if we actually made it fun? Because, I mean, images are the fun part of the web at first glance. Why not? So we were like, we want something fun, bright, friendly, and one of my favorite tools that I use often is SVG. OMG. OMG. SVG. Now I can’t even SVG.
See if it just comes up. Yeah, svgomg net. So as I’m building product, I’m usually using SVGs, which is an image format good for, like, icons, so arrows or other little print icons or whatever, but you drop them into svgomg net and it compresses them. So it makes them even smaller, so they’re better for the web. And I’ve always loved the name. Part of the success of this nerdy little tool that has a specific use is the fact that they named it SVG OMG. So when we were brainstorming, I was like, OMGIMG, we’re done. Yeah, that’s it right there. Because, again, fun, friendly, quirky. Nobody knows how to pronounce it, love it, but nothing you could ask for. Better of a brand name than, how the heck do you pronounce this thing?
[00:25:51] Michelle: You absolutely have to read the letters because you can’t pronounce it like, yeah, it doesn’t work.
[00:25:57] Corey: Thank you for doing that. I’ve never actually heard it said out loud.
[00:26:01] Jeff: So a lot of the things you described with OMGIMG reminds me of something from a few years ago. It’s called Social Image Generator. It was acquired by Jetpack and Automatic in 2021. It’s no longer available for sale. I think they rolled it into Jetpack as a module or something, but it did pretty much what you were describing is it would automatically create and enhance images for the Social Graph. So I’m wondering, Social Image Generator, which was acquired, what is going to set OMGIMG apart from something like that?
[00:26:39] Corey: Excuse me. Yeah, so there was that plugin, and there was one other, and I don’t even remember what it was called that I think is still available.
And this always sounds shady, but I swear, long before we had these ideas, I actually purchased both of them and then returned both of them.
And you’ll have to take my word for it that I wasn’t just being a jerk about it. But this is a problem that I’ve looked at for a long time. Like I said, specifically for my music blog, I said, Why isn’t there some way to generate these images? What I was surprised at and this is again part of the conversation of like, how does this not exist already?
Is why is it limited to generating an Open Graph image?
I think the plugins, to my recollection, again, it’s been a year or more, but they both only did a site wide version, so it wasn’t post per post. And maybe they had that option, but I don’t remember.
But clunky, you had to fill out a whole bunch of fields. And so I wasn’t impressed with the product itself. And then I was disappointed that it was limited to what it was to only doing this. And I even messaged both companies and said, Why do you not also let me select Open Graph. That’s a certain size and shape, right? Let me also make a square one. And one company said, Absolutely not. We’re not interested in solving that problem.
And the other one said, yeah, we’ll think about it. It was like, okay, great. And I twiddled my thumbs. I never heard back.
A year later, I sort of looked back and went, yeah, this still doesn’t seem to be a solved problem.
[00:28:41] Jeff: This is what I love about developers, okay? This doesn’t exist. Fine, I’ll make it right.
[00:28:46] Corey: Which has been a huge mistake that I’ve made numerous times.
My last plugin I just sold, I had a plugin called Social Link Pages. So a link tree or card or about me, but built into WordPress.
And I 100% built it because I was working with a group of DJs and we all were buying paying for a Link Tree page. And typical freaking developer, instead of going, you know what, instead of spending $8 a month, I’m going to spend hundreds of hours and build it myself.
And fast forward, that’s it, right? And they’re wonderful people. They’re in Australia, they’re super nice, they give back to their local community.
And obviously, it has nothing to do with them. It was just purely why something so simple, quote, unquote.
At a glance, everything seems simple or straightforward.
I’ll build this myself. So, yeah, this one’s a little different.
So you understand that I get the joke and I resonate with the joke, but I’ve actually done a fair bit of soul searching this time, because this time, instead of using another product that does this and going, well, I can do it better or I don’t want to pay for it, it was legitimately that these other products don’t do what I need.
And we’re solving a big real problem that I’m not seeing solved elsewhere without a lot of friction or pain, meaning Photoshop, Canva, people on fiverr, whatever your solution is.
And it came about. I am a very compulsive developer.
If anybody is in meetups with me, knows almost every time I get on a call I’m promoting some new product.
In this case, it has come out of nine months. Well, I’ve been building it for a couple of, you know, seven months of conversation with Corey, which is a whole different route for me and a whole different feeling in my developer gut that says we’re chasing something different that came out of conversations rather than me just having an idea or wanting to eat somebody else’s lunch.
[00:31:23] Michelle: So one of the things that I think of, there’s crossover between a lot of different, you know, one form plugin does this, another form plugin does that, and there’s a little bit of crossover. One of the things that Jeff said earlier on was that an SEO plugin. So there are SEO plugins that have a place for you to upload an image for Twitter, upload an image for Facebook, put in some text and things like that.
What is the overlap here? Does this take the place of that? Or can you still use them in concert with one another?
[00:31:54] Corey: Yeah, and quite intentionally so. I had a great conversation, for example, with Syed, who runs Awesome Motive, who is the company behind All In One SEO. And one of the first things he said to me was, thank you for integrating with All In One SEO.
As soon as I got this working, one of the first things I did was I said, okay, once we’re generating images, we need to be able to slot those images into these other into the SEO plugins because people are invested and should be, Jeff, in an SEO plugin because it adds so much value.
And for years I didn’t get it right. I was like, it’s another place to put in more words again, so I can relate to people who don’t understand the finer points of open graph metadata. Those are some nerdy words, but it’s getting easier to explain it to people of like, go plug in your URL on Twitter and see what happens. Or plug in Facebook is actually the better one because it does the live preview, and if nothing happens, you’re missing out. Right.
And so people have already doubled down on Yoast and All In One SEO. There’s a whole bunch of them. And I said, I do not want to replicate.
We do have the functionality so that if you’re not running an SEO plugin, Jeff, that these images will show up.
So we’re still giving you that value, but it’s better served by installing an SEO plugin because they’re going to serve the words.
They’re going to solve some other problems that we’re just never going to get into. Because I want to build an image product. I don’t want to build an SEO product. Very different things.
[00:33:46] Michelle: Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
It does feel good to hear you say that you work together as opposed to we’re trying to be all things to everybody.
[00:33:55] Corey: Oh, yeah.
[00:33:59] Jeff: I was just going to say I upload images. I write the article. I write the alt text for the images. Now you want me to write SEO stuff? Come on, man.
[00:34:09] Michelle: I don’t want to work as hard as Jeff. It’s okay if nobody finds your.
[00:34:18] Corey: Jeff. You’re WordPress famous. I just assume you have a team of people behind you.
[00:34:25] Jeff: Oh I kind of.
[00:34:28] Corey: It to pass it on to your underlings. It’s their problem.
[00:34:32] Jeff: That’s a great idea.
[00:34:34] Michelle: I want to know who this cadre of people behind you is. We’ll talk later.
[00:34:40] Corey: How do I get my own cadre of people?
[00:34:42] Michelle: I know, but I’m like, I need a posse. How do I sign up for that?
What have we not asked you that you’d like to still share about OMGIMG and the work that you’re doing?
By the time this comes to air, hopefully you’ll have gone to press with it, so to speak, and published it out there.
Oh, one of the questions I heard you say that you do want to make money off it, which I applaud 100%. I think that it’s great that we do things for free for the community sometimes, but we still have to pay the mortgage. We still have to put food on the table. Is this a premium? Freemium. Free? Obviously not free. Because we said that already. But is it freemium? Are you going to have it in the repo with add ons? Or is this purely a premium plugin?
[00:35:28] Corey: So one of the other mistakes that I’ve made in the past is get an idea, build the product, stick it into the repo because I’m excited. I want people to use it. I’m even happy for people to use it for free up front. But then falling into the trap that I think a lot of WordPress plugins fall into, where you actually give away the shop and then you’re like, oh, but I need to charge for something. So I will call a pro version and I’ll add bells and whistles.
And I’m not saying it’s always bad, but it’s not often well thought through, or at least that’s the mistake I’ve made often.
And social link pages, same sort of thing. I eventually came across places that I could add value that I thought was really worth it.
But I always felt initially, I always felt badly that the pro version was just kind of bells and whistles and some of the feedback reflected that, of like, why isn’t this just why is the line drawn between you can add a color to a button, but you can’t add a border color or something. It’s like, well, I had to draw an arbitrary line in the sand.
And so that was one of the other things that came out of months of discussion. It’s almost like thinking things through results in better things or having feedback from other people not being impulsive.
I don’t know. There’s nothing there. Forget it.
No, but the conversations that I had with Corey, we talked all this through and we said we’re going to go down the path of starting with “presume that everything up front is premium because this has value.”
That’s the way we want to approach this. And then down the road we’ll look at backing into the plugin repo, which is a way that I had never approached this before. I built for the plugin repo, arguably most of the time, given away too much and then slapped something, a pro together and then over time discovered, oh, the actual value is over here. Now, I will manipulate pro to include that and pretend that I had thought of that up front, which wasn’t the case.
[00:37:54] Jeff: After so many years in the WordPress space, I’ve gotten to the point now where I would rather a plugin, if you’re going to charge for it to make a premium, just charge for it right up front. Just don’t nickel and dime me. Don’t send me all these add ons or these pro versions or whatever else, or advertising or banners. Just charge for it. I’ll give you the money and let’s go about our day, right?
[00:38:14] Corey: And that’s where a lot of the WordPress ecosystem has moved upstream, right? There’s lots of conversations about this. How do we introduce new developers. If this is getting so much more complicated to integrate with, even people getting into a new block editor that sometimes has breaking changes, it’s all becoming more complicated and moving upstream.
And that’s good and bad right there’s, pros and cons. And in our day to day, we figure out how to work around that or help clients through it.
The good part of this, I think, is that 510 years ago business was a bad word, right? The zealots were winning. However you pronounce that word, the people were dogmatically, open source. Everything in WordPress should be free. And to a degree it’s phenomenal that so much of it is. I absolutely don’t disagree with that. And we’d all, most of us would love to give it all away for free if money was coming from somewhere else, right? But time, money, effort, support, this is something that a lot of people don’t think about until they’re in. It costs time, costs money.
And so I like that it’s becoming more and more okay to charge for things. I don’t think the prices are outrageous.
I think that there’s still paths that most people can take for most things that they want to accomplish using WordPress to start for free or the startup capital they need. I mean, this is a pretty privileged thing to say. I live in America so there’s definitely places in the world where a few hundred dollars is a lot of money to start up with. And I like that there’s efforts being made to try to alleviate that. But generally speaking, compared to buying a brick and mortar store or even competitors like Shopify that starts at like $50 a month or whatever it is, maybe they don’t anymore but things like that, right? It’s generally the startup cost is pretty low. But there is a startup cost and I think that that’s good. I think that it also teaches that the product that I’m creating, the plugin that I’m creating has value and is worth paying for. And if you want to go use Canva for free, you can. Great.
[00:40:39] Michelle: So all that to be said, it gives you as the product owner too, the ability to be philanthropic when you want to be and when it feels right to be. If you want to give your plugin away to a nonprofit or something like that you’re absolutely entitled to do that. But it doesn’t mean that everybody can have it for free because the work that you put into it has value. And I think that actually that has absolute merit to be able to say that. And it’s not selfish to say that you want to make money off of the work that you do.
[00:41:10] Corey: How do I want to describe this? A trick, but that makes it sound tricky. But a neat thing that I’ve done in the past, years and years ago I still was dealing in music. I was dealing with synthesizers and hardware. Right? All the neat boxes that have dials and sliders and blinky lights. Right. And to get those to talk to each other in my computer, I needed a little piece of software that was free.
But the developer, there was a pro version that the developer gave away for free. It was postcardware. So back in the day, there was shareware and freeware and malware and whatever, right? He had postcardware, and so you had to send him a postcard from wherever you lived. That was the criteria. And it ruined one of my shows because I couldn’t get a postcard to him fast enough. And so the software, it didn’t have the features I needed, but thankfully, only about eight people showed up to that show, so it didn’t matter.
But I sent him a postcard. I got the license for free, essentially, but I always sort of kept that in the back of my mind.
So I’ve been selling plugins now for about a decade. Anytime a nonprofit or even a person elsewhere in the world generally says, like, hey, I can’t afford this, or could you donate a version, or whatever, the trick that I’ve always pulled out is, send me a postcard. Send me a postcard from wherever you are in the world, and I will give you my software for free. I will save you hundreds of dollars if you send me a 40 cent, now 40 cent postcard.
[00:43:07] Michelle: I love that.
[00:43:09] Corey: Isn’t that neat, right?
If you believe in it, if you’re not lying, if you’re not just trying to get software for free, put this much effort into it once. Only once have I ever received a postcard.
And I’m like, okay, but I feel good about that. And I’ve also given it away for free a few times. Right, of course.
But generally, if it’s unsolicited, I’ve never heard of you. But I still love that technique.
[00:43:39] Michelle: I should do it I have a drawer full of postcards. So get prepared.
[00:43:43] Corey: Absolutely.
[00:43:44] Michelle: I actually love sending postcards. One of the things that I do that’s really cool. So is there anything else that we haven’t asked that you’d want to share with us and then also go ahead.
[00:43:54] Corey: Yeah, one of the things that I forgot to say earlier when you were asking about the difference between OMGIMG and other plugins, too, is no third parties.
Both of the plugins, I think this is correct. I know at least one of them, but I think both of them had to interact with an API, meaning, which is very not WordPress and we care about this less and less, but it does matter in a free version of a plugin. And it does matter on a technical level where you have to go sign up for another service and then there’s always a concern or a risk of that service breaking or stopping or being charged differently. I think in both cases, the plugin developer owned the service, but it has its place and sometimes you need that external CPU processing, right? Like there’s services for compressing images is a good example. That’s not a thing you want done on your own server, generally. And so generally your images are going to be sent to a service. So I’m not saying I’m against it or anything, but if you don’t need to, ideally you don’t.
And I’ve found that I could do it without. I can generate these images without using an external. Actually, when the conversation started, Cory and I had the twinkle in our eye about like, this might be a way when we were graduating from Crop Express to OMG, we said, what about generating these images? And I had actually already owned the Domain Screenshot Express and already had this external service that I was like, wait, this could actually do it for us. And on a whim I was like, wait, is this something that we can do locally? And sure enough, it is.
One of the other neat advantages, and differentiators at the moment anyway, is that it’s entirely in your WordPress install. The images are generated right on the screen in the browser rather than needing to talk to a third party service.
[00:46:12] Michelle: That’s actually super cool and to your prior conversation about using Linktree or something like that, it also is not using a third party service. So the idea of keeping your own traffic, keeping everything within your own abilities and not having things sit on other people’s servers, I love that a lot.
[00:46:29] Corey: Right? Yeah. One of the real conceptual differences I joke about being a developer and having to recreate the wheel over and over again is one of the real incentives for starting social link pages was not having a Linktree URL. I’m like, I already have a website for me, right? So if I’m going to create these social landing pages, why isn’t it my links? Why is it Linktree?
It’s not Linktree.com, but you know what I mean, why is it their URL? And so for me, that was real important.
And one of the things that is important, broadly speaking, in WordPress still and more and more online is privacy is owning all of your own data and that kind of stuff. And these plugins let you do that and not relying on third party services either services that your website talks to or just a whole separate service like a Canva or like a Linktree.
You’re not going over there and giving them your data.
[00:47:35] Michelle: Well, also being reliant on the fact that they’ll be there forever, where you get to control like if they suddenly disappear next week and you’re like scrambling for another service, you have created something that doesn’t rely on that. So I think that’s great.
This will all be in the show notes. So if people are listening through some other service, if you go to StellarWP.com slash podcast, find this episode, you will find the show notes. If you want to learn more. If you are interested in purchasing learning more about the plugin, it’s OMGIMG.co, as Corey had said previously. And you are on X, which I still like to call Twitter.
[00:48:13] Corey: Yeah.
[00:48:14] Michelle: And your handle there is OMGIMGCO I think I was the second follower on that account.
[00:48:22] Corey: I will give you credit for that because I’m sure I was the first.
[00:48:25] Michelle: I’m pretty sure you were the first and I was either the second or third and I was like, OOH, I feel very honored.
You’re welcome. But yeah, no, you’re doing really good work and then if people want to find you, how’s the best way to get in touch with you?
[00:48:39] Corey: Yeah, so I was going to say when you asked, it’s like OMGIMGCo on Twitter, X, whatever, is going to be the company, right? And so it’s all me right now.
Corey does help with marketing and biz dev and stuff like that, but for the most part I’m the one that’s cranking out trying to get this thing out the door and so I’m the one taking screenshots of like, oh, look at this thing I built. So right now it’s still pretty nerdy trying to get that account warmed up, so to speak, but it’s mostly going to be about the product. What I imagine more of your listeners are going to be interested in is following me, Corey Maass, spelled the right way. Coreymaass is me, but it’ll be in the show notes. But Corey Maass on Twitter is where I talk more about the actual journey and my journey and lots of dad jokes, which helps, I think.
But specifically I try to be very involved in two hashtags on Twitter. One is #BuildInPublic and the other is #IndieHacker.
This is how it took me years, despite being a nerd and signing up for Twitter back in 2010 or something, 2009, I don’t know. I’ve been on Twitter forever but I didn’t use it for a decade or more. I just couldn’t figure it out until I finally found my community on there and have been interacting with people who are in WordPress or not in WordPress, but that sort of sweet spot of small team or solopreneur indie developers, that kind of thing. And so that’s kind of what I try to talk about the most on Twitter because that’s where I get the most value, people sharing their journey, I try to do the same thing. So by all means follow OMGIMGCo for news about the product and stuff like that. But at this level I suspect more of the listeners would be interested in me personally on Twitter. And then, yeah, right I know, we may or may not have launched by this time this comes out, we are starting with an introductory price and kind of just to draw a line in the sand and then see where the pricing goes from there. But I suspect it will only go up, but so people should go and get on the list now and/or buy early and buy often.
And if nothing else, if the price does go up, send me an email and we’ll hook you up with a discount.
[00:51:25] Jeff: Any chance I can get a podcast co host discount?
[00:51:30] Corey: Let me check your references.
[00:51:32] Jeff: Listen, I’ve got a cohort of people in the WordPress space. Don’t remember that.
[00:51:38] Michelle: Did you sign up already? I’m guessing you already signed up on his website, too. Jeff, any final words from you before we wrap this up?
[00:51:49] Jeff: No, it’s just great. Too bad you won’t be showing up at WordCamp Rochester. Which, by the way, are there tickets still available?
[00:51:57] Michelle: Michelle, I think tickets won’t matter because this episode will air after.
[00:52:03] Jeff: Yeah, this is kind of a weird time traveling show we do here. But, Corey, it was great to hear about you and learn about how the plugin came to be. And isn’t it a magical thing where you talk to Cory Miller for a while, next thing you know, you’re building something live?
[00:52:19] Corey: I know, right?
[00:52:21] Jeff: Isn’t it funny how that works? So, thanks for coming on the show and giving us all the details and info about OMGIMG. And every time I see OMG, I think about that GIF of that character. He’s waving his hands, going, oh, my God.
[00:52:37] Corey: Any of those reactions is exactly what we’re going for.
[00:52:41] Michelle: I love it. Well, thank you so much, as Jeff said, for being with us today. We really appreciate you and look forward to seeing what you do with the plugin.
[00:52:49] Corey: Thank you for having me. It’s been fun.
[00:52:50] Michelle: Absolutely. We’ll see everybody else on the next episode of WP Constellations.
WP Constellations is a production of StellarWP, home of The Events Calendar, LearnDash, GiveWP, Kadence, Iconic, SolidWP, Orderable, and Restrict Content Pro. Learn more about the StellarVerse at stellarwp.com.
