Episode 16
In this episode, Michelle is joined by cohost Amanda Gorman as they welcome David Johnson for a discussion about SolidWP and all of the products associated with the brand including Solid Backups, Solid Security, Solid Suite, Solid Central, and Solid Academy. It’s a great conversation that really outlines how customers succeed as SolidWP users.
Mentioned in this episode:
- SolidWP
- SolidWP on Twitter/X
- David Johnson’s website
- David Johnson on Twitter/X
- GiveWP
- GiveWP on Twitter/X
- Amanda Gorman on Twitter/X
Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Michelle: Welcome to WP Constellations, a podcast exploration of the WordPress universe, brought to you by StellarWP.
Welcome to WP Constellations, your WordPress exploration of the WordPress universe. And we are here at StellarWP. We call the StellarVerse here, but we realize the StellarVerse is part of the bigger WordPress universe. And so it’s exciting to be able to talk to people both within StellarWP about the things that we do here and our external counterparts, which we’ve had quite a few people on the show. The last episode we had Marcus Burnett coming in and talking about The WP World, for example. But today we are focused on some stuff that’s going on here at StellarWP. First, before we get into the guest, if you will, I would like to introduce my co-host, Amanda Gorman. Amanda, thank you so much for being here today. How are you?
[00:01:11] Amanda: I’m doing well. Thank you so much for having me. I’m happy to be here with you both.
[00:01:15] Michelle: Yeah, it’s exciting. So Amanda and I go way back, if anybody doesn’t know, she graduated high school with my daughter and so our paths have crossed over the years. And when I had a position open up at GiveWP, I called her up and I said, you have to apply for this job. And the rest, as they say, is history. Now she has my old job and she’s like crushing it. So, Amanda, it’s good to have you here. And Amanda only lives across town, so she and I are a lot closer than our guest, David Johnson. David, welcome to the show.
[00:01:45] David: Hi. Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.
[00:01:48] Michelle: It’s good to have you here. So Amanda, you are the director of Community.
It’s not engagement. I’m Community Engagement. You are, what is it? Customer Experience. Thank you.
[00:01:59] Amanda: The Director within our Customer Experience department.
[00:02:07] Michelle: Yeah. For all of StellarWP, I know everything changes and then I screw up the names of things, but that’s okay because this is real life. David, I wrote yours down so I wouldn’t mess it up. But David Johnson is the product owner for SolidWP and has been since November. So you’re not new to Stellar, but this is a new role for you within Stellar.
[00:02:31] David: It’s, it’s, as you know, I came from the GiveWP brand, so I’m very new to Solid in just a matter of weeks now. So not new to the products themselves per se, was somewhat familiar with them, but wow, it’s a whole new universe over here on the SolidWP side of things.
[00:02:51] Michelle: Well, wait till you see the questions that we didn’t tell you about. So that we’re going to try to stump you. I’m just kidding. We’re not going to stump you.
[00:02:56] David: Absolutely. I’ll take a swing at it.
[00:03:00] Michelle: But before we actually get started and do that deep dive into things that are SolidWP, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do as product owner for SolidWP.
[00:03:11] David: Yeah, sure. So first of all, just a quick background on me. I’m a geek, which maybe goes without saying, I don’t know. But I’ve spent a lot of time around marketing and websites and all of that whole world and in fact owned an agency. It was a very small agency, I don’t want to make it sound bigger than it was, but I owned an agency for many years and I discovered WordPress in about 2006 and have been using it ever since and was thrilled with the ability to do all of the things that one does with WordPress. So in any case, I shut my agency down, went to work for another agency, a digital agency, very large one, in 2020, and then joined Stellar in the summer here of 2023. So I’ve kind of moved over from the “hey, we build and use WordPress. We build sites and do things with WordPress” to the “hey now we build things for WordPress and for WordPress users and site owners and builders and that sort of stuff.” So it’s kind of been fun to make that leap over into the software side of things. And I know that’s familiar, Michelle, to you, right?
[00:04:20] Michelle: To me, to Amanda. Yeah. We’ve been in this space for a little while. For sure.
[00:04:24] David: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:04:26] Michelle: I think that. Go ahead. I’m sorry, I didn’t know you weren’t done. Please continue.
[00:04:30] David: Oh, no, I was going to talk about being a product owner, but I don’t want to talk over you, you know, these delays on these Internet things.
[00:04:36] Michelle: Sorry about that. Well, I was going to ask a little bit about what’s going on at SolidWP, but I don’t know what a product owner, I mean, I kind of have an idea what a product owner does, but I don’t know for sure what your day in, day out looks like. So what does a product owner do?
[00:04:50] David: Yeah, sure. It makes me sound very much more official probably than I am, right. I don’t actually own anything. I wish maybe I did.
A product owner is a title that comes from the world of agile software development. In particular, we use the scrum framework here. And a product owner, sometimes referred to as a product manager, is somebody who sits in between all of the people who are trying to figure out what the software should do. So, for example, users of the software might be asking for features or want certain things. The people who are in charge of whether we have a business or not, when we’re making any money and can afford to continue to build software or not, may have another set of priorities. People who develop and write software, they’re the ones that actually make the things happen. They might have ideas about what needs to occur. And so a product owner sits in the middle of all of that and helps to sort of kind of synchronize all of the needs and wants of all of those individuals to hopefully steer the product in a direction that makes it more valuable to everybody.
[00:05:56] Michelle: That makes sense. I like that a lot.
It had to be interesting coming into a product that was undergoing a huge rebranding. At the time that you joined, we kind of said, okay, we’re done rebranding now, but I don’t think that you ever finish rebranding because there’s so much education that goes on in the community. “But wait, what happened to iThemes? I thought it was iThemes. Where’s iThemes Security.” All those kinds of questions, no matter how much you put out there, no matter how much marketing you do, how many emails you do. I’ve been guilty also of not knowing when things change for other products that I use outside of Stellar, of course. So understanding that you’ve stepped into a moving stream for sure. Not a still body of water by any stretch of the imagination.
[00:06:42] David: 100%. Yeah. And they did a fantastic job with the rebrand. I will say it sort of was bittersweet. It was like, wow, I wish I could have been a part of that because it was a fantastic project. But on the other hand, I was able to step in mostly after the rebrand was done and just think about the direction of the products themselves. So there was a lot that.
[00:07:03] Michelle: So what is SolidWP exactly? People would say iThemes used to be themes and then it wasn’t themes. So there was this kind of, what do you call it, identity confusion about all that. So tell us, what is SolidWP? What are some of the features that people can purchase and use?
[00:07:22] David: Yeah, absolutely. You’re nailing it on the head. iThemes was originally a theme shop, and we don’t build any themes anymore at all. So the rebrand did make a lot of sense. We are probably best known for security and so a lot of folks in the WordPress space will remember or have used or do use iThemes Security, which is now known as Solid Security. And we build a tool that helps you secure your website, keep out the hackers, make sure that your site is secure and all of the things that go along with that. But that is only one of three of our, we have a total of three products. So individually you as a user might want iThemes Security or now Solid Security. We also have a tool. In fact, let me just back up a sec. The part of the rebrand, the thinking behind the rebrand was not only do we need to distance ourselves from the iThemes name because we don’t make those anymore, there is a fantastic component to the sort of mission of Solid, which is that we want to build the tools that every WordPress site owner needs to have a solid foundation for your site. So everybody needs their site to be secure. None of us in this day and age can afford to have our sites hacked and taken over and all that sort of stuff. But all of us that own sites need to make sure that we have backups in place that we can restore from. Because the worst does happen. Even whether it’s because maybe you didn’t have security in place, your site got hacked, you need to put it back in place. Or as I have done many times, wow, I really screwed something up.
Let me just revert. So backups are essential and for all the reasons. And so we build a backups tool. And the thing that I’m probably most excited about is something we call Solid central and that is also its new name. It was previously known as iThemes Sync, which is a tool that allows you to have a portal, whereas you own websites and manage websites. And many of us do run many websites, even if it’s one or 500 or several thousand, as some of our users have in iThemes. I’m sorry, I don’t even normally use the word iThemes every day. So it’s funny this is coming up, but Solid Central gives you a place. No, it’s not you at all. It’s funny, I just decided to adopt that name today. Solid Central gives you a place that you can sign in and see all of your sites, what’s going on, what needs to be patched, maybe where updates are available and gives you a, we call it management, but I think management sounds boring. Central gives you a way to know exactly the state of your WordPress sites and take quick action when you need to on something. And we’re really excited about Central because it gives us a lot of opportunities. A lot of people have those kinds of features inside of a really excellent web hosting provider. Like any managed WordPress hosting provider has a lot of really great features. But the thing that often is missing is if you’re an agency or if you’re someone like even a small freelancer. Back before I joined a bigger agency, I was responsible for sites that were on different hosts. I had clients. So you don’t always get to choose to have your sites in one place. And so central gives you a place no matter what feature set you might get from a really excellent web host. This gives you the ability to have them all in one location so you can see the state of your WordPress sites and you can take action from there. So it’s a really powerful tool. And I’m excited about Central really a lot.
[00:10:53] Amanda: That’s so exciting. And I know there’s a lot of new features and a lot of things that are coming on the roadmap as well, which we’ll get into in a moment. But I wanted to ask you about Patchstack. I know that’s been in conversation and in our internal teams quite a bit and I would love to just hear your perspective there and especially how customers have been perceiving that value add as they’ve been switching over from iThemes over into Solid.
[00:11:13] David: Yeah, Patchstack is really a game changer for the security space. And so if you’ve ever been in the situation where a critical piece of your website, and we’ve all had this happen, right, some vulnerability gets discovered in a plugin or in a theme, and that vulnerability is critical in the sense that it can be exploited. Right now people are jumping in, they’re able to search and find all the sites that use this whatever plugin it is and they’re able to dive right in and maybe execute remote code, turn your website into a link farm for their affiliate thing or crypto mining or whatever, or worse, maybe they’re redirecting your traffic to very unseemly places. We’ve all seen this happen, right? But the worst thing is that these attacks can happen at times when we’re not able to pay attention. So even if you have an excellent process in place to make sure that you always install your WordPress updates or you always update your plugins or themes, with some situations like this, a vulnerability can be announced at night, on a weekend, on a holiday, you’re on vacation, or you just are buried in emails and notifications. We all have notification hell right now. Right? So how do you find the most important notifications? It’s so easy to miss when a vulnerability exists on your website that you’re not able to address. And so that’s where Patchstack comes in. And we’ve recently integrated Patchstack into Solid Security.
So anyone who purchases a license, and I should mention there are two levels of Solid Security. You can find Solid Security in the WordPress.org plugin directory and that is a free product and it offers a tremendous number of features. But when you upgrade to our premium product with security, Patchstack is one of the things that comes along, and Patchstack actually proactively patches your site when you can’t. And this is the thing that makes it so powerful is that it’s a step in between updating your plugin. So this is not hey, we’re going to manage your plugin updates for you. That’s not what this is. What it does instead is it prevents the vulnerabilities from having the ability to allow hackers to do nefarious things on your site. And so even if you do not have a patch installed, you haven’t updated a given plugin. Let’s say it’s a plugin that has a vulnerability. Patchstack prevents that vulnerability from creating an exposure for you because it actually sits in between your website and the visitors to your site. So it’s a fantastic addition and it is really unparalleled in the WordPress space. There are other web application firewalls that people use, there are other security solutions that do some sort of proxying or security interventions in real time. But this is the only solution of its kind and it is truly a best in class solution. So if you have tools to maybe harden your site from the usual things that maybe stronger passwords and all of the other security features that you would expect out of a best-in-class security product, you’re still vulnerable if one of these situations occurs and you’re not able to patch your site. And so Patchstack is a fantastic solution and it comes with our pro product when you are a security subscriber. So we are really excited about it because it really does, it would be bold to say that it mitigates all the possibilities because obviously that’s a place that none of us can really say. However, the vast majority of the things that might keep a WordPress site owner up at night worrying that, wow, is something happening to my sites while I’m not able to patch them. That’s what Patchstack does. It really does prevent a lot of that stuff.
[00:15:12] Amanda: That’s so cool. And it’s so nice to see how well that feature pairs in with all of our other brands and the type of customers that we’re dealing with on a day to day basis, especially the folks that I’m talking to, that my team is talking to. A lot of these folks are community members trying to run events or raise money online.
They’re not necessarily agency folks or people that are really well versed in WordPress. They’re just kind of trying to get a website up and running. And WordPress is what they’ve chosen as their given tool. And there’s a lot of learning that happens as they’re learning our products, like whatever they’re using to create the event or start the fundraising. But having this in our back pocket, in customer success: Have you thought about security?
Have you thought about creating a little bit more peace of mind? And hey, this is a sister brand for us. And here’s a way that you can get started super easily. And I know I haven’t been super in the SolidWP circles yet, but we’re kind of like edging in that direction as we’re getting more customer success managers. And I’m just so excited for those opportunities because I can just see how so many of our customers can benefit from this.
[00:16:23] David: Oh, you’re absolutely right. And it seems like in the world of WordPress security, there’s sort of like two extremes and not much in between. You’re either like a security geek and you know all the things that are going on or you’re somebody that’s like, “I just want to set this and forget it, I don’t want to know about it.” And unfortunately, security is not that way. I mean, every day something like 30,000 sites get hacked, and that’s with a robust security community and even WordPress core, they’re doing things all the time to sort of improve the security of WordPress. And you don’t get to just set it and forget it, usually because the game changes, you wake up and tomorrow there’s a new threat, there’s a new way to get in. So having a tool like this gets folks who are in that sort of mindset, like, I just don’t want to become a security expert. This gives you a way.
I will not say you can set it and forget it, because I don’t recommend that for anyone.
I recommend everybody learns more about security as much as you can. However, if you are in that situation where you have other things that you have to focus on, and security can’t be something that you pay huge amounts of attention to. You definitely need a basic foundation for your security and Patchstack steps in and provides a fantastic just catch-all for so many of the vulnerabilities that worry people.
[00:17:46] Michelle: You don’t have to be a developer to use SolidWP and you don’t have to be a developer to understand backups and understand enough to make sure that your site is secure.
[00:17:57] David: That is absolutely our goal. We want to build the tools for if you’re a pro and you know all of the things, great. I mean, we have all of the bells and whistles, especially in security. It’s probably our most robust product and anybody that is a security expert, you’ll find like we were one of the first of the WordPress security solutions to implement passwordless with pass keys and that is a tremendous way to log into your site and kind of get rid of the need for passwords and some of those. So we’ve got all the bells and whistles and tools and things that any security pro would want. But if you’re somebody that doesn’t have the time to learn all the things, I think Solid Security gives you a way to get started and get all of the essentials set up and really feel good about the fact that your sites are being cared for.
[00:18:48] Amanda: That’s awesome. And I know that we’re listening to our customers that’s baked in and that’s why I’m here. So I’m curious, what do you know or what can you share that is on the roadmap, or what are you hopeful to see on the roadmap?
[00:19:03] David: There’s a lot, and of course some things I can’t talk too much in detail about because it’s a roadmap. Development is a very fluid, dynamic process. Right? So we’re in the process of building that. And also, in fairness, I’ve already mentioned this, but I am new to the team, so my roadmap is very early. But I will say the very first priority for me, and as the person responsible for the roadmap, is that we are interested in very aggressively listening to our users. We have had a bumpy ride in some areas over the years with the former iThemes.
We have a fantastic team and even since the rebrand, we’ve been aggressively launching and releasing new versions of all of the tools. One of the things that has gotten a lot of love recently that I’m excited about is backups. The world of what was iThemes backups and is now Solid Backups was one where the other tools were getting a lot of attention from development and backups had been sort of on the back burner for a little while. And what happened as a result of that, and we’ve all seen this happen with anything in WordPress, is that PHP versions change, the WordPress core itself changes, and there’s an ongoing dynamic thing going on in the WordPress space and backups was very solid for a lot of users. But in certain hosting environments there were issues and there were some situations like, for example, if you had a very large site and you needed to back it up and move it off site. By the way, we always recommend that you move your backups off of your hosting provider because if something happens to your hosting provider or they have a hardware failure or whatever, you want to have a copy at least of your backups elsewhere, even if you stash some there. And so that can represent a really big issue if you have limited storage space, for example in your hosting account. So some of the issues that have happened there with backups have been getting a lot of attention lately. And so I’m excited to announce that we’re going to continue to hone the stability of backups and the usability of backups. There are some great new features coming that will help people in that situation. For example, when you have storage issues and a lot of people don’t even know, we have this fantastic tool called Stash Live that allows you. I set this up, I had never used it until I started on the team in November. And I set this up on one of my sites because I’m a geek. So I have an Amazon S3 account. I have a place where my backups live for WordPress, right? And I’m one of those people that’s developer level in that sense. I don’t actually write code, but on the spectrum of developer level stuff, yeah, that’s me. I want to control and move all the needles and all the stuff and I’m like well let me just try the Stash Live thing. It was a couple of clicks and what’s happening is my site is getting backed up automatically and it’s not quite real time, but it’s very close to real time. And there’s always a snapshot of my site that lives outside of my hosting environment and it’s being backed up. So we’re improving that. And that actually is a great feature for people with storage problems. So backups is getting some love in the area of helping resolve some issues where certain hosting providers or certain hosting kind of configurations. Maybe there were some issues there. So we’re excited about backups from that point of view. Security is one of the tools that, as I’ve mentioned before, is very robust already. We have a tremendous feature set for security. And so one of the things that we’re really excited about working on, and I can’t announce a timetable for this or a lot of details about it, but this is on our roadmap, is that we’re working on adding a malware cleanup service.
And so this is great for the folks who … when do you install a security plugin?
Most of us didn’t have a security tool in place until we got hacked. Let’s just be real. I remember the first time I had. I don’t know if this will date me in the WordPress space. Michelle, you might remember this. I don’t know, Amanda, you might too. But Tim Thumb. Does anybody remember Tim Thumb? The Tim Thumb vulnerability years ago, it was this image conversion tool that came with a bunch of themes, and there was a way for hackers to just take over your website. This is probably 2010, 2011, and I didn’t have a security tool on my sites until then.
And so if that’s you and you’ve never implemented security for your site, then it’s great to now have protection. But what do you do with all of the junk that the hackers installed? So having a service like that, and we are working on the details and that’ll be forthcoming, hopefully sometime in Q one, we’ll have more details to share about that. But that’s one of the items that we’re excited about adding on to Solid Security. And there are a lot more things we could talk about there. But there’s a heavy emphasis right now, and this is something that is definitely on our roadmap. There’s a heavy emphasis right now on helping those users. And I think, Amanda, this is exactly the sort of person that you were talking. Don’t. I’m not a security expert. I don’t want to be a security expert. How can I leverage this amazingly powerful tool, which is like the swiss army knife, of everything you could possibly ever do and want to do with security? How can I leverage the most essential features of that and learn enough to have all of the right things configured, but also not have to learn all of the things? And so what we’re trying to do is provide some additional help for users that are in that situation to sort of step through a process to configure the most critical security elements on your site. And it’s one of those things like we’ve experimented in the past with, maybe we’ll just turn all of them on. We’ll just say, hey, trust us, this is the configuration you need. But Amanda, as you mentioned, right, especially in the GiveWP universe, you can’t turn on 2FA, two factor authentication for all your WordPress users, because what happens to your donors when your donors try to sign into your donor dashboard as a GiveWP user, they now suddenly have to have a security dongle or an app or get text messages or whatever, and that creates a lot of friction. So there are ways that you can add that feature for all the users that have enough privileges where they could cause trouble but maybe not require it for ecommerce shoppers or donors or some of the folks that might be signing up for an event on a website or those kinds of users. So that’s just one example of ways that we’re trying to help improve security and help users that don’t necessarily understand all the implications of what happens if I turn this thing on. What’s that going to do? We’re trying to help onboard users in a way that helps them get through that, set up more meaningfully and help them be more secure without hopefully creating too much of a burden on them. But the biggest roadmap. Oh, sorry, go ahead.
[00:26:16] Amanda: I just wanted to pause and say I love all of this and I love that the direction of everything that you’re saying, it’s really aligned with what Stellar’s values are, which is obviously to keep people on, you know, that’s in our best interest. But it’s also like we’re part of the WordPress community. We want to keep people using WordPress and keep them invested in it and happily invested in it, enthusiastic about using it, and a really solid foundation for that is crucial. And being able to bring people over from really bad scenarios, like you mentioned, from malware attacks, being able to convert a customer or keep a customer when they’re in a really hard spot, that can be really meaningful. And I speak from personal experience, like around ten years ago when that happened to me and I learned about the value of security. So just all that to say, it just all feels like it’s all kind of really connected into the StellarVerse, which I love.
[00:27:14] David: I love that too. You’re really hitting the nail on the head. I mean, our goal is WordPress is this amazing thing, especially those of us that have been in the community for awhile. And we love this community. But users of WordPress, there’s such a huge variety and skill level and knowledge level and all of that. So having the solid stuff in place, having that solid foundation is exactly the goal. And that’s why I get excited. So I apologize, stop me and anybody slap me or whatever if I’m rambling, but I get really excited about Central because that’s the biggest area for the roadmap for 2024 for me, that I’m just really thrilled about because we already have ways that if you are a user of Solid Security and or you’re a user of Solid Backups, we have ways for you to interact with those capabilities and features for your website in Central, but we are really going to expand what you can do from Central with respect to Security and Backups. And so that’s going to make Central this sort of one stop shop. It really is this already, but it’s going to become an even more powerful one stop shop for you as a WordPress site manager and an owner and somebody responsible for them to just be able to dive in and see what’s going on. And you can already do things like update your plugins and those kinds of things, but we’re adding a lot of new features that will help with the usability of those various tools in central, and we’re also looking at exciting new ways to make central a more powerful tool. So one of the things that a lot of people don’t realize you can already do with Central is you can monitor the uptime of your website.
And that’s one of those components that if you get that feature from your web host, I’m not going to say that any web hosts out there are deceptive, but it behooves the web host to keep your website up, right. And for you to not have your website down. And maybe they don’t report as aggressively on when your site has been down for a while as maybe you would like to find out about. And so we have uptime monitoring in there right now that allows you to know and be alerted if your site becomes unavailable for whatever reason. And so we’re just looking at adding some additional tools to that sort of toolkit that already exists there for site owners to make it that much more powerful and useful. And so as I mentioned, one of my first roadmap items for me is to just aggressively listen to the users. So we’re really trying to understand how the users, how you use Central, how you use Backups, how you use Security. In fact, we have an email blast going out tomorrow to all of our customers to say, hey, if there’s one thing that you need, and it’s a slightly different question for each, for Backups and Central and for Security. But if there’s one thing you need, what is that? What is it you’re looking for? What keeps you up at night? Those kinds of questions.
It’s a one question survey, actually. But we’re really trying to get users to share with us what is it that would make these tools more powerful? And so that’s one of my roadmap items personally, is just to do a lot of aggressive listening. And we’re looking at giving our customers ways to quickly report back if they spot something that doesn’t make sense, or maybe it’s not working the way they expect, or if it’s an actual bug, or if it’s, hey, I really wish this did x, Y, or Z. We’re looking for ways to rapidly sort of increase that listening and feedback loop with our customers.
So really excited about those opportunities for our roadmap.
[00:30:55] Michelle: I love it. I love that there are so many things. What I love about what we do here, and I’m sure this is not just us, of course, but we never say, okay, look at that. We built a thing and now we’re done. It’s always like we built a thing. We’re really proud of it. But how could it be better?
What could we do to make it be more appealing? Whether it’s changing colors or rebrand or whatever, to the core of how it operates, I love that we’re always looking to continue to be innovative and listening to see what kinds of things people are wanting. We always teach people, right, you don’t build a website for yourself. You build it for your customers. The same thing is true for plugins. We are not building these for ourselves. We’re building them for our customers, for them to be successful in the work that they do. Along those lines, we did have Nathan Ingram on the show earlier last year, or towards the end of last year, I should say, talking about what he does with SolidWP and some of the changes, as we had just kind of finished the rebrand at that point, but community and our customer base has always been a huge part of items. And now SolidWP. So what does that look like going forward, as far as how we engage with the community and our customers in particular?
[00:32:11] David: Yeah, sure. I love the academy, the SolidWP Academy that Nathan, he has done such a tremendous job building that community over the years. And so one product I haven’t mentioned so far is that we have something we call the Solid Suite, which is all of the things. So if you become a person who you know that you need your site to be backed up, you know that you need security and you want a central place where you can manage all the things related to your site, then you can just buy the suite. And one of the things that happens when you buy the suite is that not only you get all the software tools and the pro things like Patchstack that we mentioned, but you also get the academy. And so it is this tremendous learning opportunity. And I will say I was aware of Nathan and the academy and what he’d been doing, but I had not experienced any of it until I moved to the Solid team in November. It is just a gold mine.
One of the things that I recently heard him do is for anybody that owns an agency, even if you’re a small freelancer and you don’t think of yourself as an agency, but you’re managing and running multiple websites, he shared a fantastic business model adjustment where you could just add a whole revenue stream to your business and create a better experience for your WordPress site owners, your clients. And I just sat there. I’m like, this guy is just really. Not only is he thinking about ways to make good use of these tools, but he’s actually putting money in people’s pockets. And so I love that community.
The sort of barrier to entry to that community is that it’s paid.
You have to spend some money, whether you license the Solid Suite or at one time you could get the academy by itself. And so it is paid. And there is an opportunity that for us here, and I don’t know that we yet have the exact details of what we’re going to do from a plan to execute on this, but it is an early goal of mine especially, and this is true of the Solid leadership, to find better ways to engage with and create community that doesn’t have the paywall in front of it. And again, I love the academy and depending on your business and how you use WordPress, it will either save you money or put money in your pocket, and it’s well worth the expenditure. But let’s face it, not all of us have the ability to invest in a community at that level. And so we’re looking at other ways to approach this. And some of the other StellarWP brands have different ways to do this. You too. I know you know deeply the GiveWP Facebook group, and there’s a tremendous community there. I know Kadence, which is our theme shop, that’s a terrible cheap way to describe Kadence is the most amazing WordPress theme toolkit on the that was, that was not at all. I didn’t mean that as a slight because it is truly tremendous. But they are another example of a great social media based community where they interact with and listen. And so we’re really exploring and evaluating options right now to do something community wise with the SolidWP community. And so I don’t know the details on that, but we are open to ideas. So if you’re a SolidWP user and you have an interest in interacting, we want to sort of remove some layers and buffers between the SolidWP team and our users and really start to engage with people who use the products on a regular basis so that we can have more community and some sharing back and forth that is not necessarily behind that paywall. And again, tremendous value with the academy. I love it. But we’re really looking at ways that we can expand. And I know many people, if we do end up with a good, active community of people that are SolidWP users, many of them will find their way into the academy anyway because you’re going to love the value that you get there. But I think that we do have that opportunity right now to create more community with those folks who are not yet ready to pony up for that.
[00:36:23] Michelle: Makes sense. I love it. Yeah. Let’s talk later. I might have some ideas.
[00:36:28] David: I’m sure you do.
[00:36:31] Michelle: What else? What have we not asked you about? What else would you like to share with our audience before we wrap things up? Have I missed anything?
[00:36:39] David: Wow. You all have both been very thorough today. So the only thing that I would really add is that the WordPress of 2024 is so different. And I’m not just talking about the software product that we use when you sign into your WordPress dashboard, I’m talking about the community and the dynamic. And there’s such an interesting thing happening in the world. AI is changing things.
Some of our Stellar brands, including Kadence, are doing some amazing things using the sort of large language model tools that are out there and leveraging AI. But it has created an opportunity for us as longtime WordPress users. It can feel a little, honestly, like it’s changing so rapidly and so much. And I feel like there are some sort of really foundational level, I’m sorry I’m using the puns here, but foundational level changes happening within the WordPress space and it can be a little daunting. And so I am just excited about the opportunity to hopefully have more one on one interaction with our users and with those who might be our users. Maybe you don’t have any of our products, but you’re in the WordPress space and you’re looking at solutions for security or backups or managing your tools or getting more efficient and being more productive and cost effective at all of that. And so I feel like that we need each other more than ever in 2024. I think that’s the one thing I would just say, is that we need each other more than ever because the rate of change, I feel like, is just accelerating. And I feel like to go back to circle back to the need for our WordPress community to sort of cohesively gather around is because there are competitive tools and products out there. And I feel like in some ways there are people who really would be ideally suited to have their websites and their businesses and their organizations run on WordPress and they’re making other choices that are maybe not in their best interest today. And some of that is on us. And I’m really looking for ways this year that we can do exactly some of what we’ve talked about here already and what you all have talked about and create more connection and more belonging with our fantastic world of WordPress users.
[00:39:03] Michelle: Excellent. David, thank you so much for being here with us today. Anybody interested to learn more about SolidWP or David Johnson? How do we get in touch in both places?
[00:39:15] David: Sure. Yeah. So definitely check out SolidWP.com. The website has all the things and you can link out to all the socials. You can learn about the products there, ask questions if you’d like. And we have a fantastic support team that will answer questions and all of that sort of good stuff. On a personal level, I hate to say Twitter because obviously none of us knows what to call that thing, but it’s the social network formerly known as Twitter.
You can find me there. I’m TheDavidJohnson. And that’s not because I’m snooty, it’s just because David Johnson, I might as well be John Smith, right? It’s a very common name, clearly on any platform. Even the domain name was already gone by the time I was like, I should register it. So anyway, I’m @TheDavidJohnson on twitter. That’s a great place to reach out. And I also have the domain name thedavidjohnson.com. But again, I’m not THE David Johnson. I’m just the David Johnson, you know.
[00:40:05] Michelle: There you go. And Amanda, how do we find out more if people want to connect with you? How do they do that?
[00:40:11] Amanda: I love that I’m like the opposite. I’m not the Amanda Gorman because everyone emails me in my personal email thinking that I am THE Amanda Gorman, the poet laureate.
I’m just Amanda Gormn on Twitter and Instagram. You can find me at [email protected].
[00:40:30] Michelle: Fantastic. Well, thank you both so much for joining us for WP Constellations today. Learning a little bit more about our SolidWP brand in StellarWP. Thank you so much for being part of it. We will 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.