Episode 20
In this episode, Travis and Michelle talk with Aspen Kron, part of the Liquid Web and Nexcess customer team, the most helpful humans in hosting. We talk about merging Nexcess into the Liquid Web brand, an imminent rebranding for Liquid Web, and what exciting things customers can expect to see coming down the roadmap.
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 to WP Constellations, your StellarWP exploration of the WordPress universe. I think I said it right that time, Travis. I always get a little mixed up. I never say it the same way twice, but that’s okay.
Here we are with StellarWP. This is our podcast. We love talking to people in the WordPress space and we love talking to people in the WordPress space that’s also in our space. And so today I’m really excited that Travis is joining me again as co host. So Travis Jacobson. Travis, tell us a little bit. Tell us who you are, what you do over here at Liquid Web and Stellar.
[00:00:48] Travis: Yeah, it’s good to be back. Thanks for the invitation again. I manage our affiliate programs. I’m the VP of Affiliate Marketing for Liquid Webm Nexcess and all of our StellarWP brands. So we have a lot of exciting brands and I love working with our partners and all our partnerships. So it’s been great. I love it here.
[00:01:05] Michelle: I love it too. And you’re a great co host. So thanks for being here today because today we are welcoming Aspen. Oh my gosh, I should have asked you, is it Crawn or Crone?
[00:01:14] Aspen: Thank you. Ahn is what I always say. Ahn.
[00:01:20] Michelle: Aspen Kron, who is the VP, I’m sorry, the Chief Customer Officer. That’s a, that’s a mouthful.
[00:01:27] Aspen: I know. I’m still getting used to it. It’s new. It’s a fancy new title. I love it.
[00:01:31] Michelle: I love, I mean, I know you’re not a title person. I kind of like them. I think they’re fun to kind of explore what people do in their space. And you are with Liquid Web. And so tell us just briefly, you know a little bit about yourself and what you do here. Sure.
[00:01:45] Aspen: So I come from a technology background. I’m a Georgia Tech girl. Go Jackets!
Grew up in the technology space, have been a total geek. Fangirl. Love all things Sci-Fi my whole entire life. So that was a very natural progression for me. I came out of school and worked in one of the big five consulting firms for about 14 years and then decided that I wanted to do something that was more contributing to our small businesses and less in the corporate space. Around that same time I got hooked up with folks who eventually found Liquid Web and I’ve been with them for a really long time. I have learned so much in the Liquid Web space. When I joined I didn’t know a lot about WordPress, including how to spell it correctly. One of the very first things that I learned was, oh, girl, do not spell it that way. Capital P, Capital P, Capital P.
So that was really one of the first things that I learned. I have been just so overwhelmed with the welcoming spirit of the WordPress community, if I could say anything about it. It is just such an empowerment tool in teaching others the WordPress Way and the sincere desire to grow people in the community. And that’s been part of my journey along the way. In my current role, I am in charge of all of our customers across Liquid Web and Nexcess brands. And I am really thrilled at the opportunity to have an organization that is completely devoted to customer experience and how customers are experiencing our products and services and how we can make that a more frictionless experience and then a more delightful experience. So that’s what I do here.
[00:03:24] Michelle: I love that! I met you in person back in San Antonio, I want to say, almost three years ago. Gosh, that was quite a while. I know I had just left. Not left, but I just gone from the GiveWP team into the StellarWP team. And so I just showed up there. I didn’t know anybody, but you were so kind and so welcoming. So it’s really nice to see you, see you face to face again, even if it’s not in person.
[00:03:47] Aspen: Well, I appreciate that, Michelle. Everybody has been so kind to me in my learning journey, so it’s always just great to get to meet folks and learn more about them.
[00:03:55] Michelle: Yeah, I think that’s one of the really nice things about us here, is you can just DM anybody, it doesn’t matter if they’re the CEO of the company or, you know, one of the maintenance people at one of the other locations, and just everybody just kind of pitches in and is willing to help each other. So I love that.
[00:04:12] Aspen: I love it, too.
[00:04:13] Travis: We couldn’t have someone better than Aspen to be a helpful human. Right, like Aspen is the epitome of that. So. Love working together.
[00:04:20] Aspen: Yes, Travis. Unless you’re not doing it my way, which case I would come after you, which is fine.
[00:04:27] Travis: So we’ve talked a lot about Nexcess and Liquid Web, but it was recently announced that they’re going to become one unified powerhouse brand. So maybe you can go over a little bit about what drove that decision and what Nexcess customers can expect as far as changes in their hosting and kind of more about that change, because that’s an exciting change we have coming up.
[00:04:47] Aspen: Yeah, I could not be more excited about it. I think it’s, number one, the right decision, and number two, it was really aimed at strengthening the hosting services that we can provide through the Nexcess brand and the Liquid Web brand. It was really focused more on how can we provide clarity for customers in their success and making sure that we could provide the best service quality that we could. I think that this strategic move will really strengthen both brands because the first thing it’s going to do is eliminate confusion. There is definitely some confusion about what products and services we provide. We provide best in class infrastructure underneath both brands, but it’s more well known. The infrastructure underneath the Liquid Web banner. And then removing the confusion of the Nexcess applications brand allows us to provide both infrastructure and applications as a combined service for our folks. And I think that that will eliminate a lot of the confusion that exists across the market. But our customers who know us know that we’re still the same great team. Customers who have dealt with both brands talk about what a great team that we have and what great service we provide and that won’t get lost along the way.
So on the Nexcess side, our customers there can absolutely expect a smooth transition. We have got plans among plans, among plans, detailed plans to support the plans around how we make sure that there is, number one, no disruption in service. So that is, sites and stores will still be online, they will still be running.
We have a great roadmap of enhanced features and capabilities and we have plans to start creating more smooth transitions and frictionless experiences across mostly the portal space. But in terms of our customer sites and stores, they’ll continue to run on the same fabulous infrastructure they always have.
[00:06:46] Michelle: I am hosting several sites with Nexcess right now and I have.
[00:06:51] Aspen: Me too, Michelle. I love it.
[00:06:53] Michelle: Right? So I have to say, like, I, I know a lot, right, about building websites and hosting, but I am not like a hosting professional, which, all that to say, I’ve made mistakes in understanding how to move DNS and some of those kinds of things. And so I have on more than one occasion had to like hit up that little open chat and ask somebody, help me get out of the mess I just created for myself.
[00:07:18] Aspen: That’s right.
[00:07:19] Michelle: And every single time there has been a helpful human. But, but not even just helpful, like you can tell that the people are who are answering those tickets and having those conversations with you, like helping you. It’s not just like, oh, I’m helpful, I like being helpful kind of thing. And every single time I’ve had any issue has been resolved very quickly. But I get to do something that other people who host with us don’t, which is then go to talk. Then, like, ping them in a slack channel and go, hey, that was me. Thank you. You really were helpful.
[00:07:51] Aspen: That’s awesome.
I’m sure that that brings them such joy. I have had the opportunity, I’ve been in this role now for about four months, and I have had the opportunity to interview and talk with so many of our technicians and system administrators who work with our customers every single day. And here’s what I can say with absolute confidence, is that they have a sincere desire to make people’s lives or customer’s lives easier. And they understand that the person that they are talking to on the other line is the person whose business that is being entrusted in our hands. And so it’s not just the love of technology, which all of our folks love technology. If we have one gamer out there, we have 555,000. I swear to you, everybody in the world, clearly not me, but I have teenage boys. So I understand the gaming world. So many technology folks, so they love technology for the sake of technology. But what they also understand is that when we talk to our customers and they are having problems, they are having problems that impact their ability to put food on their table. And so it’s personal. It’s incredibly personal to our people every single day. And we make strides to make sure that we understand that across our organization.
[00:09:07] Michelle: Well, I think you actually answered my next question, which is, what sets Liquid Web apart from the other hosting providers? And I think you just nailed it. Right. So I think that’s, I mean, that’s hard. But I also want to give you the opportunity to add to that question, if you’d like to.
[00:09:21] Aspen: Yeah, no, I think that’s it. I mean, we really, we really believe, we really believe that we support small business. We know we do.
We have a unique combination of product offerings. I think that really makes us distinct, and that’s that we really have a product for every project, both big and small. And when I say that, I mean, we can take somebody who, just one site, one store wants to give it a shot in a WooCommerce space, let’s say, and can grow that over time. And we have seen it happen where they outgrow some of these smaller options and need to move into larger, bigger infrastructure and more complicated and complex solutions for things that might need to scale at certain times of the year, or might need to have load balancers built into the equation, or may need to even migrate from something like Woo to something that’s more complex, like Magento. We have products and projects across all those different variations and we’re here to grow with customers as they’re ready to grow and be supportive with them the whole way. I think that is what really makes us different.
[00:10:31] Michelle: I love that.
[00:10:33] Aspen: Me too. Me too. I love that.
[00:10:37] Travis: So I’ve been here almost three years now and I love it at Liquid Web. It’s been an awesome experience. Best company I’ve ever worked at. So what do you think makes Liquid Web and also StellarWP such a great place to work?
[00:10:49] Aspen: Oh, that’s easy. One, I am completely surrounded by people who are 1000% smarter than I am and I love it. Every day. I legitimately learn something new every single day from like, smart, talented and creative people. We have it covered.
We have people who say things that I swear they are speaking a different language. It’s like bits and bytes and borderline, like in code. Like, I don’t even know if they’re talking matrix, but it feels some days like they are. And I’m like, okay, guys, you lost me at that.
But then you go on the other spectrum of that. And then we get to people on our design teams who are creating and renovating truly how our customers interact with us. And they’re leading with such a creative mind and design on how does a customer truly experience this and how can we make it easier and more delightful along the way? And the vast differences between those capabilities and contents and skill just, it blows my mind all the time. So freaking cool.
So, I don’t know, I just, I get really excited about people who genuinely care about their work, people who are genuinely talented at what they do and passionate about what they believe and that we’re always looking for ways to be continuously learning and growing opportunities for our people and always focus on ways to make it better for our customers and hyper focus on that right now, as we think about merging those product lines and making our products more enhanced and feature driven.
[00:12:26] Michelle: Can I add to that that the collaborative efforts here are phenomenal as well? Right? So all these smart people understand that true collaboration can create something better. And I have never worked with such a large group of people where ego was not part of the equation. Where everybody just wants to help each other succeed. Because we all succeed when one of us does.
[00:12:47] Aspen: Yeah, that, that is not lip service either. We have just killer folks who, who get it that, like, our collective success is our customer success. And so at the end of the day, we are focused on what does it take to make this experience right for the customer and let’s all rally together on that first, and then how do we improve, you know, things in the future for that. And people are hyper focused on that. It’s cool. Super cool.
And, you know, somebody gets ticked, you just call Jim. Like, just pick up the phone. Jim’s our CEO.
[00:13:21] Michelle: I don’t have his number.
[00:13:23] Aspen: Yeah, no, he’s just as quick. He’ll be like, he doesn’t like Slack. He said. He says Slack is too much for him, but, yeah, it is.
[00:13:32] Travis: I love how accessible everybody is and just helpful and friendly, and it’s. It’s a pretty cool culture. It’s been built here. So anything on the roadmap?
[00:13:41] Aspen: I would just say one more thing about that, Travis. It is a cool culture, and it is collaborative in nature. But we also don’t back away when we know something is wrong. Like, I love the fact that we’re super transparent. Like, just like any other company, we. We can screw up, but we take ownership when that happens, and we collectively work to try to make it better. And I’m super grateful that there isn’t a spirit of trying to throw anybody under the bus. It is truly a spirit of, okay, let’s figure it out. We screwed up. We take ownership of it, we move on, and then we try to make it better next time. And that exists everywhere in this organization, across all the brands and stellar and our sister brand, modern tribe, too. Really grateful for that.
[00:14:20] Travis: Yeah, I love that. I love it when people challenge ideas and thoughts and we all just get better from it, which is cool, but it’s not. It’s not in a mean way, it’s not an aggressive way. It’s just, let’s be better. Let’s all be better.
[00:14:31] Aspen: Let’s be better.
[00:14:33] Michelle: Agreed.
[00:14:35] Travis: I know there’s a lot of awesome stuff coming out, but anything on the roadmap this year that we should be looking forward to? Anything that you want to highlight?
[00:14:41] Aspen: Oh, gosh. The thing that I am so wickedly excited about right now is our new brand launch.
Beta is coming out on April 23, so it will be available at next.liquidweb.com soon.
Hopefully I got that right. You’re gonna have to correct me, Michelle, if I didn’t, but that will be launching in Beta. Give us about a month to kind of let it bake and get our feedback on it. But it’s so freaking cool. I love the bold messages that it sends. I love the visuals our design team has done on just really articulating our voice. We’ve got some really awesome new products in our cloud studio space, which is really highly focused on our unmanaged offerings. For people who love those capabilities, there are people in the hosting space who don’t need a managed solution. So we want to make sure that we give those options, including customers who want straight up bare metal. I had no idea what bare metal was about two to three years ago, but I have learned so much about what bare metal means. It literally just means a computer with nothing on it. Okay. People who understand it are going to yell at me for that. But basically that’s what it boils down to.
Then, in the WordPress space, the new capabilities we’ve done in AI with Kadence. Oh, that’s bringing light to my life. I am. So I built my first Kadence AI site for our internal team by myself. I will add, that’s awesome.
On regular WordPress, it took me a hot minute, but in Kadence AI, it was beautiful. Just like that.
[00:16:15] Michelle: It is slick. Yeah.
[00:16:17] Aspen: Heart so happy.
So those are the things that I’m living for right now. I will tell you, we are taking a look at every step of the customer journey in my new role. I just am super hyper focused on the entire customer journey across Liquid Web, Nexcess and then Stellar in there as well. And how do we make sure that we’re removing friction points and we’re delighting our customer in their journey in unexpected and remarkable ways. And that kind of work makes my heart just pound in excitement. So we have some big aspirations in 2024 and I’m here for it. I love a good transformation.
[00:16:55] Michelle: Can I tell you that when our Slack, when our Slack got a new logo, there was like a collective gasp and like, oh, my goodness, yes, it was. What is that?
[00:17:07] Aspen: I know it was a lot of energy.
[00:17:10] Travis: I’ve been a part of a lot of brand refreshes and rebranding and I have never been more excited for this one. For Liquid Web.
[00:17:17] Aspen: It is incredible.
[00:17:18] Travis: The site, everything is awesome. Yeah.
[00:17:21] Aspen: As we even talk goosebumps.
[00:17:23] Michelle: Very cool. Very cool. So what else? I mean, we can’t ask all the questions because we don’t know everything you want to talk about. So the next question is just what else would you like to share with us in our audience?
[00:17:34] Aspen: Oh, gosh, Michelle, that’s a great question.
I’m just so excited about the future of Liquid Web. I’ve been with Liquid Web for a long time now versus a consultant. Honestly started off doing some of that work and then I just grew to love it so much. I wanted to have a place here and I could not tell you how excited the entire leadership team is about some of the truly amazing work that’s happening here. We’ve got some great, awesome new leaders in place that we are really excited about. Just the growth opportunities for the entire company. The amazing products and features that we are offering to our customers that we have on our roadmap is just cool stuff. I can’t wait for the WordPress community to interact with the new brand and see all the stuff that we’re working on and to get that feedback. The WordPress community is like nothing else in the world of feedback. So I just want to let folks know that we are open to the feedback. So bring it on.
Definitely start thinking about checking out that new website when it launches in Beta and then does a full launch in May. It’s probably going to be the coolest thing you’ve ever seen. Just throwing it out there, Michelle, throwing it out there, Travis.
But we are excited. We’re excited about the future of how customers are going to see great things coming out of Liquid Web and Nexcess and Stellar is a combined entity.
[00:19:03] Michelle: I’m excited about it too. And I know Travis is, it’s, it’s, there’s, you can feel the buzz. It’s palpable in Slack of all places.
[00:19:11] Aspen: Yes, for sure. I do want to clarify. There are no plans to bring Stellar underneath the Liquid Web banner. Like the Stellar brand is not going away. I might have said that. A little confusing. We are merging Nexcess and Liquid Web, but StellarWP will stay right there alongside of us the whole way.
[00:19:28] Michelle: Our little, I say little. It’s not little anymore. But our software division, if you will, StellarWP with our, with all of our plugins and Kadence theme for sure.
[00:19:36] Aspen: Yeah.
[00:19:37] Michelle: Very cool. And if people are interested in finding out more. What’s the website?
[00:19:43] Aspen: Oh, the website is liquidweb.com. If you want to try it out after April will be next.LiquidWeb.com. Marketing might actually be mad at me for saying that. I’m not sure if I was supposed to say that, so. Michelle, wrong. You might. We might have to. We don’t let it. Don’t let anybody know that that came from me. That’s all I’m saying.
[00:20:08] Michelle: We’ll put you in like a silhouette. So it’s like you’re in the witness protection program the whole time.
[00:20:12] Aspen: Yes, please do that. For sure. But there will be an opportunity to provide feedback on the website and that’s important to us. Listening to our customers is incredibly important to us. So that’s how I would encourage people to get in touch with us.
[00:20:25] Michelle: Excellent. So we’ll put those links on our website along with anything else we’ve mentioned that should be there and a transcript of today’s episode that will all be in this episode on StellarWP.com/podcast. And we look forward to seeing it all come true and being part of, I feel like, is it too sappy to say, like, history being made?
[00:20:47] Aspen: Because it kind of feels like certainly our history being made. I don’t know about anything else, but it certainly ours. So we’re excited. Super excited. Hey, Michelle. Travis, thank you for interviewing me. I got to tell you, I was a little bit nervous, but it was great fun talking.
[00:21:02] Michelle: You did great. Thanks, Travis, for co-hosting and Aspen, thanks so much for spending time with us today. Really appreciate it.
And we’ll see everybody else in 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.