Sean's trip got ruined by dev work, and Andrew is getting traction with a new product

Sean just got back from two weeks in Korea and Japan. His trip got derailed when he had to jump in to put out fires and finish some Webflow dev work for a client. He and Andrew talk about the challenges of removing yourself from the day-to-day as an agency owner and how to balance work and time off. 

Andrew gives an update on the client work he's doing with Miscreants, his decision to put ChartJuice on the backburner, and the traction he's seeing with a new product (MetaMonster) he's working on with a partner. MetaMonster helps SEO agencies automate metadata cleanup using AI. He already has 3 agencies/consultants signed on to be design partners and is working on getting more.

We wrap up with an outsider's explanation of all the Wordpress drama going on right now. 

Links:
For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.

Transcript:
00:00:01.77
Sean
What's up? I wanna go see.

Andrew
Miss you.

Sean
I wanna see you too. I wanna see you too.

Andrew
How are you?

Sean
Good. I feel like I saw you in person and then all of a sudden I was in Korea and Japan and then I...

Andrew
Yeah, shit. That was like not, not far apart, was it?

Sean
So... It wasn't... My last memory of the US was being at your place and drinking cocktails. So, yeah.

Andrew
That's a good night.

Sean
It was a good night. It was a good night. We played basketball.

Andrew
but that was Oh my God.

Sean
Play is a strong word. We attempted basketball.

Andrew
We threw basketballs around in the dark and like one or two of them went into a basket.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
Oh my God. You made me feel a lot better though. Cause I was like, I was like, Sean's going to smoke me. Like he's going to be so embarrassed at how bad at basketball I am and you are just as bad as I am.

Andrew
So I was like, okay, cool.

Sean
Yeah. I think about like how like my first million has that basketball camp. Just like there's no way all these people are that good at basketball.

Andrew
I love the image of like Sean Burry is just like, you know, making people like, uh, like bring over a step stool or something so he can dunk. He's like, but then he he goes on my first million and talks about it and he's like, yeah, it was awesome.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
Yeah, I hit every sh- I hit- I banked every shot.

Andrew
No, I think like there are a lot of people in tech who are actually athletic because they played sports at some point in their life.

Sean
Yeah, probably.

Andrew
And then, and then there's the rest of us who got into tech because we were nerds and liked computers.

Sean
Yeah. Oh. Plus, I mean, you rock climb. Like, you're pretty athletic.

Andrew
I haven't been rock climbing in like two months.

Sean
You- you just suck the best at work.

Sean
Oh.

Andrew
I am actually going rock climbing outside in with some friends in two weeks, and I'm like, I should probably go climb a wall in the gym before I go, because I haven't climbed in like two or three months, so.

Sean
Okay.

Sean
Oh, cool.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
and Get those forearm muscles pumping again.

Andrew
I gotta get my skin. My skin's gonna.

Sean
Right.

Andrew
like be shredded if I if I don't climb at all and then go try to climb outside so I feel like it takes me like two or three climbs before my skin starts to thicken up again

Sean
you know what you can do there's this guy on tiktok he pours i don't know what it is but something really sticky on his hands so he like is like a martial artist or something and it's like it's like epoxy or something and he basically just rubs it on his hand and or like sand papers down his hand basically and until it gets super super rough he just does it every single day on tiktok it's gross.

Sean
It's terrible. And you can like, oh, oh, it's, uh, it's like floor wax.

Andrew
And so then it like grows back thicker or something?

Sean
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like floor wax basically.

Andrew
Wait, wait, wait. We were talking about the wrong thing. How was your fucking trip?

Sean
he just like, and he also puts his hand next to the microphone and it's like the worst version of ASMR you've ever heard in your life. It's like worst at misophonia. Um.

Andrew
wait wait wait we're talking about the wrong thing how was your fucking trip

Sean
Well, much like listening to really shit awful man hands. It was. It was good to attempt a vacation.

Andrew
Oh, no.

Sean
It was not it is it is not what I would call a vacation.

Andrew
Oh, no, Sean.

Sean
It sucked. It sucked to be honest with you. It was like it.

Andrew
Brutal.

Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is.

Andrew
Okay.

Sean
going to become mother

Andrew
So where'd you, where'd you go? And then, and then tell me what happened.

Sean
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Andrew
What went wrong?

Sean
for sure for sure Okay. um So I went to, I went to London first. That wasn't for vacation. I just happened to go to London to go see both Ben and JJ we had like a team on site.

Andrew
Hmm.

Sean
That was great.

Andrew
Yeah, you were feeling pretty hyped last time we talked right after that.

Sean
Worked. Yeah, that was that was solid. I think we had to kind of connect. I think like we don't get a lot of opportunity at the moment these or or for the past year or so.

Sean
We haven't had a lot of opportunities to really just like talk about the company and and where it's going. And there were some like really interesting conversations that came out of that. I've seen

Andrew
Were the conversations like, hey, we should take this product design guy and just like make him do more product design.

Sean
No, you didn't you never came up at all. Anyway, on to more important things. No, actually, actually, you did come up, we we listed out all the services that we like, like buckets of services. And then it was like, number four, the last one was product design. And we're like, you know, the only thing that runs well is number four.

Andrew
That's not true, I'm sure.

Sean
So how do we just be Andrew and all these things? I have a picture.

Andrew
I'm sure that's not true. Anyway, so what, okay, where'd you go after after London?

Sean
There's a picture of the whiteboard.

Sean
Okay, so so I was in London. London was okay. You know, it kind of sucked because the Airbnb I was at had like five megabits. So I have learned that you can proxy your internet.

Andrew
Oh, yeah.

Sean
i'll get into this later Anyway, not important. It was cool. I went to Korea after. The goal was to go to Japan with a bunch of my college, a couple of my college friends and have like an annual friendscation or the first of of many friendscations.

Andrew
Sick.

Sean
but But figured I'm going to Japan, we go to Korea as well. And this was like a trip that we've been planning since like pre-COVID. It got canceled because of COVID actually.

Andrew
Yeah. Oh, bummer. And you've never been to Japan or Korea, right?

Sean
I've never been to a country for that long where I like do not speak the language at that degree.

Andrew
Cool. Sick.

Sean
The only other time was like two days in Italy, which I mean like it's super easy to pick up Italian. Just be like, Alora, prego, easy.

Andrew
but

Sean
miss ahpress poor

Andrew
Sprezing, what is it? Sprezinglese or something like that? Like, do you speak English?

Sean
now you look you look yeah yeah but no this is this is my first time to an asian country that was in china to see my family there so went to korea first for ah ah like three four days um kind kind of a blur got to korea uh got to like walk around korea a little bit and then

Andrew
And then just, nope. Well, hand gestures.

Sean
after

Andrew
Would you eat?

Sean
After... What did I eat in Korea? Is that what you're asking?

Andrew
Yeah, yeah, yeah. i want i want I want like everything you ate every day for the whole trip.

Sean
I basically...

Sean
Oh. Oh, gotcha.

Andrew
We don't actually have to do that, but like my dream is just to go eat my way through like Korea and Japan and like, I want to so bad.

Sean
Okay. I do have a picture.

Sean
We should do it. We should go do that. We should go do that. Oh. Podcast in Japan. I have pictures of all of my airplane meals, if you are interested, by the way.

Andrew
I don't care about the airplane meals. I care about the like amazing Korean fried chicken and like the like like actual Korean barbecue.

Sean
Okay, so actual Korean barbecue, delicious, amazing.

Andrew
Yes.

Sean
A lot of galbi, all that stuff. Korean fried chicken, however. Dude, things in Korea are so spicy. I'm like like um'm a wimp, I know you're a wimp when it comes to spicy food.

Andrew
Oh no. Yeah, I'm a wimp.

Sean
I cried many times. I tried so hard. You would get like not spicy chicken, eat it, it would still be spicy. Every time I had fried chicken there, except for this one chain place, was spicy.

Sean
So brutal. um

Andrew
Can your friends handle spice? Were they?

Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah. they just They just feel bad and look at me and they're like, yeah.

Andrew
They just laugh at you.

Sean
Comedian stores and career, cool. Eventually, I mean, it wasn't planning to be like completed off of PTO when I was there. It was kind of meant to be like working-ish.

Sean
One of our friends hasn't joined us us yet. He's going to join us in Japan. So we were like, we had more time. And the first day I worked in Japan, oh sorry, the first day I worked in Korea, it was kind of cool because like I get to work like Korean, like, like, like, sorry, is like, like the the time zone difference is really nice because like, honestly, I was working like goblin hours, but I like working goblin hours.

Andrew
I was about to say, that's just your normal working hours.

Sean
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. It's like my preferred time to work and and the nice thing about Korea is that convenience stores are 24-7 so I can, when I get hungry or want to take a walk or something, I can go downstairs and it's one right around the corner, hit a convenience store, come back, you know, pass out, wake up at like 10 a.m. and like get the entire day to just do whatever I want.

Sean
and then come back and then do work. and then things that work blew up. So instead of going out, I just kind of stayed inside.

Sean
so that was brutal.

Andrew
Brutal.

Sean
yeah, that was tough. Uh. that became like a blur for a couple days and then finally I think, you know, I basically finished some of it by the last day and then and then we left.

Andrew
Mm-hmm.

Sean
So first we went in, after that we went and and got to Nagata, Japan mainly because there's this art festival called Echigosumari. It's not like a traditional Japanese festival, it's like an art festival where artists have their things all across the entirety of like Nagata, Japan.

Andrew
Cool.

Sean
And you have a little passport, and you kind of go and like stamp things. And you get to see all these things. And the idea is that you know these are to make you like like like not only like like see the value of that part of the land, but see how it's transformed and then sort of beautifies the the entire area.

Sean
cool concept yeah pretty interesting stuff there i got basically tricked into going on a hike for 40 miles up a mountain to go see like this stupid little castle but whatever worth it got a little tan if you can't tell um A lot of that time, it was like half work.

Sean
You know, I still have to work. And I did get to stay in like a ryokan, which is like a Japanese a hot spring hotel area for a night.

Andrew
Ooh, fuck yeah, cool.

Sean
That was cool. Couldn't get to work. And so so this is where it kind of goes downhill, right? Like in Korea, I work a bunch. And in the last couple days of Korea, I work a bunch, kind of catch up-ish.

Sean
I work a little bit, not so much. And like honestly, after hiking for an entire day, I just crash.

Andrew
Yeah, of course.

Sean
So I don't get to work that and that. I can't work overnight that night. You know, the RioCon, there's not a lot of Wi-Fi, and I can't really work that night. So now I'm like two, three days in the hole during a weekday. So then and then we fly to Tokyo and then I get like a day in Tokyo-ish. And then I just work the for like the next two, three days or four days and then finally i I got back lot this Monday.

Sean
I finished by by friday friday Friday night in Tokyo, which is like Friday morning here. I hit up JJ. I'm like, I am burnt out. I've been working.

Sean
more than I have at home on a shadier set up. And there's just a constant frustration every hour that I'm working because I realized like, I've been gone technically to all of our clients, I've kind of been gone for like three weeks, I haven't gone to the meetings because they're Sometimes just at whatever hours and I can't make it So as far as like most of our clients are concerned I've been kind of out but honestly I haven't been I've just been working behind the scenes the entire time So now I can't go and like say I'm gonna go on PTO for the rest of the year and actually have a PTO So I'm just like sat in from P and I'm working in Japan

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
But the last, you know, weekend in Japan was great. It was a good time. Had parfait, and had a match of parfait, had some yakitori, had like, I don't know, Takayaki, and had, oh, I had, we had like Japanese barbecue, yakiniku, that was great, like all-yakiniku wagyu, that was dope. But yeah.

Andrew
So what happened like why why'd you end up having to work so much because originally you were planning to like sort of be available if people answered questions but like wasn't the original plan like not to really do any like any work work.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
Yeah. I think the issue is the fact that, I don't know if this was on a previous episode or an episode before that I had to let go of one of our devs.

Sean
So basically we're just way too under capacity and to fill in for him.

Andrew
Gotcha.

Sean
There's just too many things going on. And it just so happened that like, beginning of October were a lot of launches. It's about we get to launch a website, that and it's over the whole ordeal.

Sean
A couple of the things that we launched slash half launched slash are launching like this week basically. of it just kind of like piled up onto each other. I think I think one of the things one of the concerns I had like there was a point where

Sean
I think for me, so interestingly, differently, from my understanding, Japanese war culture slash Japanese culture is incredibly organized, like logistics and logging and like writing things down. like every time like we would i would like get and get like a ah a i would get and ride from a taxi driver in Japan and they would go ahead and like they would like afterwards like log where they went and how much it was on a piece of paper or something on like a clipboard and like you know you would go to a Japanese stationery store and these like they these have they have these elaborate journals and elaborate like planners and like

Sean
ways they're gonna do because because they log so many things and I hear that's sort of part of Japanese war culture like the reason why like you have someone over time is because you have like work actual work to do and then you have like log logging work to do um I am unfortunately like not someone who prioritizes that work if I'm very busy with other things like if I have a bunch of other yeah if I just have a bunch of other things to do like like administrators have just falls to the wayside point being is I think we had a lot of inbound in q3

Sean
and early q3 we closed a lot of deals but it got to a point where there's so many like there was so much inbound and sales calls and client work at the same time and hiring at the same time that like knowing when a projects ended and when a projects would start and and these phases have just eventually got like out of control for me. Also partially to be honest with you, also for what it's worth like, like we also just switch from click up to Trello and and like I think Trello is really great for ICs to track their work and like kind of a pain in the ass as a PM, pseudo PM to like get a high level view or everything right.

Andrew
Yep, it definitely is.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
That's why we switched off of it.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
yeah

Sean
But least, I mean, you know, better that all of our team is tracking things in Trello than just me barely tracking things in ClickUp and and and people having to learn a crappy, like, not a crappy, just overly complicated tool.

Sean
So yeah, that's more or less what happened.

Andrew
Gotcha. So basically without meaning to a bunch of deadlines kind of like piled up at the same time, whereas normally you would have been a little more on top of like.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
Hmm.

Andrew
Like making sure those were more staggered and then that combined with being short staffed right now and then just having some administrative work pile up like all of those things just sort of came to a head at once.

Sean
Hmm.

Sean
Yeah, yeah, I think, and then there were just like other little fires that kind of came in. But we did just hire a new web dev and he started today. So super excited to have him on.

Andrew
Sick.

Sean
you know I'm excited to hire him, excited to possibly hire another person and sort of offload more of my life onto these folks and trying to, my goal is by 2025, I am doing zero web flow development.

Sean
for clients. Yeah.

Andrew
Yeah, that should absolutely be be the case.

Sean
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew
I keep pushing you to do zero client work, period, but yeah, that's tricky.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
It is tricky. i think I think I will probably always have to do the initial, until we find people, I will have to do a lot of the like strategy work with clients.

Andrew
Yeah. But to me, that's that's different. There's a big difference between being the person who closes the sale and then comes in and does the initial whole strategy work and then hands it off to someone else.

Andrew
you know I did that for a long time at Crit as well. then I would sort of I would hand things off to Austin or to Beena or someone to run from there.

Sean
and Yeah.

Andrew
I think there's a big difference between that kind of work and and then like being the one who has to come in and actually do web flow development or do branding or or whatever, or even having to do a bunch of like creative direction kind of stuff where you're having to get in there.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
For sure.

Andrew
like That stuff just can become so time consuming so fast.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And I mean, i I still think the goal should eventually be to have someone else handle that initial strategy stuff too. um um And I mean, it's clearly possible because we're doing that for our projects right now.

Andrew
Like you're not involved in the strategy stuff for our projects, so it's clearly possible. But certainly challenging to find there the kind of people to run those so parts of the work.

Sean
yeah yeah and just gotta to find another eight security agency owner ah okay one

Andrew
who sold his agency and then got fired. and Yeah.

Sean
Yeah. yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely possible. I think also the strategies role is like trainable to someone.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
Yeah. I think one of the things that I was also a little bit sad and grumpy about was like, I really wanted it. Like client work is always urgent and sometimes important and there's not an important, but it's urgent.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
Right.

Andrew
Yeah, it's always urgent. Yeah.

Sean
and like it's it's just kind of put a lot of the important not urgent work by the wayside and I was really looking forward to like being able to kind of continue to write out like this is how we think about strategy and this is how we do all these things and put out these like training like things that I should be doing as like the person who runs the company is like setting

Andrew
Yeah.

Andrew
Like that was the kind of work you actually had planned for Japan is just like you were going to do some of that stuff in your downtime.

Sean
Yeah, yeah, it was just like, you know, on the flight or like just in my doubt, just in my, in my spare time slash rest time, like be able to kind of like just do that level of non-client basic deep work.

Sean
So yeah, sorry to make this depressing by the way to whoever is listening at the moment.

Andrew
What?

Andrew
Now, this is the whole point of our podcast is to talk about the struggles and talk about, you know, this stuff.

Sean
For sure. Yeah, sure.

Andrew
One last question I want to ask you about this and like, you know. One answer is hire somebody, which you have now done, but like. What else do you need to do to make sure that you can like, you know, take PTO in say the spring and you can actually be unplugged.

Sean
and

Sean
I could give, I could shut the company down for two weeks.

Andrew
I mean, if, if that's what you want to do, go for it.

Sean
You know.

Andrew
But like, yeah.

Sean
uh that that's not even a joke that's like a serious consideration i've thought or or just something i've considered is like if i make it so that the company has got like yeah if if like we we do what great noise does right like we're out for two weeks everyone knows this months in advance things are prorated that way whatever like should be okay It's a thought, it's not like the most optimal thought, as like, it's not a bad thing to do, it's just like not that as the as the catalyst for me to finally be able to take PTO is kind of not the solution to the problem.

Sean
I don't know, I think I think...

Andrew
Yeah, I think you need to be able to take PTO without the entire company being shut down and like have that PTO be uninterrupted.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
If not, if that's ah ah impossible, then like something is wrong.

Sean
For sure, for sure. I mean, for what it's worth, I do think that like in my absence, the team did step up in a lot of ways, and that was cool. like think we have a good team right now.

Andrew
That's great.

Sean
I think think it was probably sucked for them the weeks I was gone, because like yes, they have to step up, and and that's fine.

Sean
I think it's like... It's like I think there's there was like a general I don't know. I think I feel bad i I feel bad for Ben and JJ because I think there's a general feeling of like while they were stepping up and doing these things I was still working so it was a general feeling of like what they're doing and stepping up is not enough to accomplish those things because there's just too much to do. yeah i think and don't know I think I struggle with this agency in particular because of how closely tied it feels like it's tied to like personal reputation at the moment.

Andrew
Hm.

Sean
Like I think, of like I sometimes fantasize about this a lot of like, if I were to just start a random ass, I don't know, let's say as an SEO agency or a paid ad agency, like, and, and like, I built like a repeatable sales model by doing like paid ads, what came in the door, maybe it was product guys, maybe, maybe it was like, still high touch or something like, there's a level of that, depth that feels like because it's not niche down in the world where all my friends are,

Sean
It feels like less of a deal if It feels it feels like less of an issue if we have Mistakes with the client not to say I want to build a shitty like mill like burn through client sort of agency but like it feels less like I think the problem here is like I still feel like of a ah ah tight grip on a lot of things because It's so tied to like, the the work quality is tied to my reputation. and So i I don't want to let that go. So I don't know.

Andrew
Yeah, it's tough.

Sean
yeah part pardon of me just wanted to just do t-shirts by like by like day three of doing like yeah by the like 70 hour mark and in Tokyo I was just like what if what if we just sell t-shirts and you know what if we're just like shots to see and you know no longer do client work but I don't know

Andrew
I think, I think.

Andrew
I mean, certainly if you had like a more productized agency, you'd be a little bit more separated from it. But as long as like, yeah, the only way I found to like really effective for, for getting leads running my agency was, you know, personal networking and,

Andrew
You know, a little bit of outbound, we did a little bit of that and like, uh, you know, we did some content marketing and that helped, but like, you know, the reputation. And I guess, I guess it helped in our case, it helped that like there were two of us. And so like, and Austin really owns the work and I owned more of like, you know, the brand and the strategy and the getting clients and stuff. And so, uh, yeah, the.

Andrew
marketing and sales side of things. And so yeah maybe that separation, that personal separation where it was like it wasn't my work for a long time, like maybe that helped a little bit. um But I also think some of that is just like something we all have to fight as agency owners.

Andrew
Like I remember, you're going to know exactly who I'm talking about. I won't name names, but like there, there was a client who was a big ass name in cybersecurity and we got to work with them.

Sean
Yeah. Right.

Andrew
And I like kind of compromised on our process to do it. Cause I really wanted their, like their name associated with us. and we dropped the ball a little bit.

Andrew
And I remember being like really stressed about that and being like, fuck, like it It felt like the first time we'd really dropped the ball with a client.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And then someone was just like, dude, it's just part of growing. And like, yeah, I don't think anyone really thought less of crit afterwards because of it.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And so like, I think there's, there's a level of like, of that that's good and that you should probably hold onto, right? Cause like we we all want to do good work. But like over servicing is such a killer for so many creative agencies.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And, and so you got to develop the thick skin of going like The clients don't, like they care as much about like things getting done on time and like and you know as like being just communicated with well as they do the actual like work that comes out. There are probably very few clients who care about the details to the level that you do. And to some degree, they're hiring you to care about those things.

Andrew
But you can kill your agency caring about those things too much. It's like this tricky balance that you have to figure out how to walk. And like part of it is getting thick skin to shit.

Andrew
Being imperfect sometimes, like just building up that, like, I'm going to be OK with this not being exactly to my standards all the time.

Sean
yeah

Andrew
And like you can again, you can take that too far. And then you're churning out crap and losing clients left and right. And your agency's in a nosedive, but like figuring out how to walk that line is, I think a really important part to building like an agency that's sustainable long-term.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
Well, I agree with you. I'm not telling that i'm not closing a shop by any means. like think i'm am If anything, I am more motivated than ever to like free myself from the shackles of my own making at the moment. So we will see. i think that I think the nice thing is it's been And a previous boss always tell me that like growing agency is the stepwise function where you're either over capacity on like work you have to get done with a lot of people or like like way too many like man out or or people hours. and

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
not enough work right and I think like I've always chosen the former and my way of solving the former is I would fulfill the work until we have someone to like step in those shoes but we've done that for so long that we at least have some amount of a like war chest that i cant like and don't We have enough cash flow and and like some amount of savings in the company where like I can take a slightly greater risk by bringing someone on.

Sean
yeah so we'll see We'll see hopefully you know eight episodes from now or so it'll be better. um I think the other thing that really kind of like made me upset was I sent you that link to that supplement thing And then I took a look at that and I think like Yeah, I think

Andrew
oh yeah

Sean
I mean, shame on me for trying to do two things at once, for sure. But I think there's definitely an extra level of frustration of having felt like this thing I'm working on stack-wise is like no one's doing it and no one's caring about it.

Sean
So I have more than, I have more time, I have a longer time horizon to actually get it done and and well and up.

Andrew
Oh, yeah.

Sean
I still think we're differentiated. For what it's worth, I think we have a new morning tropics focus. I think they're more focused on supplements. I think it's slightly different.

Andrew
Yeah. So to clarify, you found a competitor to stack wise and, yeah.

Sean
Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Yeah.

Andrew
And that has you feeling a little freaked out because you're like, shit, we're not, it's not as maybe blue ocean anymore.

Sean
Yeah, i think I think it was more the annoyance, I think the the feeling was more the annoyance of not being able to pivot to do that. Like, like i had I had a block of time when I was in Japan and Korea where I could have done something, right? And I would have been happy if that time was spent, like seeing that there was a competitor feeling like, like i love I love having seen a competitor because I feel revved up and I feel like like like like a rivalry.

Sean
But I couldn't go and do it because I had just had too much like fucking workflow development to do. Yeah. But anyway, now I'm home. So now I have a larger monitor and a better setup and more comfortable just work environments and I get to.

Sean
Do those things again. Yeah. Enough about me, how's your side of the house, your side of the fence, your neck of the woods?

Andrew
Good. So I think it's been like three weeks since we recorded or so. So in that time, started a new miscreants project so with with a good ah good friend of ours.

Sean
Yeah. You didn't.

Andrew
So that's been really fun, enjoying that, brought on a new ah new designer for that project. He's been really, really great to work with. and yeah and we'rere cooking along took a little longer than I had hoped to do some of the initial like strategy and story mapping. um We ended up doing it in lots of small chunks, which I think was good. It made it feel very sustainable. And basically, it just came down to there was a lot to talk about. There's a, you know, they're a ah ah very data heavy

Andrew
organization. And so there's a lot of use cases and a lot of questions that people can ask their data. And it just took time to like go through all of those and understand them and um and um and detail out the ways that we could build the product to help people answer answer your their questions and fulfill their use cases.

Sean
you know

Andrew
But yeah, that's cranking along. it's It's going well and enjoying that. It certainly was was nice to have a slightly larger you know invoice that I sent to you all this this past week.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
yeah Yeah.

Andrew
yeah Nice to have a little bit of money coming in the door, still super appreciative of all the flexibility and getting to, you know, it's fun to get to work together and to have that flexibility to just take on work when I can and bring a little money in while I'm building up my own things. And then,

Andrew
Yes, i I don't remember how much I've talked about this new project that I'm working on. So I'm working on a blog post this week about when to quit, expanding on some of the ideas from our podcast episode we did about when to quit, and just talking about my decision to put chart juice on the back burner. So I wouldn't say I'm entirely quitting on chart juice. Like i I still have some ideas that I've talked about on here a bunch of like you know, introducing a free tier and building some integrations and you sort of pivoting away from the chart to image API focus to make it more of like a general chart builder focus that happens to have an API built in if anyone wants to use that.

Andrew
And so you still have some aspirations of maybe maybe doing something like that. If nothing else, I think you know it could be a ah ah fun, free tool to just have out there that to let exist so that people can people can use it and can generate some some get some backlinks and generate some some SEO juice for for other projects.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
but Putting it on the back burner for now haven't haven't honestly touched the code base in like two months and have been you know fully focused on validating a new business idea. And that is going pretty well. yeah Our initial goal was to get 10 people to commit to being beta users before we we committed to building the MVP. So we we have what I'd consider like three hard commits and like six or so soft commits. like We had a number of people who committed before we really had any pricing, and so we didn't really

Andrew
You know, we, it was a pretty vague commitment.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
uh, but we had six, six soft commitments or so.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And then three people who said, who we quoted a price and they said, yep, if, if I can try it out and I like it, I'll happily pay that price.

Sean
what can you Is that a prize you can share? Yeah.

Andrew
Yeah, sure. So the product is MetaMonster. And the idea is to yeah build an SEO spider like Screaming Frog that has a native integration with

Sean
Mm hmm.

Andrew
generative AI APIs, and native integrations to your CMS so that you can crawl a website, generate missing metadata, and then push that metadata live all in one place and create a really, really nice UI for making bulk edits to to metadata.

Andrew
And yeah, we've we've decided we're going to start with meta titles and descriptions, but then have aspirations of maybe growing into more sophisticated, more nuanced things that are like maybe not technically metadata, but kind of related.

Andrew
Just generally automating some of the like tedious grunt work associated with doing SEO, and especially doing SEO on like larger sites or at a larger volume if you've got a bunch of clients.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
so Yeah, we're targeting freelancers and SEO agencies specifically, and in especially looking at people who who do work with sites that are you know at least 500 pages and up, although you know have had some people who are interested in using it even on 50-page sites. And still figuring out the pricing. like So I don't know exactly what how it's going to work yet. We're trying to figure out Yeah, exactly how much to charge and like what to charge for like how to bucket things because it's, there's going to have to be like kind of a usage based element to it, but I don't want people to have to think too much about

Sean
Mm hmm.

Andrew
Like, have I used up all my credits this month? Like, I don't and don't want people like in the tool, like, I'm not going to hit generate again because I don't want to like, I don't want to burn a bunch of credits and then and then get stuck.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
Like, i I want people to have fairly generous limits that they can work within so that they can just use the tool and and get value from it while also not like short selling ourselves and leaving a lot of money on the table.

Sean
Right.

Andrew
So. trying to figure that out. I think, you know, the commitments we have right now are for, you know, in the like, $50 to $200 a month range and you know have had ah ah one or two people say that they may even pay you know ah from the soft commitment group, say they you know could see their agency paying you know low thousands a month for for this product.

Sean
Hmm. Hmm.

Andrew
So that's that's been really encouraging. That's better than anything else I've ever tested, just the numbers we've been hearing. And we're thinking the model will probably be some combination of you get X number of sites and you get X number of pages processed per month.

Andrew
So you can crawl a site. But once you want to start editing or the metadata or generating metadata, then that counts as a page processed.

Sean
right see

Andrew
And so sort of a credit-based thing, but like doing it at the page level so you could you know generate a title five times and it only counts as one page processed.

Andrew
and yeah know There's some assumptions built in there that we can figure out the costs of all that with the AI. But you know again, we're really trying to we really want to create a system where you don't have to be like feel like we're nickel and diming you every time you you want to do something in the product.

Sean
Right, I see. Yeah.

Andrew
And so we may end up going with unlimited sites. We might go with like you know capping sites. We might change shift away from pages process.

Andrew
but that's Those are kind of the variables that we're thinking about right now. is like How many sites do you have on the platform? How many pages are you processing a month?

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And you know at one point, we were thinking maybe just pages per site. But. uh so then but then if you like if you have only have one site that has way more pages than all of your other sites then your price goes way up and that's pretty common from what we've seen like agencies or consultants will have like one or two clients that have like tens of thousands of pages and then the rest of their clients have like under 500 and so it just feels like really

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
I don't know that doesn't feel like a great experience so yeah we're leaning towards right now, at least to start with.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
pages processed and maybe a cap on number of sites that you can have. But yeah, so that's going pretty well. um um And I've been testing cold email for that. So I've gotten several of those leads have come out of cold email.

Andrew
I spent some time talking to one of my friends who is the head of SDR, or not the head of SDR.

Andrew
manages the SDRs. He manages to manage in for great noise. And so I spent some time talking to him, getting some feedback on like how he does cold email. I've got a new campaign I want to get set up this week with some of his tips and loads more prospects into that and then get that firing.

Sean
Sweet.

Andrew
And then I'm going to start working on right now, we've just got a single landing page and we're running some Google ads to that. Seeing a pretty decent conversion rate on those, seeing like 8% of traffic, yeah give us their email.

Sean
Nice. so

Sean
Cool.

Andrew
So that's been cool.

Sean
cool

Andrew
But wanna get that over from like a single page site to a slightly more complex site so that I can start you adding some content and doing and some yeah doing some light SEO work of our own.

Andrew
a few things like that. So yeah, that's kind of where I'm at with MetaMonster. We're starting to to charge ahead. We did a story mapping session last week. So we've got the MVP figured out, the scope for the MVP pretty well figured out. And yeah, my partner's going to do some designs. And yeah we want to share those with some of the people on our early access list and then start start building.

Sean
So this time, I think we talked about the last episode that isn't going to get released, I think.

Andrew
Yeah. Lost state.

Sean
Yeah, lost tape. But yeah, lost tape, lazy tape. Are you doing the development this time?

Andrew
No.

Sean
Or are you going to bring someone else on?

Andrew
Yeah. So my, my partner is going to do all the development.

Sean
Cool.

Andrew
So my co-founder,

Sean
Cool.

Andrew
They're gonna do all the development, the bulk of the development, I shouldn't say all.

Sean
Right.

Andrew
I'm i'm happy to jump in and help out. and But we really want to have a good, yeah know we wanna be doing, spending a lot of time on sales and marketing.

Andrew
And so, you know ideally we've got a ah ah good healthy 50-50 split on sales and marketing. And so I'm gonna do most of the sales and marketing. my co-founder is going to do most of the development and design, and then yeah know we'll both pitch in from time to time.

Sean
cool

Andrew
so

Sean
Cool.

Andrew
The second we get this thing built, I'm going to build a ghost integration so that I can use it on my personal site. And like ghost is not important for the roadmap, but I fucking want it.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
Right, right, right.

Andrew
And so I will happily build a ghost integration.

Sean
Hey, you don't know, you might be your killer. like If you're feeling the pain, I'm sure someone else is.

Andrew
The problem is like Ghost actually does a pretty decent job of generating like, okay titles and meta descriptions for you, but I still want better ones.

Sean
Gotcha.

Andrew
And when we get to some of the future stuff that I want to do, I really want that.

Sean
yeah Fair, fair, fair.

Sean
Cool. You hit me up the other day of like, if I see any websites for sale, is that, what is your what is your level of seriousness about doing something like that?

Andrew
So yeah,

Sean
I think it's great. I think it's a great idea, but you know, uh-huh.

Andrew
I want to have like want to have a few websites that we can test this on that ideally have hundreds or even low thousands of pages of content.

Sean
Mhm.

Andrew
And I want to have a few, eventually have a few sites that have different CMSs as well so that as we build integrations, we can we can we test them with our own sites.

Sean
Nice. Nice.

Andrew
And I just like, I want to dog, eat her in dog food or Asia Matos, Arancio, her name is Arancio now, Asia Arancio. I love, she says, uh, eating your own dog food is gross. She calls it, drinking our own champagne.

Sean
My brain did not go there by the way. My brain definitely went to urine. okay

Andrew
So much worse than dog food.

Sean
Yeah, I know.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
ah huh

Andrew
So we want to, I want to be able to drink our own champagne. So like, if this thing starts to get some legs, like, like, I think it is starting to like. At some point, I am 100% going to buy one or more content sites so that we can like manage them and test them and and experience this for ourselves.

Andrew
At some point, I would also love to do some SEO consulting so that I can like again feel the pains. That said, like you know right now, it would have to be a really good deal because like I don't want to drop a bunch of money on a

Sean
what is What is your budget for something?

Andrew
Uh, like you sent me a bunch of stuff in like the $2,000 range and like, I would consider that, but I would have to be like, um, it's, it's like 50 50, whether I'd actually go through with something like that or not.

Sean
Fair.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
Fair, fair, fair. Okay. I'm just trying to figure out how much you want me to spam you with these because I got it lined up.

Andrew
I'm down to look, I'm i'm totally down to look.

Sean
about fair.

Andrew
like, you know, if I could find something for like, you know, under a thousand bucks that had a thousand pages, I would be very tempted to buy that. even a couple of things you sent me that were in like the $2,500 range, I was like, Ooh, that is tempting. and obviously like the, the numbers change if, if they actually,

Andrew
they're getting enough traffic to actually generate revenue and like have some revenue. Like, and so it, you know, I can earn the money back, like all that's, you know, the variables. There's a lot of variables here, but like, you know, do I actually think it's a good idea for me at this stage in the like product and company life cycle to drop $5,000 or $10,000 on a content website? No, that feels like a distraction. And like probably dropping anything on a content website is a little bit of a distraction.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
But yeah we are going to need to build some integrations pretty soon. And so if yeah know if I could oh buy a WordPress site that has a decent amount of content, and like honestly, if it has shitty SEO, that's ideal.

Andrew
like If it's missing a bunch of metadata, perfect.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
But yeah, if I could do something like that for like cheap, yeah, I'd think about it pretty hard.

Sean
Okay, gotcha. Just the side expectations. I don't think you're finding that at $1,000.

Andrew
No, no, I'm not going to.

Sean
$2,500-ish seems to be the range. $4,400 is like kind of where we're talking. like You'll get something that... So if you go to flippa.com, for a while, there were a bunch of people, who like SEO folks, who got completely destroyed by Google's helpful content update and just put that stuff up for sale because they're like, well, I mean,

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
What else am I going to do with it?

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
And now we'll have a content of these kind of getting better and and these things are getting slowly re-indexed where they found ways around it but regardless like there's still a couple you can snatch up and I think it's a good like success story with

Andrew
yeah

Sean
and a monster So, but from what I see, like the half decent ones that used to have like some amount of traffic are still within that like $2,500 range at the minimum.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
But you could, you know, you could own mugshots dot.org for the cheap, cheap price of $9,999.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
And I'm just saying that's not bad like why they make $130 a month I'm probably breaking terms of service when I'm saying this but anyway it could be you it could be you

Andrew
9,999 mugshots that.org. Oh, fuck no. Fuck no. Absolutely not.

Andrew
Yeah, what what is what is $2,500 get me

Sean
there was a, there was a, uh, I won't say what it is, but there was like a 13 year old, uh, automotive website that was for sale for about like $2,500. it's kind of like, I don't think people bought it at it at that price. and it kind of just like went to nothing. sorry, it never and it never ended up selling, but like, they were making like 500 to 700 bucks a month before they got destroyed by the update with off of display ads. The guys who are selling it are specifically like this agency, like ah ah SEO content online company that just makes these websites like they make one for

Sean
Like various car brands and whatnot and I think this one's just really got completely impacted it's been around, you know, they were getting like 9,000 page views a month So five hundred I thought about buying it to be honest with you It looked a lot like this random blog project that I'm working on with a friend Even just like site structure wise. It's funny enough. So why don't we just cheat and drop the money on something like this?

Andrew
Interesting.

Andrew
By the way, what, what CMS are you using for that project?

Sean
WordPress, WordPress.

Andrew
Okay. All right.

Sean
Yeah, yeah.

Andrew
Cool.

Sean
It was kind of like a project where like I wanted to, we do so much Webflow that I wanted to see what the other side was like and how they were doing, how they were experiencing it.

Andrew
Cool. Cool.

Andrew
Yeah.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
I mean, you know, I can see the perks of WordPress. There's a lot of things.

Andrew
One of my friends told me that like with the Gutenberg update and like the blocks that WordPress development has gotten a lot better.

Sean
It's nice.

Sean
Yeah, yeah.

Andrew
So.

Sean
it

Sean
It definitely wasn't bad, especially because the way we've been thinking about delivering Webflow sites gets us closer and closer to WordPress, actually. Because like like our clients don't want to actually do web development on Webflow. what we So what we really need to kind of build out is like components that they can take and then drag into Webflow and then change the text and do whatever sort of thing. And click and that but at that point, it kind of gets into like WordPress blocks and it starts to look feeling very similar, just a slightly different experience.

Sean
So yeah.

Andrew
I've been debating.

Sean
Mm-hmm.

Andrew
So we really, we came into this planning that for like, we were either going to do a JavaScript snippet first, that we could integrate with any CMS, or we were going to do Webflow first.

Sean
Mm-hmm.

Sean
Mm-hmm.

Andrew
And we were honestly thinking about the two of those. Since talking to people, we have pivoted and we're now, I think, going to do WordPress and a CSV export because there's just, I mean, WordPress is just too common.

Sean
Okay.

Sean
Yeah, I also don't...

Andrew
It's just used by too many clients.

Sean
I also think that your ICP is more fitting for WordPress and other CMSs. Like, Webflow is not quite yet a high-velocity a CMS sort of thing.

Sean
like even limit you on how many CMS items you can have, right? like

Andrew
Yeah, that's always felt so weird to me.

Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew
Like, data's cheap.

Sean
Yeah, I don't know. Ask their new CEO. What's up? like they're They've been raising prices everywhere.

Andrew
but With... with those pricing boggles my mind.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
Yeah, so I've also, this this will be kind of an interesting conversation. I need to build a ah legit website for MetaMonster.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And I've been debating, what am I going to build it on? and um Yeah, I built chart juice on Webflow.

Sean
yeah

Andrew
I know I can build fast on Webflow and get something up fast.

Sean
Mm hmm.

Andrew
But I also know I'm going to want to build some free SEO tools for this, and I want those to have a more native experience than you can get on Webflow, unless I was debating like I was like, you could probably do a Webflow site and then just do like a redirect sort of thing where with like redirect ah pizza where I redirect like

Sean
Hmm.

Sean
Hmm.

Andrew
Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't want to do subdomains for SEO tools. I want to keep them on the primary domain.

Sean
Hmm, I see.

Andrew
but

Sean
I see.

Sean
Well, I mean, you could always export. You could always export the Webflow code so that so like like the the worth driving thing that I built with the friendly that was designed and built on Webflow first and exported and migrated to WordPress and then hooked up.

Sean
I don't know how to do that. I had't had another dev do it, but.

Andrew
Yeah, I think I'd probably just build build it myself. I feel like if I'm doing it myself, i I'm a competent enough front end developer that I'll just build it myself.

Sean
Okay.

Andrew
But yeah, I've been debating between Webflow, WordPress, or kind of tempted to try Astro with a headless CMS.

Andrew
But that feels like it's getting like a little too

Andrew
a little too special, a little too bougie for like, it feels like maybe a distraction to go that route.

Sean
Yeah, I think it's a little bit shiny tool syndrome me, and I think that I think it doesn't also make sense if you want to feel the pains of your ICP.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
Like, I think that they're, you know, when I went to the Vercel conference. The folks that were there were a lot of Jamstack people, obviously NextJ has folks, like the like the vendors and whatnot.

Sean
there was also giant agencies that were building on WordPress. like People who were building like sites for the New York Times and whatever, that was all custom WordPress.

Sean
The only other CMS that was there was Sanity CMS. I can't attest to how good it or not it is, but like all the other.

Andrew
I've used it once before. It's only as good as you make it. like It's so flexible that you have to set it up really well. like You have to architect it to be good, which is how a lot of headless CMSs are.

Sean
so Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha.

Andrew
like They're so flexible that that it's really about architecting

Sean
Got it.

Andrew
how you architected. There's a couple that look pretty interesting because they have like, you can build components for them. And then they have like drag and drop builders and stuff. So like a little more upfront work, but then you could presumably move pretty fast. um But yeah, I think especially talking to my friend today and him talking about blocks, I feel like I should, you know, I haven't touched WordPress and five plus years, I feel like I should at least give it a spin.

Andrew
Although we don't have to get into the WordPress drama because I feel like it's so over talked about right now, but fuck Matt Mullenweg.

Sean
Oh, look. Yeah.

Andrew
And, you know, it is a little terrifying to think about building your business on top of WordPress in any way, shape or form right now.

Sean
Uh-huh.

Sean
So, actually, if if our listeners are anything like me, I've completely avoided learning anything about it. I just know that WP Engine is involved.

Sean
What is happening? What's going on?

Andrew
OK, so I'm going to give you a biased take because I.

Sean
Sure, sure, sure. That's what we're here for.

Andrew
Yeah, I Jason Cohen has been really kind to me.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
He has responded to emails that I have sent him within like 15 minutes, even though he runs like a billion dollar company.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And he's not the CEO anymore, so I don't know how directly involved he is in some of this stuff.

Sean
Sure.

Andrew
Matt Mullenweg runs both automatic, the for-profit company that runs WordPress dot.com, and like commercial WordPress hosting, they have their own commercial WordPress hosting, um and is like the head of WordPress dot.org, but like and the WordPress, like you know he's the creator of WordPress, from what I understand, and is like the head of the nonprofit arm.

Andrew
The non-profit ARM owns the WordPress trademark, but granted automatic a like perpetual exclusive license to using the name WordPress in for commercial stuff.

Sean
Mm hmm.

Sean
Got it.

Andrew
So what they've always said is like, you can't use the name WordPress your business or in Google ads. You can use WP, but you can't use WordPress. he And it came out that he was fighting WP engine over their use of the word WordPress. They don't use it in their name, but they used it on their website, you know, to describe what they do. And they used it in in Google ads from time to time. And came out that he was trying to get an 8%

Andrew
a a license fee that was a clip equivalent to 8% of their annual revenue for use of the word WordPress. And basically he was threatening to sue for trademark infringement if they didn't pay 8% of their annual revenue moving forward.

Sean
i say

Andrew
as to the WordPress nonprofit, to the WordPress organization. organization And what Matt Mullenweg says is basically like, word WP Engine has made become worth billions of dollars. They're a massive company and they've done it on the back of WordPress. And and at the same time,

Andrew
they have not donated, they've donated very little to WordPress Core. So they have, they apparently have one full-time employee whose job is to work on WordPress Core, so he puts in 40 hours a week. And they, you know, they have bought and continue to maintain several open source plugins.

Andrew
They have, they have I think, sponsored WordCamp and, you know, been big contributors to some of the events and things, they have not donated directly to the nonprofit in terms of other than the like 40 hours a week.

Sean
Hmm.

Sean
Hmm.

Andrew
And Matt Mullenweg says, you know running the WordPress dot.org you know ah plugin ecosystem is expensive, and you know maintaining WordPress core is expensive, and like they've gotten rich without without contributing their fair share. And so he's trying to get them to contribute their fair share.

Andrew
via the trademarks, the WordPress trademarks.

Andrew
What it looks like to me and to a lot of people in the industry is that Matt Mullenweg is pissed off that WP Engine has been more successful than automatic um automatic um at building a good WordPress host. They have some hosting of their own and it looks like they're maybe trying to expand that right now. so it looks like he's kind of pissed off that they've done it better than him and been more successful and, you know,

Andrew
basically like regrets the like the you know open source license and the way it's been used sometimes. And there have been reports from other people that he's been kind of antagonistic to people who make money off of WordPress via plug-in, people who sell paid plug-ins and paid templates and stuff over the years that he's been kind of antagonistic towards them. and like you know, wants it to all be this like free, you know, ecosystem and all this shit, even though automatic has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars and is a for profit entity that he is in charge of.

Sean
Right, right, right, right.

Andrew
So it really reads to me like this dudes on a bit of a power trip and is trying to like, you know, you know trying to stick it to one of his competitors and get them to to you to start paying this like exorbitant license fee.

Andrew
8% of your annual revenue is insane. And that's not like net.

Sean
It's pretty crazy. so

Andrew
That's gross. 8% of your gross revenue.

Sean
Oh, so like, Kinsta exists.

Sean
Like, why aren't you going after them?

Andrew
Yeah, so apparently he does has gotten one of these license fees from at least one other at least one other host. He claims he's not gonna go after any other hosts, that he's just targeting WP Engine, but who the fuck is gonna believe him?

Andrew
And the whole thing is making people like, really, it's pissing off the community and it's, and like I talked to a friend today who is more in the WordPress community than I am. And he's like inclined to, but like he believes more of what Matt Mullen was saying and like generally thinks he's a good guy who's like,

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
has altruistic motives at heart. And even he's like, I'm tired of this drama. It's not good for the community. Like he needs to shut the fuck up and like let the lawyers work it out.

Sean
yeah

Andrew
And then like WP Engine hit back with like A bunch of findings like Matt Mullenweg has not shut up. He's just he's been talking nonstop on Twitter, on podcasts, on live streams.

Sean
Right, right.

Andrew
And then WP Engine like released their like. Their latest round of like complaints for their lawsuit like made that public and they're accusing him if they're accusing him of like tax fraud, for like not disclosing like the relationship between automatic and the WordPress nonprofit and like the use of the trademark.

Sean
Mm hmm.

Sean
Sure.

Sean
Sure.

Andrew
So they're, in in IRS filing tax filing. So they're accusing him of tax fraud. They're accusing him of like, extortion because all these text messages came out where he was like trying to strong arm their CEO into like taking a job at automatic and just dude seems like he's on a fucking power trip seems like a real piece of shit and like maybe WP engine should contribute more to WordPress core maybe that's valid

Sean
See.

Sean
I think that, you know, I, I agree with that. I think that if you are, if you've built like a multi-million dollar company off of an open source project, you should contribute a percentage of your revenue to upper limit of X amount.

Sean
Like, you know, sure. I mean, I think it's unethical.

Andrew
but

Sean
Like, I don't think you should enforce it. I think, but I think morally you should.

Andrew
Yeah, I mean, it ah ah just like it's just fucking weird. it's like That's not what open source is supposed to be, really.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
i like Yes, contribute to the core and like contribute to the good of the ecosystem. But yeah people have also made valid arguments that like WP Engine existing contributes to like the good of WordPress because like

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
commercial like big businesses don't want to trust like, you know, don't want to run open source software on their own. They want like good commercial hosting and WP Engine is good commercial hosting.

Sean
yeah

Andrew
And so they've made WordPress more legit. And like the plugins and templates and everything are the whole reason WordPress is the most popular like

Sean
Agreed.

Andrew
popular CMS in the world.

Sean
great

Andrew
so I don't know.

Sean
Agreed.

Andrew
I, yeah, again, I can, you know, I can understand like one wishing that WP engine would contribute you more to the core.

Andrew
I think it's a little weird when you are like, a direct competitor of theirs and like you benefit from their contributions.

Sean
yeah

Andrew
Like it's like, are they funding a competitor? Like what are they doing there? I don't, I can.

Sean
Yeah, I mean, I think it just sounds like a guy who like ah ah feels like slighted because he's like like he feels like he should be the godfather of it and you should all pay your dues to him is sort of my read of of that.

Andrew
Yeah. That's very much what it feels like to me.

Sean
how Yeah.

Andrew
Yeah. And again, Jason Cohen has like always been very generous with his time and like his knowledge and helped lift up other bootstrappers.

Sean
I don't know.

Sean
Hmm.

Andrew
And so I'm like.

Sean
he just

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
i said yeah

Sean
Yeah, I don't know, it sounds like Matt just wants to be like Beyonce at the Grammys.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
yeah

Sean
Well, thank you for sharing that. I did not know that was happening. knew that there was like some drama loosely, so I'm sure myself and at least one listener appreciates you telling us the internet tea.

Andrew
Yeah.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
Cool. You want to wrap it?

Andrew
You got anything else for today?

Sean
Uh, I have other like open source tech Twitter, draw a lot of stuff that I've seen, but I don't feel like, I feel like before this just becomes a tech Twitter gossip column.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
yeah.

Andrew
We're also, we're over an hour or so.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
We should probably wrap there, but cool, man.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
Cool. I'll see you later.

Andrew
Glad you're back in the States.

Sean
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Happy to be back.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
All right. Bye.

Andrew
Peace.

Sean
peace