 I'm from New York, so I speak kind of fast, so I'll try to speak slowly. If I start to lose you, just kind of fall asleep and I'll see you, and then I'll know that I need to go a little slower. Cool. So this was already covered. I'm a lead software engineer at Dow Jones, and we're currently building our whole new editorial system in Gutenberg, so that's really exciting. And yeah, I am the founder at AbstractWP, but I also mentor teaching people to code at Thinkful, and I like to share that. I give back by, I run the WordPress NYC Meetup. We have 7,000 members, and I teach people once a month how to use WordPress, so that's how I got where I am. If you want the slides later, just tweet at me, or if you like something that I said, tweet about it. I like Twitter. I like Instagram, too. That's my handle, and the hashtag WCMad. I like encouragement. It lets me know that you guys like what I'm saying, so. This is irrelevant because I didn't get to update that, but just, again, follow on Twitter, and I will drop the slides in there. This was marked as an advanced talk. You don't have to be an advanced developer to know what I'm going to talk about today or know how to build a $100,000 website, but you should know the basics of WordPress administration. One of the problems that I find is that a lot of people who try to sell WordPress, they actually have never used WordPress as a software. They're a developer. They come in, and they try to build their own custom user roles instead of building them in the WordPress way, so I recommend that you really understand how to build custom user roles in WordPress, how CPTs or custom post types work in WordPress, knowing how to do a proper development process, and again, if you guys are here, I'm assuming you're advanced. If you're not advanced, you should know this stuff, and if you don't know, it's all right, and again, these are in the slides. As of WordPress 5 in December, LinkedIn Learning, which used to be Linda, has the WordPress 5 training for free, and I really recommend know the code. These are both free courses that will get you up to speed. They're phenomenal. Anyone that wants to get into WordPress, I recommend it to them, and then finally, I have to say this now that I'm at Dow Jones in the Wall Street Journal. This is a big red alert. This is 100% my personal and professional opinion. Anything that I say has nothing to do with Dow Jones or the Wall Street Journal or any other subsidiaries, corporations, et cetera, and if you explode your website or your business, it's not Dow Jones' fault, so yeah, it's just one for the lawyers. All right, moving on. So, building $100,000 WordPress websites. Let me talk about how I got there first. I was recruited by Dow Jones about a year ago, and in the negotiations of being recruited, I said that I wanted to keep my business abstract, and I had a friend who left a startup in New York City, and he was a very successful React developer, and the only problem was that he and the other person I brought on, they didn't know how to sell WordPress. So, what I had to start doing was thinking about how to break down WordPress into really simple packages that I could easily not only communicate to my team members, but communicate to anyone I met. So, with this, hopefully, not only is it going to help you, you may not sell $100,000 WordPress websites out of the gate, but you'll be able to better communicate different packages and different ideas instead of just speaking like a developer. We're speaking, sometimes we get in this, I call it like a bubble in WordPress where we think everyone should know how great WordPress is or how great these things are. We have to remember that we're only 33% of the Internet so far, right? There's another 67% who don't know about these things, so we have to communicate in the language they speak. So, here's what I'm going to cover. First, we have to think about who needs a $100,000 website. It's not going to be everyone. You can't just expect not everyone has $100,000 to spend on a website, right? Two, I'm going to cover why they'll pay for it, right? Why are they going to pay for this site? And I'll show you that they're willing to pay $100,000 for a website. Three, I'll show you what makes a $100,000 website. So, what can we sell these people? How can we fulfill their needs? And then finally, I'll go over some real-life examples of $100,000 websites around that ballpark that I did. So, excuse me, sorry. Who needs a $100,000 website, right? So, when I first started this process, I identified four different types of organizations that are using WordPress. The first are soloists and DIYers. And that's fine. There's hobbyists. I would say that our WordPress meetup, 90% of people who work in WordPress are soloists or DIYers. They're using something like a page builder. They're using something like WP Engine, and I use WP Engine too, but they're using things that take care of all of the logic for them. They're not doing any advanced development. Everyone that uses their site, if it's like them and their spouse, they're both admins, right? They don't use the custom user roles. And that's fine. Number two, are those not using WordPress yet? So we have to think about how do you know the people who they don't understand the value of WordPress, right? Three, I would say is organizations with WP leads. These might be a nonprofit. These might be like a hospital or an organization. It's interesting to me how many lawyers, law firms, hospitals, et cetera, they use a WordPress website, but they have that one key person that manages the WordPress website. And a lot of the times that person's overwhelmed and they need someone to help them to take that website to the next level. And then finally, and this is the best type of person that needs $100,000 WordPress website, multi-user WordPress. And what I mean by that, I'll give some more examples of that in the next slide. So these are the examples of those four organizations. The first one we're not even gonna cover, this is they'll never buy a $100,000 website because they'll never see the value of hiring someone to build it for them. It's the site owner or the DIYer, right? They're always gonna try to find a better plugin. They're always gonna try to find a snippet. They're always gonna try to find someone to just fill in the blanks for them. They don't need you. And that's fine. And not everyone's a perfect customer, right? The second one is people using Squarespace, people using Drupal, people using things like CraftCMS. I get a lot of advertisements for CraftCMS because I guess I have WordPress as a keyword in my Twitter bio. Or whenever, if you ever mention, if you ever see on Twitter where someone says, I need a new website, what do you guys recommend? CraftCMS has a bot that just tells people with CraftCMS, CraftCMS. And so, yeah. So those people, they don't really, they may not understand the benefits of open source. They may not understand that Squarespace isn't a CMS, it's just a website builder. And I'll get into that a little bit. The third is, again, like back to the organizations of the WordPress lead. It might be a nonprofit with a single WP admin or a small agency they're working with. That's not really a WordPress agency. They're like a marketing agency that happens to do WordPress sometimes, right? And then fourth, and again, like this is the most important, are publishers or multi-role stores. And so the real beauty of WordPress, and you see this a lot with the WooCommerce, a lot of the times people build a WooCommerce site and they're like, well, I paid a guy $500 and it just doesn't work. And I think what they don't understand is that if you think about the way a store works, even physically, outside of a digital space, there's a lot of different things. There's the person filling the inventory, the person filling the orders, the person doing credit card processing, the person doing the invoices, the person designing the emails is a really great competitive. And if you wanna beat Amazon, I don't know how it is here in Spain, but that's your number one competitor if you wanna sell online in the United States, it's Amazon. And if you wanna beat Amazon, you have to create such a great experience. And so that's why I think number four, that's really great. And the same thing, publishers, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones and other publishers, we have multi-user roles. We have no one as an admin except for the devs. And we don't even have admin role on the production. It's only on DaVinQA. And so there's editors, writers, photo journalists, all these different roles. And those are gonna be the focus for the talk. We're not gonna talk about DIYers. There we go, okay, sorry, I'm hitting this thing really hard. All right, so how do we find the people that need this $100,000 website, right? And there's a bunch of different indicators, like one of my indicators is never work with a business owner, don't work with an individual owner, target a CMO, target a marketing manager, target a CTO, target those people. Because if you work with an individual business owner, I've even found organizations where there's 20 people, but the business owner is so close to those 20 people and micromanaging them that he's so close to the wallet that when he sets aside a $100,000 budget, he'll start to say, well, how can we get it down to $50,000 when something else starts to hurt, right? Whereas a CMO, they're given a $1 million budget, a $100,000 budget, they have a budget to spend and they will allocate resources towards you if you can show them the value of those resources. So revenue threshold is one of them, and I'll get into those. Regularly updated content, so they regularly update their content. If you have someone with a website that they never post anything or they never share any content, they're not gonna value a CMS, right? And it's not just blogs, it could be are they adding product regularly, are they updating prices, are they doing sales, are they doing promotions? Third is organization size, right? So how big of an organization are they? Fourth, and this is a big one, industry compliance. So if you can find a niche where you can find some kind of industry compliance, and I'll give a great example of that after and when I get to the next slide, it's almost like you just can, it's like shooting fish in a barrel because once you get that first person who realizes they're getting sued for something, all their friends are getting sued too and they're gonna call you up. So here's a quick revenue value indicator. There's many different ways to find out the revenue business. For some reason when you ask people, what was your revenue last year? If people get real awkward and ooh, we gotta talk about that, but I think they forget that there's math, and so you can just say, oh, they have 10 employees in New York City and employees in HR in this, et cetera, they might have an average salary of $100,000. I could go on Glassdoor and find out their average employee salary and I would assume that if they have 10 employees, they're paying an average of $100,000, they're not spending more than 50% on labor costs, so we could say they have $2 million in revenue. Another thing you can check out is CrunchBase. CrunchBase keeps data on a lot of different startups, funding rounds, et cetera, and there's another great company called DataNyze, and DataNyze, it merges data with LinkedIn, CrunchBase, tax data, a bunch of different things. I don't know if it's available here in Spain, but it's a very high quality product, but it starts at like $1,000 a month, but it's like that's if you're a larger agency trying to sell. What am I doing wrong here? Oh, there we go, okay. So, content value indicators. Do they regularly update their site? Again, I spoke about this, but if you have someone, now if they're regularly updating, and that's what's kind of funny, you'll find these bloggers or these stores and they're updating their Instagram every five minutes, they're updating their Twitter every five minutes, and why? Because it's so easy, yet WordPress isn't there, right? And so if you follow and you can create a great user experience, and that's what we're trying to do in newsrooms and Dow Jones, and hopefully that's what they're trying to do with Gutenberg, which is that it's a user experience that is simple. And so for example, get rid of the clutter in the user interface and make it so that someone can just log in, post a photo. One of the best examples that I see, if anyone follows any kind of publications, I think Vice Magazine does it, New York Magazine does it, they all say click the link in the bio to see the post, right? That would just be setting up a custom post type that links to the article, and that they all do that in Instagram, and that could even be done for a store where you feature a product. So if they're updating their content outside of WordPress, you can sell them and say, hey look, we're gonna make it just as easy as your Instagram, or even using the API to tie them together. Organization size indicators, larger organizations have larger needs, right? So for example, there was a publisher that I recently spoke with, and they have their own API for all their books, and their books API is something like hundreds of thousands of books, and they did not wanna create a custom page for each of these, and they understood the value of, can we have a CMS dynamically populate every single book as a post or a page in our website? And so once they understood that, then it was more of a story of saying, and them saving the labor costs, because once I had the conversation with them, they were having people manually add every single book, and I think they had stopped at 3,000 when they realized it was just too big of a job, and they were like, we have an API, can't you, you know, people use APIs for Instagram, can't we use our API to populate books? And larger organizations for larger needs, you can also, and when I get into some of the case studies, you know, there are organizations where it's not a one-man show entering content, and it might be someone who needs to hire contributing writers, they wanna hire freelancers, and you as the WordPress expert can educate them how you can use custom post-datuses, custom post types, and custom user roles to control the workflow of those users. Industry compliance is another huge value, and so are they devs, schools, or medical, right? This is huge, this is a big thing going on. In the United States, we have something called the American Disabilities Act. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm gonna paraphrase this. It essentially says that any public property that is fair use of your business has to be readily accessible to people with disabilities. There is a large grocery chain in the United States that spent $7 million on a brand new website, and a federal court ruled that that website, because you need to use the website to get the coupons, you need to use the website to get the prices, you need to use the website to get the newsletter, that is now fair in public grounds, and therefore it must be ADA accessible. And they got sued, and they had to pay $500,000 to the guy who couldn't use the site, and they had to pay $500,000 to fix the site. And so now the big thing is all these art galleries, they all have websites to sell their art. Well, guess what? The Art Gallery website is an extension of their art gallery, and so they're having lawsuits like Crazy in Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis, very hot art scenes, and that's been a great lead driver for us. And also thinking medical in the United States, you have HIPAA, GDPR is a great thing, going to these businesses and saying, hey, I noticed that you deal with data, and those are different value cells. And so they're looking for experts, right? So the kind of people that I listed before, they're not looking for an implementer, and you can also educate them, because one of the problems, and again, it's not a problem, soloist DIYers, they're 90% of people who come to my meetups, and that's who helps build the WordPress space. But the people that you're trying to sell these $100,000 websites to, they don't want this implementer workflow. I installed it, it works, thank you. That's like a 30-minute install, right? But as a professional developer, this is a professional developer workflow. Discovery, development and unit testing, quality assurance and integration testing, deployment and monitoring, right? No one's familiar with that, by the way, it's just a standard development workflow, again, the slides will be there, you can look it up. But I want to get to the stuff that you guys probably came for, there we go. So let's price via developer workflow. This is just a quick salary calculation that I just did for myself. It's essentially my desired annual salary, plus my costs, with weekly hours, times the working weeks. It's not really important, again, like these will be on the slides. But knowing that I live in New York City, I need to make $100,000, I guess it's unfortunate just to afford a studio apartment, $24,000 for my medical costs and maybe my hardware, and I'm only working 25 hours a week because 25 hours of production, I need another 15 hours to go and sell, right? So you have to be realistic, you can't freelance 40 hours a week. So I have to charge 103 an hour. So knowing that I charge $103 an hour, right? Let's think about, again, we're not doing the 30-minute install, we're doing a proper development workflow because of compliance reasons. We can't look what happened with PipDig, right? We can't just go and install a plug-in and expect it to be all great with our business, right? We should be using things like query monitor, you should be using things like, if you don't know what this is, you can look it up, load balancers that go and check what call outs are being made from the DNS, right? And so those are the things you can talk to your client about. But these are things that you could easily sell. Knowing if you follow the development workflow, they should take at least five hours. Custom user roles, who are your users? What are their capabilities? What will they do? Not everyone's gonna be an admin, so who will be an admin? Who will have these capabilities? Will you have SSO? That could take a whole other five hours. Are you gonna use G Suite? Are you gonna use Okta? Are you gonna use Auth0? Form integrations, what's your CRM? Is it an API? Do you wanna connect via Zapier? If not Zapier, do you wanna use this? All of these different things, mail sent via SMTP. If everyone's not familiar, there's something called a dead man snitch. You can't just set up mail SMTP. You gotta set up something to make sure that the mail's sending. Gravity Forms had an update and it wasn't sending email from MailChimp and people only found out when they got a complaint from their customers. But you can set up different things and sell those as value ads. And one of my favorites, this is like one of the coolest things I ever found, you can brand all of your error pages, not just your 404, you can drop an HTML file for your error-establishing database connection and for your update in progress. So when you're updating the website, people get that white screen, you can drop an HTML file and that's a value add for your customers. But there's more, right? So what else can we do? Now let's talk about knowing that we're doing a developer workflow. These are things that should take, I would argue, at least 18 to 20 hours. And again, we didn't get into design yet. That's, I think, too many people are like, I'm competing against Elementor, I'm competing against PageBuilders. All of those things have nothing to do with PageBuilders and that's the stuff that all the PageBuilder people forget. We're building a custom CMS. So custom development from design, sure. CRM integration with lead scoring. If they visit certain pages, score them as a hot lead. Custom Gutenberg blocks and APIs. Feedback loops, support and presale. There's nothing I hate more than visiting a website, filling out a form and nothing happens. Did they just send my email to hell? Did they go like, where did it go, right? And I want a receipt and so that's something customers, your customers may not think about. And then one of my favorite things to sell now is like I worked with the beauty salon and we sold an affiliate linking system. They were like, oh, we can't get our people to buy a product because they just buy it on Amazon. And we said, well, you're on the, you know, good morning America every morning. Why don't we just have your stylists list their favorite products and we'll auto affiliate link using something like 30 thirsty affiliates. And I'll get into some of this in the case studies. These are items easily worth $5,000. And someone just, if you guys were at the talk before this, that mobile application integrating with a customer rest API, I'd argue that's 10 to $15,000 project minimum. Amazon Polly integration, so for you that's a huge thing. Voice is gonna account for 33% of internet searches soon. And so getting your customers ready for that, selling them on something exciting. Advanced content types with a user journey. Ongoing accessibility testing compliance. Again, thinking about the art galleries. Accessibility is not just set it and forget it. It is something an ongoing process that has to be done over and over and over again as web standards change. And then finally doing multi-laying implementations. Multi-laying implementations are very complicated. It's not just creating duplicate pages with matching content. There's SEO stuff and there's accessibility, usability features in there. And this is everyone always says to me, what about Squarespace? Again, forget about Squarespace because it's not even the same thing. Once you start to understand, your client understands that, hey look, Squarespace is a page builder. It doesn't have REST API integrations. You could build it custom and it would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. But WordPress comes with the REST APIs. WordPress comes, you can again very easily do link masking, do a lot of different interesting things. So I'm gonna share two case studies where I, and again I fell into this more just because these clients, they essentially told me their problems and I productized what I thought they needed. So this startup called Todaytics. They're a 90 million dollar Broadway ticketing startup in New York City. And what happened was, they have an iOS application, an Android application, they had a Windows phone application and they have a website. And the website's built in a React and they said we don't want to build a whole new WordPress website. Can we just get the blog post into here? But we're hiring all freelance writers in 30 different countries, in 30 different locations. How do we get them all into the same site and they can't edit each other's posts? Okay, cool. We did custom REST API integrations based on location and we did custom user roles based on location and based on different teams. It was very easy and they were, the master person who was in New York City was able to add and remove street teams as needed. We set up a landing page module for AdWords. If you ever want to sell a quick 1000 to 5000 dollar product to your customer, unbounce the trashiest version of unbounce. Is it called unbounce? Yeah, unbounce the landing page builder or lead pages. They're 1200 to $2000 a year. So you just see to your customer, you set up a custom post type of promotions with a page builder with a pop-up thing and a couple of other things in there. You can recreate unbounce and throw a WP rocket on there and say hey, now you just saved yourself $2000 a year and by the way it's fully custom with unlimited capabilities. We set up multi-lang with English and Spanish and again integration of the iOS and React, custom CMS dashboards so again making it so that every person saw it differently and then prefling internationalization. You guys can Google that after that's more like just making it so that there's no SEO penalization for duplicate content in different regions. And that's why I didn't do this in Spanish, even though I speak Spanish a little bit. I have no idea how to say that in Spanish. Okay, so Wibbitz, an AI startup I worked with, we did landing page similar, landing page modules for ads, it's an easy sell. Everyone's running Facebook ads, everyone's running Twitter ads, their landing pages are garbage and all you have to do is sell them a better option. We did GUIP content planning for US, Israel and France. They have an office in Israel, they have an office in Paris and they have an office in New York. We're running into, we had a 50% drop-off rate on our sign-ups on Marketo forms. So we used WP Engine GUIP to target and serve different forms by different regions. So we didn't get the drop-off in our sign-ups in certain regions, but of course with GDPR we did lose some. We also did speed optimization and training and then we did I think like five different custom post types and each custom post type is managed by a different team because they have a lot of the visions of people are doing different things in different countries in different regions. So I have five minutes for questions. I went through that fairly quickly. Again, just tweet at me, I didn't get a chance to do this. I was at another conference speaking yesterday too. So this will be live but I'll tweet the slides to you guys. This, I'm actually turning this into a mini course but I just have not had time to work on it. So yeah, questions. I see a hand up there. It's really, there's a light in my eye. Or is someone gonna get him a microphone? Oh, I see 14. Where? Hi there. Thanks for the talk, a best talk for me so far. I think a lot of what you covered is obviously very, very relevant but I think one of the main challenges is getting in front of these clients in the first place. Right. So do you have any feedback on how to get in front of those clients? So it's a long journey because one of the things I tell clients before they hire a developer is to Google people. If you Google Victor Ramirez WordPress, I rank for the first two pages. That was very hard to do. Victor Ramirez is the John Smith Latino names. There's 3,000 of them in New York City. He's also a very popular salsa player and a senator. So I had to beat him. But I beat him for Victor Ramirez WordPress, not normal Victor Ramirez, right? And the way I did that was speaking at events like this and getting, you know, this is a high value link. Someone mentions my name and it shows up. You know, I run a meetup, I contribute, so make sure that you're, you know, you're involved in the WordPress community and that's like a badge and people will find you that way. Another way too is, you know, there's an actual amazing book I recommend. It's called Get Leads Now. And it's about making sales a habit where essentially every day you should be reaching out, like, you know, when you have a meetup or you have an event or you have contacts, reaching out to those people and just, you know, having some kind of, and again, not selling, essentially saying like, hey, did you know about the GDPR thing? Here's a great article on that. Hey, did you know about this? And just being consistent. It's not something that's gonna happen, that's why I said before, it's not gonna happen in one day, it's not gonna happen in one month. So I can't see, oh, yeah. I'm gonna hide over here. One of the points you value as high value is making multilingual sites. What solution do you use for multilingual that can be trusted for such big clients? So it totally depends on the client, right? So for like startup sites, I just use WPML. The reason I like WPML, it creates a custom user role of translator and that translator can be restrict, if you know how to, WPML's interface is not great, but the capabilities are great in that you can limit a translator to only the posts that you assign them and they have an approval process. But for things like more complicated with a big publisher where they're doing like hundreds of posts a day or a week, I recommend just, would you custom or we use some like, I've used polylang. So, how am I doing on time? Okay. One more. One more question, guys. You can tweet at me too. I actually answer my tweets. There's a lot of pressure, last question. How do you tackle the fact that you're developer in some of those companies with big budgets, one like a big company to trust? How do you face that? That they want more like a team instead of like a just a developer? So when I go to these, one of the big things I'm doing now, and I had to learn this when I first started at Dow Jones, was that when people hire me, I essentially tell them, you're buying into my system, you're not buying me. I will not answer your emails. I will not answer your phone calls. If you want a bat phone to me, it's $2,000 a month. And that usually just gets them out away. Because they tell them I work at Dow Jones, I work at the Wall Street Journal and I'm not available, but I've developed these systems. I show them demos. I actually have everything here as demos on my WP Engine account as blueprints. And I will live demo this for clients and leads and show them what I've built. And so that's kind of the thing. And I say, look, like when you're hiring me, and I have my partner, my new partner, Derek, who left the startup and is working with me, that's part of, he's doing the sales for me now, where I'll say, hey, I'm gonna hand you off to Derek, any advanced questions you have, I will meet with you and Derek, and Derek will schedule a call. So it's almost kind of creating a barrier. And that barrier all of a sudden makes people think you have a team. It's like, if you answer the phone for your client, for these larger clients, you've already lost, because they're not gonna, if I get hit by a truck, they know that Derek can go and pick up my WP Engine account. And hopefully attend the funeral and they're gonna be okay, so. The last one, perhaps. La última pregunta, quizá. Alguien? I can't see you, but yeah. Hi, I have a question. It's regarding the commendation of those projects. It's big projects, for big companies. How do you handle commendation for all of that you do for those projects, if you decide to manage? Yeah, yeah, so you should productize these things. So I can talk about this, because this is something we're open sourcing. One of the problems at organizations like Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, et cetera, is that the same problem that you guys have, you may adopt a WordPress website and they have 50 different plugins and these other people have 50 different plugins and these have, you know, someone else is using this and someone's using that. You should have your own standard kit of things that you're used to, right? And so, for example, I always use Beaver Builder white label for my landing pages. I always use WFML for my startup translation. I always use, so a lot of the documentation is just, it's wash, rinse, and repeat. That first client's gonna be the most expensive one, but a lot of it's repeated. I also recommend, oh man, they killed it actually, but there was an application called Clarify and what it would do is let you take screenshots and would progressively add them to a Google Doc. But I also use a tool called ScreenFlow and we record custom videos. And then as far as the WordPress documentation goes, if you follow default WordPress standards, you can install something like, it's from the guy's white label CMS, it's called video user manuals and they let you white label their manual and that's the great thing. As long as you don't do this crazy version of WordPress, as long as you use ACF, Gutenberg, the standard, you know, the WordPress standards, that documentation already exists. There's a cottage industry of people making documentation for you and then all you have to do for the custom post types is record a quick video with something like ScreenFlow. Thank you. Yeah.