 Thank you. Thank you. Good morning everyone. Today we're going to talk about cooperation, banding together with your competitors, your competition to help grow your business. I'm David Blackman. And I'm Tim Schreifler. And we have a unique situation because as you can see there's two of us up here. So Brian called me David and then him David. I'm actually Tim. It's all right, no worries. But I'm gonna go ahead and introduce David. Since there's two of us we don't have to talk about ourselves. I can talk about him brag about him a little bit and then hopefully he'll return the favor and do the same for me. David Blackman here has been using WordPress for about four and a half years now. He has a WordPress web design agency with his co-founder and business partner Corey Jenkins. Shout out to Corey who is a organizer here. And in addition they have a product company where they create products for the Divi theme framework as Brian mentioned. And then additionally David is co-host of WP the podcast and a panelist on Divi chat a podcast for the Divi theme. Thank you Tim. That was mighty nice. This is my good friend Tim Schreifler. Tim Schreifler runs a web development agency as well. Tim Schreifler online solutions. He also creates plugins and themes for the Divi theme as well. He's my co-host on WP the podcast. Has anybody listened to WP the podcast out here? I saw a hand. Oh there we go. Three listeners. I'm happy. After today we'll hopefully have three more. Yes that's right. So and he's also one of our panelists on Divi chat which is a weekly live podcast we do. We cover a lot of things WordPress. So Tim what is co-opetition? So co-opetition is a made up word. Not by us. We can't take credit for it. But co-opetition is a word mash of cooperating with your competition or another way of looking at it. Partnering with your competition. So rather than viewing your competitors as barriers or stumbling blocks to your success, you view them as opportunities or opportunities to partner and collaborate to achieve success together. Thank you Tim. I just want you all to know that I'm a Superman in here. And if you know David Blackman you know he's not really from this planet so that works out pretty well. Yeah it works. Alien once or twice. And we kind of talked about it a little bit but we're competitors in two different ways. So we both have web design agencies where we create websites for clients in a competitive market. So we are in the Divi theme framework and so we both have people that come to us that want someone that are experts in the Divi theme and so we're literally bidding on the same projects. So we're competitors on the service side and then we're also competitors because we both create products for the Divi theme framework plugins and themes and then as well for the Divi theme framework as well as the WordPress market as a whole. Yeah Tim has a wonderful e-commerce theme and we have an e-commerce theme and it really hasn't heard us to have the same type of theme going after the same audience and stuff. And I want to talk a little bit about our story and kind of go back to even before our story started and tell you a little bit about my story because I know that cooperating is not a new thing in WordPress. Maybe it's a new word. You may hear all kinds of versions of cooperate and cooperating in this talk but I know that it's not something that's unique to us. I know this is the WordPress way. It's open source. The WordPress community is phenomenal. And you know when I started when I found WordPress which was September of 2013 a friend of mine needed to create a blog. I'd never built a website before and I felt like you know what I'm a technical guy. I can probably help you out. I started doing some Google search found this thing called WordPress and just absolutely fell in love. Well as I started trying to learn WordPress watching lots of YouTube videos lots of Google searches. Those marketers were they were on a point. They had their pixels work in. So when I go log into my Facebook I'd start seeing the same type of people. At the time it was Derek Halpern. I was looking into the thesis you know DIY themes. I also you know was looking at Genesis and stuff. And so I had like Derek Halpern and Frank Kern and Amy Porterfield and even though they had nothing to do with my friends you know building his blog for his website. I was very intrigued by them because they seem to be targeting me or entrepreneurs who wanted to start businesses online. And then I would see them at events and stuff together. And I kind of felt like you know what this is kind of like a good old boy network. You know they know each other. They're going after the same user but they're not you know cutting each other down at the knees. I felt like now this is my perception. This is I've never met them. I've never talked to them. This was just my perception on the outside looking in. I felt like they were working together in a lot of ways that they would not release things simultaneously so that they could help promote each other. And it wasn't hurting them. It was benefiting them. And that was just kind of my first little glimpse of wow that's pretty cool. So fast forward to a whole two months to or three months to December of 2013. And this theme called Divvy came out. And me being a novice a brand new WordPress user you know I got to be honest. I was Genesis and thesis was caving my head in. I wasn't a developer. I wasn't a CSS. I didn't know PHP. And then I saw this dragon drop thing and thought holy cow you know it's got a lot of power. It might have some potential. Let me take a look at it. A few months later I went to elegant themes this blog read a blog post about WordPress. I don't even remember what the blog post was but there was a comment in the on the blog post that said hey I started a Facebook group over here. You know if you want to come over and join it maybe we can help each other learn this new thing called Divvy. And that's what I did. I joined I was one of the first 20 members could have been one of the first 10 members. I'm going to fast forward to now those Facebook groups now probably have cumulative 100,000 members. So that's a lot of people. So when I was in these groups learning and building websites with WordPress because I loved it and I was passionate about it. There were a lot of really really helpful people. And I noticed that there were people that I felt like we would work good together and stuff and maybe if we kind of worked together maybe we could help grow each other's businesses because by this time of course a few months down the road into WordPress I'm an expert and I'm taking clients on and I've really got to learn it now. So I just that's kind of where my mindset was from the beginning and then fast forward a little less than a year later Tim comes into that group. And you know I just kind of saw Tim as one of those people that would fit well with our with our group of people and you know masterminds aren't new. None of this stuff that I'm talking about is new. None of the stuff that we're going to talk about here on the stage is brand new. We're going to share with you our store our story. We're also going to tell you what we feel like works really good and how it can maybe help you grow your business because where I've come in September of 2013 to where I'm at now four and a half years later with with our WordPress company you know seven full time you know contractors my wife won't let me say employees because she's a CPA contractors and you know eight part time contractors and tell you what it's done for our business as a whole is just been phenomenal and I and I attribute it 100% to having that mindset of you're not my enemy and there's plenty of business in the world to be had you know and we don't need to fight over it. Why don't I help you and then our businesses have basically exploded. I've talked for a long time. I'll let Tim you know kind of kind of jump in and say some things as well. Yeah so I'm going to go through just a couple of ways that we put that into practice what David's talking about you know the WordPress spirit co-op addition and one of the things that we did and this is to David's credit it was his idea or maybe it was his business partners Corey's idea. He seems to take credit most of the time but we decided to create product bundles. So as as we've mentioned a few times now we were both creating products for the Divi theme framework at that time Divi was quickly becoming it now is the most popular WordPress theme in the world or at least the most popular premium WordPress theme and I come out with a product called Divi dashboard welcome and it allows the user to use the Divi builder to customize the WordPress dashboard and so they could create you know upsells for their clients you know contact forms whatever around that same time David created a product called Divi Goster. Let me clarify David didn't create that product. Somebody on David's team created that product. Corey had a big big hand in that but Divi Goster was you know we decided to white label Divi. So for example you know if you didn't want your clients knowing that you were using the Divi theme or the Divi builder you could use the Tim builder you know or turn it into whatever you want and I kind of thought it would be great to put these two together and stuff so. Yeah so we did we put it out there into the marketplace and people loved it. People love product bundles and it did it did really well and so fast forward a few months down the road. David coordinated another bundle a bigger bundle with those same products we mentioned plus three other or two other WordPress Divi developers who had products and we called it the ultimate Divi bundle and it did quite well and so I think just the spirit of co-operation putting our products together in a bundle creating something of true value that that customers can get excited about because they could you know one price you know discounted rate but then simultaneously helping us each individually grow our audiences by getting in front of each other's audiences. It was a big deal and it was quite successful. Yeah we you know we basically leveraged each other's audiences and I found out some some very interesting things about our audiences because you would assume that they're all using the same theme that they would be all the same types of users but that one the case they were very very different so cross pollinating his audience with my audience ended up being a really really good thing and I didn't know that until down the road and I'll talk a little bit about more about it later I think it's important these product bundles that Tim and I are talking about I'm gonna I'm kind of an open transparent guy I'm gonna share numbers with you and stuff Tim I'm gonna let him he's a big boy he can do whatever he wants to do but on the product side of things on those bundles we generated and revenue $150,000 on putting those products together from you know brand new WordPress product creators you know so it was it was not a small thing that happened it was a pretty major significant life changing thing that you know let's fighting together instead coming together working together just catapulted our business and stuff so I think I'm supposed to sorry Tim I'm kind of ad lib a lot of times I'll go down some you know different paths we also you know what ended up happening was we had sort of an unofficial growth council you know to where we talk all the time you know we share revenue we're very open about our companies you know and not to say that you should do that with everybody you have to use your own intuition you have to know whether or not this person's a good fit whether you can trust them or not are they gonna stab you in the back take your customers away because you know what there are people out there who aren't you know don't have that type of mindset and they may want to abuse it or use it we fortunate in our group we have several it's not just him and I there's there's a I'm gonna use the term gaggle I don't know why you know a big group of us that you know that we work together and stuff and it's been pretty awesome so we we bounce each other you know we kind of mastermind we bounce ideas off of each other I'm gonna say this right here I don't know if it was supposed to come up anywhere else in the talk but you know if somebody would have told me when I was starting my WordPress business and said hey this is the secret to success I'm gonna give it to you right now you know I want you to go in your town I want you to find your your biggest competitor I want you to sit down with them once a week have coffee with them and I want you to share all of your top secret ideas with them your best ideas for the year and your business is going to explode if you do it I would have said hey yeah right buddy you've lost your mind but in essence that's what's happened and and that's kind of what I want to share now this evolved it didn't happen immediately we obviously worked together in these Facebook groups and and got to know each other and stuff and but as a result the end result is we do do those things and it's perpetuated you know really good growth for our companies and it was very unnatural for him so yeah absolutely when you have someone that you met on the internet essentially who is one of your competitors and he's sharing numbers you know how well how many products he sold yesterday and sharing his ideas for new products it's I don't know for me it was a little unnatural like wait whoa I'm not going to tell you that information like that's confidential that's secret and that's something that I'm you know naturally I'm more of a lone wolf solopreneur I kind of do my own thing but kind of through this process of co-optition it kind of opened me up and to see the value I mean in general community isn't something that I naturally would see the value in you know say five years ago or so but being a part of it and you know really to David's credit kind of facilitating and being the one prompting this type of business relationship you know seeing the value now it's a pretty special thing and another thing that comes with that and this is kind of obvious is a mutual respect David joked how we both have e-commerce child themes that that compete and that's fine because you know just because someone bought his doesn't mean they can't buy mine for their next project but at the same time I'm not going to go and rip off all of his products and say you know in the name of co-optition you know what are you going to do about it so there has to be that mutual respect and I think that's something that that we've you know through this process and over the last couple of years have come to really gain respect for and I think it probably goes more on the plug-in side where we're really really respective themes are things you know I mean you can have a thousand different restaurant themes and stuff you know and and still I mean there's many people that purchase his e-commerce theme and they purchase our e-commerce theme you know they talk about it in Facebook groups all the time you know they recommend them side-by-side and stuff so I think you know it is important to find people that aren't you know don't have a greedy mindset that you know give me give me give me give me give me you know it needs to be about the collective and stuff and a couple of the things that forgot to add to the slide that ways that we've cooperated together is we started two podcasts together the first one called Divi chat where the group that David talked about where we've kind of all come together and helped each other promoted each other we created a live podcast that is on YouTube live and we basically you know share everything we know want to share everything that we've learned and bring value to the rest of the Divi user community and I'm glad because we forgot another thing on the slide and I'm going to give a shout-out to a couple of people at least one person in here give WP is in the house we did a co-op atation between several WordPress developers when Hurricane Harvey happened and they were gracious enough to donate products and we raised almost twenty five thousand dollars and we clap for him too because he donated some products and we just basically put products together and stuff and gave people a really awesome deal and get out powered it to yeah so if anybody else is in here that donated to it and I'm just not seeing you raise your hand and I'll give you a shout-out to so yeah yeah and then the second thing is we started a podcast together called WP the podcast separate from the Divi community where we basically share everything we know about running a WordPress business yeah my whole four and a half years which is you know I've taken the crash course and in WordPress that's for sure yeah so we know obviously not everyone is product creators and so it's not always applicable to create product bundles and you know do bundle fundraisers like we did and so we put together a couple ways just to kind of spark ideas of ways other companies can cooperate you know WordPress is a big platform there's product creators there's service companies there's bloggers there's online magazines whatever and so we put a list of a couple things jump in first yeah yeah sure some of the places where you can find us is in person you know this isn't rocket science meet-ups you know word camps we're here reaching out locally and stuff I want to I want to kind of give an example the person who introduced us Brian it is Brian correct thank you thank you for doing that by the way when he was sitting up there and he was kind of getting our little intro bio and stuff he was telling me about his company and stuff which is different than my company but it definitely can fill a need for what we want to do with our company and stuff so I don't know if my mind's just always kind of working that way and stuff but you know in person word camp here we are at a word camp I met Brian 30 minutes ago literally and he's telling me about his maintenance company that offers maintenance services and stuff and my partner and I are like you know we want to turn that over to somebody because you know that's just where we want so perfect example yeah absolutely so I mean these are kind of obvious things where you can meet people that are like-minded that kind of have the same aspirations ambitions and they might technically be competitors on paper but you don't have to view them that way and online is a big thing that's how David and I met that's actually how David and Corey met they were business partners for what 18 months no we were we were full-blown business partners for 14 months before we ever met in person Corey's ma he thinks he's married to Mandy up there Mandy is awesome he's married to both of us you know anybody that knows if you're in a partnership you're in a marriage so they bicker like a married couple as well yeah we met we met in those same groups that Tim and I are talking about and Corey and I just became really good friends you know he was really great at what I really sucked at you know and I I'd like to say that I was really good at you know some things that benefited him and you know it's been almost three years May 2015 so coming up on three years in May Corey and I will be officially you know partners and like he said you know I mean isn't online the the world just awesome you know I mean it's just it's just crazy yeah so a couple places just to list out a few things where you can meet like-minded people kind of obvious WordPress Slack groups Facebook groups are huge I was not really into Facebook until a couple years ago and I heard about the Divi Facebook groups and people were helping others and you know it was like I don't know it's something that you don't see every day and it was really I feel like it kind of encompasses what the WordPress community is all about which is openness and helping each other and and so yeah that's it can be a great place to meet potential people yeah the Facebook group is really really good for that for that actually I you know I've been in the Slack I'm in the Facebook you know in the in-person stuff but the Facebook's you just I don't know why for me I could even see character traits in people as they were communicating in the groups how they were being helpful or you know kind of what their motives were and stuff so it was really easy to see on a on a mass scale of where you know you may find potential people that you want to partner with that's actually a good segue into our next slide key traits to look for yeah are they ambitious are they looking to scale their business you know some people are are happy with you know the level of revenue that they're doing in their business or you know the level of growth that they're experiencing and some other people might want to scale you know they want to go to the moon as they say and so David saw you know potential you know for him and I being on the same page of you know our aspirations and you know wanting to grow our businesses and the Divi theme community and so it was a good match for us to even though we're competitors to partner up and see what happens yeah and you know you want to look for when he's mentioning about those traits and stuff you know I look at character traits you know are they helpful are they selfish you know are they truly you know being helpful or do they have an ulterior motive you know are they solving a problem and then hey ping me over here and I'll send you my rates kind of thing and there's nothing wrong with that it's perfectly okay I think it's just important that you know what it is that you're getting you know so you know and and I don't feel like I'm unique or different than anybody else I think every all of us have these abilities to see you know and use our intuition and say okay you know this person's motives are good this person's motives yeah they may not be so good but they do have some some you know assets that may be able to help me and benefit me and and I have used people like that for one-off services and stuff so yeah if you've ever been a part of a WordPress Facebook group and you know there's hundreds out there there's always the one person that is basically just pushing it to get work and you'll see someone that'll ask an elementary question like how do I change you know the menu or something and that one person will ping them and say private message me I can help you with that and so that's like the opposite of you know the person that you would want to cooperate with essentially yeah and you know which one are we only it's our first time so forgive us practical ways you can co-operate is that the way is that where we're at yes sir all right obviously if you've got product companies if you're a product creator you can find different companies that can accentuate your products and stuff and I'm just going to say it don't be scared now we don't only do divi products we have wordpress products as well we probably have in the neighborhood of 20 wordpress plugins so um look for you know like our dashboard welcome and divi coaster you know the ultimate divi bundle this was a for four top developers in that niche the divi niche I know we're talking about that a lot but that's kind of where our success and growth came from that's our story and they had we had four developers in there that were you know I'm going to say probably for the the top four companies in divi you know product creators for divi and they all came together with their their best products their number one sellers and said let's give this thing a try and and it was it's it's done really really well for us so look for you know product companies that can help you and stuff yeah but not everyone's a product company we have service companies as well um so for example service companies we mentioned how david and i are companies sometimes we're bidding on the exact same project and there's times where david has said hey by the way we bid about this much if you came in right around here you'll probably get it like you don't really see that all the time your competitors telling you how to win the bid that they also bid on um and so for service companies outsourcing referring work i've referred david's company work all the time we have this mutual collaboration of co-optition so i'm you know not in a place from taking on a lot of projects right now focusing on the product business so i'm feeding him all of my leads that come through my website that's an obvious way where service companies can co-operate together um another way is joint educational freebies so divi chat wp the podcast uh webinars stuff like that even if you're a company that does web design locally and you know you reach out to a competitor in your area you know you could put on a seminar bring a whole bunch of small business companies in the area come together teach them about you know the best practices with web design and internet marketing whatever and you know that's a great way where you can come together with a competitor to bring value to your community and grow your businesses in the process yeah looks like the same all right now we get to talk about how it's helped us and we're going to let you ask questions i don't want us to be talking the whole time so if you do have questions we're going to leave plenty of time for questions and stuff um how has it helped us you know i was sitting in a coffee shop with a laptop trying to figure out wordpress you heard the beginning part of the story and stuff um i attribute 100 percent of our growth to cooperating i kind of like the word cooperating with tim and several other members of our community that we've come to know and learn you know and i'll let you say and then i'll share you know kind of yeah some other stuff absolutely i mentioned a little bit already how community and you know sharing and all that it's not something that i'm used to and like to do but taking that step of faith and kind of going out there and partnering with a competitor someone that you know we're not supposed to partner up together you know that's not the business way but it's it's been absolutely a phenomenal experience because not only has it helped our businesses grow but i have someone that i can bounce ideas off of there's a saying that entrepreneurship can be the loneliest job in the world because no one really understands what you're you're you're doing what you're going through you know and so having someone that's right there with you doing the same thing having the same challenges it's a it's a great experience and something that's kind of hard to talk about because it's well i'd express i just figured out how i'm going to express it i'm just going to share my own experience and story and you know that little plug in i remember kory and i we were like hey man we made an extra 300 bucks this month you know holy cow you know this is awesome and then we got to the point where we were making like a thousand extra a month and a couple of thousand extra a month and stuff and and it was just like it was kind of surreal to us and that was just kory and i doing our thing you know before we really dove in with this group of people and i can tell you that in the last two years we've grown our email list to almost 40 000 emails our revenue when we were you know a few hundred dollars a month we're going to probably i would like to say we're going to do seven figures this year we're going to definitely do in the high six figures but my goal is the seven figures and and i don't want to sound grandiose and i don't want to sound egotistical but that's literally what happened to our business that's what transpired by me going over to him and saying hey let's work together you know what we got some awesome products we got a killer community and wordpress an awesome community in divi you know why don't we try to work together and see if we can just scale this thing and uh and it's just been it's been phenomenal it's been it's been a meteoric you know rise so and that's david in a nutshell sharing revenue numbers with a room full of strangers wordpress tv so yeah i think final thought i mean if this is something that's uncomfortable and you're like me you're not like david you know just get out there and do it take that step of faith because it's something that can really transform your business while bringing value to customers as well and so this fully kind of expresses do i look like no you had a question the good old handshake okay handshake agreement yeah you know it's you're probably bringing up this is why i love wordcamps we're gonna learn some things too even being up here it's probably wise maybe to do agreements in contracts but uh yeah we haven't done them and i think it comes back to partnering with someone that you trust you fully trust and you see you know the same you know like-mindedness since we do now have a podcast and we do plan on coming out with a online course together that's something that we will be doing is uh putting together an LLC yeah legally 50-50 partnership but yeah that's right yeah we haven't uh i'll tell you my first in four and a half years to do and this is totally wrong so i'm like not the person to take advice from when it comes to doing business this way but um i never had contracts you know i just had a handshake and i'll you know you're as good as your word so if i told them i was gonna do something i did it you know and if they told me and it's worked out great now since our businesses have grown internationally and not locally which was primarily initially we do use contracts now for web clients and stuff yeah so i'm just gonna repeat the question because we were told to repeat the question uh so he's uh asking about the divvy theme and then Gutenberg and how they're gonna play together basically as well as how it's gonna affect client work is that correct we're gonna take a stab at that first well i mean i i have spoken with with nick roach about this CEO of Elegant Themes and you know he says that they're gonna you know it's it's still early in the game for Gutenberg but they're 100% going to be compatible with Gutenberg so as far as the client services side and absolutely we're gonna take advantage of at least i know our company is we're we're already diving into Gutenberg and you know see him where we can create utilize blocks and stuff and and and take wordpress to the next level wherever it's gonna go and stuff so yeah yeah so he's asking if there's been if we've in our research seen any companies that didn't have such a successful co-opetition i i i haven't seen any i mean you're not gonna see Verizon or AT&T you know hugging each other seeing kumbaya doing co-opetition but and you're right it's probably not something that's suitable for every business every business model but i think it's probably more suitable or it's probably suitable for more businesses and people think you think oh well a service company you're doing in a local area like there's no way you can really you know come together and yeah you might not be able to you know put together bundles like we've done but you can do something where you provide value for your your local community yeah and i have seen somewhat in our same you know because i've been in it from the beginning kind of in the our little wordpress community and stuff i have seen that where people have have been reserved and um i've honestly felt like they probably could have been very very successful and because they were reserved which is which is okay it's okay to be cautious and and and um and to be the way that you are it's perfectly okay i feel like it has hurt them you know it hasn't benefited them you know because they haven't jumped on the train so to speak yeah not we're not going to name any names obviously but you know looking at where you know a couple of competitors in our in our niche market were you know several years ago and then where david and i and several others have continued to grow helping each other grow they've kind of you've seen this decrease where they're not the you know the leaders in the space anymore and um and and i uh yeah i attribute that to the way that we've cooperated someone up here had a question purple shirt yeah so he's asking about when we start to do contracts are we going to do it on a product by product service by service or how that's going to look like um i i know for sure when we we dive into the online course where it's we're sharing you know revenue from this course 50% you know that's more cut and dry a lot of the stuff that we've done uh previously is you know more informal and it's kind of hard to put a i'm sure you could put a contract around it but um i don't i don't really know do you have any thing to add i i think it's going to be situational i think it's going to depend on on you know how it evolves obviously it's evolved now we've been tim and i are up here and it's us too and it does seem like a bromance but and hey we do have a bromance but we're both happily married just to be yeah yeah we're both happy i will tell you this it's it's much larger than just he and i there is a group of people that have been working together in in our core group there's a minimum of 20 of us all business owners all competing in the same niche all product developers and all of their businesses have skyrocketed because they said hey let's help each other we don't really have agreements we don't really have contracts we do have some goals since we saw how effective and well it's worked we have started planning out future 2018 2019 revenue goals things we want to do together and stuff products we want to create together and together and stuff i do see some you know like tim said we're going to form a company around that to where we're both protected and stuff and um i don't necessarily know that maybe contracts is the way to go i don't know we have attorneys we have CPAs we have people that'll guide us when we get there and i do think eventually as the the revenue scales the way that it's been scaling we're going to probably do that so yes we will yeah so he's asking if we have our own LLCs and then have one joint so currently no we both have separate LLCs David with his partner Corey and then me by myself but yeah we're going to form one that my LLC 50 percent owns the middle LLC and then his LLC will own that right that's a good point definitely and before we run out of time we probably have about 30 seconds she gave us the one minute thing thanks man this was our first wordpress saw thank you