 I'm going to speak about using WordPress to test and validate ideas. So I have revived a website of mine called W Possible, which is essentially about WordPress for makers. I've been, over the last year, getting more and more into this whole make this space, the idea of quickly validating. And I'll go through some of the, what I, why I think that's useful. So this is what I decided to do. I decided to do four projects, seven days, hopefully to come into you guys and tell you great, everything worked out well. It was like eight days ago. It's been pretty interesting. Those are the four projects. First is W Possible, which is WordPress for makers. So what I found yesterday, speaking to people, is that there's guys who are just starting on WordPress, and there's guys who are developing, and there's a whole group of people in between. People who are, who are, who know enough to be dangerous, who are able to compete on plugins, etc. I think that's also, that's kind of the audience that I'm looking for. People are thinking, kind of get things done affordably and quickly. The second one is called Writing Visible. I mentioned that I was studying. I was having great difficulty actually just writing. So I created this section to be a writing environment. It's actually quite cool. Think Workers, which is a lead service for indie analysts and school companies. Again, solving my own problem is an independent public policy analyst that chooses not to do any government work for fairly obvious reasons around how tenders are educated, etc. I needed to broaden my way of actually getting, getting work. And it's up in here, which, which is really my, my baby. And I mean, it's a, what do you essentially want to do? You just want to try to take a marketplace from these tools. I don't know what that means. I actually don't know what that means. So I'm happy for people to come up to me and say I've got a good idea. We've got a couple of people, beta people involved in this, testing out a couple of things, etc. So it's quite, it's quite, I'm finding it quite exciting. So let's deal with entrepreneurship first, right? Because one of the things I'm really worried about when I speak about entrepreneurship in the South African context is that I'm not going to go into all of the data, but it's very, very difficult in South Africa, even in a comparative perspective to other countries. If you look at the, the GEMS data, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data. And the primary reason for this is a very concentrated economy. Now you can, you can worry about the very concentrated economy. It's very important to do that. But you also need to think about how we actually begin to grow this economy and make it more equal. This is in case you guys are interested. I have a whole thesis on this. If you have some of these interests that I'm happy to, I'm happy to share this here. Secondly, hardship is glamorized. So if you go into it, if you use the hashtags, grinding, hustle, you know, I'll sleep when, I'll sleep when I die, et cetera. It's obvious, right? It's obvious. Thanks, guys. There's always not a successful outcome. So you need to know this here, the dream that you're thinking of. You've got to play most of the contingency that it's not going to be successful. That'll stay if you're a parent, which I am, because you've got to worry about your kids, et cetera. Right? So use everything I say with caution. This is no manual. This is no great way of reading. It's not the answer. I'm not telling you guys anything. All right? So if you spend enough time and spend enough money on the internet to recognize the yellow background of the red border. This is a psychological place. If you speak to internet marketing groups, this thing sells like crazy. All you need to do is put a buy button and a PS at the bottom and you're going to get tons of sales. Okay, so this is me in 24. I decided it's time to actually do something with work. I'm using WordPress since before Kubrick was the default thing. It was actually called, I think it was called WP, classic or something like that. Anyway, that's me in 2014. I said, let me start doing something. I need to transition from being a freelancer into actually developing products. So I put together a bit of money. I had lots of time. It was me after about six or seven months. I ended up, and I was running proposal desk. Having spent all the money I put in there, all the time, not a successful outcome. I did have sales. I was not able to scale this thing. But it's not a linear process. So it's not like you're just doing one thing. So you start out by like checking out 20 themes. You buy the really expensive theme because it's going to like sort out your schema. It's going to integrate with the slide. And if you have your, I need to have a copy of it. So you need to check out plugins. Then you're going to have so much choice in the world because you made a spreadsheet, a lot of spreadsheets. Well, I can merge categories across the thing. And obviously to get the plugin, you need to put some more money. So you buy plugins. And at the end of the process, you end up with no money, no product, and lots of wasted time. FML. Because I'm trying to sound like a man. But I mean, that's the reality of all time. That's the reality of a lot of people. And I say this with experience because I mean, in South Africa, I hate this experience of gauging or talking to you. So it might not be worth as much as something else. Maybe you're buying meaningless, right? Maybe you're putting down money for training. It's obscene when people train, charge for training. You're developing this system, that system. All right. So not a trade smidge. A ton of things. Because learning that ahead is not really good at CSS now. Really, really good at CSS, right? And it's actually very helpful. Not so bad. I wasn't... I had an affordable loss. I had an X amount of money. I didn't put it a little bit more in there, but I didn't like it with my shirt on. I mean, I wasn't like completely in the stuff. So these are key learnings. I'm not going to really go through this except to highlight the last... maybe the last three points, right? One is to focus on people's stuff. That's what I learned. To focus on what's in your control. Your time, your money. Then I think it's more important focusing on the outcome. The spreadsheet that you have calculating monthly return in revenue is enough. You want your control. But you have your control as much as you can do in every day. And your resources. Secondly, I suggest many ideas. I know this... what I mean is that the speed of this page is really quick once, but you need to test it quickly. You can't spend like six months on this idea. It would be like week. But I mean, if you're going to... onto this very interesting site called Twitch, we spoke to them. Over the last four weeks, there have been people like everybody who can do it for our startups. Very, very interesting to us as I told them. One of them, I'll come to a little bit later, but one of them, which I might not listen, is called Identity WordPress. Which actually uses your Google Docs to actually create a blog. That's amazing. Except the guy's main website, which is called Stars Store, is actually lots of WordPress. But I mean, it's like 24 hours a day. 24 hours a day. I think that's pretty amazing. Secondly, it's really less lonely. You need to join a group, some sort of group. I'm really trying to work this... so I take a Slack group day. I do something called Work Check. It's called Working Progress. It's made up of all people that are makers of bootstraps, etc. Don't kill me. I'm not afraid to do that. I'm like, they're all in no way to do this. I'm learning a hell of a lot. I mean, it's exponential learning over a period of time. What about others? I mean, today with my friend, we work together on a lot of stuff, about ideas of him. And your family and friends, amazing what resources you actually have. So that's my story. Let's just bring it up in a little bit more context, a little bit higher level. So this WordPress, in around 2003, that's a very scooping team, a people team. When at that point in time, we were thinking about, if you had a magazine theme, it was like totally cool. But for me, I spent endless hours working with something called Morning After. Early day, I was the only one who knows the theme called Morning After. Okay, so it's like the most awesome team you have is not only on WordPress.com, and I was hacking this thing. It was a guy in Germany who was a tutu-tutu-tutu for two big weekends. There's no around. Around 2008, there was a feature of a theme called the Gum Lord Special. Now that you can see the theme at the time. But what it was actually was about getting magazine-type themes into the space. Also about the time that you had companies like Woodleam, Studio Press coming up, Gravity Forms, etc. Now we are here in 2018. We have a customizer. We're able to sell products. We're able to do lots of stuff, causes, etc. Not sure what Gutenberg means in all of this going forward. I tied it out. I kind of like it, not like it, etc. But it's a way that's going. But there is a big question around the direction of WordPress going forward that I want to raise. So the second slide says, in the startup world, why is this happening in WordPress? What's happening actually in the startup world? In the beginning, just a little bit before 2003, before the dot-com power, it would say if you build it, they will come. And I just had to get some presentation. But that was the only matter. It was, let's scale this thing. Let's go. This internet is going to be huge and definitely crash. Once it crashed, people started to think about and think about what can we do better. And what they came up with was something called the lean stack. So I actually used that lean stack as a very proposal. That's just a thing that actually you can work on. And basically what it said is that you need to first sort out your market, sort out what your market wants, understand their problems, et cetera. Once you understand that, you actually build the product. The idea being is that you wouldn't waste your time building something that nobody wanted and that's fit. So I think that's great for some organizations. But if you're a solo entrepreneur, in my experience, maybe somebody else implemented, maybe a better implemented, you might have a better outcome. I think you're going to end up losing both your money and wasting your time. That's my own opinion. Actually, if you look at the sort of the lean stack, the main book, at that time, called Four Steps of Perfidy, it goes through like about... I don't even know. It's more like 67 big steps, each of those steps are smaller steps. It was simply not acceptable in a lot of ways. And I lost support. I think I did it reasonably okay. And now I've discovered this thing called make, which is like a different sort of approach to doing things. Much less complicated, a lot more risky, you also need to be a lot more a lot more adventurous. And that's what I kind of want to speak to about here. But first we need to deal with one of the biggest issues that people have. That's what falls in your own ideas. So I have a huge problem. I didn't think about ideas like this earlier. You guys might be thinking four ideas is crazy. That's actually a short list of... I don't know how many. And it kind of looks something like this. I mean, there's like a whole lot of stuff going on, the criteria that you want to use. So here's your pain point. Can I get you a curtain? Is there a market? Can I blow the plug? Is there a passion for it? The expertise is a competition in the market. So we do things like Ethereum must be took a total addressable market, et cetera. That's way too complicated. So I think for me, you need to look at three things. One is that is there a customer? Are you solving something that's real? Do you have the skills on your own in my opinion? There's people all the same. So with a great perspective, designers and intelligence in the room, if you have a budget, let's say on the top, in some of you who work like 30,000, you don't have the mind to hire a good developer or a designer. You also don't want to take the risk of using market cases, et cetera, because you need to spend a lot of time. So this is my skill. And the third thing is are you having fun? There's a project that I ran which is essentially focused on getting tenders, electronic people. It sounds like a great market. And I wasn't having fun in this because I personally was not involved in that space, right? So that's just a way of summarizing it so that we can get a picture. You can point four here. That's like a sweet spot. That's what you want to do. Point three, if you're having fun and you have customers, this is like a marketer's delight. So I've seen a lot of people who are really good at marketing able to scale this thing through pre-orders and then be able to actually outsource the development. So that might be an option. If you're having skill and customers, you might as well be working someplace. Because I mean, without being disparaging into people who are working full-time or whatever, I work full-time in the trade unions. I enjoy it up to a point and then just like, no, this thing isn't for me. And if you're having skill and you're having fun doing it, it's a hobby and that's great. And I mean, maybe that's all you need to do. This is about filtering your ideas. So I'm not saying you can use this. But what I am saying is that reduce the complexity of the criteria used to select the idea. That's the important thing. For me, it's this. I mean, for you, it might be something else. But I think if you go about three, the complexity, the mathematics, is a hell of an interest because I actually did the final calculator. So for everyone you add in there, it just increases exponentially. The number of possible iterations there are here. Step two is to bulk quickly. All right? Okay. So this word came. I love word presser. Getting hold of word presser is not the only option. There's whole platforms and hacks of plenty. We go through a couple of them. So I have seen in a lot of stuff people are linking up something called card, which is awesome. An air table. You can actually run a mini membership website on that. It's actually awesome. And it's almost free. Almost free. You can actually do it like really cheaply. If you do your courses, there's things like teachable, a rare thing to think. Also, most platforms, products, obviously Shopify is huge in South Africa as well. Blog, you have things like ghost and there's a whole lot of other stuff here. So it's not only word pressing. You need to find a mix of stuff that you're going to do. But I think word press, even if I look at all these options because I've done them, I think word press has something to offer that's probably better than all of these. First thing is your platform. Your name, your company name before that. If you don't come, get it in teachable, etc. What you find out that a lot of people have a word press blog and around the causes of teachable. Totally understand it because learning management system plugins, I believe in word press space are completely outpriced, in my opinion. They're outpriced, but also I think they do too much. There's a wide range of well-supported solutions. It might be a bit more expensive in the beginning, but for instance, if you want to do a job board, there's something called WP jobs manager. Also planning, also support for the company that owns word press uses that. There's tons of them. I've been paid memberships to pro. Also, I want to mention because it has some integration with pay fast, but there's other options. The third point I think enables a range of user experiences. So if you want one of these whole supply platforms pretty much stuck into how they do things, which might not be the best thing for you. Might not be the best thing for your students. There's a wide range of integrations, right? And you use what works. I mean, I just, I just warn you, I mean, trying to get integrations going on a word press that you can spend hours, days, months even. It's totally, it's like a rabbit hole. You might not ever return. The most important thing I think is that it allows to take platforms. You can go from a block to a membership site. They're using some evidence so you're able to stack it up over a period of time. The final point is it allows you to build your own. There's a huge amount of confidence in seeing this thing work, seeing it out in the world, right? Okay, so now we get time for the acronym. This thing got a bit funny being there, it was done. This is a boot-framing work, right? So, I don't know where to summarize this thing because it's just like, you can go all over the place. And I think this last night, so this, this is called a boot-framing work, right? So it leads for the course. Why are you doing this thing? Always for regionality, putting it in inverted commas because we don't want to get too hung up on innovation, et cetera. So for example, if you're doing a low-cost segmentation of something that exists, so I'm thinking like maybe a learning management system plug-in. If you go in there and do a, if you develop, and you do a cheaper learning management system plug-in, I'd probably be interested in buying one. So this is yesterday a regular mention of DOS. DOS is great, and I've used it for the premium version, et cetera, but it's got something called SEO press. It's like $39 a year for unlimited websites. I bought the thing, I'm giving the thing a go. It seems to be working. So what that guy's done is awesome. He's given you unlimited plug-ins. At a low-cost price, it's essentially what people call a low-cost segmentation strategy. So I mean, there's lots of things that you do in terms of regionality. But the important thing is the solutions. You need to be actually solving something. You need to be actually solving something. And you need to have the product done. So that's really, really key. What I'm finding that you cannot be getting on an additional feature, an additional day, an additional brand. You just get the product done, see if people are going to send it out. What's interesting is people are extremely, extremely helpful. And whether you're making mistakes, in the nicest possible way, tell me your estimate. It's absolutely brilliant. No matter your context, you should really know there's something that's very not perfect. Obviously, it can't be perfect. There's something that's easily reported. People are in support here. Operations, critical. So yesterday we had this talk. We found it very interesting around how you automate your business using some CIM. It's very important to get a funnel, funnel going in your business and finances. Absolutely critical. So basically what you're doing is moving from the idea side to the operations. Once you've sorted out the back end of the stuff, you're then worrying about traction, which is the T, sales and valuation and importantly training progress. And then the final one is about scale. So what's important here is you're not selling to hundreds of people. You're maybe not even doing Facebook ads. You're basically selling to a very small group of people trying to get, trying to see whether people will buy it, what pain points they saw. And the scale, there's different types of scale. It's an area that I'm incredibly interested in both as I'm talking here, but also as somebody who's interested in public policy, how do you actually take a good project and actually scale. And then ultimately you need to make a decision. So like I said, I mean, it's about getting through this. I think you can get through this entire loop if you have most of the product done in about seven days. You're going to work long hours. I was going to use another word, but you're going to work longer hours. So let's get back to WordPress. What does this all mean? Number one, use managed hosting. That would be hosting. It's very expensive. Right? Thank you with a range of issues for me. Security, caching, and at least for the ones I use, the hosting stuff often ends long time ago about what you need to do with the platform and people. And I also don't have a guess I think this way. I use it tremendously. I mean I think the support for me, I'm probably like, any of the guys who asks lots of questions, I'm probably that guy. I use them extensively and they've been very, very helpful. Use the default theme and default plugin settings. Right? So I believe all of us start here on PDCC. People on PDCC. Because the minute I go into that theme shop and I start at WordPress and I end up at elegant themes and newcomers and studio press, I'm going to go completely nuts because everything is so great. So I mean, I'm just bullying it on 2016. Do not reinvent the wheel. Incidentally, the 2016 thing is not my thing. It's actually a site that's shared with me. What's on that page? Again, for you, it's the totally weirdest dude you've ever met in the WordPress community. He believes in not spending any money on any plugins. And he sells a little notebooks around how you don't need to spend money on plugins. Totally fascinating. Create a reusable stack of plugins and themes. So if you're going to do many projects, try many things, you just need to have a stack of stuff. I know those plugins fairly well and hopefully they keep you in good state. Double bonuses if you can get a lifetime membership because you don't want recurring costs recurring costs going forward. Build a funnel. That's absolutely critical. So you need a way of automating this thing to some extent. As a solo person, you ain't going to be able to run around and customize service. I want to do that. I'm sure all of you guys want to do that. But you need some level of automation. Link it with your operating system. So things like email marketing, invoicing, etc. Very importantly, use a local install. So I have broken stuff. Like the day I needed to be needed to launch. That is like, yo, this whole thing is like, oh, fortunately, oh, there's something called Visco. So I've learned that you need a local install. I mean, that's about using WordPress effectively. What are the shades of green? WordPress has changed this. I spent roughly, five minutes left. I spent roughly days upon days, actually, looking for the right color of green, because it just needed to construct the right way. Don't be, I want to be fun geek, because there's another thing that I want to do, is that I want to put in Google fonts, etc. Let's go with the default stuff. You're going to get out of this there. Don't be a security ninja. Don't actually, in my personal opinion, how many, I don't understand the security plugins. It's beyond my level of comprehension. Those settings, etc. I mean, I, for instance, have been locked out of my website. So, I mean, I also see the hosting guys, they sort it out, and they're doing a fairly good thing. The other thing which I see people now doing is now anything. I mean, speaking to people, everyone will often, it's not like, I have this thing and they're like, okay, do you know much of the action talk? And they have no, I just want to figure it out. That's a great stuff to get caught. Don't, don't actually do that. So, forget, tell you, forget customized on your website. What you need to be doing is you need to be tailoring your product, your service to your customer. It's a key, it's a key mind, it's a key mindset. Now we come to whether you can scale this thing or not. I was supposed to be done by yesterday. I was going to present this great thing. So I did four projects seven days. No, I mean, I'm still figuring, I'm still figuring out whether I'm going to scale this thing or not. But I will be because I'm going to block this whole thing and people can people can follow on. So, this is like a three, three quick things. One is that I think is very important to sort out your ideas and to sequence them. So what I find with a lot of people solo-premiers, particularly if you can consult team or building a product, you're like wearing two hats and you have like two projects on there. You need to sort out exactly what it is you can do. Secondly, go for the sale. I'm a very, very reluctant sales person. That's part of the reason why I didn't make so much money on it. I did it for six months on a pizza, etc. I had like hundreds of users, but I wasn't actually making any money of this thing. And then the final thing is I hope you guys actually reach a point where you're able to scale it. But if you don't really scale it, you wouldn't have spent a year doing this thing and you wouldn't have spent tens of thousands of lands doing this thing. You might have spent like a few thousand then and it's a month, it's an excellent learning experience and you get paid for the next month. That's kind of like the make up philosophy. So if you guys want you can go to WC WPossible.com slash yet another WordPress newsletter. Sign up. Promote anything. I'll put in a code there saying WordPress WordCamp James Berg if you guys are interested in any of the products. And yeah, thank you so much for the invitation and thank you for listening.