 The topic today is growing in the WordPress ecosystem through partnerships. It's one of my favorite topics. And in today's talk, I have three particular goals for our time together. The first is I want to set some context and share with you some of the ways that I found helpful to think about the WordPress ecosystem. We're going to talk about the size of the space. We're going to talk about the shape. And we're going to talk about the health of the ecosystem. The next goal I have is I want to inspire you with what's possible when it comes to partnerships. And to do that, we're going to talk through what I've found to be really helpful, the five stages of a partnership. And then along the way, I also want to help you move from inspiration to action and share some specific pieces of advice and guidance and questions to ask so you can put some of this stuff into practice. I think partnerships are, they can be a lot of work, but it's also one of the most effective tools for growth in the WordPress ecosystem. So I'm excited to be able to get into this with you today. My name is Jonathan Wold. I am the co-founder and CEO of Guildenburg, where we're working on building an app store for the WordPress ecosystem. And we do that by facilitating partnerships between products and hosting providers. So I get a lot of context for working through partnerships, and I'm excited to share some of that with you guys here today. So let's talk about the WordPress ecosystem. It's big. According to web pros, there are more than 82 million active domains running WordPress. There's a lot more installs than that, but in terms of what they're currently considering active, it's kind of a hard problem to get exact data on this, but we know that it's big. There's nothing quite like it in terms of size. Proprietary ecosystems like Shopify and Wix, Squarespace tend to get a lot of attention, but when you put them in perspective, they're very small compared to just how large WordPress is. So we know that it's big. A good example of its size, if you take, I think the data might be a little bit different now, but I'm built with 28% of all e-commerce sites running on WooCommerce, which is quote-unquote just a plug-in for WordPress. It's significant, and I think it's kind of easy for us inside of the ecosystem to lose track of that every now and then. So I think it's important to keep this in mind. It's quite large. So beyond its size, I find it really helpful to consider these two other dimensions of the space. The first is the shape of the WordPress ecosystem and then the health. Let's talk about the shape first. So I find it helpful to think about the WordPress ecosystem and put the businesses within it into three broad categories. You have product companies. These product companies are building plugins, themes, extensions, et cetera, for WordPress. A lot of these are native. They build plugins that you can get on the .word repository. You also have a lot more SaaS, softwares of service providers that are coming in and building integrations for WordPress and for plugins within WordPress like WooCommerce. So product companies mix up a big chunk. Again, exact data is kind of difficult. We'll talk a bit about why, but by my conservative estimate, there are tens of thousands of product companies that focus on WordPress. So that's the significant piece. Hosting providers are another piece of the ecosystem that are in their own category. There are thousands of hosting providers of all shapes and sizes focused on different markets, different geographics, different focuses, different audiences. And hosting providers to me are actually a big part of the strength of our ecosystem because they're able to represent a lot of different interests and needs. So that's a whole category. And then last but not least, the service providers. These are your agencies. There are hundreds of thousands of these, and they're the ones who are making stuff happen in WordPress. Someone decides to use WordPress, but they need help. So I think it's important to think about these companies and in these different categories and think about the dynamics between them and recognize that they have distinct needs. We'll talk about some of that a bit later. So when I think about the health of the ecosystem, I find it helpful to look at the project itself. So that's, of course, every year we have a couple of new releases of WordPress. There's a lot that's going on there. Some people follow closely. Many people don't. So you'll get an update to WordPress, and there's a whole lot that goes behind the scenes to make that happen. It's incredible. If you want to get some perspective on that, you can go to make.wordpress.org. If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading the book on the WordPress project. It's called Milestones. It's a history of the project. It's excellent. I'll kind of talk you through it, and there's a lot there. It's pretty incredible. It's volunteer-led, and as many of you here know, but for folks who are outside, they don't really realize what all goes into making that happen. So I think it's really important to think about the health of the project. Does it have the resources it needs? Does it have getting the funding that it needs? Next up, you have the community. WordCamps are fantastic. I'm so happy to be able to be at WordCamp Atlanta here. And to me, the community, both in-person and online, is a big part of the strength of our ecosystem. So it's really important to pay attention to, like, are the WordCamps getting the support that they need? How's the meet-up ecosystem going? And yeah, so it's great to see you guys here. There's nothing quite like being in-person at a WordCamp. And then last, so I think it's important to think about the ecosystem itself. This is especially hard, and we're going to talk in a moment about why, but I don't see a lot of work happening right now on looking. Like, right now, generally, we pay attention to one thing. Is WordPress growing? And so generally, every year, it's like, yes, it's growing. There's more people that are using WordPress. We see the numbers go up. But it's hard to know, like, how much success are people actually having with WordPress? I think a lot of the success that's being had with WordPress, we owe to the service providers who are making sure that their clients are being successful. But WordPress, quite frankly, I've been 18 years full-time in this space. I love WordPress. I'm all in. And it can be hard to use. It can be really frustrating. And for all the incredible effort and care that goes into the project, I think it's important that we take a step back sometimes and say, okay, if someone's brand new coming into our space, how does WordPress out of the box compare to something like Wix or Squarespace or Shopify? And it's important to ask those questions. But it's hard. And growth is also hard. And in the WordPress ecosystem, I think it's especially so because of its nature. We have these... It's one of my favorite words, but it's this word called decentralization. What does that mean? So I think it's helpful to think about a comparison. If you look at Shopify, who many people know quite well, Shopify, it's a software-as-a-service platform. It's an ecosystem of its own. And you can go on to Shopify and create a store and get up and running quite quickly. Now, keep in mind though, so Shopify by size is actually smaller than WooCommerce, which is interesting. But Shopify is a centralized ecosystem. If you want to do business in Shopify's ecosystem, you do business with Shopify. You sign up for their partner program. You get into their app store. You sign up for their agency program. They have a whole thing. And there's a lot of benefit to that. It's nice and simple. It's clear. There's risk to that as well, but you kind of know what you're getting. WordPress is not like that. It is a decentralized ecosystem. And you can decide to use WordPress. And you can, as a kind of perfect illustration, you can choose to host WordPress wherever you'd like. We have a number of hosting providers that are sponsoring here, which is fantastic. And they all offer good service and good product. And there's a lot of choice for end users. So let's take a few minutes to talk about the benefits and trade-off of decentralization. Because I think this is the, this is a core, we need to keep this in mind when we talk about partnerships and why partnerships are important. So for end users, these are some of the benefits that we have of decentralization. The first is this idea of shared ownership. When you choose to use WordPress for a personal blog, for a business site, you're taking ownership of that. That's yours. You can do whatever you want with it. And one of my favorite things is to go to a meet-up and to see people helping each other with WordPress. And what I love, because of this like open-source piece, there are people who absolutely help because they love helping. It's altruistic on their part, right? But that's not, to me, the core driver of what makes this work. I think a lot of people, whether they're conscious of it or not, understand that if I help someone else have success in WordPress, I'm also helping myself. Because it's also mine. So I think that's a really important part. You don't get something like that. You don't see people creating word-camp type things for Shopify. That has to be paid for. But why is it that volunteers are willing to put time and effort into something? To me, it's this idea of shared ownership. It's one of the benefits that we get in a decentralized space. You also have a lot of choice. There are lots of options. If you don't like one host, you can move to the next. If you don't like one product, you can use another. If you don't like a service provider, there's another option available to you. And that's an incredible benefit that you get in a decentralized space. And resilience. So right now, we're still in this growth phase. One of the questions that is interesting to think about, I find anyway, is like, what would it take to kill the project? And it would be very hard, actually. WordPress has so much going behind it. We can complain about things. We can say, oh, I wish this was better. I wish we had more of this. And it's all true and valid. But there's an incredible amount of momentum behind WordPress that makes it quite hard to stop. So it ends up being a quite safe choice for people. With each of these benefits, though, there are also trade-offs. Let's talk about those. So while it's nice to have the shared ownership, decision-making can be quite difficult in a project, right? Where if we all own it, like, how do you make choices about things? And for those who follow the history of the project, we've had multiple moments where there's been controversy around specific decisions with the product. Like, okay, what are we going to do about this? And people rightly care quite a bit about it. So it can be difficult in a decentralized space to make decisions. When you have so many options, it can be difficult to make good choices. How do you choose between the dozens of products and the dozens of forms of products, for instance? How do you choose between all the hosts who offer a good product and service? That can be quite difficult for end-users. And then, ultimately, the other side of resilience is this idea of stagnancy, right? Like, it can be hard to kill, but it can also be hard to grow at a certain point if you get locked into this idea that, oh, we're having a hard time making decisions and there's too many choices and it's difficult to navigate that. We can kind of get stuck. That's the other side. It can be difficult, but it's also hard to grow. And that's going to be important for us to pay attention to is WordPress continuing to grow. Are we able to cut through some of these trade-offs? And this is a key piece. With these benefits and trade-offs, these don't go away. This is the other side of decentralized. You don't have these problems in a proprietary ecosystem. You have a different set of problems, but these don't go away. Decision-making will always be difficult when ownership is shared and when you have lots of options, it's difficult to navigate that. So what we ultimately hope to do and what we can work together to do is try to mitigate some of these trade-offs. So let's look now at these benefits and trade-offs through the lens of two specific audiences, hosting providers and people making products. Just to kind of take this further, as an example with a hosting provider, they typically have limited influence on decisions. These are some of the challenges. Because you don't want to be the host that says, you can't use this plugin. So they end up in this position of, all right, you want to support as much as possible. You can kind of get stuck with things that just aren't great. Plugins that aren't well-written, they have performance issues, et cetera. I guess that's the limited influence on choices. And on decisions, it's similar. Decisions are being made in the project that may or may not directly benefit the customers of a host. And you have limited influence typically as a host on those decisions. And ultimately the host ends up facing that higher, that risk of stagnancy, where it's like I've talked to quite a few hosts who woke up one day and realized that they have a lot of WordPress that maybe even the majority of their customers are using WordPress and they're like, okay, well, what do we do with this? And then they get into it, it's like, well, what can we do? We can't, we see these problem areas, but we can't tell people to not use this. They can try, but then they're just going to move to another host. It can be kind of difficult to navigate that. And it's great to have the growth, but there are some very real trade-offs that are challenging to work your way through. On the product side of things, some of the challenges that we face, there are low standards for creating products. If someone comes into our space and wants to create something for WordPress, that's awesome. We love that, we encourage it. And it can be a real nightmare to support, it doesn't follow best practices. You run compatibility issues quite quickly, right, where one product doesn't work well with the others, and because it's decentralized, no one's enforcing any standards, which is how we like it. We like the freedom to be able to do things with the way we want to. But it can create some real nightmares for end users who, they just expect things to work, especially if they're coming from a proprietary platform that enforces standards. They expect things to work, and in WordPress funny things can happen when one plugin is doing something with the user table and something else is, and it's just there's a whole set of challenges that come up. And ultimately, in a decentralized space, when you have thousands of hosting providers with customers like each having all their own customers, it can be quite hard for a product to get noticed in that space. If it's a proprietary platform that's centralized, you might have to pay a lot of money, but you can get in front of Shopify's customers, right? And WordPress it's a lot more challenging to get access to that distribution. So how do you mitigate these trade-offs? We don't want to change the nature of it because we enjoy the benefits, right? WordPress is massive, we have this large ecosystem to work with. So how do we mitigate these trade-offs? What I find to be the most effective is partnerships. And when I think about a partnership, and there's so many different ways that you can slice and dice this, but ultimately it's about two companies coming together to create value for an end user, to solve a problem for an end user, right? And ultimately these end users are the people who are using WordPress. So we're going to look at this through the lens of a product company working with a hosting provider. It's very similar as well for like agencies, but that's the lens that I find that I've had the most experience. I'll talk you through that. There are no like right or wrong, well there could be some wrong ways to do this, but there's no like, I actually really enjoyed Nathan's talk on systems and processes. Partnerships is a perfect example of this because you could easily argue that oh, everything is unique and different and that's true, yet processes and systems very much apply to this work. Over the past couple of years I've really enjoyed watching products and hosting providers develop out their partnership practices. Folks are starting to get a lot better at this. It's still early. So what I'm going to share with you next are some stages that I've found helpful to look at partnerships through and those are these five. The opportunity stage, the design stage, the start stage, the growth stage and support and similar to what Nathan was describing earlier, I think it's important that you sort of give each stage its proper time and space. Sometimes we're eager like oh, we want to just jump in and get something started. Well, we're going to make sure that we're aligned before we do that. So let's look at each. So the opportunity stage so let's imagine you're a product and you want to grow distribution and working with the hosting provider is like a really logical place to do that. And there's a whole number of ways that you could partner. You might do a co-marketing partnership. You might do an integration where they're going to include your product and their offerings, right? That could be a basic integration, that could be quite deep. There's a lot of ways that you can go about this and I find that there are three things that are really helpful to keep in mind. First is start with the audience. This is probably the biggest mistake that I see people make is like they're excited about doing partnerships together, but they don't have a clear, they're not clear on who the audience is. For instance, if you're focused on small business owners, the type of partners that you should be looking for are those who also serve small business owners, right? You could have a great idea for a partnership, but if you're trying to partner with someone who serves a different audience, you're off right from the get-go and that's going to hurt your ability to find success together. The next thing is to focus on creating value for that shared audience. This is quite basic, but I see it missed oftentimes in the interest that these parties have to do business together. They forget like what are we actually doing? What problem are we solving for our mutual customer? And then there, with those things clear, you can hypothesize what that deal looks like. The ideal, of course, is to have a three-way win, right? The product wins, both partners win and the end user, in this case, also wins. And that's not trivial. I've seen partnerships where two parties are winning, but the third is not. Or only one is winning, and that's not going to be a strong, long-term partnership. So make sure that you have a clear audience in mind, that you're choosing partners that share that audience, that you're able to identify a clear problem to solve, and then you go from there into the design stage. And the idea, so this can quite literally mean design, but in this context, I mean design at a more meta level. And to do a partnership right, you need to make sure that you have the right people involved. This is a common mistake that I also see, where maybe there is now a partner, a manager at both organizations, that's a great start. They can work together. That's often not the case. There's often not someone dedicated to partnerships yet. That's great if that's the start. But then there's often a lot more people that need to be involved at different steps in the process. So on the one hand, while you don't want to bog things down, you need to make sure that people are aware. I've seen partnerships go live and people within the organization didn't know that that was a thing. That's not uncommon. So you need to make sure that you understand who needs to be involved in this and that they're involved. And stay focused on the problem. This is a callback to the first step. I've seen people get excited about doing a partnership. They get into the next step. And it just gets lost in the details where they're excited about how the integration could work. Or we're going to do this and that and they lose sight of why we started to do this in the beginning. And importantly, in this stage before you go live, do as much as you can to test this. Like talk to your shared customers together. Hey, if we do this partnership, is this valuable? Are we bringing more value to that shared customer? Test and validate it. I'm a big fan of excel something before you make it. Make sure that you're really solving a problem before you jump into it. Here's a couple of questions that I find helpful to ask at this stage of the process. What is our solution to the problem? So we have identified an audience. We've identified a problem to solve. And what do we think our solution is? It's kind of stating the obvious, but I see people, they can't answer this question sometimes. What's the solution? How are we going to provide more value? How does it work in practice? Like what is it, it'd be great. Have someone like, diagram the steps out, right? Sometimes you miss something really simple where it's like I've seen partnerships go live and when you just go through the flow from an end user perspective, it's confusing. It's not working as intended. And it's like, they lost sight of that somewhere in the mix, which leads into the third question. What's the journey that our shared audience is going to go through for this partnership, right? Make sure that you're not losing sight of that and you're consciously looking at the experience that they're going to have. How do we want folks to feel? I like asking this question because for most of us the answer isn't we want them to feel frustrated, we want them to feel discouraged or disheartened, but that's often the reality is people get frustrated, discouraged and disheartened when they're trying when they're working through something. So we want them to feel a delight in the process. We want like, oh this is great they're making things easier for me. So think consciously about how you want that shared audience to feel in this partnership and check that along the way and ask, is that the case? It's often not the case, which is sad. And then ultimately how are we going to know that this is working? This can be hard up front. Sometimes it's simple and straightforward. You just got to ask the question and have a clear answer. If you don't you at least need to hypothesize how will we know this is working? Well, maybe we'll ask our customers. That's a great one. And they can tell us themselves whether this is providing value for them or not. So you've found an audience you've identified a shared problem to solve you've designed a solution for them. Now it's time to get started and in the start stage a couple of basic things I found helpful create timelines and checklists because you're now involving two different organizations you're going to have different ways of doing things different standards and procedures a timeline can be a great way to sort of align your interests and make sure that you at least talk you have the same expectations one might think oh we're going to go live in a month the other's like yeah that's in six months so have a timeline together identify the tasks on both sides of the partnership make sure that you stay focused at this stage on the audience experience this is another place where can get off the rails you crush it on the design stage you have that's good to go but then you get into timelines and planning and resourcing and maybe something doesn't get communicated to the people who are actually building it make sure that you stay focused on the audience experience and personally it's painful for me I've learned to embrace the pain but like be willing to let things go in the process right sometimes you need to refocus sometimes you get some feedback because you did that testing and iteration and people told you like oh this feature that you thought was super cool no one likes it so okay we gotta let it go and simplify and give them what they need much better to do that early than go live with something and you know so refocus and simplify where you need to and keep focused on that problem that you're solving for the shared audience alright so we get it started now we're going to go into the growth stage this is where this is what the everyone's been working towards and I find there's a few things that are helpful to keep in mind first is focus on the initial like momentum right like get the ball rolling get those early wins sometimes I see folks get way too ambitious and design a partnership they're like oh we're going to do this and this and this that may all be possible but focus on some getting some momentum going so that you that you can build on that rather than just like being hypothetical make sure you stay focused on the ideal outcome for the end user what are we trying to do for them right this is again another stage where you can lose sight of that you're up and running things are going well hopefully and we can and gotta remember why did we start to do this to begin with especially people get excited like ideas can come in oh we can do this integration over here we can work with this we can do some more of this and say wait why did we start to do this to begin with are we still talking about the same audience and this is important for product companies especially because if you work with a hosting provider it's not uncommon for that hosting provider to have a number of different audiences they serve right and it can be tempting to just take that product and apply it across the board and that's not necessarily a good fit for that product so you need to stay focused on that ideal outcome and then at this stage I think it's important to think about this in a long term sense right plan for the years ahead and this is a good way that you can kind of check and balance the initial energy that can come from something working and build on that momentum but rather than just moving too quickly plan like think longer term right you don't want to be disruptive to the end users you want them to have a good experience so now is an opportunity for you to kind of align road maps etc and let's talk about some of the ways that you can build on that momentum and create momentum initially these are some of the things that I've found useful you can work together on audience education right so this is a nice way to do co-promotion where you can create materials together to educate that audience and you can both promote those I think that's a great collaboration it's really important to work on road map alignment especially for products that there's opportunities for a deeper integration and that's simple like maybe it's a quarterly meeting where you are meeting with the product folks on both sides and your comparing notes, your partners now and just make sure you don't miss obvious opportunities to collaborate and align interests and build on momentum further it's great to facilitate feedback exchanges between your customers sometimes the product will get great feedback in this case like about the host that the product can pass on I've noticed that people have a harder time giving direct feedback to the folks that it should go to so partners can be great to facilitate feedback to each other so take advantage of that I find that feedback is invaluable to help shape discussions and identify opportunities it's important to also work on partner education this goes in both ways especially for a product working with a hosting organization for instance, it's not uncommon I've seen partnership deals go live and the support organization within the hosting provider doesn't know about the products they have a large organization it's hard to do that so the product can work on ways to simplify that maybe make it really easy like one pager that gives a summary of things like easy references to documentation there's work that you can do to make that simpler for folks and educate each other in the process and then once you see that something's working look for opportunities to expand and build momentum but just keep focused on that original audience and problem that you were solving you of course can choose to change the audience but that needs to be a conscious choice and then that leads us to the last stage in partnerships and that is the support stage I personally don't find this exciting but I found that it is essential so you just got to make sure you put the right people on this who love doing this type of stuff and there's a couple of things that I find helpful to keep in mind during this stage so again, if you plan for the years a good partnership can be running for years and it's important that you're supporting it well so watch for new opportunities there's all sorts of things that can come up like those feedback exchanges could bring about a new idea for a product or maybe another partnership so look for ways to create processes and systems around gathering those opportunities. I've seen some real gold lines that come up in support tickets that can be easily overlooked if someone's not paying attention to it make sure that you keep team interests aligned this one's really interesting especially for larger organizations so if a small organization is partnering with a large organization it's important that the small organization takes time to understand the interests of the various parties involved and that they're doing work to support those interests and make sure they stay aligned with them this is important and this, yeah, just basically understanding what success looks like for the various folks involved and then last but not least, it's important to plan a sunset for the partnership I find that whether or not you ever execute on it but think ahead to what does that look like maybe the product changes they decide to focus on something else so how do you make sure that those customers are well served? Plan for that from the beginning and that often opens up a lot of new questions and new opportunities entirely by doing that well so there's a lot of opportunity in our WordPress space, I love it I feel like we're still just getting started after all these years we get to enjoy the benefits of decentralization there are also a lot of trade-offs and strategic partnerships to me are one of the most effective ways to mitigate those trade-offs and create a lot of value for a shared audience I love what I'm seeing in this space I hope to see a lot more of it I appreciate you guys if you have any questions, I'll stick around and thank you very much Karim, please What are some ways that service companies and product companies can work together? That's a good one so the question is what kind of service companies and product companies can work together? What's interesting I see this happen sometimes where service companies get into product so they can get stuck between these worlds it's not uncommon sometimes it's as simple as the grass is greener on the other side other times it's very real driven by needs that customers are asking for so that's interesting but for the most part they're very different types of businesses that companies make is that they try to sometimes go into the service business and they're just not cut out for that it's a whole different way of thinking and so it's a great partnership to have for a product company to work with a service company for folks who need more there's a couple of things I've seen go quite well but in general what I find to be effective is for the product company to do work to develop a program for service providers so when requests for customization come in those flow to the service providers that gives the service provider something they're looking for which is new business and the service provider is well suited to be able to do that so it can start out very simple just a referral program and it can grow from there for the product to create resources they can create an experts program there's a lot of ways that you can develop that but I think that's a great example of a partnership and ultimately it's customizable like you need good service providers so I love seeing that and love to see more of that any other questions awesome I'll be here the rest of today so thank you guys very much