 Hey, everyone. I'm Neely with GoDaddy Pro with a maker of the web to talk about her business, her journey, and hopefully learn a few tips along the way. With me here is Miriam Schwab. Thank you so much for jumping on and talking with me today. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. So let's go ahead and just do a little introduction. Tell us who you are, what you do, and we'll kind of take it from there. So my name is Miriam Schwab, and I am the co-founder and CEO of a company called Stratik. We're a static hosting and publishing social for WordPress website. I am originally from Canada. I've been living in Israel for the last 26 years, and I'm a mom of seven. Oh, wow. Definitely, I keep been busy. Yeah. I have very few bored moments in my life. So tell us how you really got started with WordPress and just your business in general. Like what made that happen? So the way that I got started with WordPress was also kind of driven by my children. So after I had my fourth kid, I realized that like a nine to five type of job doesn't work for me anymore. I needed more flexibility. I also wanted more room for creativity and to grow and to learn new skills. So I went freelance, originally more on the content side of things. But as I was working with content and providing that to customers, it increasingly had to do with websites, which fascinated me. So I started to teach myself to build websites. First, they were the old-time static FTP, the files up to the server types of sites. Then I started looking into content management systems. Stubborn WordPress really fell in love with it and started to offer that as a solution. So you did a lot of agency work and web design and stuff, and that's a bit different than what you're doing now. How did that transition really come about? So in the agency, we were working with, eventually, we progressed to working on higher level types of projects, higher budget projects, and that meant that companies that were hiring us were ones where their website made a huge impact for them on the business level. They were using their website as a key marketing tool for lead generation and things like that. And so they were willing to invest more in it to keep it high quality, retain the integrity, stable stability, et cetera. And so they turned to us for that, and we were good at doing that. Those types of companies, they needed a retainer type of package from us, and so we started to offer that, where we kept the site maintained. We didn't just build, hand it over, and then we're like, bye, good luck. We did that in the beginning, and it turned out to not work out very well, because then they wouldn't maintain it properly, and they'd come back and be like, it's hacked, and we're like, you know, we told you to update the plugins, but you didn't. So then we started to do that for them. And that was great, because anyone who has managed an agency knows that you're constantly running after the next project, where and retainer work is steady income, which is very good and creates a level of stability. But as time went on, that retainer work started to demand more and more of our time, because it was, there was, you know, we went from an era where a hacker was a person to hacker bots, right? And so you're always trying to stay one step ahead of the hacker bots, and speed became increasingly important and increasingly difficult to achieve. A lot of our customers would come to us with sites that they had built elsewhere. And it was, you know, we'd hack away at them, trying to make them faster, and it was very, very hard to do that. So at a certain point, after doing the WordPress agency work for, I don't know, about 13 years, I started to think that maybe WordPress's time had come. The chatter among the general web development community was that WordPress sucks. It's old school, you know, it's lamp, it's legacy. It's time to look for something more modern. And I started to explore the world of static site generators, and found them to be very exciting. Like they were modern build tools. And the end result was everything that WordPress kind of wasn't there, pre-rendered pages, so they're super fast. And they're like, you can't hack them, essentially, they're scalable, you never have to worry about scaling for traffic or DDoS or anything. So I started to think maybe we need to shift as an agency to providing that as a service. But then as I started to explore that more, I saw the weaknesses that it has in the strengths that WordPress still has. And my eventual conclusion was that WordPress still, by far, is the best tool for managing websites out there. But then I thought, let's maybe bridge these two worlds. And that's where the concept of static came, which is WordPress and the static site generator. And then you get everything. The best of both worlds. Wow. That's fantastic. It's something that I've forgotten a lot about. I build websites myself. And it's something that I'm going to have to look into just to help my clients a little bit more. Now, one of the great things about WordPress has to be the community that backs at least me for personally. How has the community impacted you? The community has had a tremendous impact on my professional and personal journey in terms of learning and also making friends. I really love going to WordCamps and seeing the companies that show up to support and contribute and sponsor. I've been particularly impressed with GoDaddy's progression in terms of their participation and contribution to the community. It's kind of transitioned from being a very corporate type of approach to being much more open source culture and friendliness. And I've loved seeing that. And I especially actually love the people on the WordPress team at GoDaddy. I've made some friends there too. So what's next for you in your WordPress journey? Well, I'm going to be speaking at a number of conferences. The next one is WordPress EMEA. I'm very excited about that, especially since it's also focused on the EMEA region, which is where I am. I'll be speaking about a static first approach to WordPress. The idea behind the talk is to help people understand what it means to publish a WordPress website as static and what they need to keep in mind in order to build their sites so they're static ready. That's awesome. And now how can people find you? Well, you can Google my name and find me everywhere. My kids are always telling their friends, my mother is in Google. So you can Google Miram shop. But also I'm on Twitter and I'm on Facebook and I'm on LinkedIn. And I think that pretty much covers the social. So you can find me there. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to really tell your story and talk to us about what's next for you and your WordPress journey. I'm Neil with GoDaddy Pro. We'll see you next time.