The people that have done this the best, hands down, and it's a lot of ways, this is the way that the the most successful agencies that I see, regardless of whether they're doing highly productiz services, they know exactly who they serve. They know what keeps them awake at night. They know they know the pain in the ass of the very specific thing that they can finish the the sentence when the person starts. And when you have that dialed in, then marketing and sales and all of the other things just become very, very easy.

Welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. It's true. It's not just a slogan, that's the whole reason we do what we do. That, and for all the money and fame, of course. This week we're joined by co-founder and CEO of Gridpain, Patrick Gallagher, all the way from Michigan, in the middle of America. In this episode, we explore the future of WordPress, if there is one, which we believe there is, the problem with most hosting plans, how transparency has helped GridPayne scale, and why you do not owe it to your clients to provide good hosting for no money. We also discuss offering hosting as the ultimate downsell, how to build a dedicated hosting environment, plus a whole lot more. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, please welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast, the one and only Patrick Gallagher from Grid Bane. Hello, my friend. How are you? I'm fantastic, Troy. How are you? I'm excellent. All the better for you joining us here on the Agency Hour Podcast, all the way from where are you based again? You are in Michigan. I'm I'm in Michigan. Michigan. Wow.

And so I'm I'm right here in Michigan.

So like in the middle.

That narrows it down. Yeah. Right. Near the capital.

You guys are coming out of summer now, coming into your fall. Is that right?

Yeah, actually, today you can tell it's starting to get dark, you know, like earlier and earlier, which pisses me off to no no uh end. I thought you were there. I thought you liked the dark. No, I actually um I just discovered really in the last couple years that it's like it's not that I mind winters, it's that I am I mind the gray. Like the you know, just no sun for four months. It it tends to drive me up the wall. So, but yeah, this morning it was like 45 degrees, which is not very warm.

Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit. Yeah, yeah, it's cold. Um now, for those that don't know, we're here on the agency hour podcast. We're talking to the CEO of a hosting company. That's what everyone thinks. They're like, oh God, why are we talking to the CEO of a hosting company? What could I possibly learn from hearing about someone come on the agency hour and sprook their WordPress hosting business, right? Um I just want to give a little bit of context. Uh, Patrick and I have hung out at live events before. Uh, we've had many, many conversations, and the reason you are here is because you have a great, I believe, a great insight into the WordPress ecosystem and what makes it tick and what uh what makes agencies, successful agencies, different from other agencies. And you've built something really unique here at Gridpain, which I do want to talk about. But before we unpack that, just give people a bit of an idea of where you came from and how you got into this space in the first place. What would you, what's your background?

Yeah, so I actually ran my own agency for uh the better part of 13 years, um, doing almost exclusively development on WordPress. And so I could at the time I called it a marketing and technology consultancy, uh, because there were certain instances where we would go fairly down the, you know, fairly far down the rabbit hole of like doing advanced networking inside of people's offices, things like that. But invariably there was always a website component, you know, build, uh, maintenance, marketing kind of kind of build-out with that. And so I ran that for a really long time. Um, and in that time, I used certainly every shitty host on the face of the planet, um, but also some really good ones. And um after the second time canceling an account with uh with WP Engine, um, I realized like to hell with it. Like I need to solve this problem for myself and for my for my customers. And so I actually set out, I had no ambitions of building a hosting company. Like I set out to build a tool that I needed for my agency. And so about a year into that process and about a hundred thousand dollars of our money invested in that, my wife said, you know, you don't really get excited about your clients anymore. All you do is you talk about that that thing that you're building, you know. And I'm like, yeah. And she's like, maybe do something about that. And uh so shut up. Or shut, yeah, shut your trap, you know. Um, and so so I I went with the former and um I largely fired all of my clients. I I literally still to this day I had I think I have three. And they're and the only reason I have those three is because they just don't need anything, and and I just I'm really just hosting their sites for them. Um and so we launched Grid Pain publicly in February of 2018, and we've been head down, largely bootstrapped um for the first four plus years, um, just investing our own, you know, our own resources in it and invest reinvesting um uh from our top investors, which is our customers. And um, and now we've got this thing that has helped over 10,000 freelancers, developers, agencies all around the globe. Um, and we power over a hundred thousand sites now. It's it's something significantly higher than that. It's a little bit difficult to keep track of because we we don't really keep a lot of stats on on what people are doing with their boxes, but um, yeah, over half a million sites have been brought into the world and and testing and training, and roughly a hundred thousand of them still exist.

What was the problem that you were trying to solve when you canceled the WP Engine account again and hit a brick wall and realized there was nothing on the market that could provide it?

Yeah, so so in their case, it was um their support was a very, very slow Google search. That's how it felt to me. It was basically something that I had searched for 30 minutes prior and discovered that probably wasn't going to work on their platform. Um, because WP Engine, like like all of the sort of traditional players, all the sort of normal Walled Garden managed WordPress hosts, they don't let you actually have access to the underlying servers that are there. You know, and so my my background is a computer science, as I as I said, I'm I'm used to rolling up my sleeves and being able to mess around with with the hardware. And and so what I what I really wanted was, you know, they had a pretty slick dashboard that made it very, very easy for my project manager, for example, to be able to go and spin up a site. Okay. And so she was she was great at sales, she was great at customer service, she was great with people, she knew WordPress. But if I said, hey, I need you to go stand up an Ubuntu 2204 server in Dallas, she wasn't gonna be able to handle that, you know? And so so WP Engine checked a lot of those boxes, but um, but they never just like Kinsa, just like Flywheel, just like all of the, you know, the big traditional players, they don't let you see or access or do anything with the underlying resources. And so a lot of people that come into the grid pain world, it's not even that they necessarily are are super pissed about the value for money argument, but it but a lot of times that's a big driver in it. Um it's that they it's that WP Engine won't tell them what is actually there. They'll tell them that they're out of resources and they'll say you need to upgrade and go to the next plan, you know, you need to bump up and go to the next plan. Well, you know, once they actually start to realize like how tiny that server is that's behind the scenes and how much they're paying above the the retail cost of that. And then when they also see that like all of the software that's doing the management is actually just fully automated software like what we've built at Gridpain, they start to realize that that maybe this game isn't quite cracked up to you know what what WP Engine certainly wants you to think it is, you know, that it's somehow magically, you know, their systems just do all of this management stuff for you. And it's like, yeah, it's fully automated open source software, and that's nothing less, nothing more, you know.

And part of the challenge with we were a WP Engine user for a long time. I uh we're now uh we now host our websites on Grid Pain. So you know, full transparency. Um one of the one of the reasons that we made that shift because we got to a point where we had, you know, nine or ten websites on WP Engine, and we wanted to write, and these are just internal sites, right? We don't actually, I mean, I stopped doing client work back in 2017, so these were just internal projects, right? Um, my wife's got a podcast blog, I've got a blog that gets like, you know, four visits a month from my mum. Um and you know, um, and and and then so we want to roll out another site, and we had to upgrade on WP Engine to like the 30-site plan, which was like an additional 150 bucks a month or something. I'm like, I just want to add one fucking site. I don't want another 20 sites. Now, I I I it I don't know whether they've changed that model or not, but I know this has been a sticking point, and we, you know, I'm fortunate or cursed, depending on which way you look at it, to have seen inside thousands of freelance and agency businesses over the last 10 years through uh the coaching work that we do here at Agency Mavericks, there's a little plug for you. Um and one of the big chal one of the big complaints and criticisms and uh that we hear is hosting if you get in bed with a company like Kinstar, Flywheel, WP Engine, where you're locked into those kind of brackets, right? You then add another site because you've bought another client, yay, you for growing your agency. We're now gonna penalize you by charging you another $150 a month to upgrade to the next bracket of sites, right? So you've now got 29 blank slots in my plan that I'm not using that I'm paying for because I'm basically being penalised for growing my business. Uh and I don't need and and also to migrate to to go, well, well, I don't want to do that anymore. I want to go to another host, is just so fucking painful in the mind of the freelancer or the agency owner that I'm just gonna pay the lazy tax and stay where I am. Or worse, you end up with 10 clients at WP Engine, and then you start hosting sites over at Flywheel because you only want to pay the $35 for another site. And so now all of a sudden you've got you know 72 clients spread across five hosts, right? And you're you hate your life because you're trying to manage all the logins in Airtable, and you know, you're paying Airtable $300 a month for their fucking enterprise plan, and the whole thing's a nightmare. So um, you know, the the however I will say this the challenge I found with something like grid pain is, and just because I'm a numpty, is you do have access to the box. So you provision your own server. It's it's kind of uh it's kind of management software built as a nice dashboard on top of the underlying uh boxes which you can access from you know what wherever you want to act wherever you want to spin up a server. So can you can you kind of talk us through how it's different, not pricing wise, but how the user experience is different and the value prop is different from the Kinster Flywheel WP engines, the the ones that we're used to?

Yeah. So so what most people don't really realize is that almost all of the managed hosts on the face of the planet, um, uh every one of the big players that you just named, um, they aren't actually technically the host. And um, and what I mean by that is that if you're at Pageley, for example, Pageley runs on AWS, which is Amazon Web Services. Okay. And so Amazon Web Services has 35 different data centers all around the globe. If you're hosted with Pageley, which, you know, at one point was literally my um, you know, the it was their breadcrumbs that I was following to build what it is that I built at GridPay because they were the tip of the spear and managed WordPress. Then GoDaddy bought them, and now everybody of any import at that company has, you know, done their earnouts and gotten out. And so who knows how long it will remain to be any good. But if you're at WP Engine, you're at either AWS or Google Compute platform. If you're at Kinstad, you're at Google Compute platform. Um, for a long time back in the day, if you were on WP Engine, you were on a company called Linode, which is now owned by Akamai. So behind the scenes of all of these hosting companies, including yours, no matter what it is, you're most likely at one of these large um, what are known as infrastructure as a service providers. Okay. And so a bunch of people in your world probably host on Cloudways. Some of them may or may not know that DigitalOcean bought CloudWays, and now if you're on CloudWays and it feels like you're getting shoehorned out of being able to use anything other than DigitalOcean, it's because you know, DigitalOcean paid $350 million for that company and it's not really Cloudways anymore. It's some weird uh amalgamation of Digital Ocean, of DigitalOcean's making, you know. And so what we do is uniquely to anybody in the entire ecosystem is that we have a very, very high-end, you know, managed solution where we're doing 24-7 support, averaging single-digit minutes, handling anything you can throw at it. But what but we let you own that piece of the relationship direct with the infrastructure provider. And so if you, you know, one of the one of the best examples of of how this plays out is um one of the guys that moved to us right before COVID, a little bit before COVID, he had just recently moved 500 sites from LiquidWeb to Flywheel, and then Flywheel got bought by WP Engine. And and while nearly having a heart attack and crashing his car, he's freaking out. You know, this is an unacceptable scenario for him. Everything that he thinks is gonna happen actually happened. You know, his his account manager changed, his account manager changed again. You know, these kinds of things stack up. So one of the first calls that we were ever on, he's I'm I'm giving him a demo and I'm showing him, hey, okay, now you have a server and it's up and running in DigitalOcean. And and he goes, Okay, that that's all great, that's all fine and good, but like what happens when when WP Engine just comes and buys your shit? And I said, Well, um, you know, certainly that could happen, but look, Ken, whose server is that that you just spun up? That's your server. That's a relationship that you own with a publicly traded company that if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, you know how long those servers are gonna run? Probably a really long time, you know. And so that level of transparency um is I think absolutely is a definite huge part of the success that we've had with Grid Pain. Um, it also comes with the the downside that people are constantly asking me, like, what if I don't know anything about servers? Like, what do I do? And it's like, well, great, just don't ever touch them. Like, literally, at least once or twice a week, I say, just click the buttons and follow along and then never log in. You know, like you you don't you don't need to do that stuff. You can do that stuff. You can go through 2,000 pages of documentation and just go completely batshit on whatever you want to do, or just spin up some sites and get back to work. That's what I need.

I I don't know anything about servers and that my brain doesn't work that way. And I just went in and clicked the DigitalOcean button because it was the first one and then spun up a server and then added some sites. I have I haven't logged into DigitalOcean. I'm not even I don't even know where the emails go. Like I don't I don't I don't care. Like it's if anything happens to GridPay, I could go to DigitalOcean and go, okay, well, we've got these servers, we've got some websites on them, we'd lose the grid pain interface and stuff, but you know the the the the they're my servers on DigitalOcean, right? They cost me pennies. Yeah. Um but I like it.

You know exactly what your costs are gonna be. Yeah, yeah, you know exactly what things are gonna cost.

Right. I don't have to log into DigitalOcean and configure. So grid pain is gridpain is a essentially a software company that allows you to integrate to, you know, spin up a box on on DigitalOcean, Vulture Linode, Amazon Light Sale, Upcloud, uh, or you know, and then install WordPress on that box, right? And uh, and and it has some other stuff built in which we can talk about. But so, but essentially it's kind of like you're not really the host, are you? Like the host is DigitalOcean or Vulture or Linode or wherever I choose to provision the server.

Yeah. Well, and and um, and so some people get concerned about that in terms of like, well, how do we get support? And it's like, well, the reason that you found about found out about Grid Pain is because we have world-class support, you know? Um and so we we on the regular, um, I mean, we get about a thousand, get about a thousand trouble tickets a week, I'd say. And again, we're averaging generally single-digit minutes to respond to those things. But but yeah, I mean, we are a software as a service that basically makes it possible for you to, at the very minimum, just host your own sites and and save a lot of money and have good performance and and have a lot of flexibility, all the way up to what I really want for the world, which is um we want to have large-scale agencies or even just super ambitious solopreneurs that are they're couch surfing right now. We want people to go and build interesting hosting companies or interesting productized services on top of the back of our stuff, you know, and it's it's what I needed as an agency. I decided I wanted to build a hosting service for for my clients. And it was like the more that I invested in that and made it right for me, the more that I realized that I wasn't unique and that there were that there were more people out in the world who potentially don't like the idea that it's like all the margin is gonna go to Kinsha, but all the wet work has to be done by the agency. You know, like when your clients' sites are messed up or they go down, they're not calling Kinsta. You know, they're they're calling you. And so you might as well make the margin, you know. And so um, I think it is, you know, it's it's troubling. Um, if uh I'm sure you guys have people like in the admin bar, you've seen Kyle Van Dusen's group, you know, he he posted something, uh he posted like a survey not too long ago, and it was like, uh aside from payroll, what's your largest cost center in your business? And almost everybody said hosting. And I'm thinking like, uh, yeah, okay, maybe that's the highest line item, but how are you not also going, that's the best fucking money that I spend in my business? Because there's almost nothing else that you can, there's literally nothing else that you can do where it's like, I can literally show you how to spend a dollar and charge a hundred dollars. You know, and if you're not doing that in your business, then you know That's right.

I mean, I had I had I have this conversation almost daily, right? Almost daily. I'm hosting my clients' websites and uh we roll that into their care plan. How much is it costing you to host a website? $35 on Kinst. What do you charge for a care plan? $39 a month. You pay you're charging $4 a month to send them a fucking invoice. Guess what? You're losing money. I hope they never email you because the moment they do, like you're already losing money. Like it's and and I think it's a agency, freelancers and small agencies have this mindset that they owe it to their clients to provide good hosting. No, you do not. You do not owe it to your your client. You owe it to your client to deliver on your promise, right? You don't owe it to your client to provide good hosting. Hey, go and host at you know, Bluehost if you don't care about your business. Sorry, Bluehost, and I'll build you a website and I'll put it wherever you want. But if you want my advice, then you should host it here and it's gonna cost this much, right?

Yeah, yeah. I want to talk about it you touch Sorry, go on.

Go ahead.

Uh well, I was just gonna say, like, you you you you touched on a on what has been a hot button sort of thing for me lately, which is this idea of like what I would call hosting and what I would call my agent or my care plans if I was doing if I was doing agency work, you know, because I think that this is this is an area in which I think that people um really get it twisted, you know, like they go to sell the care plan way too late, they go to present the idea that they're gonna host their thing too late, and they don't make it a requirement that it's gonna be hosted in my world. You know, they go, oh, well, the client wants to host on GoDaddy. Tough shit. That like literally, I would not take a client that does not let me have 100% control of these things, and it's not optional. It's not optional. Like it like making it optional is literally just a horrific disservice to you and to them at some future date, you know, because something's gonna get hacked and it's gonna take you four times longer to get in and unfuck the mess at GoDaddy than if you just had it working right the whole time in your own world. And that doesn't need to be on grid pain, it can be on Kinsha, it can be on wherever, but but you made a good point. Like if you're literally paying $25 and then charging $50 for your care plan, it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You want to work with people who, when you tell them, oh, it's a minimum of $100 a month for basic maintenance, the basic bottom care plan. That's it. And if they balk at that, then maybe they're not the right customers.

That's right. In fact, you're doing them a disservice by letting them host the website that you spend time and effort building. If they're hosting it on a shitty host, you're doing them a disservice, right? them do that. It's just not optional. Like you, you know, and this was one of the things that I mean back in, you know, before you existed, back in 2012, I did a presentation at Word, 2013, I did a presentation at WordCamp Melbourne called 101 Ways to Elevate Yourself and Demand Higher Fees. And one of the slides was just host on WP Engine because at the time they were like the premium host in the market. And then I had all these other things that you could do like, you know, make sure your website's clients are secure and and let them know that you've done that. Or just host at WP Engine because WP Engine were the first host that had all those kind of features baked in. Yep. And friends don't let friends host their sites on Bluehost. I'm sorry, Bluehost. But you know, you kind of major bid so you could align it. Now so talk to me. If I'm like I have a lot of people in my world who are agencies and course creators, right? If I wanted to build a dedicated host for course creators to come in and host their courses and built like a dedicated learn dash kind of hosting environment thing, right? And kind of sold that as a was or a sass or whatever you want to call it, a lass or whatever, right? What would I need to build on top of the grid pain interface for my clients? I mean I would just give them WordPress access. What like how did how would that work?

Yeah so so I deal with this almost exclusively now I'm either dealing with um in terms of my day-to-day sales conversations and and sort of the the consulting that we provide to our clients to help them you know get unlocked and and find that that next place of I know I sort of want to go in this direction a lot of it is is is is creating like you've like you described effectively a productized version of a website. Okay. And and I had not heard last before but I actually kind of like that learning learning management as a as a service but but certainly WASS is is popular. And and the way that I look at it um all of the all of the tooling that we've built um makes it very very easy for people to do this at just bonker scale. And um and I think the thing that people get wrong in this context is they get way down the rabbit hole of thinking about all of the little pieces of the puzzle that they're going to bolt on inside of the WordPress install. It's not enough that it has Learn Dash it needs to have gamey press and it needs to have this and it needs to have this and it needs to have and then you got 68 plugins installed and it's a complete nightmare shit show and um and that's not a good thing. Okay. And so for anybody that's considering this again no matter where you want to do it um narrow down what it is that you want to provide people. Okay. And then the other big thing that I see people doing wrong in this in this in this context again like I can wave a magic wand for you and show you like here's a white label dashboard and here's all the API calls that you need and and and we this is exactly how we built that checkout or here's how you can take Zapier and nest together you know the the the checkout from over there to make the thing happen. What people are generally getting wrong in this regard is they need to think of this not so much as even just take WordPress out of the equation. This is software as a service okay and I want people to think about it in that context because then you'll start reading the right books, you'll start watching the right YouTube videos you'll start paying attention to the right blogs because you won't be thinking about agency WordPress development world. You'll be thinking about things like I need to have an amazing onboarding experience. And if I don't have an amazing onboarding experience then I know that my SaaS isn't going to convert as well from trials to paids to recurring to expansion you know like I I really I if if if I could have one bit of impact throughout the rest of the year it would be to get people to realize that they need to think of themselves if they want to go down this rabbit hole, which I highly recommend that every agency at least consider because what this solves at minimum like there's there's probably some agency owners right now that are thinking like I don't have the time I don't have the bandwidth I don't I don't know as I want to build this thing understand that that what we're describing this is what it is that you can sell to the person who can't afford your shit this is literally the thing that you can sell to the person that says $5,000 for a website $15,000 for a website holy shit I I got like maybe $300 a month. Boom we'll take $300 a month you know and so that's that's how I look at it is this is your ultimate you know worst case scenario this is your ultimate downsell you know is oh you know what it doesn't seem like we're a good we're a great fit I've got this though you know and so if you want give that a try here's a free account test it for the next couple weeks and then again maybe six months from now they do have $15,000 for a website you know and it's stickier like it's sticky revenue you know like I we're we're I'm cut we're kind of deep in the high level rabbit hole which is a whole other value prop.

But one of the things that I like about about that is that you can you know similar value prop you can sell it as a managed service or you can sell it as a software right now if you're selling it as a software and they don't want you to manage it anymore that's fine but you can still pick up three or four hundred bucks a month out of the out of the software part of it right so it's stickier.

If I'm if I'm hosting 150 clients on a you know learning management as a service um then you support me in terms of I have a pro something's gone happened with one of my clients' sites and I need help you support me and then I support the clients right that's generally how we want to structure things um we do have conversations ongoing right now with people that they want us to handle 100% of everything you know um I personally I you know yeah if you want to pay us significantly more money to handle front end support that's fine but I would argue that even if you have gobs of money to hand me right now I would not I would not let anybody external to my company handle customer support for at least front facing client customer support for at least the first three to six months and arguably further than that because you want to find where the friction is you want to find where the where where the documentation sucks shit. And you don't want me to be making those decisions because hopefully you deeply understand your client in a way that I never will you know because otherwise if you don't then why aren't they just using Wix? This is another thing that I think a lot of people get get wrong in this context is um is they they go, well I'm gonna build um websites for home services companies and you go okay what does that mean? And and they go well I'm gonna do tree trimming and I'm gonna do gutters and I'm gonna do hardscapes and I'm gonna do landscapes and I'm gonna do pools and I'm gonna do you know I'm I'm gonna do um hospice care and I'm gonna and it's like okay I guess you could but I can tell you this if I'm a gutter guard guy and I come to your website and you're talking about landscapes and hardscapes and and tree trimming and 15 other things, you're not talking to me. And that's all the all the the time and leeway that I need to get a little bit distracted by my kids or a little bit distracted by TikTok and then I'm not paying attention to your shit anymore. You know? And so the people that have done this the best hands down and it's a lot of ways this is the way that the the most successful agencies that I see regardless of whether they're doing highly productized services they know exactly who they serve. They know what keeps them awake at night they know they know the pain in the ass of the very specific thing that they can finish the the the sentence when the person starts. And when you have that dialed in then marketing and sales and all of the other things just become very very easy because they go oh Troy actually knows what the fuck my problem is. He understands my thing.

And the thing is I don't care like customers don't care how the sausage is made right they they just want the outcome they just want the result. They just like hey I'm paying you I want value for money I want more value than I'm giving you in terms of money. So make this investment pay off and I don't really care how the sausage is made.

Yeah they definitely don't I mean they just want sausage they just let them eat cake you know that's what they want.

That's right exactly hey if the idea of building a dedicated hosting environment for a particular niche so if you're in the dental niche or if you're in the HIPAA compliance or if you're in the influencer or the course credit or whatever, if you're super excited about building a productized hosting environment and a hosting platform for your community and you want to use something like grid pain to drive it but you're tapped out because of bandwidth because you're doing too much development or SEO campaigns for clients, maybe you want to hit up E2M. They are the sponsor of our podcast Full Transparency. They also sponsor our event Mavcon which is coming up in a few weeks uh out in the in the east coast of the US E2M are a white label development agency that can take care of all of your WordPress development needs and your WordPress care plan tasks and they can also take care of your kind of you know basic SEO for clients freeing you up to do more of the things that you should be doing as an agency owner. And what I believe you should be doing as an agency owner is figuring out how to make better products and better solutions for your clients and how to do better marketing. And maybe you just don't have time to do that because you're too busy you know tapping away on the keyboard pushing pixels around the screen or updating plugins. So e2msolutions.com if you go to e2msolutions.com slash agency dash mavericks uh you can hook up with those guys you'll get a uh a a substantial discount for the first month take them for a spin we have a bunch of clients who are using e2m and who have now seen the light because these guys develop amazing uh they they do amazing work they project manage the the projects for you they have 180 staff uh based out of India and they are led by Manish who is an absolute legend and who is coming out to our event and uh is just a you know great part of our community. So check out E2M to free up your bandwidth so that you can think about how you can make better products and solutions for your clients and how you can do better marketing. I want to talk a little so two conversations I want to have one the future of WordPress and two AI. Let's do AI first because I think it'll be more fun how how how do you see AI changing the agency landscape and what is grid pain doing how are you leveraging AI?

Yeah so I spend at least an hour every day trying new open source models trying trying everything that came out that day as much of it as I can obviously you can't keep up with it you know you can't keep up with it. We have not yet deployed anything uh of um of at scale that I would like to and the reason is is that the the types of benefits that I think that it can have for a company like mine is in having a really um a really high-end fine-tuned model um that literally can take our 2000 pages of documentation and contextualize it into useful um customer support instantaneously getting people unstuck um that's one that's one thing that definitely will be happening with grid pain and I think if it doesn't happen with every hosting company they're high like it's just there's too much opportunity there. There's um but there's there's a lot of things that are really really interesting in AI that um that nobody's doing yet um that that I think are going to have even larger um potential upsides for for my for our company and for our clients you know and a a good example of this is um there was uh there was a bit of research I think it was published November of last year and it's still it's still just almost unknown um this guy basically instead of having mid-journey or an image you know like a stable diffusion type image model instead of having that take a prompt and then draw a picture of a cat you know on a pogo stick or whatever the hell it is um he actually fed it images and said make these images smaller in size but not lose quality and so the AI model actually started compressing images and he was able to get image compression that exceeded anything that exists in the wild you know the JPEG standards the the the um the dub the the webp standards now the thing that was interesting about it was the hallucinations that it would have so you'd have you'd have an image that was like almost perfectly flawless of like the Hollywood sign and all of the the you know the valley but then if you zoomed way in there would be buildings that it actually like made up you know where it was just like I that's sort of what that looked like so I just I guess that's what that looks like you know and so the image was smaller but it was not identical you know or you'd have something and there would be like a little heart emoji and the heart emoji would have a drop shadow and the original image didn't have a drop shadow you know and so it was one it's these little tiny details that it would hallucinate and and of course there's some purists that would go well not you know I've got a photography client that can't happen and then there's me that just thinks I don't give a shit if the if the heart emoji is has a little drop shadow on it that's fine. That's completely irrelevant. Save another hundred K off of the page load you know and so these are these are the kinds of things that I tinker around with um I personally don't love it for um for any content that I would create for myself because I'm I'm fairly opinionated and I like to write and I'm clearly totally fine with running my gob but but taking existing taking like a customer service person who knows the right technical answer but maybe they answered kind of curt or they're or they tend to just be very very you know gruff or brief and just here's the KB taking that answer and then feeding it into chat GPT and saying hey can you make this sound like a Walmart greeter you know I think there's a lot of value in those kinds of things you don't need to automate you don't need to you don't need to go and build some elaborate bit of software you can literally just tell your people to just go and if you're not certain about a response that you're gonna send out just have chat GPT dress it up for you a bit you know yep I agree with you the the I we've we're experimenting a lot with AI and I'm I'm trying to get something out of a writing tool that I would I mean we use ChatGPT to augment our YouTube video scripts, right?

So I come up with a concept I come up with an idea uh I'll go hey look this is what I want to talk about here's my opinion um spend a lot of time prompting it and then it will kind of so one of the things I'll say is like give me a 500 word metaphor on why uh you know value-based pricing is better than an hourly rate and then it will just kind of give me a whole bunch of shit and I'll go oh that's interesting if that's interesting oh I would never I would never have come up with that that's interesting most of it's kind of horseshit and I'm like you I'm kind of opinionated so I will write most of it myself but I'll use it for inspiration. I am very excited about the possibility of and something that we are um starting to roll out is having chatbots trained with our documentation and then deploying those chatbots into internal Slack channels so that the team can go, hey I'm kind of stuck here what's the company position on this like because we're we're essentially an opinionated coaching company right so we coach agencies but we're very opinionated like we tell people you know you shouldn't do this and here's why you should do this and here's why so we're not we're not like you know a bland kind of coaching company that says well you know we're not teaching first principles right we're teaching very opinionated frameworks and a very opinionated way of growing an agency because you know it works. And so I want my we want the team to be able to go here's our opinion on this and here's why so that anyone in the in the company can answer a customer question. Once we've deployed that in Slack and we've got it well trained we'll eventually siphon off a part of that knowledge base and make it public on our website so people can come and basically kind of self-help get the the vending machine DIY version of the opinions that we advocate and that we teach hopefully give them some value and encourage them to book a call that I'm really excited about that but I I cannot get ChatGPT to be as opinionated as me. It just it just won't it's you know for a whole bunch of reasons. It's probably a good thing that it's not there yet but I'm looking forward to the day the robots become more opinionated than me because then I think it's interesting.

Yeah I mean I I use it a lot for um you know I think a lot of the again a lot of the things that people are using it for is just like oh I'm I'm crushing it on all these SEO articles and it's like yeah I don't I don't know is that's actually going to be true. You know like I think at the end of the day I think it's gonna be more and more and more important that you are a compl like I think it would be better that you're an opinionated asshole and a whole bunch of people don't like you because at least no one will go well chat GPT didn't say all that shit you know that guy said that stuff you know and so it's like you know I I think it's actually one of the things that I see you know there's obviously like you know content marketing you know 101 is like well if you don't want to have to make all the content yourself go and curate the content you know and so you see like the same shit being shared in the same Facebook groups over and over and over again. It's like hey guess what this news is it's like you cross posted that in five different spots not only is that going to become utterly worthless but any thin content that doesn't come from a place of like oh she's a mom of three kids and she's done this and this is why her opinion matters you know like this is why yeah the answer is 12 but here's why that matters you know and um and I just don't see I don't see it getting anywhere close to that anytime soon which is fine. I I mean I'm totally fine with there's a lot of scenarios where it's like I would be totally fine with the robots making the decisions you know like the mistakes that human beings make all the time every single day behind the wheel of their car I hope that the the AI the AI can't get there fast enough in my opinion.

You know but but everybody that's truly concerned about losing their job it's like you you're kind of telling on yourself you know yeah that's right exactly I so here's here's here's my approach to that like and I I'll say this with this disclaimer right no one in our company is at risk of losing their job. So I'm just gonna say that right now okay so anyone anyone listening to this if you happen to listen to this podcast and you work on our team don't panic no one is at risk of losing their job. But I can tell you this yeah the people that I will pay the most attention to on our team are the people that come to me and go, I've replaced I've figured out a way to get AI to do 60% of my work how can I be most valuable to you right now because I have some time on my hands. Right? Yeah exactly they're the people I want to have conversations with. If you're spending eight hours a day smashing the fucking keyboard because you think that's valuable, right? Dude, that the most valuable thing you can do is think. And so get like I'm encouraging all of I'm giving our team full license and full permission to go and find robots to put yourself out of a job disrupt your own role with robots and then come to me and go, what should we do next? Great. Let's sit and think about how we can make better products and do better marketing and serve our clients better than ever because the robots are doing the vacuuming right?

Yeah exactly well and you bring up a great point like um you know I I get again I'm I'm on this at least an hour every single day but but the you know the people that are still gaga and losing their shit about it, you know, a year later um it's like I I constantly, you know, they're like, oh have you seen this have you seen this have you seen this and it's like yeah I keep my finger on as many of these different pulses as possible but what I really want to do is I want to go talk to the brilliant people that I know that are on my team that are connected to my team that are that I'm gonna do business with. I want to go talk to really really smart people because that's where some useful shit is going to shoot out of our out of our heads you know like nothing nothing really valuable it you know is okay yeah you need a nursery rhyme for your four year old you know that incorporates these five names of their favorite stuffed animals brilliant that's exactly what that shit is for but if you're gonna go solve a serious problem or you're gonna go and try and compete with a billion dollar company you need to be talking to brilliant people not brilliant collections of what everybody said on the internet in 2021.

That's right you know exactly uh exactly hey um I could we could I could spend the rest of my life talking about AI dude it's really exciting I actually feel like I mean I just turned 50 last week right and I I feel like this is the most exciting thing that's happened since the internet like I I I'm gonna say this now I will mark my life going there was the I grew up with the rotary dial telephone right uh then there was touch tone telephones then there was the pager then there was the mobile phone then the internet happened and the internet changed everything in my life it's like pre 1994 1995 we had no internet then I had a 7.7k dial up modem and everything changed right AI is the next for me is the next line in the sand we will remember our kids my kids will grow up my kids are six and three now they will grow up thinking AI is just a normal part of life right they won't remember my nephew and my niece who In their early 20s, they don't remember life before the internet, right? They've always had it. So I feel so I'm like a kid in a candy store. I'm so excited about this because I what I see now is the potential the potential is for small business owners to create things that they've never been able to create before. So one of the so for example, there's there's a tool called Opus, which is still in beta. It'll it could be a couple of years before it's in production, but essentially you you describe what you want in terms of a movie scene and it shoot it produces it for you. It shoots it. It's like it's it it's it's like my like Max, who's a videographer here, our creative director, he said the other day, it's only a matter of time before we tell Final Cut or Da Vinci what we want, and it just produces it and edits it, and the colour grade is perfect and the audio is perfect, right? I mean, that gives small businesses the opportunity to produce amazing promotional material where previously they would have had to have a $100,000 budget to produce that stuff. And it's already happened in the voiceover world. I'm a voiceover artist from way back. It's already happened in that world, it's already happened in the music business, right? AI is already producing songs that people can't tell the difference between the AI and the real version. Spotify's business model is completely fucked because their biggest cost is publishing, paying the songwriters the royalties. The only way that company gets wildly profitable and delivers for its shareholders is that the robots write and record and produce the music, which will happen based on our algorithm, right? I'll be tuning into Spotify going, oh my god, this is a great new record from Deathcab for Cutie, and it won't be. It'll be the robots. And then the humans will go on tour and as a cover band, will play that album live around the world and tour and be the rock stars, and there is no royalties and no publishing involved, because that's the biggest expense in that whole thing, right? Uber, biggest expense, the drivers and the electricity at the fuel, right? So driverless electric cars, that's the future. So if you're looking at the future, going, my job is at risk, then you're right, you've outed yourself. Your job is to figure out how to replace yourself with robots so that you can do something more valuable. Yep, 100%.

Yeah, it's it's it's interesting. When um when I went to college in um 1998, I went for computer science um with a minor in psychology. And the reason why is because I was obsessed with AI, and I wanted to go and figure out how to build a brain. So like I had to figure out how the brain works, so that's why I took psychology, and then I was going to take computer science. And um, and it's funny, I was just thinking about this recently. So, do you remember when Ken Jennings and then the other guy played against Deep Blue on Jeopardy? Oh this was about that long ago.

I know of it, but I don't no, I don't remember it, but I've I know of it.

Yeah, so this is literally, I'm pretty sure I was just thinking about this a couple days ago. I think I literally wrote a paper in high school about well, I certainly wrote a paper in high school about um Gary Kasparov losing to a computer in chess. And that was the first time that a grandmaster had ever been beaten by a computer, you know. And and so that's that's how long I mean, I'm dating myself, obviously, in terms of age. Um, but uh like it's interesting to see that it was like, I was so, so, so early. Like AI then was a complete and total joke, you know? And um, and so so what you know, and so one thing that's sort of interesting with that is that um I was thinking about the fact that it's like, yeah, that everything that we have now is very, very, very interesting, except um Chat GPT would lose lose its face on Jeopardy because it's not that fast. And so it's interesting thinking about the technology that they built, the massive rooms full of supercomputers that they built to compete on Jeopardy. You know, like ChatGPT can write you a sonnet, but it might not actually know that MiGs Field was an airport in Chicago, you know, which is actually one of the questions that that that the IBM computer got wrong. But but anyway, like um I'm I'm with you. I'm with you in the sense also that um that I certainly see this as a as a as a kind of defining pinnacle moment, you know, of of we will sort of judge our lives as it was before that happened and then it was after that happened, you know. Um and and it's that big of a deal. And so I think that I think that um it can't be dismissed. It's not it's not gonna it's not gonna take your jobs, it's not gonna eat the world. Um I'm not I'm genuinely not concerned about that. I think it's far more likely that we just melt the polar ice caps and we kill ourselves than the robots are going to come and and decide to kill us all. Yeah, you know, like I usually do.

The sun will swallow the earth before the robots kill us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and there's and there's a lot, I mean, there's a ton of um research that shows that it's like the higher the intelligence you have within a given body of people, um, the lower the crime, the less violent crime happens, you know. So it's like we're going to somehow have this amazing AGI that's the smartest thing that exists in the entire universe, but it's actually gonna be wrong at things that are fundamentally just they happen naturally. Like the more advanced and in intelligence across all kinds of species, like they tend to communicate better, they tend, you know, it's like it's just not it's just gonna fuck those parts up, though. It's gonna be the smartest thing ever, but it's just gonna be a homicidal maniac, you know. It's just like those things are not really correlated, you know. But anyway.

Um, before I let you go, and I am conscious of everyone's time, uh, because I could dude, I could sit here for weeks talking to you about this stuff. But before we go, we do need to talk a little bit about WordPress. Um you were at WordPress uh at WordCamp US recently. What I I feel like, and I'm just gonna be you know transparent here. I'm a WordPress nerd from way back, right? But I've I'm discovering things like we're using high level for all of our marketing automation, our sales automation. We're using high level for our landing pages and our opt-in forms and all that kind of stuff because it's like super fast. There are no fucking plugins to update. I don't have to worry about backups or security or any of that kind of stuff. Uh, and we're still using WordPress for our mothership website and our blog. Um, although, you know, I gotta say, I I've got a personal blog on WordPress that I'm considering moving to another platform just for as an experiment. The platform is framer.com. I discovered it recently. It's I discovered it through Reloom, which is basically a kind of design AI design platform that plugs nicely into Figma, and then I discovered Framer. I kind of feel like WordPress is is um is lacking direction. I feel like it doesn't kind of know what it is. I feel like it's trying to be everything to a lot of different people, and you know, I mean you're in this space more than I am. What like where do you see the future of WordPress and and what is the direction of and where's the direction coming from?

So this is a this is a tricky one. Um I think that I think that Matt Moonwag has an incredibly difficult job. Um and I do not I literally tweeted to at him today and because he's getting blown up about Yeah, they they replicated the um the plugins and themes um catalog onto WordPress.com. Okay, so every page, every URL that's on .org for all the plugins and themes is now also on .com. And so if you search for you know WordFence plugin, you might get the WordPress.com result ahead of the regular WordPress.org. And um, and of course, immediately the the the pitchforks came out, and there's there's plenty of of um lava to be to throw at them in in this regard. Um, but then you also, you know, you've got one guy, I mean, he is literally the benevolent dictator of 44% of the internet, you know. And and and this became that that benevolent dictator phrase that's been thrown around for a number of years, um, that became hyper clear to me at WordCamp US last year in San Diego. Um and it was um that we announced that they had invested in my company, we announced the strategic partnership, and um, and then I watched him at the his state of the word, his keynote there, basically have one side of the room shit on the other side of the room back and forth in the Q ⁇ A. Like basically it was like someone, you know, and this is just my interpretation of things, and obviously, you know, some of these things can can get people very, very riled up, but but it you know, you've got this, you've got this person that's saying, hey, why isn't translations going faster? And then translations is saying, Why isn't why isn't accessibility better and faster, you know, and and you have this one guy who has to kind of sit in the middle of all of that tension and with flawless, you know, public PR training, say, you're right, you're valid, you know, and we're working really hard, but these are big problems, you know, and um, and I think so, in some ways, I think the the biggest challenge is is that he doesn't want to hurt anybody's feelings, and so he can't necessarily really drive the product ahead in a way that that Shopify Shopify just has to do one thing, and they have to do one thing really, really well, you know. Um and and I just think that for as long as he has to not piss anyone off, or at least as long as he tries to do that, um, to make to be to make it the biggest camp possible, I think that we are going to lag in in innovation, you know. Um I mean again, it's like you look at what people are talking about in all of the at the WordCamp talks, you look at what people are talking about in in social media, they're not really talking about the deep underlying technologies. They're not talking about innovation, they're not they're not really talking about how do we use AI to have WordPress websites automatically get unfucked because we've got the logs and we could do like there's 50 different ideas that that I think we could be executing on if we just wanted to do these things. But but unfortunately, we've got 44% of the internet that they feel they feel responsible for, you know, and so they're they're like super hardcore about not having backwards, you know, backwards breaking compatibility changes because maybe six million websites will go down. I'm of the mindset, will we even notice if those six million websites that haven't been updated in five years, will the owners of those websites even notice that their own website went down? You know, I don't know. I think that I think that there's I think that I would be doing different things in his shoes, but uh again, I wouldn't want his job for anything, for any sum of money. Because um, because he is tasked with this this massive, you know, growing and and gnarly ecosystem, good, you know, gnarly good, but also gnarly like non-trivially complicated, you know. Um so where do I think it's all gonna go? I think that mainstream, what I would call sort of vanilla direct-to-consumer WordPress, I do not think is going to really rock the boat for any time, any, you know, any reasonable amount for the next three to five years. I think what you will see is you will see hyper specialization of teams and companies working together to go way down specific rabbit holes to solve things like security, to solve things like performance. And those things will not arrive in core because they will be highly opinionated and because they will actually be a forcing effect that that some people just can't stomach. I mean, we're literally living through that right now with our own company. We've got this security plugin that we've helped this independent security researcher launch out into the world, and there's people that are very, very pissed off that we've taken such a strong stance that it's like, no, no, this is objectively the right way to do it. Um, you've got a bunch of people that want to say, hey, everybody's entitled to their own opinion. And we're more of the mindset of like, yeah, it helps if you have data, though, you know, like bring bring your opinion, we'll bring our opinions and data, and then we'll suss some stuff out, you know. And um, and unfortunately, I think that again, one of the it's sort of the best thing about WordPress is sort of the worst thing about WordPress. The barrier to entry is zero. That's right. And I think that's anyone can sign up. That's right.

I think my observation is that WordPress Matt's tried to kind of straddle the WordPress.com and the WordPress.org horse, right, for a long time. And I just wish that he would go and make WordPress.com a super profitable commercial enterprise and do amazing things over there and let the open source community sort out what's happening at WordPress.org. Um, you know, there have been stories in the past where automatic have spent $100,000 buying a domain name just to have it redirected away from a theme company who weren't GPL compliant and have, you know, uh kicked sponsors out of WordCamps because they're not GPL compliant. It's like, for fuck's sake, just you know, the the the challenge is if you're not like if you're gonna, if you're going to take that stance on WordPress.org, then you have to be actively involved in leading the charge at WordPress.org. I don't think it's um I don't think it's wise to step in and take the moral high ground on a couple of those issues and then just kind of leave the project with no leadership. And I think that's been a real challenge over the years. Um and I I think you're right. I think WordPress, what any innovation at WordPress.org is gonna come from smaller teams, plug-in, team companies, service providers, people that build niche solutions on top of WordPress. It's certainly, if you're sitting around waiting for it to come from the top, I don't think it's gonna happen.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and and again, I think it's I think you're exactly right that in a lot of ways, um, uh one logical pathway forward is you make dot com um just a direct-to-consumer, do do do blocks, do your block editor, do your full site editing, make compete with Wix, compete with Shopify, make the most generic stepped-on thing you possibly can. That's great, you know, and then but let .org leapfrog way past you, you know, and and let the developer community say, you know what, we're fine with a whole bunch of really old sites not having forwards compatibility now with this with this functionality, because we're not going to be able to take advantage of there, are so many technologies that people in WordPress don't even realize like how hamstrung we are, you know, as relates to if you're using a slight, slightly different type of open source software that does nearly the exact same thing, um, you can see things that are just literally things that are like us multiple orders of magnitude, faster, more efficient, you're melting the ice caps less. Like there are there are baked-in design decisions that they made perfect sense 20 years ago when Matt was building the project, when he was when he was knocking it together out of out of um out of B2. Like, that's all fine. But the idea that it's like, no, no, we're still gonna live on those very foundations 20 years later, that doesn't work, you know, and that's doesn't make any sense, exactly. And I and I just think that ultimately, I think that it's I don't believe it's gonna go away. I do I think you can't have something that's 44% of the internet and not, you know, and then somehow lose. But certainly we see stalled growth. You know, we have enough data and we have enough customers in enough countries to see stalled growth in sophisticated markets. Like if you're in the United States, you're in Australia, you're in Europe, you've heard about WordPress, you've you've you've you know, you've been to that puppet show, you've seen the strings, you and and unfortunately, it's a combination of the fact that it's not groundbreaking software, and maybe your agency owner doesn't really know what they're doing, that a whole bunch of people think that WordPress isn't actually as powerful as it as it can be, you know, because it's like, well, I'm on my third agency now and my site doesn't rank and my pages run like shit, and my stuff's constantly going down because I'm hosted on EIG, and you know, and and a lot of the bad stuff of WordPress uh that has nothing to do with WordPress rubs off on WordPress. Thankfully, you've got hyper-developing economies in Latin America and APAC where people are just now really becoming internet, you know, civilians that like businesses are getting modernized in these regions, and that's where I see the bulk of growth in um in WordPress. And that's why I think it's really cool that they have actually finally leaned in and there was, you know, post-COVID, there was the first um first WordCamp Asia. And if I was, if I was mad, I would be pouring a lot of dollars and a lot of effort into developing regions because that's where your next however many percent is going to come from. Um if you want to capture, I mean the thing about it is is if you want to capture the imagination and the interest of kick-ass developers here in the United States, for example, right now, you need to be doing something in the blockchain or you need to be doing something with AI. Because 100%. You know, a shit hot developer that works at Stanford isn't thinking, you know what, I'd like to sort of work in PHP, but I'd like to work on PHP that like isn't really even valid PHP. You know, like I want to work on arguably antiquated PHP. You know, yeah, okay, great. Your blockchain, you know, is that's interesting, but no, no, no. I'm gonna I'm gonna work on the loop. You know, like I'm sorry, that's just not what's happening, you know.

So that's right, exactly. Uh man, we could I could do this for days, and we will again. We'll get you back for another episode at some point because you know we could wax lyrical about all sorts of topics. Um hey, where can people so I want to thank you for your time and your generosity coming to hang out with us here on the agency hour? Where can people reach out and say hello and thank you for this and getting get in touch?

Yeah, so um gridpain.com, uh, go scroll down to the bottom of the page. You don't even need to sign up and get an account. Join our Facebook group. That is where there's tons more value. That's where some of our, you know, all of our biggest power users, that's where they hang out, that's where we congregate, that's where I share my random musings if if you want more of those. Um, and you can literally tag us there and ask questions and learn new shit about WordPress. So that's probably the best bet. I'm trying to get good at Twitter, but I just love it. I don't have the bandwidth for another social network at this point. So yeah.

Xx.com, whatever it's like. Yeah, yeah, I don't even know what to call it. So yeah. Yeah. Uh well, yeah. So join the Facebook group, go and hang out at self-managed WordPress, it's the Facebook group. Go and hang out there and and tag Patrick in a post and uh start the conversation there. Get involved and uh go and check out Gridpain. Uh, we don't have an affiliate link, so just go check it out, gridpain.com. And um thank you once again for spending time with us here on the Agency Our Podcast. Appreciate you, brother, and look forward to hanging out again soon. Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Troy. This was a blast. Um, I'll I'll come back anytime. Thanks for listening to the Agency Hour Podcast and a massive thanks to Patrick for joining us. I always love catching up with you and nerding out with you about all things tech and marketing and hosting in WordPress. Okay, folks, don't forget to subscribe and please share this with anyone who you think may need to hear it. It really helps us spread the message and get this podcast into the ears that it needs to be in. I'm Troy Dean, and remember, friends, don't let friends use cheap hosting.