Marketing a WordPress Product Live: Session 9

Transcript ↓

In this podcast episode, Michelle Frechette and Corey Maass explore the intricacies of managing online communities within the WordPress ecosystem. MIchelle shares insights from their involvement with a Mastermind group and moderating a Facebook group for LearnDash, emphasizing the importance of nurturing community connections. Corey discusses their experiences with various online platforms, including email groups, and the pursuit of the most effective platforms for WordPress community engagement, such as Twitter and Reddit. Together, they delve into the challenges of maintaining active and engaging communities, highlighting the significance of platform choice and community care in fostering a thriving WordPress network.

Top Takeaways:

• Embrace Growth and Change: Corey and Michelle discuss how their approaches to work and life have evolved over time. They acknowledge that as they grow older, they become more selective about where they invest their time and energy, focusing on what feels right for them personally and professionally.
• Authentic Engagement: They emphasize the importance of authentic engagement on social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit. Rather than adhering to rigid posting schedules or following trends blindly, they advocate for genuine interaction and contribution within communities that align with their interests and values.
• Community Support: Both Corey and Michelle highlight the supportive and inclusive nature of the WordPress community. They contrast this with negative experiences they’ve had in other professional settings, emphasizing the value of finding a supportive network of peers.
• Balancing Work and Enjoyment: Despite their professional responsibilities, Corey and Michelle prioritize enjoying life and having fun. They acknowledge the importance of self-care and finding moments of joy, whether it’s attending a party or indulging in a favorite beverage, even while maintaining a busy schedule.

Mentioned in the show:

• Facebook
• Discord
• Slack
• Twitter
• Reddit
• LinkedIn
• Beaver Builder
• WordCamps
• WP Accessibility Day
• WP Coffee Talk
• WP Motivate
• Ben Layer
• Asana 
• Zoom
• WP Speakers
• 10Up
• Cory Miller

You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:

• Corey Maass
• Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status Draft podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis.

Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS.

Transcript

Michelle Frechette (00:00:04) – It’s taking its own sweet time.

Corey Maass (00:00:12) – Oh. Now streaming.

Michelle Frechette (00:00:14) – There we are. Hello. Hello. Another Tuesday.

Corey Maass (00:00:21) – Another Tuesday.

Michelle Frechette (00:00:23) – And I didn’t do any of the things I said I was going to do this week. So. 

Corey Maass: Me neither. Yes.

Michelle Frechette: Like I’m feeling guilty. I want to cancel. But no, I don’t want to cancel. I’m just like, I didn’t post the socials this week. I didn’t do any of the other stuff I said I was going to do. Life, man. Life just got in the way this week. 

Corey Maass: Oh exactly. Exactly. 

Michelle Frechette: So it’s a new week. We can try again.

Corey Maass (00:00:48) – Right! And that’s. Yeah. And I ten minutes ago I, I, I saw a message I’m, you know some thread updated and I saw two two messages from Post Status and I was like she’s cancelling. Yes. And then you didn’t. And I was like, and I’m not either because life happens. And and this is what honestly like part of what’s fun about a live podcast and doing it doing it consistently just showing up.

Corey Maass (00:01:15) – But zero days.

Michelle Frechette (00:01:18) – And the other thing, for me at least I hope for you also, is when you’re partnering with somebody that you can trust to accept the fact that you have off week sometimes and that you know, every idea isn’t going to be the best idea, and that the things that you say you’ll do sometimes fall prey to life and other things. So. Yeah. So before we even get started, let’s just get the let’s just get the whole, I want to say eruption. It’s not the right word, but what do we eclipse? Let’s get the eclipse thing out of the way. I just have to say, living in the path of totality should have been freaking awesome.

Corey Maass (00:01:59) – It should have been convenient is what you really want to say.

Michelle Frechette (00:02:02) – And awesome though I had, I had my cameras, I had everything ready to go like I have. I have the right screens, like screens, whatever the filters for my camera, so I wouldn’t blow out my lenses like all of that.

Michelle Frechette (00:02:13) – And it mattered not because all it was was cloud cover. I am the sea. I live in the Seattle of the East Rochester, New York. You cannot count on the weather, period.

Corey Maass (00:02:24) – Right. We when I, I went to school in Binghamton, two hours south east of you. two, three hours, three hours maybe. 

Michelle Frechette (00:02:35) – Two and a half and. We’ll, we’ll.Split the difference.

Corey Maass (00:02:37) – Depending on how fast Michelle drives, how leaded her foot is. But yeah, when, when I did the, like, walking tour. Welcome to campus. They said, you know, we I mean, you you’re a college student. You generally always bring a backpack. And I said always, always, always bring an umbrella. Get one of the little ones, stick it in your backpack. You’ll go through two a year. They said Binghamton. And I think it’s the same valley that goes north and west, basically, they said. We get more precipitation than Seattle, like it’s one of the highest in the country.

Corey Maass (00:03:14) – And so and sure enough, and I actually think it worked out great for me because I love like I love gloomy, gray, rainy, you know, like that high pressure like, energizes me.

Michelle Frechette (00:03:28) – So I don’t like it during the only eclipse I’ll probably well see in totality in my lifetime, but. Oh. Well, but I was. I was angry scrolling Tik Tok. I don’t want to see your. I don’t want to see your eclipse photos. I don’t want to see it. Stop it.

Corey Maass (00:03:46) – Mine would have looked totally different.

Michelle Frechette (00:03:50) – That’s right. I wanted to see it in person anyway. No, but you’re. But you’re right. So we have the Great Lakes make up a huge part of what’s of the weather system of the northern part of the United States. And Rochester, Syracuse, Binghamton. We are at the tail end of that. So when the weather, as we know, weather flows from west to east, typically speaking, it picks up all of that precipitation and all of the moisture in the air over the Great Lakes.

Michelle Frechette (00:04:16) – Then it deposits it right where we live. And then just south of here also are the the Finger Lakes. I think it’s funny. They call them the Finger Lakes. There’s like 12 of them. I don’t know anybody with 12 fingers on their hands, but, Oh, look at you. 12 fingers no. but yeah, there’s just the weather systems around here are unpredictable at best. So anyway. What’s that? Something biting you?

Corey Maass (00:04:43) – Something is biting me. Yeah. So we’re we’re in. I put the screen, we have a backdoor that we leave open, and I, we have one of those, like walk through it, screen doors. And so that put that up today but not soon enough because we’ve flies and mosquitoes are all going crazy. And yeah. And they’re all confused too. So they’re just like attacking.

Michelle Frechette (00:05:05) – Am I going in or out or where? Oh, you’re the new buffet. Thank you I like this. For sure. Oh my goodness. So one of the things that I, that I thought we could chat about a little bit is tending to community.

Michelle Frechette (00:05:21) – So, I am in a new Mastermind group that is, we met for the first time today about community and how you build community. And for many WordPress products, whether it be hosting or plugins or themes, that words can’t come to me fast enough today. Facebook is where most people turn to, to kind of build that group because there’s already a built in audience. Whether you use Facebook like you used to, whether you are posting, you know, your meals and whatever on there, like people used to do, or you just because there’s a built in audience there, it’s not an additional platform that people have to locate. Seems to be the place where a lot of communities kind of come to, to rest for all the different WordPress products. Although, that being said, there are also Discord channels. There are also Slack groups. There are other places that communities can meet. And we do have a Facebook group. And I have been remiss at posting in it. I don’t know how often you posted it.

Michelle Frechette (00:06:29) – I’m not seeing it come up in my feed, so I need to actually remind myself I’ll make a little tickler on my calendar every day to kind of pop in and maybe post something, share one of our blog posts or, you know, just maybe the the link to what we’re doing here or things like that, just to kind of keep it relevant, keep it fresh, and maybe keep people thinking about joining it. Yeah. So I was just thinking maybe there’s a little bit we could talk about that. What are what are your thoughts on community groups?

Corey Maass (00:07:00) – Yeah. The our speaking specifically about our Facebook group. I view it as early days and so I’m kind of not I don’t worry so much about it like it’s on the list. So if I were not now when I do a release I write up a little blog post, even if it’s just a couple of sentences, or whenever we publish an article that goes out to all the socials, it ends up going on the OMGIMG Facebook page. And then I also usually drop it in that and it might get a like or something, but it’s like, yeah, to me it’s it’s about.

Corey Maass (00:07:38) – But it’s a land grab and or putting your flag in the ground or whatever the metaphor is, and then and then adding it to the rotation, essentially. Right. Like and you can.

Michelle Frechette (00:07:52) – See you’re still getting eaten alive.

Corey Maass (00:07:54) – It went from my neck to my leg. This is getting weird.

Michelle Frechette (00:07:58) – I wonder what it is. 

Corey Maass (00:07:59) – At some point I. I wound up with, like, hanging fruit flies in my office, which I.

Michelle Frechette (00:08:03) – Oh, I hate those.

Corey Maass (00:08:05) – Kill fast as I, you know. but they don’t we, we worried that they were fleas, but they I identified them as not fleas. That doesn’t mean that they’re not biting some other biting something. And then.

Michelle Frechette (00:08:19) – Gnats I think fruit flies must be in the gnat family.

Corey Maass (00:08:22) – Right. And then springtime. Now they’re going crazy and they just want to eat me or something anyway. But yeah, it’s funny because like, okay, so I’ve been online since the 90s and was always like immediately was drawn to the community aspect of it and me being me, I am a leader or at least a person who will just take over if somebody, you know, drop in.

Corey Maass (00:08:49) – If the group doesn’t have a leader, I’m like, okay, fine, let me lead at least a little. 

Michelle Frechette (00:08:53) – I’ll do it. Yeah.

Corey Maass (00:08:55) – Yeah and so I’ve often, often at various points in my history on the, on the internet, like I’ve been part of, you know, moves and MUDs and, big email groups and then, okay, I just saw it fly by. And then, like, Yahoo groups were a big thing for a while. and I remember.

Michelle Frechette (00:09:21) – Oh yeah.

Corey Maass (00:09:22) – Like, I wound up, you know, and they’d come in as emails and they found up just being threaded emails and some of them, I think you could go like Yahoo eventually updated the UI, and then they kind of drop support for it. But, I wound up taking over. So like, I used to ride a scooter and so I wound up taking over the, the very large email group for the type of scooter that I rode, which meant moderating all the messages that came through and all that stuff.

Corey Maass (00:09:52) – And then, for better or worse, within a couple of years it had been online for many years. But then within a couple of years, the US lost their one distributor and and and just traffic just immediately plummeted.

Michelle Frechette (00:10:05) – Plummeted. Yeah.

Corey Maass (00:10:06) – All right, all right. Whatever. You know but it was I’ve, I’ve had that kind of experience a few times where I’ve just sort of taken over things or I’m, I’m very like, if I’m a fan of something, I, I do best by getting involved. And so, you know, if there’s an online community that I see languishing or if there’s a big Facebook group, like, I and obviously I’m not always accepted, but like, what was it? Oh, Advanced WP run by Matt Cromwell I think. Right. Or folks. And so.

Michelle Frechette (00:10:38) – Yeah.

Corey Maass (00:10:39) – At one point I was on there a lot and it seemed like there was a a backlog. And so I messaged him and was like, hey, I’m happy to be a moderator.

Corey Maass (00:10:49) – He said, no, no, no, we’re good. You know, we have a dozen people coming in. And then it was fine. But like that kind of thing, like I just tend to get involved. So, but I’ve watched because of because of overall my involvement. Like I’ve watched a lot of communities come and go. A lot of it’s about moderation. A lot of it’s about there’s the hardest part, of course, is the the Catch 22 of if nobody’s there, that nobody’s going to join. So then nobody’s there. And and at this point, I think I do better with, we’ve talked about this in the, in a number of contexts, but I do better now being patient and just going, okay, this is going to grow over time. We’re just kind of putting it here for now so that it’s there. And, you know, I think we’ve got a dozen people in the Facebook group and it’s like over time somebody will join, somebody will join, you know, two years from now, we’ll go, oh, wait, wow.

Corey Maass (00:11:45) – There’s there’s 300 people here, you know.

Michelle Frechette (00:11:49) – Yeah.

Corey Maass (00:11:49) – And it’s and it becomes an opportunity like I think that’s the.

Michelle Frechette (00:11:52) – Yeah I agree I think even a new garden where you haven’t even planted anything still needs some tending, right? There’s like, I’m not going to say weeding like weeding people out, but you have to keep the soil fertile. You have to kind of, if you keep reminding people like why they’re in there and that kind of thing. So. Excuse me. I’m going to make it, one of my jobs to post in there at least once a week. More often, if I think about it, just to keep it relevant and keep it on people’s radar kind of thing. You know, and if we run any sales or things like that, make sure we post in there and just, you know, all of those kinds of things. I’ve seen a lot of Facebook groups, come and go, but I’ve seen some come and really just like it’s amazing. Like there’s our group that I’m one of the moderators on, and then there’s like the Learndash group that has almost 30,000 people, and that’s a huge job to try to manage.

Michelle Frechette (00:12:48) – Right? I’m not the only person who’s moderating an admining in there, but I’m one of like four. And so on the daily basis, I’m having to approve people in and deny people who, you know, we put questions and I don’t and I have to check ours. I don’t remember what questions there are, but I have questions that I put in groups when I manage them, so that I know that the people who are joining the group are legitimate. Right? So like so for Learndash, like one of the questions is like, you know, we have this goal. Do you agree? you know, and then it was like, what’s tell us one of the sites that you are building on. Or and they can say WordPress because at least that’s an, you know, they don’t know yet or whatever, but that’s an actually legitimate question. And then like, will you agree to the questions? And so people will write things like, and I know it’s bots, don’t get me wrong.

Michelle Frechette (00:13:32) – I mean, I’m, I’m not dumb. Right. But it’ll be like hi admin. Yes, admin. Let me in like, sorry you did not pass the human test. You will not be admitted to this group because we don’t want you spamming your Louis Vuitton purses and whatever else in this group. Right. And, and just kind of monitoring what people post. And we do have the ability for people to report posts. And so I see that on almost a daily basis, because one of our rules is you can’t offer 1 to 1 assistance, like it’s not there for you to build your personal brand. It’s there to be a resource. And so I don’t see everything, but people will report them. And then I have to like delete those comments and put that person on, on an approval like they can’t post unless I approve them and just things like that, you know, or sometimes people will just post. Videos to something that’s completely unrelated or their fundraising page or just whatever. So, you know, we’re really cautious about making sure that the integrity of the group stays where it needs to be.

Michelle Frechette (00:14:31) – And so that’s what I’d like for our group grow as we as we grow the product too. And so, you know, I’ll be what is, what’s the nursery rhyme about? Like with, with silver bells and cockle shells and I’ll be that, Mary Quite Contrary, but I won’t be contrary. But I’ll be like tending the garden in there a little bit from time to time, too.

Corey Maass (00:14:54) – Well, it’s I mean, it’s we’re we’re still at the spaghetti on the wall phase and.

Michelle Frechette (00:15:00) – Oh, sure.

Corey Maass (00:15:01) – And there’s also the. There’s always the quandary about. There. There are platforms where our audience is likely to be. It’s like it took me years to find, like I always had, not always, obviously, but for for a decade had a Twitter account, barely used it, couldn’t figure out how to use it, decided like at some point arbitrarily like, oh, I’m going to start using this and get more active with it and forced myself to just at least once a day, like skim it.

Corey Maass (00:15:34) – And and over time the algorithm got better. But also I was like, oh, there’s the WordPress community is here, right? Rather than Facebook, like there are WordPress communities there, but an open, generally helpful WordPress world exists.

Michelle Frechette (00:15:51) – Larger community. Yeah, like the community at large.

Corey Maass (00:15:55) – More so than like Reddit as crickets. Like those people. On rare occasion post. And it’s and I, I knew that because years ago when I got on Reddit, I subscribe to all the WordPress things and then forgot all about it because literally none of it ever showed up. Because people, that’s just not where WordPresser was go. And, and I, I like Twitter, I like Reddit, but like, if I have no idea if WordPress is represented on LinkedIn and I will never find out because I couldn’t make myself go on LinkedIn like you offered me $1 million. And so I think it’s, you know, that’s that’s the thing, right? Like, you have to find the, the platform that works for you and the cadence that works for you.

Corey Maass (00:16:42) – And then it’s also that that’ll change over time. And so, you know, if you post it even once a month just to keep the thing alive and obviously me too. I, I think that that’s fine. Now, 17 people warrant a post a month, 170 a post a week, and 1700. These are hard and fast numbers. People write this down. But 1700 people, you know, and it’s and it and that’s I mean, that’s the thing we’ve found about internet community is that it fuels itself and and then it needs more friction. It needs more moderation or approval. It needs more time and attention. Excuse me. But it’s it is interesting. Like different products. pushing people towards the .org support or, I’m a big fan of Beaver Builder. They push people towards, like, their Slack. and there are a number of experts that are not officially related to Beaver Builder in that Slack, but that will jump on your question and try to answer. Just phenomenal. Different from I recently joined their Facebook group, which is pretty active, but a lot more, beginner.

Corey Maass (00:18:02) – And, you know, the topics differ. And so it’s also just fascinating to see, like if they’re paying attention to this, like they, they’ve, they’ve got different, types of customers on different platforms, you know, and and it’s just been interesting to watch and experience that one too.

Michelle Frechette (00:18:23) – Yeah. And you know, it’s interesting. So like some of the groups that, you know, that we have for StellarWP so like Learndash and Give and you know, just the events calendar, all of those different groups, it takes more than one person to manage it too. Right. So like I am in there from a community and marketing like bent. Right. So I’m not we’re not marketing in there. I’m not saying that. But like with a mind of marketing and learning from the people and how can we provide.

Corey Maass (00:18:52) – In there as marketing and marketing as community.

Michelle Frechette (00:18:55) – Right. But but I can’t answer the questions that are that are devs can answer. Right. And we don’t offer support in the community.

Michelle Frechette (00:19:05) – So if you come to the committee with a support question, I’m going to respond and say, hey, these are the two places where you can get, depending on what it is, right? Learndash you have to have it’s premium only. So here’s the support page. Go open a ticket. Right. Because this is not for that. If you’re asking other people how to do things and best practices, great. That’s 100% what you should be doing in that group. But then also every Monday, I welcome the new people to the group and say, hey, show us your project. What are you working on? And then once a month, I offer, I ask for a show and tell like, show us your anybody. Just show us your page. What you know. What is your installation of Learndash look like? What is your course look like? And then also I give people an opportunity to self-promote. So if you have an add on, if you have if you’re building sites for other people, like this is the thread that you can do that in so that we manage 30,000 people that stream.

Corey Maass (00:19:53) – Yeah.

Michelle Frechette (00:19:53) – Yes.

Corey Maass (00:19:54) – At least that pressure once a month in a controlled way rather than it being a barrage of.

Michelle Frechette (00:19:59) – Yes, exactly. Yeah. But again, that’s the a difference in size 30,000 is behemoth right. That’s a lot. And that’s only a third of like what some of these other groups have which have even more than that. But then you know, yeah 20 people, that’s that’s smaller, that’s it’s easier to manage. There’s lower expectations in a group that size. And nobody’s self-promoting in there. So yeah. So it just as it grows, there are different considerations to take into account, and how those kinds of things need to be managed. Like if somebody asked me open graph questions, I have such a cursory understanding of all that, I’d be like, hey, Corey, I got a question for you to answer in the group, you know, kind of thing. But if somebody was like, hey, can you show me how to use it? I’d be like, hey, let’s hop on a Zoom call.

Michelle Frechette (00:20:44) – I will show you how to use OMGIMG. And so there’s there’s different opportunities for different people to be involved. I guess it’s part of what I’m saying. Yeah.

Corey Maass (00:20:54) – So then the, the other aspect of community is real human beings.

Michelle Frechette (00:20:58) – Yes.

Corey Maass (00:20:59) – And we’ve talked often about WordCamps and I’m. I’m very smoothly and sneakily changing the subject slightly.

Michelle Frechette (00:21:09) – It’s all good.

Corey Maass (00:21:09) – But umI talked to Cory.

Michelle Frechette (00:21:17) – Miller.

Corey Maass (00:21:18) – Miller. Within that part I got, I was trying to remember when, sometime in the last week.

Michelle Frechette (00:21:24) – I knew, you know, his name. I was, I was saying for anybody else listening.

Corey Maass (00:21:28) – Cory Miller, the other Cory, the other Cory M yeah. But, You’re taking, basically taking your suggestion and running with it. We I think we are going to do a propose a talk at WordCamp US because they just opened up, submissions and doing the building, building and public level and and so we’ve started working on an outline like basically we jumped on a quick call, did a brain dump and.

Corey Maass (00:22:03) – Which I have to keep reminding my. I keep looking at it and going, oh, like I have to do this whole talk like, no, you don’t. You need to do a paragraph.

Michelle Frechette (00:22:10) – Yes.

Corey Maass (00:22:11) – And then when they say yes, you can you do the whole talk.

Michelle Frechette (00:22:14) – Yes.

Corey Maass (00:22:15) – But but yeah. So talking about like the.

Michelle Frechette (00:22:18) – Please let me read it before you submit it so I can give some ideas. 

Corey Maass (00:22:22) – 100%, 100%. You and I was honestly thinking like you might even be involved or be interesting to. So they had asked for. So there’s regular talks 45 minutes. There’s like the fry your brain talks that are 90 minutes or something, and there’s fireside chats, which is shorter, that kind of thing. And so we were. Looking at all of it. And actually, I think we might say like this, you know, a sentence for each, like, if this is a regular talk, then these are the topics we’ll cover. But I also thought it would be interesting to be, I mean, just because Cory and I are both such talkers and you as well, that it might be cool to do even a before and after or a like Corey and Cory do the ideation, and then Corey and Michelle talk about the marketing and where we’re at now and what struggles been and stuff like that.

Michelle Frechette (00:23:16) – I love that.

Corey Maass (00:23:17) – I just I think that’d be fun. I think it’d be interesting if it was more than one person. And we all seem to like that idea and. And I think fun too for the people who have seen us talk like this to then have us on stage, you know, not quite doing a live version of the Cory, Corey and Michelle launch a product in public, but you know.

Michelle Frechette (00:23:41) – Something along those lines. 

Corey Maass: Yeah. You know, so.

Michelle Frechette:  I think that’s a great idea for sure. Absolutely. And I’ve been thinking more about like, podcasts and things like that too. Right. So I’m also one of the organizers. (Dog barks off screen) Oh, she doesn’t like what I have to say.

Corey Maass (00:23:57) – No, she, she found she just found the open window.

Michelle Frechette (00:24:00) – So I thought maybe that maybe she found the fruit flies. Excuse me. No, but I was. I’m also one of the organizers for, WP Accessibility Day. And so I’m working with the organizers there and different podcasters to try to get us, not me, but, you know, the organizers on different podcasts to talk about WP Accessibility Day.

Michelle Frechette (00:24:24) – And so as I’m building that list out and, you know, pitching to people, I pitched all the time for stellar stuff to I’d like to start to get you on some podcasts to talk more about OMGIMG, like you were already on WP Constellations at Stellar WP, which was awesome. But I have another podcast called WP Coffee Talk and we need to get you on that one because, you know, I mean, it’s a go. I, I’m the only one who has to greenlight anything over there, but I will.

Corey Maass (00:24:50) -But I will be drinking tea I apologize.

Michelle Frechette (00:24:51) – That’s I’m drinking tea right now actually in my my Paige Lee Yeti which. Oh. Wrong way. Yeah. so, you can I have people drink bourbon, like, you could drink whatever you want, I don’t care.

Corey Maass (00:25:05) – Just depends on when we record. I only drink at bourbon after 8 a.m..

Michelle Frechette (00:25:08) – So there you go. Well, my coffee talk is always outside the normal business hours, because I don’t do that during work hours. So. Bourbon it is.

Michelle Frechette (00:25:17) – We’ll both be drinking bourbon in our mugs or whatever you want, but, Yeah, let’s get that lined up. I do have, 16, I think, yeah, 16, episodes that I’m hurriedly putting out to a week right now. So we’ll be catching up on those. There’s no rush, of course, but we’ll get you on that one for sure. And then I’m going to follow up on a bunch of different other podcasts to see if I can get you to be talking about things, you know, more than one place. So, that would be good.

Corey Maass (00:25:46) – Yeah. I’m recording one with, Ben Lair WP. He’s starting a new one.

Michelle Frechette (00:25:53) – Did he name it yet? I don’t think he named it yet. Did he?

Corey Maass (00:25:55) – He, he asked on Twitter. and people were like obvious Lair is a pretty fantastic because he also I think he, he doesn’t. He’s like, we’re just going to talk. I don’t, you know, we have we have some things in common. One of them is WordPress.

Corey Maass (00:26:12) – Go. I also think we like we’ve we’ve talked he’s, English and like, we’ve connected a bit about English-isms and language and, and in a fun way. And, and we can, we can both get a little outrageous with, with jokes and stuff. And so I’m curious to see just how off the rails it potentially goes.

Michelle Frechette (00:26:38) – I want to know how much swearing, how much swearing there’s going to be. I know he likes to sling a few words here and there. and I do too, but I try to keep it PG for the most part, but it depends on which podcast, quite honestly. But yeah, when we started recording, WP Motivate Kathy Anthony, we weren’t sure if we, if we should say the S-word or not. So we just kept calling it compost. But now we actually swear.

Corey Maass (00:27:09) – Which then becomes its own thing.You know. 

Michelle Frechette (00:27:11) – It does. It’s a kind of life. It’s of its own. Absolutely.

Corey Maass: Nice. That’s awesome. 

Michelle Frechette (00:27:17) – So I’m going to make a list and, you know, I’ll talk to you offline about those kinds of things because I don’t think that other people I don’t think all podcasts want people just suddenly converging on them. I think people need to do a little bit of their own research on some things. but I’ll, I’ll come up with a list for you and we’ll talk through, you know, how we can and when we when we can and whether we should and those kinds of things. Because not every podcast lends itself to plug in conversations, right? Some of them just aren’t about that at all. But yeah. so we’ll we’ll take a look through that kind of thing. But if people are listening WPPodcasts.com is a Hero Press website that does link, any podcast that wants to be in their WordPress related. Of course. It’ll pick up you can, you can submit your own with your RSS feed and automatically pick up your episodes, which is how it’s getting the episodes that I’ve been putting out.

Corey Maass (00:28:05) – Nice, I was actually just wondering if there wasn’t a single repository, which of course there is for sure.

Michelle Frechette (00:28:13) – Yeah, I knew all about that one for sure. But yeah. So I think that getting on some podcast and then also like, you know, like we talked about before, doing some talks at different, Meetups and if we can find some more online Meetups and I haven’t done any, I’m going to make a note here to online Meetups and see. And you’re already on WPSpeakers.com, aren’t you? I think you yeah, I thought you were on there already so.

Corey Maass (00:28:36) – I should probably revisit it. 

Corey Maass (00:28:38) – I’m doing a lot of revisiting. Like there’s there’s things that I’ve thrown myself on or at or and then like, I’m starting to look for, more freelance work and so redone, like looking at my website some and I apparently have matured? So like, my, my redesigns are a little more staid or traditional than they have been previously. And I’ve now put my like not even, even before starting to look for more work again lately. Like for OMG I’m finally believing that that there’s value on LinkedIn.

Corey Maass (00:29:18) – I don’t see it, but like there are people there and so it’s like OMG I should have a page there. And if nothing else, I needed a page to test that our images work on LinkedIn and how LinkedIn represents images and stuff like that. But so I’m, I’m going through a phase of being boring online, and it hurts me because that’s.

Michelle Frechette (00:29:41) – Like, that’s my life. That’s my life you’re talking about, you know. 

Corey Maass (00:29:45) – No, but you. Like I mean, we keep talking about the classified that we took out two weeks ago, and it’s like being creative with and and so like my like. The gelform.com me as a developer. I went from a slightly interesting, albeit dated design to a very like business card design. But like even me as a musician right now, the sight is not interesting. Hurts my soul is like I got my first job. Like, you know, in the 90s because. Everything was table based and there were no rules like my primary site was this.

Corey Maass (00:30:24) – I wanted it to be like this. Choose your own adventure. Like half, I don’t know, exploring caves and half like abstract art. And so you would. And I just took all this weird abstract photography that I had and scanned it, and then, like, tried to make their way back in the day, there was a website called Hell.com that I think is still online, but at the time in the 90s it was an experimental website. They would do, I don’t know, once a month or something. They would do, they called installations. And so like I remember and and playing with web tech and so they the one I remember was there was a button like, you just go and it was like clickbait clicked it and it proceeded to pop ups open to pop ups until it crashed your computer 

Michelle Frechette: On purpose?

Corey Maass: On purpose. Like they were just bland and they were all just blank. And it was just it was just an experiment in coding and in tech and, you know, and it’s like this, this is obnoxious, but in the context of art and experimentation, if you know what’s good, what it is or what’s coming or whatever, it’s it’s fascinating.

Corey Maass (00:31:35) – They had a bunch of stuff like that that was like just weird and like, I didn’t want to ruin anybody’s computer, but, but I hid things on the site, and you had to scroll sideways instead of up and down, which was, you know, and within a not before iframe, so within a frame of a frame. And so, you know, just fun and interesting, especially because it’s like talking about me as a musician, like, this should be different, not just a hero. And then three things telling you about how cool of a musician I am, like, anyway. And I and I keep that in mind. Now I’m just ranting. But I keep that in mind when like designing product, you always want it to be clean, simple, fast, efficient, like all that. There’s a there’s a time and a place, but you can also get creative with fonts or, you know, it’s like a beautiful design is a beautiful design. And I’m seeing that less and less on the internet.

Corey Maass (00:32:34) – So looking for that. But anyway, all that to say, like, yeah, doing doing more boring things online except for where appropriate.

Michelle Frechette (00:32:44) – There you go. Now that makes sense. And it’s and like we talk about it’s about personality and that your brand can have a fun personality. It doesn’t have to be. Typical marketing, right? Like we think of. It doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t have to fit the cookie cutter of what every plugin page looks like or every plugin site looks like. I mean, it should still be accessible. It should still have good, you know, contrast, like all of the things that make it accessible to everybody. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be playful. It doesn’t mean it can’t have, you know, a personality. There’s another, company that I do, I manage their Twitter account for, and I post jokes on it sometimes, and I make my own jokes for it and memes and things like that. In between all the stuff that we talk about, why their company is a good company, but it definitely has its own personality, and it reaches people in a different way than some of its competitors do, which is just it’s fun.

Michelle Frechette (00:33:44) – And if you’re not having fun, like, why do it right?

Corey Maass (00:33:47) – There’s, a pretty well known, DJ and musician that I follow. And he mostly posts about gigs or, you know, he does some acting. And so here I am on set. And so it’s it’s fun and interesting to follow him anyway. I love his music. I admire what he’s accomplished and he’s done it all without being very commercial. And then of course I, I envy the hell out of him. I wish I was him, he’s a rock star and I wanted to be yadda yadda. But he also loves dad jokes. And so he actually wound up putting out a book of dad jokes under the name of himself as a DJ and musician. And so there’s actually an I ordered it. I have no idea where it is now that I think about it. Maybe it was a PDF. So, but there’s like there’s even a bunch of the dad jokes only make sense if you’re a DJ. Like things that you wouldn’t know.

Corey Maass (00:34:44) – Okay. So you ready. He has his, he posted on Tuesday. He said I was surprised to see that a lot of teachers wouldn’t let their students go out and watch the eclipse. They were trying to keep the pupils safe.

Michelle Frechette (00:34:59) – I actually saw that today. 

Corey Maass: Did you?

Michelle Frechette: Someplace else. Yeah. That was a good one, though. It was a good one because it caught me off guard. The first time I heard it, I was like, oh, I see what you did there. Absolutely.

Corey Maass (00:35:09) – Yeah. And he like, I they’re not all original and a lot of them are terrible. That’s half the fun. But I know that he I know that he thinks of them all himself. Whether they already exist in nature is a different thing. But anyway.

Michelle Frechette (00:35:21) – Oh, yeah.

Corey Maass (00:35:22) – But I admire that. And like I, for better or worse, I reply and and sometimes pile on with the puns or, if I come up, if I think of a good dad joke that I think he’d appreciate, then I go and I tag him, get the appropriate rolling of eyes as responses.

Corey Maass (00:35:39) – But but yeah, I love that. Like it’s personality. It’s yourself. And it’s like that’s I’m. I love this medium, I honestly am I’m thrilled that and flattered that Ben reached out to me to to be on one of the first ones. But it’s like this is this is how I work best. Like with focus. Because if we’re if we’re just chatting or having a Twitter conversation, like, I get distracted so easily and then the conversation falters, whereas like, this is a focused conversation. And then I’m also the type of, more askew extrovert. But, I’m that stereotype of, I think, best out loud. And so this helps me, you know.

Michelle Frechette (00:36:23) – Absolutely. I am sharing a site with you. In the chat here, which I can share, I can share my screen and show people too. This is one of my favorite places to go because you can find, like, what are the hot memes, right? Or things that make sense. 

Corey Maass (00:36:41) – They really are. These are all the ones. Like I recognize them immediately.

Michelle Frechette (00:36:44) – Yeah. And like, you could add a caption. So like over here for this top one, we could be like sites that don’t use OMGIMG in the bottom would be sites that do use them. Now that’s boring, right? Like just just do it that way would be boring. But there are a lot of really fun ones. Like I can’t even think of it, right? Like, this one here, right? I bet he’s thinking of, you know, about other women. And he’s like, I wonder how much better my featured images could be with OMGIMG, like that kind of stuff that it’s like, it’s it’s a little bit of a groaner. It’s not that unexpected, but it’s way more fun than just, hey, here’s our latest blog post thing, right? And so I do these like, I think for this one, I don’t know what that says. For this one, I did something like, buying tickets to WordCamp US or WordCamp Buffalo.

Michelle Frechette (00:37:35) – And then the other one was like buying tickets to hashtag WC BUF as like they’re the same picture, like, you know, kind of just silly, stupid things like that. They just make people laugh. And so when I did that for WordCamp Rochester last fall, I had people commenting like, this is you guys are on your game like, this is the best whatever I’ve watched in a long time kind of thing because I had fun with it. And if you can have fun with it, I think it translates so much better to other people too. You’re not harming anybody. I think there’s a, what is it? There’s a there’s a meme from Mean Girls, but they’re like, get and lose over going to the mall. And so I use that picture. I was like, get in WordCampers. We’re going to Rochester. Like just stuff like that, you know, so we could be look for some of those coming up in our social. That’s what I’m saying to you right now.

Corey Maass: Love it. 

Michelle Frechette (00:38:28) – Absolutely.

Corey Maass (00:38:30) – I struggle with or have struggled in the past. With. Doing it right? Like and I, I don’t worry I don’t worry about Twitter. Like I see people who their numbers that they are aspiring for. There are. Now like cadences they’re trying to hit and all that stuff. And I cynically, I’m like. And I hope that they. Their audience is 100% on Twitter or, you know, like somehow they’re they’re going to sell the ebook or whatever, but it’s like, this isn’t I, I don’t see it, you know what I mean?

Michelle Frechette (00:39:14) – I don’t I don’t think that your regular Twitter posts are necessarily driving ROI in any immediate way, shape or form. But what I love about it is it just brings that branding. It makes people brand aware they can see the voice of the brand. So when you do post silly or fun or whatever, they see the voice of it, they see it’s like. We’re not a security plugin where it’s like, you’re going to get hacked if you I mean, it’s not that, like serious, right? This is like this is a fun plugin.

Michelle Frechette (00:39:46) – You do fun things with this plugin. You make your website look really good with this plugin and that’s, you know, you can and you and we think about open graph and all of those things that make sense. And that’s like this is the fun plugin. Like put this on your website. It’s like I talked to Derek Ashour earlier today who has a confetti plugin. I bought a developer license on Black Friday for the. He was going to give it to me for free and I’m like, no, I want to support you. 

Corey Maass: No kidding. 

Michelle Frechette: But I’ll take it half off or whatever. It was Black Friday right there, like a buy developer license instead of just a single license. And now if you sign up for WP Speakers, you hit that submit button at the bottom of that form and you get like an explosion of confetti. Because did I need confetti? No. Does anybody need confetti website?

Corey Maass (00:40:32) – Maybe. Maybe.

Michelle Frechette (00:40:33) – But is it way more fun when you have confetti? Like yeah for sure right.

Michelle Frechette (00:40:39) – So I those are the kinds of things that delight people. Right. It’s like it’s like that custom 404 page. We’re talking about the custom 404 before things that delight people, things that are sometimes they’re obvious, right? Like, hey, I hit submit and there was an explosion of confetti. That’s really cool. Sometimes they’re Easter eggs that you kind of have to find, and that’s fun too. But yeah, there’s just there’s just different ways to engage with people. I feel like I just got bit by something on my foot.

Corey Maass (00:41:07) – Sorry.

Michelle Frechette (00:41:08) – No. Did you send it through the airwaves?

Corey Maass (00:41:12) – Well, I sent you a I sent you a bug.

Michelle Frechette (00:41:17) – Oh, that was a bad joke, for sure.

Corey Maass (00:41:21) – So, so, so a question for you. What I was leading up to is there’s. The the nerd developer productivity. Blah blah blah. In me, it’s like, okay, so you need to go make 100 memes and then schedule them, which you can’t do, right? Like. 

Michelle Frechette: No, you can’t.

Corey Maass (00:41:40) – And so how on earth do you, Michelle, who touch a hundred things a day for a dozen different companies, corpse orgs like. Are you? Are you just splashing around non-stop of like, oh, I’m going to, you know, do ideas just pop in your head? And you’re like, right now, even though I’m in the middle of a podcast with Corey thinking about OMG, I need to go create a meme for.

Michelle Frechette (00:42:07) – I have all this. I have no book next to me at all times, that I write things down, and then I have to go back through and revisit it. But yes, sometimes it’s random thoughts. For my day job, I have an Asana board because if I didn’t, I would never remember what was coming next. And I live by my calendar. If it doesn’t hit my calendar, it probably doesn’t see me there because, I just won’t remember. I’m glad my daughter doesn’t listen to this, because I forgot that she was coming out to have lunch with me on Sunday, and, because I didn’t put on my calendar.

Michelle Frechette (00:42:40) – And so I said, yes, I would love to be a judge on the 48 and 48 websites. And so, so I she messaged me first Sunday morning. She stayed until 4 a.m.. So she had some sleep and that. But she was tired and so she messaged me. When she got up around 11, I said, why don’t you come out as soon as you can. I’ll order us lunch. You don’t have to stay long because I have a 3:30 pm engagement and then you can go home and get some rest, but we’ll have had lunch together. You can pick up the goodies I brought back from Asia. She didn’t feel guilty because she didn’t want to be here all day. I didn’t feel guilty because I was keeping her here all day. And so, you know, it was kind of a win win. Even though, of course, I would have loved to spend more time with her. But I got to do all those things. But if it had been on my calendar, I would have said no to the 48 and 48 because I had a date with my daughter.

Michelle Frechette (00:43:28) – So yeah, sometimes those things happen like, and when I look at my calendar, if it’s in the late evening, I will forget about it. And then two minutes before I get a notification that I should be at my desk. Which is why tonight at 10 p.m. my time, I have a Post Status Professional’s Online meetup for the Asia Pacific Time Zones and I keep reminding myself of that so I don’t be like, I’m going to go to bed at nine and then forget to open up Zoom for that. So.

Corey Maass: Yeah. I do that. 

Michelle Frechette: I need to,I probably should set that alarm on my calendar for at least half an hour before so that I’m not.

Corey Maass (00:44:07) – I do hours before. If it’s like if it’s a 9:00 or 10:00 thing. because I’m not always sober in the evening and, and I’m usually falling asleep by a certain time. And so it’s like I will actually set an alarm for. Seven and eight and nine. You know, it’s not I’m not trying to get blackout drunk or anything, but it’s the like.

Corey Maass (00:44:32) – Oh, right. Like. 

Michelle Frechette (00:44:32) – You can’t do that.

Corey Maass (00:44:34) – You know, and also it’s real easy to just it’s like, oh yeah, it’s seven. Okay, I’ve got a thing in three hours. And so then you watch a movie or something, but then you’re tired and you forget to eat and all that stuff. So, but I guess. Yeah. So but getting back to like the. I guess it’s it’s a matter of like, consistency and inconsistency. Like I go out right now because I’m like, I’m hacking on something. Like, I’m like, I’ll go days without posting on Twitter. And and sometimes I’m aware of that, you know, and so then I, I’m now Twitter is a habit which Twitter people will be thrilled to hear like those who own Twitter. Right. But. Right.

Michelle Frechette (00:45:20) – Right.

Corey Maass (00:45:21) – You know, but they don’t get any of my money, but they get my content just fine. Like, I hereby consent to, content for, a platform, but, but, yeah, it’s just it’s I feel like it’s tough, especially with so many of us tech people are ADHD or our shiny object or whatever, you know, and so it’s.

Michelle Frechette: Guilty.

Corey Maass (00:45:49) – You’ll do you’ll do Twitter for an hour in one day, and then three days will go by and crap, you know? So now I just think.

Michelle Frechette (00:45:58) – People will think I died because I was haven’t posted on Twitter in three days. Yeah, right. I worry about that sometimes and I shouldn’t worry like it doesn’t matter. But but yeah, but creativity also can’t always be forced, right? So like I will there are times when I’m like, I should make some memes and I will look at this page of like, there’s like hundreds of pages of memes that you could add captions to, and nothing will come to me that I don’t look at and say, that is so lame. I would be embarrassed to put that out there. And so I’ll be like, well, try again tomorrow for that, and I’ll make a note to go back and and try to be creative. I, I’m supposed to be writing an article this week that should be published by Friday, and I have had no. Like I have a writer’s block about it.

Michelle Frechette (00:46:42) – It’ll happen, but it probably if I if I’m not feeling creative when I write it, it’s going to not sound creative when you read it. So I’m trying to make sure that I’m writing when I’m feeling creative, because I don’t want this to be boring, right? I want it. And people, when they know it’s me, they tell me that they hear my voice in their head and I don’t want them to hear boring Michelle. I want them to hear fun Michelle. Right. And so that’s how I think of our marketing too, is I want to create for us when I’m feeling creative and not out of because I have to, you know, kind of thing.

Corey Maass (00:47:12) – And I’m so and I’m enjoying that. Like getting back to the the spaghetti comment and the 17 people they got Facebook group, they got.

Michelle Frechette (00:47:23) – Thank God you bring us back to the middle because I keep forgetting. So go ahead. Yeah.

Corey Maass (00:47:26) – Which is fine. Like I, you know, it’s, it’s after work and you’ve got bourbon in your Yeti and.

Michelle Frechette (00:47:34) – I wish.

Corey Maass (00:47:35) – But it’s like I, I guess I enjoy. For me personally, I enjoy being creative when I’m creative, working on what I’m working on, what I’m working on. But but something for me has changed in the last few years where I’m, I’m finding that I’m where I’m finding it easier to be a little bit more consistent or to balance, to juggle more things. And so instead of a month going by where I don’t tweet, it’s a couple of days go by and I don’t tweet or, you know, doing a blog post or something for OMG and and I don’t it’s, I keep bringing it up because like I said, I, I tend to think better out loud sometimes. And I keep trying to figure out like, this is, you know, my calls with Cory and now my calls with you. Part therapy, part brainstorming, part shooting the shit with a friend, you know, but it’s also, I because there is a focus like, and we, we in theory have listeners, and again, like, we get what, 25 to 30 on average, like not hundreds, not thousands yet, you know, someday, maybe, But for the sake of other people going, oh, I struggle with that too.

Corey Maass (00:48:58) – It’s like, I wish I could share. I keep saying it out loud because at some point it’s going to occur to me like how and why? And I don’t think it’s just that I’m older and, you know, have slowed down or whatever. Like, I don’t know, something’s something’s definitely different for me now and I wish I could express better what it is. I’m seeing more success in that. I’m not, at least not driving myself crazy.

Michelle Frechette (00:49:26) – I love that, though. I mean, we we changes, we grow. I mean, we can only grow older. We can’t grow younger, right? I mean, mindset, yes, perhaps, but not not chronologically. But as we have experiences and gain experiences in our lives, they they inform what we do. And so it makes sense that as we get older, things start to fall into place more because we have more experiences to to draw that experience to, to create what we’re doing going forward and learning what works for us and what doesn’t.

Michelle Frechette (00:49:57) – And when we work with others, how we work well with that particular person, that just others in general. And so I think that makes a lot of sense actually. And I appreciate that. Yeah.

Corey Maass (00:50:07) – Yeah. Well, and and I think part of it too is like I’m not. I did the like Startup Hustle for a long time, or I was at least surrounded by it. And so there’s it’s for me, it was never really there were instances of FOMO, but it was more of the there is there is an expectation of hustle all the time. I was in New York City and I was at the one of the We Work co-working spaces, but it was actually a pre- incubator. So I’m surrounded by people who are, you know, talking about how they have. They finally got the the call with the VC or with Google. And it’s going to change there. And I’m like I’m over here still just kind of coding my my idea you know. And eating ramen. I paid for not the business because I was not ramen profitable.

Corey Maass (00:50:58) – But it’s like also getting getting older, calming down. Finding peace. Finding stability, whatever that looks like. And so also being able to like at points, still struggling with disappointment or, or what have you. But usually being able to like, carry it a little better and forgive myself easier. Like that’s part of it too. Oh, I haven’t tweeted in a while. Okay, next time I think of something, I’ll tweet, you know. Rather than it because there’s I, there’s I think it helps that I this is such a terrible thing to say. I stopped reading books, stopped reading blogs, stopped going to so many Meetups, like because everybody everybody’s an expert. It drives me crazy that people prescribe things to you like, this is how you succeed. And it’s like, this might be how you succeeded. Probably not even, you know, but you must tweet four times a day. And I and I tried that for a long time and I couldn’t. And then I felt guilty when I couldn’t, and then I stopped, you know, and it’s all the, all the traps you fall into with, with bad habit building.

Corey Maass (00:52:11) – As opposed to like just kind of going with the flow a little better. And at some point the hope is you change gears and, or you discover, you know, going all the way back to the beginning of this conversation. You’re welcome. Talking about community is like. And suddenly you get a little bit of traction. And then that’s when I’m. I’m actually curious to see how capable I am of. Then going the other way. Oh, every time I’ve talked about this before. When I had Kanban, my Kanban WP plugin. Coincidentally, every time I went to a WordCamp, I got sales. And the month would go by and like, not 100%. And there was literally no correlation. Like I would go to WordCamp Birmingham, Alabama where they had like 80 people. Nobody knew I was there except for the people in Birmingham, and somebody in Asia would buy my plugin, and I will would have not have had a sale for six weeks or something. And and so I was like, well, the universe wants me to go to WordCamp, so I’m working.

Corey Maass (00:53:26) – But just the so then it became this like this drive. I have to go to go to WordCamps. I have to, you know, and you burn yourself out or you, you end up with unrealistic expectations. Something like that, you know.

Michelle Frechette (00:53:41) – No, it’s so true though. Absolutely. So I guess the lesson this week is do what feels right. I mean I always, I always believe in that. Some things you have to learn because you don’t know that they’re right for you or not right for you. And like there was a time when, like, I got a Twitter account back when I was working in higher ed because I wanted to make sure I had a Twitter account, but I didn’t post anything forever. I think the first one was like, well, if Twitter, here I am. And then I posted the next one like three years ago, three years later, I mean, and then my daughter said, you have like 100 followers. I go, oh, that’s cool.

Michelle Frechette (00:54:18) – She goes, you’re not following anybody. You’re supposed to follow back. Like, okay, so I started following people back. And I mean, at some point you can’t continue to do that, right? Like I have 17, almost 17, three, 17,300 followers. I can’t follow 17,300 people. Some of them are bought, some of them. So I mean, I vet them now, you know who I follow back, that kind of thing. But, but yeah, I didn’t even know that you could use Twitter to engage with people like that. So until you learn it, you can’t make it part of your day to day or your strategy, but do what feels right. If Twitter is not the right platform for whatever business you are, but Facebook is, then go with Facebook, you know, or LinkedIn or Reddit. I mean, I see WordPress and I know it’s because I follow the WordPress stuff in there, but I see WordPress ads paid advertisement on Reddit every single day. And I do look at WordPress Reddit almost every day, and there are lots of posts.

Michelle Frechette (00:55:14) – But that doesn’t mean that they’re the right post to respond to. Like I go into the plugin one and I suggest plugins with a disclaimer that hey, I work for this company. So just so that, you know, I’m putting it out there, but I answer questions and if I’m I’m not a developer, if I can’t answer the question, I don’t. But I look for the questions that have zero responses and then I go, hey, if I can give this person some insight, I will do that on WordPress, WordPress plugins, WordPress themes, whatever. It’s 5 or 6 different WordPress channels in there. They’re all lowercase p because you can’t do CamelCase in Reddit, which is just whatever. But anyway, so maybe REddit is a place to lurk sometimes, right? Just not every day, once a week to see if there’s something you can solve or if there’s if OMGIMG is the solution for somebody. I.

Corey Maass (00:55:59) – I thought a aas doing but not so it’s okay.

Michelle Frechette (00:56:04) – I mean, I’ve seen people ask questions about plugins that I’m not associated with, but I know who the owner is and I DM them in Slack or on Twitter.

Michelle Frechette (00:56:12) – I’m like, hey, there’s a Reddit question I think that you could answer, and I send them over there and sometimes they don’t care, and sometimes they jump right in and make a sale. So you just never know or save a sale, even, you know, a subscription or something.

Corey Maass (00:56:24) – Yeah. Well it’s like, yeah, somebody I. I got my wrist slapped for mentioning OMG too many times on Admin Bar. even just as a like when I’m working on my plugin and I had actual valuable content. So I got a very nice message that was like, you need to stop just including the URL. We get it, you know, perfectly fine playing in somebody else’s sandbox. You follow the rules. But then somebody asked two weeks later about, you know, social images, and somebody was nice enough to tag me. And I was like, oh, that’s me, that’s me. I’m over here, you know

Michelle Frechette (00:57:03) – Put me in coach!

Corey Maass (00:57:04) – And so it’s funny, like, I mean that.

Corey Maass (00:57:07) – So that kind of relates too what we were talking about of like you only be in so many places, you know, and it’s funny because like, these are the things I used to try to optimize. You talked about getting something out of Twitter, right? Like I at one point I read a bunch of stuff I learned like. How to optimize Twitter and all the things you’re supposed to do. And I even was pretentious enough, to like, I was on a panels in 2010, 20 years ago, regurgitating all this stuff that I that I’d read and never really did myself. I did a little bit, you know, but not not enough to be wielding the authority that I pretended to or whatever. But it’s like, there’s just each trend or each, you know, and again, it’s like, what? What can you stomach, like what can you add? And there’s a little bit of like, if you’re posting nonstop on Facebook and nobody’s hearing you, I think you’re going to organically stop.

Corey Maass (00:58:12) – Some people won’t. Right.

Michelle Frechette (00:58:13) – Some people see it as their their microblog. Right.

Corey Maass (00:58:16) – Which is fine.

Michelle Frechette (00:58:17) – That’s fine.

Corey Maass (00:58:18) – They’re doing it for them not for other people. But like if you’re and I and I think that that’s, that’s what’s real hard at this stage is like I could spend, we both could spend every breathing moment posting memes and, and blogging and da da da to 17 people over here and to zero people over here and 80 people over here. And once in a while you’d be like, oh, here’s a group, and they’re asking a legitimate question. So I’m actually going to reach a thousand people for a second, you know? But it’s like. The plugin wouldn’t ever get worked on. And, you know, and it’s just that I think is what I, I finally went numb or something like I’m. And so it’s like exactly what we said. Like it’s and thankfully I feel bad. I feel badly for. A lot of people, and I did this too, 20 years ago, like setting up an expectation of like, this must succeed or I can’t pay rent, you know, or and people do it like that.

Corey Maass (00:59:23) – And I’ve worked for those people and will never again. But like the, the A-type super like associated with Silicon Valley and venture capital and you know, yelling and being super aggressive and macho a lot of the time, even sometimes when they’re not men and, you know, and all that stuff and it’s like I, I slunk away from that. I realize in hindsight and I did and part of honestly, that’s part of what drew me to WordPress is you just generally don’t have those kinds of people or that kind of attitude. There was a nice, I think maybe it was in Post Status. Or maybe it might have been Mega Maker, where people were talking about the the singing the praises for the WordPress community at large. In particular, they had gone to other conferences, they had gone to conferences not related to WordPress, and it was eye opening, and they were somebody was even asked to be on a. On a panel or something to like, talk about their good experiences in the WordPress community, because how could these other communities learn from it?

Corey Maass (01:00:40) – And so maybe once in a while we don’t realize just how good we have it.

Michelle Frechette (01:00:43) – I think that’s very true. I think that’s very true for sure.

Corey Maass (01:00:47) – I remember, Going to a dev conference in Nashville that general dev, and they brought in one poor guy from, I think, 10up and nobody went to his talk. I was one of the two people who went to his talk. it was perfectly fine talk. And I and I chatted with him afterwards and he’s like, they clearly don’t want didn’t want me here. Don’t know why. He’s like, nobody picked me up from the airport when they said they would like they I saw them treating other people, other presenters well. They didn’t treat me well. I don’t know what the deal is. Okay, fine. but there could be any number of reasons for that. But, you know, red flag. And then I had flyers for the local WordPress Meetup. So at lunch, I walked around and handed out flyers, and the amount of bullying and derision and contempt that I received was astonishing.

Corey Maass (01:01:45) – It’s like we’re grown ups and I’m totally used to devs being like, oh, my tech’s better than your tech or whatever, but just like the amount of. Not s-word composting on WordPress. And I walked away from a guy and I heard him snort, and I. And I heard him crumple up the flyer. He’s like, that’s not dev or whatever. It was just like, what is you like, what is wrong with you? I was like, wow, okay, I’m going to go back in my bubble over here. You know, like we have created a safe-ish space. Much safer than a lot of other places.

Michelle Frechette (01:02:20) – True. Yeah. 

Corey Maass (01:02:22) – Community. Yeah. WordPress. Yay.

Michelle Frechette (01:02:24) – Absolutely. I’m all about our community. I think everybody knows I’m all in on WordPress community. Couldn’t agree with you more. Absolutely. So.

Corey Maass (01:02:37) – So speaking of not again. As we’re wrapping up, I am I am 47 at a time of writing. I am 47. Tomorrow I’m getting in my car and driving to New York City, like towards the end of the day and going to a party like I used to do, partying all night and then basically just driving home.

Michelle Frechette (01:02:58) – And sleeping the rest of the day. 

Corey Maass (01:03:01) – Yeah. And I am and I, I keep telling everybody because I want them to laugh at my expense because it feels ridiculous. But once in a while you have to relearn all the dumb stuff that you’re actually not supposed to be doing anymore at age 47 or whatever. But I try not to go backwards.

Michelle Frechette (01:03:24) – I try not to pull all nighters anymore because my body will not allow me to do that very often. And yet there are days when it happens. So I get it. I get it absolutely. Well, good luck to you on that journey. Stay safe. 

Corey Maass: Thank you. 

Michelle Frechette: And have fun with it though for sure.

Corey Maass (01:03:41) – Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, it’s it’s honestly like it’s all going to be it’s also mostly going to be other men in their 40s, some women, but it was largely a male. I mean, nightlife and DJing and dark, brooding music tends to be a bunch of guys, but we’re all converging. So a bit of a reunion.

Michelle Frechette (01:04:03) – Oh, nice. Well, this will make it. This will make you feel good. I thought you were, like, 38, so I thought I had so many years on you. I’m 55. I only have eight years on you. Not like 20 years on you. So. I think we both feel better about that.

Corey Maass (01:04:17) – And I think and and honestly like, yeah, I think we, we both look and sound and act young because I think we’re having fun.

Michelle Frechette (01:04:24) – Absolutely. Although I’m going to go ice my back now and put a little icy hot. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding.

Corey Maass (01:04:31) – Just going to go drink bourbon.

Michelle Frechette (01:04:33) – So there you go. Well, I would if I didn’t have a 10 p.m. meeting. Tomorrow is Bourbon day, so maybe a little Baileys. No, I can’t put Baileys in my coffee tomorrow morning. Anyway, you didn’t hear it here, but you heard all the rest, and.