Post Status Cache Up With Kyle Van Deusen

Transcript ↓

In this podcast episode, host Michelle Frechette interviews Kyle Van Deusen, who runs a small web agency in Richmond, Virginia, and founded “The Admin Bar,” a community for freelancers and agency owners. They discuss the 2025 WordPress Professional Survey, which Kyle conducted to gather insights from web professionals. The survey, which received 1,233 responses, highlights the experiences and challenges faced by freelancers and agency owners.

Top Takeaways:

• Many Agency Owners Lack Business Fundamentals: A lot of agency owners start by accident, not with a business plan. As a result, many undercharge and lack confidence in setting prices. Kyle pointed out that few are reaching their income goals—not due to market limits, but because they don’t know what’s possible. This shows a big need for basic business education around pricing, value, and financial planning.
• Marketing and Networking Are Largely Overlooked: Nearly 60% of respondents aren’t doing in-person networking, and many aren’t investing in marketing. Too many rely on being found organically, which isn’t enough anymore. Kyle and Michelle highlighted that growth requires showing up, building relationships, and actively promoting your services.
• Community Helps Build Confidence and Clarity: Talking with peers can shift your mindset and pricing strategy. Kyle shared how learning what others charged helped him raise his rates confidently. Community support helps agency owners avoid mistakes, learn faster, and feel less alone in their journey.
• The Survey Is a Valuable, Underused Resource: Kyle stressed that the real power of the survey lies in how people use it. By digging into the data, agency owners can find paths others have taken to success. The more participation it gets, the more valuable and representative it becomes for the whole community.

Mentioned In The Show:

• The Admin Bar 2025 Survey
• The Admin Bar
• https://www.facebook.com/groups/2147806538801573

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Social Media:

• Kyle Van Deusen (Founder, The Admin Bar)
• Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

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

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Transcript

Michelle Frechette 00:00:02  We are back with our next cash up because we’re catching up. Get it? Little play on words there with my friend Kyle Van Deusen. Kyle, how are you?

Kyle Van Deusen 00:00:11  I’m excellent. Any time I get to hang out with you, it’s a good day for me, so thank you for having me on.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:14  Likewise. Thank you for being here. I reached out to you because I initially was going to invite you onto our Post Status Happiness Hour. And that just doesn’t work for you because you’re a man who takes care of his family, and you got to get kids off buses and dinner started all those things which I 100% appreciate. But this topic is so important. I’m like, well, then we got to get it on the calendar another way. So here we are today. Before we dig into today’s topic, though, why don’t you just, for those people who may not know who you are, I find it hard to believe that there are people who don’t. But if they don’t know who you are, tell us a little bit about yourself and your, your project.  I’ll let you even say the name.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:00:54  There we go. Sweet. Well, thank you so much. my name is Kyle Van Deusen. I run a small web agency here in Richmond, Virginia. I’ve had it for about eight years now. Just a agency of one. It’s the way I like to do it. And about seven years ago, we started a community called the Admin Bar. It’s mainly freelancers and agency owners sharing what it’s like to run an agency. So all the whining we like to do about clients, what tools are you using? All those kinds of questions. And we’ve grown that community to about 12,000 people or so. Slowly, over time. We have a really good group of folks, and I think what we’re going to talk about today is our annual survey, which we call the 2025 WordPress Professional Survey. Because naming things is difficult and I can’t say agency owner and freelancer and, you know, so we came up with a bit of a generic term there. But this is the fourth year in a row we’ve we’ve ran it this year. We had 1,233 people respond to the survey, which is our most ever. And I’m excited to talk about some of the results we found.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:49  Yeah. Me too. Before we do that though, tell a little bit more about the Admin Bar. So I know you’ve got a Facebook page or Facebook group. I was part of that group for a long time. And then I was and I was getting your emails. And this is going to sound really dumb, but I didn’t realize that at that point that, like, I could actually pay to join a more inclusive part of the group, which is your Slack channel as well. So, the Friday Chaser, is that what you’re calling the newsletter on Fridays?

Kyle Van Deusen 00:02:15  Yes. Yes, ma’am.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:16  And it’s all like bar themed, which I totally love. I think that’s a that’s so much fun. And what’s the benefit of actually, I mean, I’m not here to try to sell your product or anything, but what’s the benefit of being in the Slack group that you’ve got the slack community?

Kyle Van Deusen 00:02:31  Yeah. So, everything that’s happened with the Admin Bar basically has just happened by accident and good coincidences or happy accidents, however you want to look at it, but it’s just grown over time. One of the things that we always loved about the group when it first started was like, you knew everybody’s name, you knew stuff about their agency. We were very familiar with everybody. And just as time goes on and people come in and people leave and the community grows, you lose some of that eventually. And we have a lot of people. You know, if I had it to do all over again, I probably wouldn’t build the foundation of my business on top of Facebook, of all things. So we have people that also don’t want to spend a whole bunch of time in Facebook. So a couple years ago, I had some people that were just asking, like, because of all the content we create and stuff like that, can we, you know, can we send you a tip or whatever or, you know, buy me a coffee kind of thing? So I ended up setting up our what I call our Barfly Community, which is essentially a Patreon, except we don’t run it through Patreon. So everybody that’s a member of that gets access to our Slack channel, which is kind of like the Admin Bar group of the old days where there’s fewer people. There’s about 500 people that are a part of that community. And then we do exclusive webinars. We do happy hours every month. We do giveaways and things like that. So I try to pack it with a bunch of value. It’s ten bucks a month. But we try to do lots and lots of stuff to make it well worth it for everybody.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:48  Yeah, and it is. And I you know, I’m not in that, that agency mindset anymore. I was a freelance slash agency of one. I used to call myself, you know, a marketing agency of one person kind of thing. And my, by the way, my business card had my title as Marketing Diva, which I still love. I may go back to that someday. It’s kind of good. But, not being a not being an agency or a freelancer, I felt kind of almost guilty joining. But I have been able I think if you even if you aren’t building websites for other people, it’s a great opportunity to lend your knowledge, help answer questions in there. It’s not to sell your products and things like that. So, like, I’ve never in their peddling anything, but opportunities and, and I think it’s great for that. And so, even though I’m not an agency, I love participating and helping other people in the community. And I think that’s what it’s all about. So thank you.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:04:43  We’re lucky to have you do it. Doing this and working. You know, I’m sitting in a basement by myself all day, so having other people to do this with is so, so helpful and just, just have another set of eyes on things. Or how do you guys do this? Because there’s so many. I mean, this survey unlocks a lot of it, but it’s like, I would have never thought to do this or that. I could charge that much, or that people all are doing this thing that I’m not doing. If you just didn’t have a community to talk about all those things with. So it’s really important.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:10  And one thing about the agency survey, I’m sorry, is that what you called it? Remind me again.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:05:15  The WordPress Professional Survey.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:18  Professionals. Thank you. WordPress Professional Survey, is one of the things that, I think is really great about it is it’s not just good for agency owners, professionals who are, you know, trying to make their mark. And how much should I charge? And am I charging enough? It’s also really good for agency adjacent businesses to understand how to market to those people. Right? So and how can we help? What are the pain points that we can help solve within that community to make them more fruitful and make them more successful too. And I don’t just mean like, hey, how can I, like, get into and into the mind of an agency owner and figure out how to manipulate? Not that at all, as much as what we do with like plugins and marketing agencies and things like that is to solve pain points and make other people more successful too. So, that said.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:06:09  The first year we did that, did the survey and I had that feedback that like a big hosting company had got all the results and had a meeting about it, like in their big headquarters building. I’m like, whoa, this is crazy, you know? But yeah, I mean, it gives you insight into what’s actually happening inside these agencies because there’s so much posturing and all these kinds of things. So I think it’s helpful for everybody to just kind of know where we all at.

Michelle Frechette 00:06:31  Well, one of the things what I used to build websites for other people is to remind them that they’re building a website for their customer, not for themselves. And I think that your survey helps the ecosystem understand that we’re not building plugins and we’re not building hosting. We’re not building agencies for ourselves. We’re building them for our customers. And so in order to do that, we need to know what it is that they think and what that is that they need. And we can’t assume that. And I think that’s a really good lesson that we, we, we tell our customers all the time, but we need to internalize for ourselves. And so thank you for that touchpoint and keeping us all like, a little more human about it. That said, though, I really would love to just dive in. So if you want to share your screen and for those who are listening and not watching, we’ll try to describe what we’re also looking at. But, the the website itself has amazing. And I was looking at the wrong, the wrong. I was looking at the wrong one. By the way, Kyle, I was looking at last year’s. So that’s.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:07:30  That’s why you thought it was the third. 

Michelle Frechette 00:07:31  That’s why I thought it was the third. That’s right. I must have clicked the wrong thing on your website. Anyway, you. For 2025, you surveyed 1,233, which is a pretty big representation of the community, for sure. WordPress professionals asking all kinds of questions, and I’m going to mute myself and let you talk a little bit through it. And I will interrupt with questions as you go. But I think there are some really fascinating things that you discovered.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:07:58  Yeah, absolutely. So and I’m no professional statistician or whoever, the kind of professional people that do surveys are. I’m not one of those, obviously. I don’t even know what it’s called. I had no idea how hard it would be to survey people. And like all the second and third layer type questions, you have to ask yourself, and like the amount of biases I’ve put into these surveys over the years, completely accidentally. But just because I didn’t know how to do this, it’s really, really difficult. And one of the hardest things here was to get people to answer a survey. You almost have to have a what’s in it for me kind of thing, and if I put any kind of incentive into this, then it skews the results, you know? Or if I get a sponsor for this, then people are worried that I’m doing what the sponsor wants and not for the community.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:08:42  So it’s been a real challenge to try to get 1,200 people to spend 15 minutes to fill out the survey with nothing in it for them, other than creating a community resource. So I’m really excited that we’ve had 1,200 people do it this year. Every year it’s crept up. I think the first year was about 600 people. But I put together this results page, which is just all the high level results, which we’ll kind of go through here. This includes everybody who filled out the survey. So that’s agencies who have been doing this for 20 plus years and have 50 people on staff and are making several million dollars all the way to people who are in developing countries doing this part time, working a completely different currency. Right? So this is a big mixed bag here. But what comes along with that is this link we have at the top of the page that says the full database of results. If you click into that, that opens up Airtable. That’s how I collected all this information that gives you the ability to sort and filter and search through all this information. So if you just wanted to narrow it down, like I will do for myself, I’ll say I only want to look at people who are full time in the United States with at least five years experience. Well, then I can filter that down. And that’s like 300 people, so it’s less people. So maybe the data is not quite as accurate, but it’s people that are very specific to me. And now I can make a really close comparison to other agencies in my place rather than just everybody in the world. But I think it’s important to kind of look at it as a whole. So there’s a video at the top of the page that’ll quickly show you how you can sort and filter that information, but so we’ll just roll through these here. There’s a we asked 20 questions. I started with a list of about 100 and had to narrow it down to how many could I do I think I could get people to answer and and keep their attention for. So most of them are multiple choice just to make it easy for people to answer. So yeah, 1,233 surveyed, the average team size was three and the average years in business was 12, which is pretty exciting. for so long, web developers have been kind of a new emerging business. And now we’re we’re becoming veterans. It’s kind of like, now I have gray hair in 1990. Wasn’t 15 years ago like it is in my head. It’s actually much longer ago than that now.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:44  Oh, crazy isn’t it?

Kyle Van Deusen 00:10:46  Yeah. So this is definitely representative of our community, which like I said, is is mostly freelancers and agency owners. I would say we skew towards the smaller side of that, but we have people kind of all size here. So, of the people that answer the survey, 77% are doing it full time. About 23% are doing it, as a side hustle or part time. One of the new questions we asked this year, I tried to keep some questions the same every year, so we could see how those trends change over time and the questions that were less trend related. I try to sprinkle in new ones. This was one of the new ones to find out where people are getting most of their clients. Are they local in their community? Are they within their state or province, or are they just within their country somewhere, or are they outside of their country? Most of the people are doing work with people inside their country. That came out to 54.8%, but not necessarily just within their community, which I was actually surprised to find. I would have thought that inside my community number would have been quite a bit higher. One of the questions that we’ve been tracking over time is how would you characterize the overall trajectory of your business? So the three options people had were growing, stagnant or declining. Right now we’re showing 57% growing, 35.5% stagnant and 7.5 declining. Those numbers, those growing numbers have actually come down slightly over time. I want to say last year it was around 62% or 63% down to 57% this year. I think there’s a lot of factors. You know, I don’t know how much I should editorialize in the middle of this, but, well, you know.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:13  I’m, I’m guessing there’s a couple of things at play here. It’s not necessarily the same 1,200 people. Right. So you’re going to have some, some difference that way. But also, there might be demographic information that shows this versus last year as well. So for example, as we age up, perhaps we’re starting to back off on our businesses a little bit, things like that. It’s hard to say for sure.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:12:35  Yeah. And there’s all the AI in economy and the drama in WordPress in the last year. I mean, there’s just lots of things. There’s a lot more choices when it comes to agencies and how business owners can do this themselves too. So I think all those things kind of factor in. It’s, this question is a good representation of this. And there’s several questions like it where maybe just this data in isolation doesn’t tell us a whole lot, but because we’ve been doing this year after year, now we can zoom out and kind of look at the trend over time. And I think that data becomes more and more valuable over time.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:08  Yeah, absolutely. More than 50% say they’re growing. I mean, that’s still a really good number, right?

Kyle Van Deusen 00:13:11  Yeah, absolutely. So along those lines, do you think you’ll still be running your agency in five years? We have 66% saying yes, 8.2% saying no and 25% saying unsure. The yes and no numbers seem pretty clear to me. The unsure is the one that you know. I wish, I wish we could do follow up questions to all these. I just don’t think people would spend the time on them, but I would love to know. What that unsure is is what people were thinking when they answered that. Are they unsure because everything’s unstable and they’re, you know, they’re afraid they’re not going to be able to do it or they’re just like, you know what? I might be done with this. So I’m not sure exactly what that represents, but it’s interesting nonetheless. How many hours do you work on average per week? So 26%, which was the biggest number we collected in here are working 30 between 30 and 39 hours a week. Between 40 and 49 hours. Was it 22%. So most people are working that full time schedule. We do have a few of us. I was in the, you know, 70 to 79 or 80 plus category last year. And I have definitely calmed that back this year, which is is great. But there is a couple percentage points of people working essentially two full time jobs within their agency, which is which is really brutal and hard to sustain for a long period of time. Here’s a new one we asked this year, was do you require a signed contract for your project? So 44% said always, 45.7% said it depends on the type of project, and 10% said never. What I thought was interesting in this is digging into that Airtable base is when I filtered this down to US versus everyone else. The number for us is really bringing up that always. And I think it’s just because we’re so litigious here in the States in a way that maybe people aren’t in other places. I think it was US and Germany had the highest number of always, and everybody else was much, much lower. So this is one of those questions where you definitely want to filter that down and see what’s normal in your area. All right. So what services you’re offering I gave everybody a big list of choices. This was one where you could select multiple answers here. So no surprise most people in our community are offering website maintenance. That was 93%. Website design, website development, and hosting. All of those were above 70%. And then we get into kind of some of this middle ground where I’ve color coded things on the screen here. So everything that’s yellow is kind of in between, you know, I think it was between 70% and 30% or something like that, but 33 and 66. But, so kind of in this middle is strategy and consulting, search engine optimization, e-commerce, copywriting, graphic design, performance optimization, discovery sessions, and branding. What’s interesting about this set of questions here is to go into that Airtable base and start filtering this down, where you can compare average salary, which you’ll see here in a minute. Revenue numbers, all those kinds of things based on what services you offer. So you can turn some of these things on and off and say, okay, well, one interesting thing, and I don’t have the exact numbers on in front of me here, but discovery sessions, only 36.5% of people are offering discovery sessions with their clients. But the amount of revenue and the amount of take home pay agency owners are getting, the ones that offer discovery sessions are doing a whole lot better than the ones that aren’t offering it. So that’s one of the big benefits of a question like this. And being able to go through all the data is to kind of see like which which services are punching above their weight. And we also haven’t here kind of at the bottom of the list under 33% email marketing and accessibility. That’s another one of those where people who are offering accessibility are have much higher revenue numbers. But less than a quarter of the people are doing that. Paid ads, social media management, conversion rate optimization and software development. We don’t have a lot of software development people in our group, but 12.3% are offering that. All right. This one I know you like here. What marketing activities did you pursue in the last year? So I come from kind of a marketing place, I feel I feel like all of us is web. Web people are marketing people. But what I’m learning more and more is I do this. A lot of people are more on the developer side and less on the marketing side. And that’s just my perception was a little bit different. So the highest one was in-person networking. As far as what activities did you pursue? 57% are doing in-person networking and that was the highest one. So this is another one where people could mark all the ones that apply to them. So the numbers don’t add up to 100 because people would ideally be doing multiple of these things. What I thought about was crazy to me, and seeing these results is the second highest one was asking for referrals. In our business, referrals are pretty much everything. They come in warm. They’re really easy to close. Everything about getting a referral for an agency is absolutely fantastic, but half the people out there aren’t even asking for referrals. To me, this felt like, here’s the most basic thing you could do to improve your business. Ask for referrals. That’s it. And half the people aren’t doing that, which is really interesting to me. And it kind of shows like we get so stuck in the weeds. Part of it’s we have so many things to do to run an agency. But, you know, only one of these, the in-person networking was above 50%. Most people just are not doing a ton of marketing. It looks like.

Michelle Frechette 00:18:19  Yeah. But it’s like the kind of idea where if when you have a brick and mortar, you’re not only the person who’s running the business. But you’re also stopping the toilet, cleaning the sink, scrubbing the floor, like all. And, you know, clearing the snow away kind of thing. And so you’re trying to manage everything. To the point where you’re looking at what your basic core competency is to make money off that. So it is it’s just you. There’s only so much of you to go around when your operation of one.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:18:49  It’s it’s a huge, huge challenge. I will say again, when you break this down in the numbers, the people who are doing more revenue, they’re also doing more marketing. You know. The thing that’s interesting about all this is like, well, that’s pretty obvious. but sometimes you need just the data in front of you to say, okay, well, if I want to make more, I need to be offering these services that seem to pay really well. Excuse me. And I need to be marketing them. Like, the formula is not that difficult, but execution is definitely more difficult. A new question we asked this year was, do you publish any of your pricing publicly? 41% said yes and 59% said no. This one’s kind of hard to do any takeaways from we didn’t we’ve never asked this question before. I was just more curious on this one. I couldn’t really find any clear distinction between revenue or anything like that with people who publish their pricing versus those who don’t. A lot of us are doing such custom work. It’s really hard to say a website costs X because it’s like asking how long a piece of string is. So it’s kind of a difficult one.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:19:53  what is your hourly rate? So this is when we’ve asked year over year right now the average was $96.36 with the median being $95. Again, this is another one where if you filter this down to your country, you’re going to find these numbers jump around quite a bit. I want to say in the US it went up to like $115 as the average instead of $96. So you would definitely want to look at these numbers kind of where you’re at or where you’re selling services to. All right. Getting into all the fun financials here, what was your total revenue in 2024? So, considering I want to be delicate on how I talk about all these things, but considering 77% are doing this full time, and 42% of people who answered this are making their total revenue was less than $50,000. That makes me a little bit nervous. So 42.9% of people had a total revenue. That’s not after expenses or what you’re paying yourself under $50,000. Now, depending on where you live in the world. Maybe that’s a good living where you are based on how many people I know that answer the survey that are in the US, UK, Europe, Canada, Australia, those numbers are pretty low to make a living doing this.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:02  It does match with the previous answer though, right? So and how many hours a week was the average that people were working. It comes right in around 40,000. So that makes sense.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:21:13  Yeah it the numbers do add up there. But man.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:17  Yeah it’s rough. 

Kyle Van Deusen 00:21:19  I felt compelled to start this business because of the things that a lot of us want, the freedom and the setting, your own schedule and the. I’m sitting in my house in a hoodie and pajama shorts, you know, like, that’s what I like about doing this. But it ended up being very lucrative for me. And I make more money doing this than I would have ever made it a 9 to 5 job, and not everybody is finding that. So that was one of the huge eye openers for for this survey for me is like, okay, I have to work backwards because it’s hard for me to like self analyze. Why was I able to get past these marks? And so many other people are having trouble, but I’ve been spending a lot of time on that. Like what were some of these key things that happened in my agency that allowed me to push over some of these barriers? And how can I share those with the community? Because the kind of technical work and valuable work that we’re all doing, we should be making a at least a decent living off of it. So I would love to see these numbers go up and up and up for all of us. All right. And then, this one I’ve toyed with over the years, which is how much did you pay yourself? This one becomes hard, I think last year I did like profit margin or something like that. But we’re not all bookkeepers and we’re all doing the books a little bit differently. So what I asked this year was how much did you pay yourself in 2024? Include your salary, your owner draw, your dividends, your benefits. And I think I even had in parentheses not what you tell the government you paid yourself. So many people are, you know, they try to keep their paycheck low so they pay less taxes. Totally get it. I’m not reporting this to the IRS, so your secret’s safe with me. But I wanted to get a good idea of, like, okay, how much could you reasonably assume you’re going to make if you, if you had an agency? So, again, the numbers were on the low side here. 36% under 20,000, 30% between 20 and 50,000. And then, the rest of this, which is, you know, 40% of the people are making more than 50,000, essentially, with only about 7% making 100,000 between 100 and 150,000. So those numbers definitely decline as we go higher and higher there. So a huge one for agencies and, and, businesses like ours is what is your recurring income? The more that you can have, the better. So you’re not living on that roller coaster of project to project. About 21% are making between 0 and 500. 14% making between 500 and 1,000. 19% making between 1,000 and 2,500. And those numbers kind of dwindle down from there. We did have, you know, a decent amount of people. All those numbers kind of keep going down and down and down. I’m trying to explain it to the people just listening to this, but, the numbers go down like you think they would, and then jump up at 20,000 and that goes up to 6.3%. And I think that’s probably the people that have switched over to the website as a service type model, where instead of charging $5,000 for a website, you charge $500 a month for, you know, a few years. And that definitely kind of switches that from project income over to recurring income, which is definitely helpful for cash flow. So I cannot blame you.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:19  Absolutely. No, not at all.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:24:22  All right, so, what is your average project price? The the biggest one in here. The biggest result was 38.2% of people said they were between 2,500 and 5,000. So that’s what a good chunk of WordPress websites are going for these days is between 2,500 and 5,000. We had 22% that were under that $2,500 mark, and 10% that were under $1,000, but it kind of gradually goes down as we as those numbers get higher and higher. So about 20%, we’re just under 10,00. 6,7, 8% or over 10,000. so.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:57  This would.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:24:57  Be a whole lot.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:58  This be another good one? That would be good to kind of dig in and see what countries people are paying more or less for. I would imagine you could see some correlation there.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:25:09  Yes, absolutely. And with the services as well, what services you offer. Because the people who are. I’ll just. I’ll say just offering. But if they’re just offering design, development, maintenance. Those numbers are much lower than the people that are also offering SEO or any other kind of marketing service or accessibility, like all those skills that make you a little bit more niche than the average agency. End up driving those prices quite a bit. So the more you know, it’s not necessarily work harder all the time. But if you can be strategic about what services you offer, there’s just some that are going to afford you more income than others will. All right. So I think we’re out of the financials for there. What builder are you primarily using to build websites today. We’ve I think we’ve asked this every year. even though the, some of the builders have kind of come in and out of the list as we see how, how well they respond here. Since we’ve done this Elementor has always been the leader. This year they actually got edged out by Bricks. It’s actually interesting to watch the graph over the years. So if we go back to the first year, I think Bricks was like 0.4%, and then the next year it was like 11%, and the next year it was like 20%. And this year it ended up being 24.4% to Elementary’s 24.1. So at least in our community, Bricks has just been growing at such a rapid pace. And Elementor obviously has a million more installs and all those kinds of things. But it seems like a lot of people are starting to adopt Bricks. We didn’t use just blocks as kind of a generic category like we’ve done in the past. I brought I kind of picked out some of the ones that I see people talk about more often. Generate Blocks at 9.7%, Kadence at 9.7%, Spectra and Stackable were lower on that list, but definitely some block packages represented. And obviously I did not get all of the builders in here because 9.6% were not listed. So I had people yelling at me for that one. So we’re getting to the end here. What is the relationship with AI in your agency? So this is another one that.

Michelle Frechette 00:27:10  Fascinating.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:27:11  Yeah. I worked a long time on how I was going to ask this. I think last year we asked, are you paying for an AI tool in your agency just to see our people starting to adopt this and not just use the free tools? But this year I asked kind of, what is your relationship? And the choices were you’re embracing it, you’re dabbling with it or you’re avoiding it. AI is in everything now, like every fast app we open has some kind of AI sparkly button, begging for your attention in it now, so it’d be hard to completely avoid it. But we have 5.3% of people avoiding it, 37.4% of people dabbling with it, and 57% which was the largest number in this, fully embracing it. So lots of people starting to see what they can do with AI in their agency. All right. And the last question that I put very, at the very, very bottom of this survey, and I will tell you how long I agonized over exactly how do I ask this question. So I do not end up on the, the S list. Which is what I’m trying to avoid doing with this question. But no secret there’s been some drama in the WordPress space over the past year, and I just wanted to see, you know, I live in the echo chamber. I’m talking with people who are obsessed with WordPress most of my day.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:24  Sure. 

Kyle Van Deusen: Is it just that that group of people seemed really upset, or is the whole community falling apart? After WordCamp last year, it felt like everybody was falling apart, but these results really made me happy. Cautiously, the options were very optimistic, cautiously optimistic, I’m neutral, I’m somewhat concerned, or I’m very concerned. I don’t remember if I said the question exactly, but what is your outlook on the future of the WordPress project? To see that 46%, 46.5% are cautiously optimistic. About 17% are very optimistic. And then the somewhat concerned is fairly, fairly low at 16.4. And the very concerned is 3.7. That made me really happy because if you go on Twitter, you would assume that 125% were very, very concerned. So I was glad to see this, that, you know, there’s a small minority of very loud, vocal people who are very upset. But in general, I don’t think people are that worried, which makes me feel a whole lot better.

Michelle Frechette 00:29:21  Yeah, same. I was talking to somebody else this morning explaining that there really are more than one WordPress community, like with a global community, that it’s really a Venn Diagram of like three communities with this overlap. Right? So you’ve got the real insiders, the ones that are giving hours a week and on, you know, working on Core and things like that, that you’ve got the people who are oblivious to the fact that there’s a community at all, and then you’ve got kind of like everybody else that are in the community their, maybe part of the ecosystem and that kind of thing. And then there’s this pool in the middle where they overlap. And as communities grow, ebb and you know they don’t. That’s not static. Right. So there’s that center piece is going to get bigger and smaller. But I think what your survey shows is that there’s a lot of people who are just like, this is my business. I’m just doing it. I don’t need to be part of all of that. Right?

Kyle Van Deusen00:30:18  Yep. And I think, you know, not everybody is as addicted to the internet drama as some people are. Some people kind of, I think, stoke the flames a little bit. It’s good for their view numbers or whatever it may be. But I also think like. I, I want to say that people being optimistic about the future of WordPress makes me excited, because I think there’s, there’s so much about WordPress that we rely on for Core, and there’s been big changes in Core and the number of updates and all that. But the third party ecosystem around WordPress is so massive now that we rely less and less on Core, like having to spoon feed us everything in order to make whatever we need happen. Like if we need some kind of functionality on a website, we’re not entirely reliant on Core to be able to provide that functionality in order for us to have it. There’s plugins and all kinds of things we can use. And I think that was that’s the whole idea around it is Core isn’t going to do everything for you. So I think maybe part of this shows us the optimistic side of me on this says, you know what? People aren’t as worried about the future of WordPress Core, specifically because they have such an ecosystem built up around it that there’s a lot of other people, even if they’re upset or whatever it may be with what’s going on in the politics of the platform. There’s so much built up around it that there’s not a whole lot to worry about. I don’t think.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:44  Yeah, I, I that’s that’s always been my take as well. Some of us have been called out for not taking a side, believe it or not. But, I think it’s important to remain neutral in some respects, you know, and and see both sides of things all the time. So it’s one of those interesting places to be for sure. In this.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:32:02  I just like to say I see both sides, I see it, but.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:07  Exactly. And I’m not saying more than that. So, what was your biggest takeaway from from doing the survey? Like what was the thing that you saw in the results this year was like, wow, that’s impressive or concerning or whatever?

Kyle Van Deusen 00:32:22  Yeah. I mean, for me, I think I’m I’m definitely a numbers kind of person and I’m, I’m very into the financials of my business. So looking at all the financials was probably the thing that I focused on the most and really trying to draw those conclusions between, like, I can’t assume that everybody’s trying to make $1 million a year or trying to pay themselves $100,000 a year, but I feel like that $100,000 take home pay is kind of a goal that a lot of people who start their own agencies have, right? They would love to make six figures doing this job. So for, you know, only 7% of people making Taking 100,000 will say 7, 8, 9, 10. Only 11, 12% of people making that and the rest of the people being below that number. I just want to get that number up. I’m not, I would say I’m disappointed in the fact that what else can I do to help the people who want to grow that number? What else am I not providing through our community that can help people get those numbers higher? Because believe me, the businesses were out there serving. Have plenty of money for this. They go rent a building for whatever their business is, and they spend $20,000 a month on rent, and we’re feeling awkward giving them an invoice for $2,500 for a website. For a lot of businesses, it is a drop in the bucket. I think part of this is like our part of the opportunity here is the business education for people who are web developers, right? Most of us didn’t start a web agency because we went to business school and we looked for opportunities and we decided web development all learned that that’s the best business opportunity. Like we made a website for a friend. That friend told somebody else, that person offered us 500 bucks, and we were floored that somebody would pay us money to do this thing we’ve been doing for fun on the side. Right? So I think there’s a huge opportunity in that business development space in our, in our agency world that I think we can really level up a whole lot of people and get them to where they want to be. If they start understanding some more of those, like business fundamentals. So that’s kind of where my mind’s been since the survey started.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:24  Yeah, absolutely. And looking at things like how much your revenue is versus how much you’re putting into marketing or networking, like you said, like it was what almost 60% of people were not doing. Great. Thank you. So yeah. So they did in-person networking and asking for referrals was like just over 50%. Like half of the people that took the survey basically aren’t doing any actual, like investment in marketing, you know, time or otherwise, other than just, you know, hoping that people will find you. And it’s not that easy anymore to just be found. So there seems to be a lot of lines that you can draw between the different, answers in your different questions, which is very interesting.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:35:11  Yeah. And, you know, we really started this community because I connected with somebody else who was a web developer. We weren’t, we weren’t really involved in the WordPress space at all. We kind of connected on a project and then hit it off, and we started sharing stuff that was happening in our agency and eventually our financials and all these kinds of things. And both of our businesses really took off at that point because instead of having to learn every single lesson for ourselves the hard way, we were able to learn from one another. And it was eye opening to see, you know, I was charging $1,000 for a website. And he said, well, I’m charging $2500. I’m like, you can you can ask $2,500 for a website. And he’s like, sure. So I go ask $2,500 for the next website. And the customer says, yes, I would have never in a million years done it without the confidence coming from knowing other people were doing it right.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:56  So exactly.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:35:57  Part of what I hope people take away from this survey is like seeing what’s possible. I’m not saying everybody wants to make $1 million or take home 100,000, but whatever your ideal situation is, I guarantee you can filter out these results and find people doing it. So go narrow that down, whatever your goals are. See what those people are doing. Maybe they’re doing different marketing. Maybe they’re offering different services. Maybe they’re charging different prices. There’s all kinds of things you could be looking at here, but I think the answer to what a lot of people are looking for is in this data. If you just dig into it a little bit, you got to go beyond the surface level results. I just put on this page because once you start sorting and filtering all this information, you could do it literally thousands of different ways, but go in there and start playing with that data, because I think the agency you’re looking to build is listed in there. You just have to find, you know exactly what that is and see what they’re doing.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:48  I’m curious. And obviously you didn’t ask this question, but I’m curious. I wonder how many people who are agencies of one are portraying themselves under a name that makes it sound like they’re bigger than they are? Right? Like, it’s just that that like, Michelle freelancer versus, you know, I had a company named Marketed by Michelle, and people assumed that there were more than one person in there because it had a name that was not just my name kind of thing. And how much that might encourage people to think you’re more trustworthy, because if something have. I did have somebody say to me once, well, what happens if something happens to you? What happens to my website? Right? When they found out it was just me? And so I wonder if there’s some kinds of those things happening in play as well. So, obviously you could ask 500 million questions and people aren’t going to complete a survey like that.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:37:35  Yeah, I wish they would if they would answer all hundred of my questions, that would have been really helpful. That’s interesting though, because there is there’s like the plus and negative side to that. I go with a company name so people don’t think it’s just me. Some parts of my website say I and some say we. So it’s kind of a mixed bag now I do being bring people in occasionally. But you know there’s there’s the reliability dependability side where somebody might feel more comfortable if they thought there was a team. But there’s also the like, personal touch that comes with you just being your name and like getting one on one attention. So there’s both sides to that coin. So yeah, that would be an interesting thing. I’m definitely going to write that down for next year’s survey.

Michelle Frechette 00:38:15  Or maybe just ask it, ask it in the, in the Slack channel and just kind of get an idea of how people, you know, how that might how that might apply. And if it’s even a question worth asking.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:38:26  I’ll do it before this is published. We’ll have it.

Michelle Frechette 00:38:28  I have no doubt that that will be true. Very cool. Well, this has been very eye opening for me as somebody in marketing, and I really appreciated reading through it. Is, is this just a survey that you put out to your own community? Is this something you’d like to see the wider community participate in the future? Do you want more people to participate?

Kyle Van Deusen 00:38:49  I would love for more people to participate. I, you know, obviously I mostly just reach the people in our community. I did promote it. We had the survey open for about three weeks, two and a half, three weeks. So it was on the website. I sent it out in a million emails and then everybody said, oh, I didn’t see this, you know. I would love for more people to participate. The truth is, if you’re not connected with the community at all, the chances of you stopping down to fill this out are much slimmer. So my hope is that, you know, the results page tends to get tons of traffic. So, our biggest traffic spike day was the day the results came out. And we get lots of new people into the community through that. So I think we can do a good job of making people aware that the survey exists here with the results, and then hopefully they’ll come back next year and want to participate in it. Like I said, I do my absolute best to try to make this as fair as possible and as open as possible. There’s no sponsorships. Nobody’s paying me to do this. I would love it if they would or could because man, I cannot tell you how many hours this takes. And every year when I finish it, I say I’m never doing this again and then I end up doing it. But I just know that I just want this to be a community resource that we can all take something from. And it’s not for one person’s, you know, purposes or desires. I had people offer to sponsor it, but I just want this to be, you know, just for us. So hopefully everybody will, you know, take 5 or 10 minutes, come in, do your part. And then we the more data we have, the more accurate these results are and the better picture we have painted of what it’s actually like running an agency.

Michelle Frechette 00:40:20  Absolutely. Well, I think you’ve done a great job. I want to thank you for sharing it, and I hope that more people will even look at it as a result of me speaking with you today, so.

Kyle Van Deusen 00:40:30  Well, I’m sure they will. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity. I do really appreciate it.

Michelle Frechette 00:40:34  My pleasure. Thanks again Kyle, and we’ll see everybody next time. I don’t know who we’ll be talking to. If you have ideas of people we should talk to, let me know. But we’ll see you then. Thanks.