Transcript ↓

In this episode of the Post Status Happiness Hour, Michelle Frechette and Marcus Burnette introduce “Sponsor Me WP,” a new platform designed to connect WordPress contributors with potential sponsors. They discuss the motivations behind the project, their collaborative development process, and the platform’s user-friendly features. The conversation highlights the importance of community engagement, transparency, and direct connections between sponsors and contributors. Listeners are encouraged to provide feedback and share their experiences to help shape the platform’s future, reflecting the hosts’ commitment to supporting and empowering the WordPress community.

Top Takeaways:

• Sponsor Me WP was created to connect WordPress contributors with sponsors in a simple, transparent way: Michelle and Marcus collaborated to launch Sponsor Me WP—a platform where WordPress community members can share their contributions and availability for sponsorship. It was born from Michelle’s need to supplement her income after being laid off, combined with Marcus’s technical skills and his existing work on WP World. The site allows contributors to create a profile, import data from WP World, and indicate their available hours for sponsorship, while letting sponsors reach out directly—no intermediaries, no money flowing through the platform.
• The platform is intentionally simple, inclusive, and community-driven: The site avoids complex monetization, user gating, or financial processing. It’s designed to be lightweight and easy to use, with user control over profiles and direct sponsor-contributor communication. Michelle and Marcus emphasized that it welcomes both established and aspiring contributors, and they’ve taken steps to ensure fairness (e.g., randomized listing order) and community safety (e.g., ability to remove bad actors if needed).
• Michelle and Marcus are passionate about building community-first tools—and open to evolving based on feedback: They view this project (like WP World and WP Speakers) as a gift to the WordPress community. The hosting was donated, and their time volunteered. They’re also actively seeking ideas for improvement or expansion, especially from people with experience in seeking or providing sponsorships. Their approach centers on reducing friction, encouraging transparency, and enabling community members to support each other’s contributions meaningfully..

Mentioned In The Show:

• Kinsta
• WP World
• WP Speakers
• Underrepresented In Tech
• Sponsor Me WP
• GitHub
• Speed Network Online
• Pressable

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

• Marcus Burnette (Creator, The WP World)
• 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. 📝

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

Transcript

Michelle Frechette 00:00:03  Here we are for another Post Status Happiness Hour Live. And I could almost call you a frequent flyer now, because I keep inviting you to talk about all the different things that you do and I do, and it’s kind of fun. Like usually it’s a little darker in your corner, though. You usually like all this mysterious, but you actually have a light on behind you this time.

Marcus Burnette 00:00:23  Yeah, there’s actually a window there that I just keep covered most of the time. But I felt a little bit like I’m being in a dungeon. So yeah, now I go up and let some light in.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:34  Now it doesn’t look like your wife makes you work in the basement, so. Awesome. Well, you and I have been working on quite a few things over the years that I call community gifts. And you call community gifts because, even though sometimes we have sponsorship on them, things like that, they’re really not created to be moneymakers. You and I are not trying to get rich of some of the services that we provide to the community. And so when you had put out. Shortly after I got laid off from working at Stellar and before I had secured some other contracts that would keep keep food on my table, as they say. I, I had been approached by Kinsta to sponsor some of my hours, so they sponsor five hours a month for me, which is super awesome. But that leaves about 35 hours a month. That is unsponsored. And I thought, I am really, really bad at going and knocking on doors and saying,’ would you give me some money, please?’ And I was just like, it’s not in my nature. And other people do it so well and like, no, no, no heat to them at all, no shame. Because, hey, if you’re really good at that, go for it. But it’s not not something I’m comfortable with. So I thought, what could I do to kind of put it out there as a need? And before I even had thought to solve a problem, you had added something to the WP World that said Open to sponsorship. And I thought, well, that’s great. But like, how do people know? How do they get in touch with me? I love that it’s there. And then I had this idea to create a similar database to some of the others I’ve created before, like the WP Speakers and Underrepresented In Tech. And I thought, I don’t want to replace anything that you do, because I think the things that we’ve done together, or even separately, that kind of meld together nicely, are really complementary and really work to help, across the board. And I have no idea how you make all the things work that you make work. And you keep saying, I’m not a developer. Well, in my book you are a developer because I’m not. But, but I so I said to you, what if we took that concept, like, one step further and did something like a sponsorship website where people who are seeking sponsorship can put it out there. They’re bio things like that. It’s not the WP World. So it’s not everything. Anything. but it’ll link back to the WP World because we put that in there and you made it. You can show in a few minutes how easy it is if you’ve got a WP World to just like, boom, all your information comes in, which I think is brilliant. But also a way for people to be contacted easily. Not be the middleman. Like no money is funneling through us all, all of that. But make it easy for sponsors to find contributors and for contributors to seek sponsorship. And you said, yep, I’m in which that was music to my ears because I love the WP World and everything that you put into it. And then I’ve learned this thing where if I get people to work with me, I don’t have to do all the work myself. Like, it took me 56 years, but I figured it out. And so partnering with you on this was just a no brainer to me. And you took what was in my head and made it so much better than I ever could have envisioned it being. And so Sponsor Me WP was born. And so I want to want to hear from your side of things like were you like, oh God, Michelle has another project and I can’t say no.

Marcus Burnette 00:04:05  No. I feel like it was it was almost kind of like serendipity, right? Because you, like you said, you had, you were going down this path after you got laid off, like, how do I how do I now supplement that income in different ways? Sponsorship is a great way for that. And at the same time, while you were mulling that over, our friend Taco over in the Post Status Slack was asking, hey, is there a place where people can find, you know, who’s looking for sponsorship? And I started, I read that message and I was like, you know what? That completely makes sense for something in the WP World to I already have, you know, there’s a list of people that are in the WordPress ecosystem that are doing things in WordPress. Why not add a simple checkbox and a link for people to be able to say that they’re looking for a sponsorship? Then you can click through that link and learn some more. A lot of those are like GitHub links, so people can can do the sponsorship stuff. And so when you approached me and were like, not everyone’s a developer, not everybody has that GitHub link. And like, this is what I’m looking for as well. Can we build something? You know, we you and I have been looking for a while to do some stuff together and a lot of our, a lot of our projects like sort of intertwined with each other but haven’t been something that we like together built. And so when, when you were like, hey, I see that you added this to the WP World, is there a way that we can do some version of that that’s maybe a little bit broader, a little bit more inclusive of people that aren’t necessarily developers? A place where people can can talk a little bit more about their contribution. Where on the WP World there’s not really a bio like, it’s sort of more of a resume, and you can see what people are doing in WordPress, those plugins and themes that they’ve built and videos now and all of that stuff, but there’s not really a place for a bio for you to really talk about who you are as a WordPress server and what you’re doing, and especially when it comes to contributions and how you contribute to the space and stuff. And so I thought that was a great idea. Let’s build a site where people can go ahead and sign up there. They can talk a little bit more about how they contribute to WordPress, and then there’s a direct contact link there. Rather than sending someone off to a GitHub page. We do have, you know, a place where people can still put that info in, but rather than sending people off to different places, let’s just give a direct contact there. So if you’re a sponsor, someone who has some sponsorship dollars and they’re looking to find places where you can plug into the WordPress ecosystem, this is a great place for you to go find people who are looking for money to be sponsored, to contribute to the ecosystem, and then, you know, they can tag themselves in the different teams and the stuff that they want to work on.

Marcus Burnette 00:06:45  So you as a sponsor, if you’re really excited about, like the WordPress photo directory, which is something that you and I are both part of. You can help that grow by contributing or by sponsoring contributors that are working on the photo directory and things related to the photo directory. So we’ll look at it in a second. But you can kind of narrow down even the things that you want to put your sponsorship dollars towards, depending on what things contributors are working on. And so anyways, you came to me with that and I was already sort of thinking about it because of the WP World, and it just sort of fell into place. I feel like it was the perfect time for us to put this together. And so you and I sat down and tried to determine, you know, what does this look like? What are we looking for from people? How does this tie into maybe some of the other things that we’re doing? Like you said, it connects to the WP World. So we have that tie in to our other projects. And in that particular case, it just makes it easier for you to pull your info in. If you’re already part of the WP World to sign up for, you know, Sponsor Me WP and get your info in there. Takes, you know, a click, you know, a few seconds and most of your entities in there. Then you can focus more on writing that. You know, that bio of like how you want to contribute, and really selling what it is that you’re doing in the ecosystem to sponsors who are looking to to come through and, you know, sponsor you for that work. So yeah, I think the timing was just perfect.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:12  And at the same time, I was having conversations with June Lou about Speed Network Online. And so I spun up a site with one of my hosts, and she went to work on it, like literally between Monday and Wednesday it launched and suddenly you’re saying, hey, look at this. I got the prototype. What does this look like? And I’m like, wow, that was fast. Like, I couldn’t let, like, the Speed Network just go that fast. It was making me jealous.

Marcus Burnette 00:08:41  I did like, I got a little jealous that somebody was publishing something and I wasn’t publishing something new. So I got to work.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:48  They both went up pretty quick. Hey June and June in the comments saying hello. They’re singing your praises, June. I don’t know if you heard that, but. So yeah, so I had two projects go up pretty darn fast, which is exciting to me. One of my biggest concerns and everybody that knows me is like, you should not have been concerned about that. But one of my biggest concerns was when you’ve been laid off, if you take any time off to regroup, kind of heal from emotions and all of that, that you start to become irrelevant. Like if people aren’t seeing you in the community, they can forget you for fairly quickly. And yes, I was still working with Post Status, so I know that wasn’t really going to happen, but I needed to be busy. I needed to sit down at my desk every day and work so I wouldn’t get comfortable laying on the sofa, watching movies, eating grapes.

Marcus Burnette 00:09:36  I think that’s definitely a possibility, but probably less so than than anyone thinks in their head.

Michelle Frechette 00:09:43  I probably for sure. 

Marcus Burnette 00:09:44  Especially if you’ve been part of the community for a while, the way that you have and you’re still going to events and still in Post Status. Yeah

Michelle Frechette 00:09:51  Yeah for sure. But it’s still but it’s a fear right? And so I wanted to make sure that I was creating and, and doing things that felt like work and, put and putting things forward into the community positive way. So that June and I, you know, partnered up on one of that you and I partnered up on, Sponsored Me WP is was very exciting to me. But what I really want to show well, first of all, we launched it on whatever day we launched it, I don’t remember and like. But then I was like, I was a couple weeks ago, within a couple of days, there were like, there’s already like 30 people in there and like a couple more days go by and I’m like, I think I was at WordCamp Europe and I was like, I pulled it up. I was like, there’s 74 people in there. And then I look today and I think that the count as of right before the show was 90. So yeah, clearly there are a lot of people.

Marcus Burnette 00:10:36  92, 92 right now.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:38  Yeah.

Marcus Burnette 00:10:39  Getting close to that triple digit mark already.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:41  I know.

Marcus Burnette 00:10:41  Within a couple of weeks.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:42  So what I wanted to do was have you, because I manage all the other things while the shows going on here. Do a little demo, demo of this site. and kind of walk us through how people can get involved, what it looks like, and, how it works. So I’m going to add that to the screen now and let you kind of give us a little walkthrough.

Marcus Burnette 00:11:03  Awesome. Well, I’m already logged in, so let me log out real quick just to show how easy it is. I mean, we’ve got our main landing page that just kind of talks a little bit about what Sponsor Me WP is. pretty simple. Create your profile. sponsors can come in and find people that they want to, to, you know, to sponsor for contributions. And overall that helps us grow the WordPress ecosystem together. And then a little bit info about us down here. but.

Speaker 3 00:11:34  I love I love the.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:36   I love, I love the images of us, the little cartoons. It’s hysterical. 

Marcus Burnette 00:11:41  Yeah. I had, I found some that looked pretty fun. And then I was challenging ChatGPT to turn our like avatar photos from. I think these are both our like Twitter photos. 

MIchelle Frechette: I think so.

Marcus Burnette: Into the style of whatever the style was that I found in it. It did have a fun job. I thought it was fun photo, so I went with those instead of the usual ultra realistic photo photos. I thought they were fun.

Marcus Burnette 00:12:05  So yeah, it’s it’s super easy. Kept the the signup form nice and short. Email, First Name, Last Name, and Password and, and you’re in. So let me go ahead and log in to mine. And so once you’re, once you have an account, you and every time you log in, you’re automatically sent to the update profile page by default.

Marcus Burnette 00:12:32  So there’s always a chance for you to clean up anything, make any changes. Let’s say you get someone that sponsors contribution for five hours. It’s easy for you to come in here and update the number of hours, so that people can get a good look at, you know, how much contribution you’re still looking for or sponsorship you’re still looking for. So pretty simple. You know, the usual. Thanks. Mark Westcott, shout out for his form for making making life easy for us again. I use it all over the WP World. So it made sense to to put it in here as well and keep everything in check for us. And so there’s a couple of tabs here. It’s personal info. This is that bio area where you get to really talk about what it is that you do, contributing to the WordPress ecosystem.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:24  Including adding links. You made it possible to be able to even add links within the text there.

Marcus Burnette 00:13:29  Yeah, you can add some links within the text here if you want to share, you know, links to some of the examples of things that you’ve done or just kind of however you want to structure your. I kind of wanted to take the rules and limitations off a little bit about how you structure your own bio. So everyone kind of is, is able to, kind of share a little bit about what they do in their own way, which is going to differ whether you’re a developer or photo directory or marketing team or like all the different like ways that you can contribute are very different and you have different opportunities to share examples of what you’ve done or what you’re working on and stuff like that. So it’s pretty open. Yeah, you can share links in here to, to any of those spots. Then there’s a tab for social, which gives you a chance to put in all your different social links so that you can link to those including, you know, our other projects, WP Speakers and WP World. And then there’s a, the sponsorship section. Section itself is where you’re going to want to kind of fill out the bulk. Besides the bio, this is where you fill out your, your handle. Talk a little bit about the number of hours that you’re trying to get covered and how many you already have covered, sponsorship wise. If you have that GitHub URL that we were talking about before, or some other way to share some sponsorship information with potential sponsors, you can put the URL in here. And then we have all of the teams listed to make teams listed here so that you can choose any of the make teams that you want to be involved with. I know that contribution also sometimes falls outside of some of these make teams, like if you want to be sponsored to contribute to like PHP or Node.js or some of the other open source projects. I wanted to give people the opportunity to add those things in as well. So, if you have other projects outside of the make teams that you want to be sponsored for, you can add those here so that if you’re following along video, you see this little thing in the corner that popped up that’s just been sitting there and it popped up when I first got here onto the page and it says, want to speed up your profile creation and import your data from the WP World. This is kind of the like fanciness that I was excited. Not that I wasn’t excited to build the rest of the website, but excited to try to figure out if I could actually make this piece work. 

Michelle Frechette: And you did so.

Marcus Burnette: Yeah I did. And so if you sign up with the same email address that you signed up for at the WP World. So that’s like the only real criteria there. If you’re using different email addresses it’s not going to work this way. That little pop up just won’t show up I don’t think.

Michelle Frechette 00:16:15  Because that’s the key.

Marcus Burnette 00:16:16  So that’s the key. If you sign up with the same email address that you signed up for at the WP World, then you can click this import from the WP World, and it will show you all of the things that you filled out at the WP World that correspond with what’s going on at Sponsor Me WP, and so you can fully apply all of them, or if you just want to update your .org handle and your speakers URL and your website URL. You can choose those individually and hit apply, and it’ll just only update those things for you so you have full control over what it is that you want to pull from the WP World over into Sponsor Me WP.

Michelle Frechette 00:16:57  Super nice, you don’t have to put all your social handles in and type those all out.

Marcus Burnette 00:17:01  Yeah, all the social handles, track them down, copy them, make sure they’re in the right format and everything. This handles all of that and pastes it in for you. So. Yeah, exactly. You know you could do just give me and Twitter, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon, and hit apply. And now all your social handles are in and ready to go. So I was very excited to to figure that one out. And

Michelle Frechette 00:17:24  I was super impressed when I saw it, that’s for sure.

Marcus Burnette 00:17:27  Yeah, very excited for that. So then you filled out your your information and you end up in our list of contributors here on the site. Very intentionally. This is a random pool of contributors. What we wanted to make sure was that we didn’t prioritize, you know, ten people or. Yeah, ten people because their last name starts with A, B or C or something like that. so.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:54  And those poor people whose last names are W never get sponsors.

Marcus Burnette 00:17:57  Sponsors all the way at the bottom, never, never get noticed or anything like that. So this is intentionally random. If you have a particular person that you’re looking for like Michelle, you can start to type it in and it’ll pull up that person for you. If you want to sort it by last name, there is a button over here where you can click the button, and then they will be sorted by last name for you. That’s totally up to you. And then, I’ll refresh again. Just a randomizes again. And then you can also filter by the teams. Like I said, sometimes as a sponsor you want to sponsor particular parts of the project, different parts of the ecosystem. Let’s say you’re building something that really relies on Gutenberg continuing to progress, right? So you’re going to want to find contributors that are contributing directly to Gutenberg and sponsor their time specifically so they can continue working on those things. If that’s the case, let’s say in this example, I can just click Gutenberg. And now I have a list of the four people currently in here that have noted that they’re specifically working on Gutenberg related things within the ecosystem. And so then you can see how many, how many hours they are looking to be sponsored, how many hours they’re already sponsored for their time. You can pick one. I’m going to click on Tammie’s name here and it’ll take you to their profile. You can read, right. This is the bio that Tammie put in. So you can read more about the person that you’re thinking about contributing to. See the different teams. Tammie does have a link off to GitHub where you can directly sponsor through GitHub if you want. And then everybody has this form at the bottom where you can send a message to that contributor to say, ‘hey, I’m interested in sponsoring you potentially for your time with Gutenberg, you know, time working on the Gutenberg project or part of the project. you know, let’s get let’s get it together and chat that through’. So you put in your first name, last name, email and a little message, and that will go directly to the contributor. Not to us. That goes directly to the contributor. They can see that message. And then via email you can go back and forth. As the sponsor with the contributor and figure out what works. And then the contributor can come back and update their sponsorship hours and all of that. So that’s kind of the walkthrough there.

Michelle Frechette 00:20:25  One of the things we wanted to make sure was that we weren’t the middleman, so to speak, in any of it. So I did have somebody, you know, when we first launched it say, well, how do we get paid? That’s between you and the sponsor. So that’s why there’s a contact form there. Every sponsor does pay out differently, sometimes less so for like Kinsta. I have to invoice them my time every month. I don’t have to give them a written account of everything I did. But I do have to invoice them. And that’s going to trigger a payment to me. Others may, you know, hit up your GitHub and automatically have a pay go through there. It really differs depending on who they are. And so we don’t want to be part of that at all. And we certainly don’t want to have any income through this that then shows up on our taxes because we funneled money through to anybody else. And so the whole idea was to create this, kind of a marketplace, I guess, a way to match up between sponsors and contributors so that you can talk to each other, find each other easily, and then take the conversation offline so that you can have those conversations one to the other. And we also didn’t want to put a lot of we didn’t want any financial information to go through the site either. It just makes it a lot safer and more secure for everybody. If your financial information is not showing up on our website.

Marcus Burnette 00:21:41  Yeah, absolutely. No, we’re we’re looking to be I mean, and this is very similar to really how I’ve structured things with the WP World, how you structure things with WP Speakers like this is all just to kind of foster that connection between between people in the WordPress space, whether it’s, you know, people connecting with other people or companies connecting with people, people connecting with, in this case sponsors, potential sponsors. You and I really enjoy building these projects that like just create that connection between people. And then from there, you know, like on the WP World, I foster the connection for people to meet up at a coffee shop, they have to figure out which coffee shop works for them and go hang out together and buy coffee and whatever. Same goes for this. We’re looking to to create that connection and the ones that connection is made, then the person who is sponsoring can say, here’s, you know, here’s what I need to be able to sponsor you financially, or the person who’s doing the contributing can say, here are the different ways that I can accept, you know, being paid or whatever. Like it’s all, like you said, it’s all going to be different from person to person. And so we didn’t want to we didn’t want to force a specific way on anybody. And we also didn’t want to really have our hand in any of that transaction, the monetary transaction. And so the site is just here to create a connection between between sponsors and contributors. And then how they work that out is going to be different from sponsor to sponsor and contributor to contributor.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:14  Yeah. We also don’t tell you how much your hour is worth. So how many hours you do and what your hour is worth, because an hour to one person may be valued differently than an hour to somebody else. And so that is 100% between you and whoever’s sponsoring your time in the community. Fantastic. So that’s I mean, literally that’s it. There’s a homepage and there’s a directory, and we haven’t done anything else with it. Because it’s by design, should be simple. It should be easy to use. I may throw something in there a little bit later about, you know, how you can just reach out to people and how we’re not to go between a little more in depth, if you will, of another page that just is a little more direct in how this all works. But for the meantime, I think it’s very simple, very clear, very concise, which I like a lot. And the design, you did such a great job on the design work Marcus. Thank you. I say it’s our project. It was my idea and 100% your execution.

Marcus Burnette 00:24:13  The, it’s funny because the design is like version six. It’s the only one that you saw, but it’s like version six behind the scenes, because I just could not, I could not get to a place that I was happy with it for a long time. and it was honestly not until I was playing with those silly avatars of ours, the AI generated avatars that I felt like I had some sort of a design direction. I was like, oh, I kind of want to follow this direction. So, you know, on the.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:44  I love that. So literally just go to SponsorMe.com for more information there. But a couple people have put some comments in the comments thread. If you have questions about this we would love to answer them. We’re a captive audience. We’re live right now. If you’re watching this later, you’ll have to reach out to us through the website, I guess. But, we would love to. What did I put through here? Yeah. If you have questions there it goes, if you have questions for us, post them in the chat and we will be happy to answer them. Speak now or forever hold your peace. Just kidding. It’s not that serious, folks, but it is a lot of fun. So yeah, if you have any questions or ideas for us, we’re also open to ideas, right? So if there’s something that we failed to see that would be really amazing to have in there. Tell us about it and maybe we’ll make it happen. And maybe we’ll be like, no, because you never know. 

Marcus Burnette 00:25:38  Yeah, definitely one of the things that I’ve noticed through our projects, right, I’m sure you get the same is once you, once you toss it out there to the world and you start to share it more broadly, you know, folks start to have some ideas of like, well, what if it did this? Or what if it could do that? Like, I’m totally open to that, both with the WP World and Sponsor Me WP please share as like absolutely I have a roadmap. I have lots of ideas of what I would like to do with this and the WP World and everything else. There’s a nice long list, but I can only think of so much and I’m only going to think of so much, and I’m only going to think of so much from like one perspective, from my perspective. And I have not, like I was sponsored by my employer to work a couple hours a week, but that was like part of my regular job, so I haven’t had to go out and find sponsors to specifically come and say, hey, we’d like to sponsor five hours a week for you to do this. So I don’t have that perspective. I don’t have that context. You do. So you and I can bounce that off of each other a little bit. But others who have gone through this who have looked for for sponsorship or have gained or have gotten sponsorship, reach out to us, tell us what’s what’s worked, what’s helped. What would have been nice, right? Maybe there’s some things in that process where you’re like, oh, it would have been nice if the sponsor had this information ahead of time, or I knew this about the sponsor when they were contacting me, you know, how do I need to do I need to update the contact form, the individual contact form to have more information, less information, structured differently, like I’m open to all of that. Like and and I know that you are too. So if anybody has ideas on how, especially those that have been through some of the sponsors, the contribution sponsorship process, like tell us what worked, what would be great to have that’s not already there? We’re totally open to.

Michelle Frechette 00:27:26  Other than the payment process.

Marcus Burnette 00:27:26  Right. Other than the payment process, because we do want to just keep our hands out of the, out of the proverbial cookie jar that’s between you all. We’re not looking to have anything to do with the money part of it.

Michelle Frechette 00:27:38  And we’re not seeking sponsorship for the site either. So like, it’s literally it just lives there. The hosting was donated by Pressable, so we don’t even have to pay for that. I think I’m paying, like, 20 bucks a year for the domain name or something like that. So our time has been the gift. I well, Marcus’s time has been the gift because.

Marcus Burnette 00:28:00  Your time as well. Yeah. We’re we’re not looking to make anything from this other than connections between contributors and sponsors. This is this is our one of our our gifts back to the community.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:14  Absolutely. So if you have ideas, tell me and I’ll tell Marcus and he will know how to make it happen. It’s my favorite thing. It’s like, I love all your ideas, Marcus. This person had this idea.

Marcus Burnette 00:28:26  Marcus here is a list of ideas, and I’m. And I’ll be absolutely happy to work on them because.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:31  You make things happen so quickly, like the WP World from its inception to where it is today. Phenomenal, right? Just so phenomenal. And I think of all these other projects as being just like part of that whole universe of like it’s a Venn diagram and everything kind of, you know, overlaps a little bit. We got a question, Ericka. I we saw I saw Ericka just last week.

Marcus Burnette: Hey Erica.

Michelle Frechette:  In, in Europe. So, and she’s on TikTok. Ericka is on the recent TikTok. On for, WordPress. And I was like, tell us in Spanish. And so she and I didn’t even know what she said until after I got it home. And like, she said hi to me, like it was so nice. So anyway, but the website is also for people who are not yet contributing, are also looking to be sponsored. Right? I would say yes, if they’re looking to get to be able to contribute and they need to be sponsored to do that, I have no problem with that. We’re not gatekeeping it. So, the thing I would hate the most is somebody says they’re contributing, they’re not actually contributing, and they’re just siphoning money from some company, but that’s up to the company to do some vetting and make sure that things align well. Because we are not gatekeeping any of that. But that said, I will say if there are bad actors in the community and they’re using our site nefariously, please let us know. I don’t anticipate this community will do that, but we can remove them from the site if we needed to. She saw the video because I tagged you on Twitter, isn’t it? Yeah. That was so cute. I’m having so much fun, by the way, with the WordPress org, Twitter or TikTok account. 

Marcus Birnette: Tik Tok, yeah I’ve saw a couple of them. 

Michelle Frechette: Oh my gosh, it is so much fun. So, Yeah. So those are that’s what we have got going on. And I hate to even say this part out loud, but if you have other ideas of gaps in the community that we can maybe help fill and pull other people into it, tell us, because there’s probably a way to work it into the WP World or so, or even Post Status and things like that. So recently posted a spot, WP Speakers, which means I still get to help manage it, but I am not.  I don’t have to deal with the dev of it anymore, which is nice. So, Joost team is doing that. So, and Dave says he’s been following the WordPress TikTok videos. They are fun, a total fun. There’s some funny, funny ones coming up. Man. I make myself look a little silly and I’m 100% happy with it, so it’s a lot of fun. You know, we we usually save an hour for this show. I think this project was. I’m not going to say it was simple to do, because I don’t want to downplay the amount of work that you put into it, but we’ve made it simple to use. Or we, I’ll say the way we’ve made it simple to use. We’ve made it easy for you to be able to create that account for yourself. Now, my ask of people, if you’re paying attention and watching, share it with, share it on social media. Tell your company if your company is somebody who sponsors. The whole idea is not every company has the people power to be able to take 5 or 10% of their time and their and their, their team to contribute to the project. So they would rather use money to help other people who are already in the community do that. And so that’s why this is a perfect thing, is helping make those matches. So if you know people who are looking to sponsor you, you know, people are looking to be sponsored and and please, if you see us, posting it on social media, a simple share would be mean the world to us so that we can actually start to make some of those connections for people in the community.

Marcus Burnette 00:32:10  Yeah, absolutely.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:12  Any, any anything else you want to add, Marcus?

Marcus Burnette 00:32:15  No, I don’t think so. I think, Yeah. Like. Like you said, there’s there’s some complexity under the hood, but the whole point was to make the site itself as simple and user friendly as possible. And so. Yeah. Share it. Sign up if you’re not already signed up. And then we’ll, we’ll get those sponsors in and, and get some people sponsored for contributing.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:38  Let’s make some magic. Last chance, if you’ve got a question, hit us up because we’re going to close this down in a minute. I don’t have anybody for next week. I’m still working on getting a guest for next week’s Post Status Happiness hour. So if you have a project that you’d like to share, please hit me up.

Marcus Burnette 00:32:55  Means we have a week to come up with another project to collaborate on to build it, and then I’ll just be back on again.

Michelle Frechette 00:33:04  Like, hey Marcus, are you free tomorrow? My project fell through for tomorrow. Hear me out. WordPress the Musical. Can we do something by next week?

Marcus Burnette 00:33:15  By next week. I’ll get. I’ll get my daughter on it. She’s musical.

Michelle Frechette 00:33:19 She probably.

Marcus Burnette 00:33:20  I would not be much of a help there personally but.

Michelle Frechette 00:33:23  I was gonna I was in a meeting, earlier this week, and like, in the chit chat time before things get started, like, what are y’all watching on TV? And I said, I’m rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the beginning. It’s it’s like it doesn’t even fit the TV because it’s like square versus, like the letter box where you see now and and somebody in the group said once more with feeling Michelle. And that was the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So I have that in my head right now. I’m not really writing a musical. Oh Dave the musical, backed up by Disney.

Marcus Burnette 00:33:56  So yeah, it would be interesting. It’s almost, it’s almost worth asking ChatGPT to like, outline what a WordPress the Musical would be would look like.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:07  Oh my goodness. All right. If anybody does that. Share it.

Marcus Burnette 00:34:10  yes share it with us I want to I’m curious.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:13  To well thanks for being with us everybody today, Marcus. Thank you again, especially for the last minuteness. But for all of the hard work that you put in to Sponsor Me WP, I appreciate every time we have an opportunity to do something together to share each other’s projects. You are one of these people in the community that is just such a pillar of the community, and being friends with you on top of that is just the icing on the cake. So thank you.

Marcus Burnette 00:34:37  I super appreciate that. So happy to work, to work on anything at all with you and even just chatting outside of WordPress. Always a good time.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:46  I know. I wish you were going to Montclair too, because we had so much fun last year.

Marcus Burnette 00:34:50  I know.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:51  I’ve done all together and all the things.

Marcus Burnette 00:34:53  I’ve been in the last three years, and I am starting to feel a little sadness that I’m not going to be there this year. But, it is what it is.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:59  We’ll see you at US this year?

Marcus Burnette: Yes. 

Michelle Frechette: Excellent, excellent. All right, so, Marcus, don’t hop off right now. I’m going to stop the stream, but I got a couple quick things to share with you before I let you go. Bye. Everybody will see you soon.

Marcus Burnette: 00:35:12  Bye.