Supper Club × Syed Balkhi and WordPress

Welcome to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. We've got another supper club for you today. We got Saeed Balki on today from from literally everything.

We'll explain. Saeed is big In, in the WordPress land as well as he has a whole bunch of, premium plug ins and, just a kind of a all around cool guy. So I thought we'd have him on to to talk about all the stuff that he's into. My name is Wes Bos. I'm a developer from Canada. With me, as always, is mister Scott Talinski. Key, how are you doing today, Scott? I'm doing good. We're going to LEGOLAND tomorrow, so I am

mentally preparing myself for a trip 2 LEGOLAND. That's what I'm doing.

My my kids had 2 parties this weekend, 1 at a Ninja Warrior Place.

And then the other one is at this, like, indoor kids playground that's just lights and flashing and glow in the dark. And I am just, like, zapped today.

So overstimulated from all the yelling and music and everything like that. Yeah.

Yeah. I hear you there. This This episode is sponsored by 2 amazing companies, Hasura, which is the instant GraphQL API for your database, and LightStep incident response, Which is intelligent on call scheduling and escalation.

So welcome, Sayid. Thank you so much for coming on. Hey. Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure. Awesome. So, why don't you give us a little rundown of of who you are and what you do and what all your your companies are, and then we'll we'll dig into it. Sure.

I am the founder and CEO of Awesomeotive, which most people are like, what the heck is that? I like to say I'm a blogger.

I created this blog called WP beginner, which, taught people how to use WordPress.

And from there, we started creating plug ins and SaaS apps to help small businesses grow and compete with the big guys.

And now we have a portfolio of over 30 different, companies and products, And our software used by over 20,000,000 websites.

That's incredible. So This all started from you starting a blog. Like, when did you do that? That's correct. I started WPBeginner

in 2009.

And really I was just creating tutorials like how to make a website with WordPress, how to install WordPress, how to add a contact form in WordPress, and You name it.

And then over time, what we learned was that, you know, plugins were built for developers and not necessarily the end users. The user experience left much to be desired.

This was the feedback that I saw from our users and our blog really existed to help them Succeed with the WordPress site, and I created this product called OptinMonster, which, helps you collect email, subscribers from your website, and that was the genesis. Unreal.

Because you and Chris Coyer, smashing mag back then, I was sitting there being like, Man, like, starting starting a blog was the thing to do. Mhmm. And I was just like, man, like, these guys are are doing I want to do that. And a year later, I wanna do that. And a year later, I wanna do that. And then there there's something to be said for just sitting down and banging outposts and sharing Stuff that you learn because, like, like, here we are.

What? Like, 12, 13 years later.

Chris Coir just sold CSS tricks to Digital Ocean.

Smashing Mags doing really well. You are obviously have a very thriving business selling premium stuff and SaaS apps from it. Like, There's there's something to be said for just keeping at it. Don't don't you agree?

Absolutely. You know what they say, Wes, about, like What? The the best time to plant a tree This is like right now. This or the 2nd best time is right now. The best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. That's gotta be the same for a blog. Right? I mean,

2nd best time is right now. Start it. Yep. Oh, that's Great. Do you do you employ any, like, techniques or tricks or anything like that in in order to get lots traffic. Like, do you figure out, okay, what are people searching for and have all these keyword tools? Or or is it simply just like, this is something I needed learn or this is something people are probably looking for, I'm gonna go ahead and and write a blog post about it. You know, over the years, the process of, our content strategy has changed. So when I first started, I literally would just answer the questions that I saw people were asking in different forums.

And usually the forum responses were not as good. So imagine if you were a developer and you wanted to start your own blog, you go on Stack Overflow and the answers, You know, not as detailed. You can take that answer and make it longer and and more step by step. That and that's that's what I sort of did In the beginning, I also would look at on Twitter. They they have a very robust search tool, and I would see what people were searching about. You know, you can Say, show me WordPress and everything related to questions. And it will show me all the questions people are asking about WordPress, and I would just go write those, tutorials.

Of course, there was some about, like, you know, new plugins that were being launched, the industry happenings, and so on.

And then as we progressed, you know, you feel like, oh, man. I have written about every single thing that is to be written about. Yeah.

Right? And then and then you start looking at, keyword resources, like AnswerThePublic or Semrush and so on. And, You know, from there, you know, as WordPress has grown, I mean, my gosh, like, when I started using WordPress, there were no menus. There were there was no header Maker, you know, all of these things are No. No custom menus came out. Yeah.

So, you know, WordPress has grown so much over the years that I feel like we cannot, we can never run out of ideas.

There's 59,000 plug ins that are, you know, helping people do all sorts of different things, and Our users are always asking us questions. So our process now on how we come up with ideas is quite a bit different than what it was 13 years ago when I was writing.

And we have a thriving community where people are suggesting ideas, and we just take those and turn them into tutorials. Turn them into blog posts. That's that's amazing. It's interesting you said this Twitter search tool because

that's what I did in the very early days. If you go back to my YouTube Search from oldest. There's a couple videos on there that I basically just have. This person on Twitter asked this question. Let me show how I would solve that. Or, like, that's what I did in the early days to sort of get into the community. I was just I had a tweet deck column that had, like I forget what it was. I think you used to be able to search by question Jen on Twitter.

And, like, I just typed in CSS WordPress, and it was kind of like like Stack Overflow. I spent a lot of time on that as well, but,

it it's a great way. Just literally search what people are trying to fix. We do that a lot with this podcast too. I mean, we we see things Come up or we're we're hitting stuff in our own life where we see questions pop up and we're like, oh, this is a great episode. Let's, let's take 20 minutes, 30 minutes, hash that out. Precisely. So, So, you know, we just use that content strategy, create a good content, and then, you know, other developers who

had, you know, the same questions or maybe their clients were asking the same questions, and they didn't wanna necessarily create their own resource. They started sending people our way. And then it sort of just grew from word-of-mouth.

Of course, in the early days, we were friends, with, for example, with with tele at Smashing Magazine would promote us, and we would do a bunch of collabs and Darren Rouse from Problogger.

And a lot of collaboration was done in the early days to grow the community. And then from then, it's just been word-of-mouth. Wow. It's amazing. And now you have, what? There's a team of writers that just write for it full time? Yeah. We have a pretty decent sized content team across all of our brands, from WPBeginner to The Monster. Every single one of our brands have a dedicated blog, dedicated community.

We have a pretty robust content marketing team That's producing content. Wow. I so I saw some photos of,

I I forget where I saw this, but I saw, like, you have, like, a a meetup or, like, you have, like, an all hands where everybody comes and visits, and you're just ton of people. Like, how how many people work for you?

So in Automotive, we are over 200 people across 45 different countries, Fully remote. We've always been remote for, you know, from the beginning.

And then, you know, I've taken, like, investment stakes through the WPBeginner Growth Fund that I launched in 2018 and across our portfolio, we have, over 400,

team members. Wow. That's incredible.

I thought, aw. That I saw that. Yeah. I saw that, and I was like, this guy replies to my emails in, like, 6 minutes. How do you have that many employees? And, like, do do you have any like, how how are you able to to do that? Like, you do you have, like, a really good management team, or what does that look like?

Yeah. So every single one of our brands have a general manager or president that, operates that business unit. So I'm not in the day to day of those businesses.

Okay. Which allows me to be able to respond to your email as soon as it comes. I literally have a filter. Wes sent me an email.

A big light in your office.

So was it was this part of the the plan From the beginning, did you did you see it getting this big from the beginning, or was this like, I'm gonna start a blog? Or was it like, I'm gonna start a blog, and eventually it's going to I employ 200 plus people. Yeah. No. I did not see it coming. It was just a vlog.

And then, you know, we I I really all the solutions that we have, were problems that I had in my business. For example, I had a blog that got traffic and like most websites, people would leave and not come back. Right? Because they found the answer and they would leave. So I wanted to collect emails which everybody knows. It's it's the way to get people to come back because you can connect with your visitors.

And I was using these different lead generation plug ins. They were not scalable because our site had a lot of traffic and those weren't really coded well, So I built OptinMonster, and OptinMonster helped me collect a lot more email subscribers and every all of my readers were like, what Tool are you using? Because the one you're using looks a lot slicker, and it was just custom built for me. So I turned it into a plug in, a partner with my cofounder Thomas, Griffin on that, and then we launched it.

And it blew up. And then, you know, a couple maybe, like, 2 years later after that Or maybe 3 years later after that, we acquired Monster Insights. Actually, prior to that, we acquired Envira Gallery and Soliloquy.

We sold those 2 businesses later on, but we acquired Monster Insights. It used to be called Yoast Analytics, because

Oh, okay.

Yeah. Yeah. So, basically, every year, I do a survey in the beginning of the year, and I ask our our readers bunch of different questions, Including for blog post ideas, etcetera. And one of them is if you could have me build 1 product, what would it be and how much you would pay for it? Which just gives me all the insights I need, And then we pretty much just go and either build those products or buy one of those products.

So, you know, analytics solution, MonsterInsights, I needed it for our own sites because I wanted to make sure event tracking was being done right and so on, and we had built custom scripts. So we just rolled all of that in. So now I can just Plug and play master insights on whichever website I build or buy, and it gives me all the analytics.

Same thing happened with WP forms.

And then, you know, I'm like, hey. I we're we're doing a lot of SEO work. I feel like SEO plug ins have stopped innovating. And so in 2020, I, bought all in 1 SEO, and we were kinda changing the landscape of, SEO tools. That's been pretty exciting.

We we said you know, it's it's kinda funny. It's like 1 step after another, not necessarily planned ever. It just kinda sort of happens.

So, you know, when we were when we started selling OptinMonster, Thomas and I, we used this, plug in called easy digital downloads.

It was created by this really reputable developer, Pippen Williamson, and we use that to sell our plug ins.

And over the years, We became one of the bigger users of Easy Digital Downloads.

And then, last year, Pippen reached out to me and said, hey. I'm looking to move on. I've been doing this for a decade, and we ended up buying easy to deal downloads. So, you know, would would I have predicted that in 2013 when we first started using EDD? Probably not. It just happens.

What what's your background in before this stuff? Like, it seems like you have a certain degree of savvy. Is it just like your intuition, or or do you have a background in in growing businesses before this. No.

I have no background in business. Nobody in my family had a had a bit ever created a business.

You know, I kinda just dabbled on the Internet and try to find ways to monetize and earn a living.

I built websites with people. I used to do my you know, I'm not a very good coder.

I I can I can understand a little bit, but,

my background is marketing? Oh, unreal. This episode is sponsored by Hasura, which is the instant GraphQL for your data That's using any Postgres or Postgres family of database.

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head on over there right now and give this a try. Thanks so much for Hessara for sponsoring. The design of this stuff looks really good. Is that, Like, a core tenant of of the stuff you type you tend to do is that, like, I remember using lots of WordPress plugins in there Cobbled together are the worst when the the font is not the same as the rest of WordPress and whatnot. Like, do you spend a lot of time on design? Do you have a do you have a whole Team over there or does each team have a designer? Yes.

Each team have their own designer.

Yeah. We we spend A good deal of time on design primarily because, well, I should say, our focus on design is not just how it looks and feels.

It's how it works.

And we spend a good good bit of time on that. How do we reduce the number of clicks it takes to accomplish something? How do we, make it stupid simple? So I would say, how do we make it stupid simple? And what would a user back to when they're if they're not in WordPress. So we look at other ecosystems and and try to offer that Consistent experience that people are having, whether they're using their mobile app or another app, that's not WordPress.

What about let let's talk about code management as well.

So you have how many products now? Like, 12 or so?

Over 30 different brands in their portfolio.

So how do you manage the the code for all of this? Are you are you on GitHub? Do you have a monorepo? Is every product in it? Do you have do you ever share code, between products?

Yeah. So we use GitHub, for for everything. And then, so so each Business sort of operates independently, with a different GM president.

So they may, you know, they may choose to do things slightly differently. I don't try to influence Those, micro decisions that are being made.

But a good bit of the teams are using, Zenhub Inside GitHub, which allows you to have task management a little bit better with Kanban boards.

In terms of code sharing, you know, certain APIs, of course, are, you know, being used by, all different brands Just for the sake of easy management, other times it's just, code forking. So 1 person said, oh, I like what you've done here. They would just fork that code, Enhance it, improve it, and move on. We really believe in moving fast, and being scrappy along the way. So when a when a new brand is coming out, we're not going to say, oh, well, let us You know, slow down and create this 1 gigantic, universal class which only serves as 3 use cases, and then you come up with the 4th one, and you're, Oh, man. I need to rewrite the whole thing, and now it in fact rewrites on 4 different things. You know? We don't we don't do that. But, but, you know, we have certain classes that that we have written and We even open source them. For example, TGMPA.

Right? It's it's, TGM plug in activation class. It's short for Thomas media plug in activation class, which is the universal, dev class that everybody uses in WordPress for inter plug in dependency or theme to plug in dependency.

So if you have a theme that requires a certain plug in, you're going to use this class.

And a lot of our plug ins use that. I mean, we we coded it for ourselves and, mean, this is the most universally used class for for plug and distribution from dependency point of view.

Cool. Let's talk about YouTube before we move. I talk about WordPress in general some more, but, you have also,

like, a pretty large YouTube channel as as well. Right? Yes. I have a pretty large, YouTube channel in WPBeginner.

We have about, 274 1,000 subscribers there now.

In the back in the day, maybe maybe over a decade ago, I actually created a fun side project, Which I sold, and that YouTube channel was even bigger.

I don't think you can see it in my background, but I have one of those 1,000,000 gold play button. Yeah. Hang hang on. 1,000,000? Yeah. So that that will have. What channel was it? It it was called, list 25, and The channel is pretty much dead now. The new owner took it and didn't do a whole lot with it. But it was, like, you know, those top 25 viral content kind of thing, and And it had,

over 2 a half 1000000 subscribers, over half a 1000000000 video views. It was just viral content Oh, god. Degrading. Was Was this one of those videos that like, you know, when you go to YouTube when you're signed out and you you view trending and stuff, you're like, who's watching this? Was that one of those channels?

Yes. Yes. Absolutely.

You know, it was like BuzzFeed esque kind of content. Things you I said things you didn't need to know, but you now, you know, kind of thing.

That's unreal. So And you just you just created that while you're doing all of these.

Yes. Like all your WordPress stuff. So that's Yes. You're you're in the marketing brain inside of you being like, I like, are you able to just look at something like I'm curious. TikTok. Are you able to look at TikTok? And do you see how it works and and how, how you can make it like, use the algorithm or or people's

The way people act on the app? Yes. I I I'm I think one of my strengths is that I can identify patterns fast.

Okay. And So so if something is going viral, like, you know, I'll just kinda look at the ones that are going viral and identify certain patterns there, and then we can just emulate those.

So the the YouTube channel, that was a college project. Right? I was in college, and me and my college roommate decided that wouldn't it be fun if we just created this thing? And we did. You know, we just spun up a WordPress blog and then turned all of our blog content into, videos,

And that was a pretty good strategy. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure that. I mean, he got it to a 1000000 subscribers, which is No easy task. That's for sure. That's true. I was, like, looking at it, and it's in the very corner of his video. And I was looking at it. I was like, that's, oh, that's old one, but it's Yes. It's bigger. Scott, you have the old one as well. Right? Yeah. Mine is right there next to the bag of chips.

Yeah. But it the the 100,000 has a black frame. And I was like, which one is that that you've got there? So that's pretty interesting.

Do do you have a a team that does WPBeginner videos as well? Yes.

Video has been a big focus for us over the last couple of years. WPBeginner has a decent sized video team now, but also our our other brands like WP forms and all in one SEO and Monster, etcetera, they all have Video teams, and we're pumping out video content, both from using YouTube as an acquisition channel and discovery channel for our new users, but also creating video tutorials that we can then embed inside our app to make you know, if somebody has a question about how to do something Oh, yeah. Related to this particular feature, they can see a relevant video,

for that section in the help area. Yeah. That that's always interesting to me because, Like, I think about the landscape of me being online. In the early days, it was definitely a blog, and then, then it, like, was more YouTube and and Twitter and stuff like that. It's interesting to see people adapt to the different platforms. Do you like, if you if somebody was, like, looking to do something like this today And they were to only do 1, would you say start a blog or start a YouTube channel? Or start a TikTok. Or TikTok. Yeah.

Or a podcast. You know, they all have their advantages, but I think, there's only 1 platform that you truly own, and that is your blog. So Yes. I would not say just start Instagram and build your following there.

You can probably build a bigger following on TikTok Rather than your own blog right away because TikTok has a recommendation engine. It has users. You might be able to get viral and but the key is once you hit Those followers, you gotta bring them over to your own platform.

That way you don't become a victim of The platform changing algorithm and you going down, that happens way too often. Right? I've been around back in the friend feeds day. Right? So social media has Come and go. Platforms come and go.

The one thing that you always own is your own domain name. I mean, we learned that lesson pretty

pretty distinctly when you know, my my whole career is based off of YouTube to start, and, we got our channel up. No. We were living off of that ad revenue, and then YouTube decides to cut that ad revenue. And we're like, oh, we don't have a backup plan for this.

And that was a big wake up call for us to To get off of the platform in terms of, using the platform more as an acquisition channel like you mentioned rather than the the strategy or the platform.

I've been watching like I've been pretty heavily into TikTok the last year or 2.

And you see these people just blow up like, Scott, do you know who the island boys are? No.

No? Okay. Just just Google island boys. So 2 guys. I'm not gonna Google island boys, It's better to do it. You would enjoy it.

So, like, these guys blew up massive, Like, sit in frontcourt NBA games, like, massive deals with everybody.

And now they're they're TikToks are just you can tell they're just grasping for straws, and trying to to to get it. And I don't think they moved anybody off the platform. And, like, that's that's what you got to do, man. You got to get them, like, OptinMonster right there. You got to get them in the email. You got to have them coming back because as soon as that platform pulls a rug or changes and it's happening Faster and faster.

Like, YouTube, it might have been years before they changed something with TikTok. It's every couple months they're changing the algorithm. And For you to know it, you're saying, oh, what happened to what happened to the island boys? You know?

Even when I didn't even they didn't even know they got it. And oh my gosh.

Just don't do this now, but after this podcast, please go take a Take a look into the island, boys. Pretty, pretty unreal.

Let's talk about WordPress in general. So WordPress, Has this very odd, like love in the web development industry is that everybody who doesn't code PHP Hates it. And everybody who's in PHP, whether it's Laravel or WordPress, is very happy with their life, Is doing well as making really cool stuff, buying Lamborghinis, all of this kind of cool stuff. But so, like, What do you think about that? Like, why does everybody hate WordPress, but everybody inside of WordPress seems to be doing fine? I think it's

Echo chamber effect that we see.

So depending on the community or tribe that you belong to, You sort of drink that Kool Aid and then everything that's not there, you kind of learn to hate on it.

You know, I I believe that when we're building something, what matters above everything is the functionality of it. Who cares if it's written in PHP or React or Vue JS or Node or whatever it might you might be using Python, etcetera.

As long as it works and it gets the job done for the user, ultimately, that's what the goal of a software developer is, is to get the job done.

And there are many ways to get get that done. You know, we have tools that are using PHP, Laravel, WordPress, Laravel, both both PHP, but we also have React and Vue and all sorts of fun stuff happening in Golang and, etcetera. That but, You know, we me, as a founder CEO, I don't control those decisions. I think those decisions Get made by the different product teams and those businesses operate pretty independently anyways.

So they choose what's right for them in that specific scenario.

And our core values to labor for simplicity.

So the goal is to, you know, take the quickest, shortest, Simplest way, to get the job done because, ultimately, the user doesn't care what language it's written in. That's such an important thing that so many people miss out on, especially

In our current industry where they want to oh, I the the my site, I wrote it and reacted now. Svelte exists. I need to rewrite this thing And I I'm one to talk because I did exactly that, but I I I I did it for certain reasons. But still at the end of the day, right, you you You can waste so much time when that's not what's important at all. It's the product. It's the user's the user's results that matter, not your, You know, your your code stack. I think that it has just lost a lot.