Matt continues with Season 8 with the second roundtable episode talking to Jennifer Bourn, Davinder Singh Kainth and Chris Badgett. This panel represents the thought leaders in the WordPress community and they have been working in the WordPress space for a long time by adapting to the changes in WordPress that are impacting their businesses. They finish the episode with projections of WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

Listen to this episode:

Jennifer Bourn - Co owns a design and development agency called Bourn Creative. She co-authors a course called Profitable Project Plan that helps designers and developers improve their business. Jennifer is a co-organizer of the Meetup in Sacramento and also WordCamp Sacramento. (0:46)

Davinder Singh Kainth - Designs and develops for direct clients and white label clients for several agencies. He has several niche websites for training and recently launched his first podcast called Smart Web Creators. (1:06)

Chris Badgett - Chris is the co-founder of LifterLMS, a WordPress solution for creating, selling and protecting online courses. He has worked as a freelance WordPress implementer and built a successful freelance agency. He has the podcast for course creators called LMSCast. (1:34) What you will learn in this Episode:

Changes in WordPress:

Jennifer - Day to Day interaction with clients is showing how much WordPress has matured. It used to be a growth area across the board. Now there is growth at the bottom and the top. Jennifer is seeing a squeeze in the middle where there is so much competition. Onboarding a client with processes is so important to see continued success with the middle clients. The "race to the bottom" has so much competition that in order to be profitable you need repeatable processes. (2:53)

Chris - The landscape is changing for online courses because of the ease and power of page builders. The tools make WordPress so much easier to use. It becomes less important now that a website is built on WordPress. Chris is still seeing stable growth on the product side and WordPress is still great for a customized solution where extendibility is needed. Enterprise and larger businesses will pay for premium solutions. (6:15)

Davinder - people are finding out that WordPress is not "free" even though it is open source. Themes and plugins that are needed for added functionality cost money and will not fit into the $30.00 a month solution offered by a WIX or Squarespace. Davinder is seeing agency level pricing going up and WordPress tools are now being priced correctly. WordPress still allow you to have total ownership and control of your design and data. (10:29)

Theory of New Customer Cycle:

There are still customers that are growing their businesses where a startup website no longer works for them.

Davinder - efficiency of the page builders lets freelancers handle the middle market and create a niche. It allows a freelancer to work with the business to see how much revenue is being generated from a client's website. (13:47)

Chris - is seeing the diffusion of innovation in the WordPress community. Customers who purchased LifterLMS may need additional customization to build a solution. A client can look at themes, content and request help from freelancers that are considered successful LMSLifter builder