Building Trust at Scale and Navigating Agency Challenges in the Age of AI

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In this episode, host Adam Weeks is joined by Marc Benzakein for a thoughtful conversation about the challenges agencies face in today’s digital landscape. They kick things off with a personal touch, catching up on life and joking about buying lunch, before their chat about the ever-present client question: “What have you done for me lately?”

Drawing from real-world agency experiences, they discuss the impact of AI on workflows, shifting client expectations, and the constant demand for efficiency and proof of value. Marc shares his perspective on how MainWP supports agencies, the ongoing struggle with plugin updates, and why proactive communication is a game changer when managing hundreds or even thousands of sites. You’ll get practical tips on reducing mental load, scaling without losing quality, and delivering trust through transparency.

Whether you’re just getting started with website management or you’re a seasoned professional, this episode is packed with honest advice, relatable stories, and insights on staying relevant in a rapidly changing field.

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https://youtu.be/MgB1OAE5i4c

Takeaways

• What Have You Done for Me Lately? Is a Real Pressure: Agencies constantly feel the pressure to not only deliver but to continually prove their value to clients, especially when sending invoices or discussing ongoing services.
• AI’s Impact on Agencies Is Both Opportunity and Challenge: The rise of AI has changed client expectations around speed and efficiency. While AI can automate tasks, there’s still a vital need for human oversight, especially to avoid errors or unexpected issues that may arise from automation.
• Efficiency Is Crucial for Profitability: Agencies need to relentlessly focus on efficiency to remain profitable. Tools that automate or streamline maintenance work (like MainWP) help agencies support more clients with less friction.
• Clients Judge on Current Value, Not Past Successes: Agencies have to regularly remind clients of the value they provide through ongoing communication and deliverables, not just rely on past achievements.
• Managing personalized Sites Requires Strong Systems: Whether handling a handful of sites or thousands, agencies face universal challenges: plugin and theme updates, knowing what’s happening with each site, and monitoring for issues. Efficient workflows, automation, and reliable tools are essential. Every second saved matters.
• Automations Are Good, But Oversight Remains Key: Automation helps with scale, but Marc Benzakein highlights the importance of human checks whether reviewing bulk emails or monitoring software updates to ensure quality and avoid embarrassing mistakes.
• Proactive Communication Builds Trust: Agencies earn trust by being transparent and ideally, proactive about issues. It’s better to inform clients first rather than let them discover problems on their own. This applies to technical issues as well as handling client relationships.
• Not Everything Is About Tech—Wisdom Matters: There’s knowledge you gain from years of experience (wisdom) that AI can’t replicate. The value of an agency often lies in knowing when to trust tech, when to be hands-on, and how to communicate effectively.
• Scalability Is a Non-Negotiable for Growth: If agencies want to thrive, they must be able to grow without burning out staff or losing quality. This means choosing tools and building workflows that accommodate growth and empower agencies to keep personal touches where it matters.
• Build Relationships with the Right Clients: Agencies and clients work best together when their philosophies align. The importance of fit sometimes even at a values level was mentioned as a quiet but crucial ingredient to long-term partnerships.
• Expertise Can Be Relative: You don’t have to know everything. Just one step ahead of the client’s needs makes you valuable. Being able to communicate and deliver that expertise is key.

Mentioned Links and Resources

• MainWP (Agency Website Management Tool) – MainWP is highlighted throughout the episode as a tool designed to help agencies efficiently manage multiple WordPress websites, streamline updates, and provide automated reporting to clients. 🔗 https://mainwp.com/

Timestamped Overview (audio)

• 00:00 AI Efficiency and Business Profitability
• 04:35 AI Needs Human Oversight
• 09:51 It Just Works Mentality
• 11:49 Efficient Quad Code Integration
• 18:03 Proactive Client Communication Strategies
• 20:32 Essential Tools and Vigilant Automation
• 23:01 Detailed Host Communication Praised
• 28:09 Agency Loyalty Through Alignment
• 30:02 Becoming an Expert with Tools
• 32:36 Lunch Plans and Connection

Adam Weeks:
Hi, this is Adam Weeks from Open Channels, and I am joined by my good friend Mark, Mark Benzakein. We are going to be talking about What have you done for me lately? This is a conversation we were talking before I hit record, and there’s a lot of pressure on us as people and agencies. What have you done for me lately? We send out those invoices and we know the people on the other end of the invoice are saying, oh yeah, this was great, but are you going to keep providing for me? Are you going to keep offering this? So, so, Mark, What have you done for me lately? Or how are you experiencing that?

Marc Benzakein:
I’ll tell you what, you and I are going to be having lunch in a couple of weeks. I’ll buy you lunch. That’s what I will have done for you lately in a couple of weeks. How’s that?

Adam Weeks:
I love it.

Marc Benzakein:
I love it.

Adam Weeks:
That’s going to be fun. Yeah, it’s been too long. Yeah. Agencies and a lot of people who listen to Open Channels are agencies. They experience what agencies experience. You have experienced this and you are now at MainWP, and I believe you guys are trying to help, help agencies out. What, what do you see agencies, what are they struggling with here in 2026? So many things are changing with AI. What are, what are you seeing agencies struggle with?

Marc Benzakein:
Well, I think, I think that of course you just hit on it, AI and the quote unquote efficiency of AI. I think that the debate is still out there whether or not it is truly efficient. But I do. Think that people are looking at the writing on the wall, whether it’s accurate writing or not. But the writing on the wall is that AI is going to, quote unquote, you know, be able to do things in, you know, a much quicker period of time than what a human can do. And so I think that that’s the biggest challenge. But of course, the challenge, whether you’re an agency or whatever kind of business you might be, efficiency is always is going to be at the forefront of your, of your mindset because efficiency leads to profitability. And that’s really when you talk about a business, let’s just assume we’re all in business to make money, right? So, so with, with MainWP specifically, if you want to talk about that, I would say that the focus is always on how can we provide agencies with the ability to work more efficiently and effectively, but not just from a standpoint of what have we done for them lately, but what can they do for their client lately? And, and that’s an important thing. So whatever their deliverables are to be able to justify their existence is important to us, right? Yeah. And, and so we look at things like, for instance, the Pro Reports or, you know, how, you know, in the world of like the WordPress maintenance space, and dashboard. Well, obviously, maintenance is a big business for agencies. It’s a big draw. It is a lot of work. And we try to make that as easy as possible for the agencies to get that information and be able to provide something fairly quickly and efficiently to their clients that say, hey, this is why we exist, this is why we’re here, and this is why you’re paying us.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah, I think about AI. There are pros and cons, and one of the cons I would imagine is the expectations that it can upset. Whereas a client may have expected, hey, like this should take you this amount of time, but then, you know, someone was telling them about, hey, my Claude bot or whatever it is I was on, you know, using Claude and look what I, spun up over the weekend. Shouldn’t your agency be able to do that too? Yeah. How are you guys seeing about setting expectations in this age of AI? Is that— yeah, maybe slow down a little bit.

Marc Benzakein:
Well, I think that one of the things that we will always hold on to with AI is the fact that there is always, always going to need to be some sort of human oversight and intervention. So creating tools as a general, not just a main MVP, but as a general state of mind, providing tools for human oversight to work, you know, effectively across the board is, is an important thing. So AI may be able to do something quickly, but if you don’t have someone behind the keyboard that can say, yeah, this is good code or this is bad code or, you know, this is good writing or bad writing or, you know, whatever it may be, it’s always, I mean, the thing that you have to keep in mind is that AI is still based on all of the stuff that’s out there, right? It’s not gotten to the point where it’s thinking for itself yet. It’s really not. It’s really just processing data at a much faster rate. And so if you have a lot of garbage code out there, for instance, yeah, it may work this week,, you know, I have actually had, I’ve gone in and had AI create plugins for me that worked today, you know, and then 3 weeks later I’m like, hmm, what’s going on here? Because I’m not, you know, as much of a coder as I might have once been. And so I think that the key for humans is to say, look, AI is here and it’s not here to replace us. What we need to do is get better at recognizing the patterns that AI is throwing out there and being able to see what’s wrong and, and be able to fix it and do it in the most efficient manner possible. And, you know, or you can just fight it and see where that leads. You know, good luck. Yeah. Yeah. Good luck with that. With that behemoth. Right.

Adam Weeks:
So Yeah, I imagine that you spend a fair amount of time talking to agencies in the trenches, like what they’re, what they’re doing. Do you have any examples? Maybe redact some names or not. What examples? Like what are— what specific stresses are agencies having that maybe are managing multiple websites? Like if you’re, if you’re like, it’s one thing to like, okay, I can, I can handle like this one website, but what happens when we have 20 websites that we’re managing, 50 websites? What are some of those current struggles that you’re seeing? Maybe they’ve always been the same.

Marc Benzakein:
I think that they’ve always been the same. And it’s always been this, this concern with plugin or theme updates, that kind of thing happening automatically, or core updates for that matter, happening automatically, and not being able to really actively see what’s going on or knowing. And when all of a sudden— and one of the things that I’ll point out here is we’re noticing that there may be a wider gap. So, so because of the way MainWP works, we’re very privacy focused. We actually do not know for sure how many installs there are out there because we don’t collect any data from our customers other than their email address. And then the billing, we don’t even collect their billing information that goes to a gateway. So we don’t, we don’t. And as a result of that, because of the fact that we’re so privacy focused, we can only basically We basically look at what the repository shows us and things like that. And, but, so, but the conclusions that we’re coming to, what I’m getting at here is we’ve always said, well, our average agency has 30 sites. They manage 30 sites. Okay. Or our average customer has, manages 30 sites. But the reality is we’re finding more and more that there’s a huge gap between the bigger agencies and they’ve got thousands, literally thousands of sites versus, you know, and then there are others that might have 5 to 10. I talk to agencies pretty regularly and it’s, you know, once in a while I’ll be like, oh yeah, I, I don’t have a lot of sites. I have about 800 sites that I’m managing. To me, that’s like a big number. But then I talk to other people and they’re like, oh yeah, we’re managing 3,000 sites. And so when you, when you think about that, managing that many sites, you have to have really good monitoring to know, like, when these automatic updates are happening. You have to have really good, like, microscopic control over what kind of updates you want to happen automatically and what kind you don’t. And you need to know when something is going wrong and all of that. So there’s that aspect of it. And, and there are some agencies that I’ve spoken to, they say, they say, look, I use MainWP just to see all the sites that need updates, but I still, you know, from the MainWP dashboard, I still manually update and make sure that works. And then I have other agencies that say, look, MainWP has been great, never had any problems. It just does everything automatically. And I look at the uptime monitor to make sure that everything is up and running and looks good. So everybody has kind of a different attitude and Yeah, different workflow. And, and, and for us, I think we’re kind of into that mentality now of every nanosecond counts. And so, so we have gone into like changing the UI so that you’re not clicking as many times to get to the same place. Screen refreshes don’t happen as often because, for instance, every time you would, you would update something or check something, it would, it would do a refresh of the, of the tables. On your screen and things like that. And so little things like that, that, that take you from almost like this attitude of, yeah, it works, to it just works, right? And the it just works mentality is what we’re always shooting for because that means that, that you’re not noticing anything that’s kind of like getting on your nerves a little bit. And, and those, those seconds count. Yeah. And And so, so it’s almost like the things that we’re shooting for are not things that, that people will tangibly notice unless they’re really looking for it, but they’ll just feel more comfortable. They’ll just have a feel for it.

Adam Weeks:
Lower, lower mental load.

Marc Benzakein:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, you know that when you load a website and it takes 10 seconds, which, you know, if you think about the old days when we had to ride to the library to get a book, and yet this 10 seconds is like excruciating to us now. Yeah. The faster you can make things, the better. We are just in that kind of world. And so that’s, that’s where a large, a large part of the focus has been. But we also feel like people should be able to work the way that they want to. And so if you want to integrate quad code into some of your workflow, you can do that if you want to, you know, do— if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. If you want a command line interface, you can have that. If you, you know, all that kind of stuff, it’s a matter of that, but it’s always a matter of making it work efficiently. And I think that that’s one of the things that when people ask, what have you done for me lately? It’s like, well, You know, some of this may not be as tangible as you’d like, but it is really big.

Adam Weeks:
And yeah, I want to go back to updates. Is anybody managing or, you know, are there agencies that are managing websites out there that they’re comfortable turning on all the auto updates? Is anybody doing that successfully?

Marc Benzakein:
I will tell you that I have had some people say I will do automatic updates on everything except for the plugin from this manufacturer. Okay. This, this, this developer or whatever. But I’ll do automatic updates on everything else. You know, this is me, this is, this is my toolbox. This is what I always use, blah, blah, blah. But there’s this one and I won’t say which one it is because it comes up a lot. But there’s this one that comes up there like, I will always do that manually because I don’t, you know, when it works, it works. But when it doesn’t,, you know, I have to roll back and, you know, and I need to be there just to watch it.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. Those are the war stories that people have. You know, that’s how you become an expert, I would say, is knowing which ones those are.

Marc Benzakein:
Right, right. Absolutely. And that’s what, once again, one of those things that AI really can’t do for you. I mean, I don’t know what’s it going to do, look at a bunch of statistics and look at like WordPress.org reviews and say, oh, Look, 40% of the time the reviews say they had a hard time updating. So therefore, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s data points to a certain degree, but once again, you’re going to need a human to go in and verify all that.

Adam Weeks:
Well, and also there’s, there’s no real way that I can think of that you could tell the AI, here are all of the times that I have had a plugin not, you know, had a plugin break something when it auto-updated. Like, you know, you’ve got, you know, 10, 15 years of those things and there’s no real way, I think, to have it know everything you know.

Marc Benzakein:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There’s something to be said for personal experience or what I call wisdom. And, and AI is intelligent, but it’s not wise.

Adam Weeks:
When it comes to— I think of this like a mental load idea and that many of the people who are you know, building websites for others, managing, maintaining websites, they are working from home. They’re not in an office with other people. And so with that comes, all right, I’m gonna sit down on my computer and what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do first? What’s most important? And oftentimes the client that’s yelling the loudest or the most, you know, that’s what you’re gonna do. But when, when you have a process, I’m curious your thought about how an agency can approach systematizing, systematically reducing the mental load of managing websites. What do you— how do you think about that?

Marc Benzakein:
So from a client— okay, I’m not talking about an agency point of view, but from the clients of the agency’s point of view, all they want to know is that their sites are up and running. That’s it. Okay. They’re not going to probably make a peep unless something doesn’t work exactly the way that they expected it to or something goes down. From an agency point of view, it’s really assuming that, you know, you are a good agency and you’re always monitoring and paying attention to what’s up and what’s down. In my opinion, an agency should do two things. One, they should pick a good host. Okay, so The host, in my opinion, also is responsible for things like they should notice if there’s a thing down before even the agency notices something is down. So you have to start at this level, right? Okay. So you start at this level with a good host. It’s like they’re, they’re hypervigilant about their servers and making sure that sites are up. And if something looks even a little bit suspicious, then either they take care of it or they let the agency know, hey, we’re having this problem, this is going on, etc., etc., etc. Okay. So that’s that part of it. The agency then is responsible to decide whether or not that needs to be reported to the customer or if it is something that their client may not need to know about because it may not affect them. Okay, for instance, you might have a host that for some reason that says, I don’t know, I’m going to pick up something random that’s probably not even realistic. But like, let’s say that, that a host says, hey, we noticed every single WooCommerce site is down on our server. Okay, but I might be an agency and all this person has is a landing page and they don’t have a WooCommerce site. Why am I going to contact them and say, hey, the host is having problem with WooCommerce sites? Okay, that’s, I mean, that’s, that’s kind of like an extreme kind of example, but I’m trying to come up with something, you know, like that, that— so the agency needs to be able to disseminate the right information to the client. They need to be very proactive, which means that in their maintenance plans or whatever it is that they’re doing, they need to report to their clients proactively once a month or whatever it is, everything that’s going on. Okay, so that the client knows what they’re paying for. Because if the client is just saying, hey, I’m spending this, whatever, $150 a month or whatever it is for maintenance, and I don’t even know what they did last month, then there’s a problem right there to begin with. Okay, so, so something that an agency should look to is how can we do this in an efficient manner? Because if we’ve, if we’re managing 3,000 websites, you know, either we have to have a really big staff that’s producing a lot of paper or we need to have systems in place that make it really easy to disseminate this information, even automate it if it, if it makes sense. That way everybody is happy. Everybody gets the information that they need. A lot of times if you have like these bigger websites, you’ve got people who have decided you’ve got an IT staff that has to justify why they’re paying for maintenance, why they’re paying for hosting. They have to pay it. They have to justify it to a bean counter. So they need to be, you know, so it all goes downhill, right? And ultimately, if they can’t go to the powers that be and say, you know, here, then all of a sudden the C-suite gets involved and everything, you know, goes. And then the IT is like, okay, I need justification for this. And the agency feels like they’re about ready to lose a customer, whereas if they’d been proactive all along, these things are, are not going to come up quite as often.

Adam Weeks:
Well, and if you’ve got one website that you’re maintaining, uh, yeah, uh, send a quick email, like, you know, that’s easy to do. But when you were talking about, yeah, I’ve got 800 websites, yeah, how do you, how do you do that?

Marc Benzakein:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you need, you need something like what we provide. Um, I’m not saying it has to be us, although I would you know, love it if it was, but, um, but, uh, you need, you’d need something like a main WP that, that handles that for you. I still think that even with all automations, I tend to be, me personally, I still tend to be a, I need to lay eyes on this to make sure that what’s going out makes sense and, and that it works and that everything does the thing that it does. I mean, uh, every single week I send out a mass email and I still double-check to make sure that going to the right people and that the audience— yeah, and all of that. And, you know, I don’t want to get like a million spam complaints because I wasn’t vigilant on, on who those emails went out to. And so automations are great, but you got to, you got to keep your eye on it.

Adam Weeks:
Well, yeah, you, you don’t want to send a message that shouldn’t have been sent. I don’t want to waste my client’s time. Right. You also do automations, don’t want to miss anything because if the client says, hey, my, you know, this is not working on my website, this is down, this is like, you want to be the one to tell the client. I was a school principal and I never wanted the student to go home and tell their parent what happened bad at school.

Sponsor Announcer:
Right.

Adam Weeks:
I didn’t want that to be the story because I knew I needed to get out in front of it to give it context, like, okay, little Johnny was the, you know, like that’s the, that is a way to control and help make sure, because I, if the parent was the one that was saying, hey, Mr. Weeks, my child said this, I know exactly how that conversation’s gonna go and it’s not gonna go well.

Marc Benzakein:
No, no, no. The last per, especially when you look at the filters that children have. Yeah, yeah.

Adam Weeks:
The kid’s gonna put themselves in a very positive light.

Marc Benzakein:
Right.

Adam Weeks:
And Mrs. So-and-so, she was so mean to me.

Marc Benzakein:
Or that kid. Exactly. Okay, well, that’s not quite what happened. Yeah, yeah. And you and I have talked about, about the PR of it all, right? Yeah, yeah. And, and that’s part of it, but, but the best kind of PR is the proactive PR, not the reactive PR. Um, one is, one is good public relations, the other is crisis management, as we’ve talked about. And that’s the last thing that you need to deal with. And, and, uh, I will tell you, you know, the host that I use for everything every single— there, he, you know, and it’s a small host up here in the, in Northern California, and he, uh, I, I actually work with him on some things, and man, this stuff, he goes into detail. It’s not just like a, hey, we’re having this issue, it’s like, this is what happened, this is how it happened, blah blah blah blah blah, and he goes into great detail. And, and I’ve already fixed it, you probably didn’t even notice. I mean, that’s the funny thing is like at the end of it, it’ll be like It’s already been fixed. You probably didn’t notice, but I thought you might be curious as to, you know, all of this. And, and I think that, you know, sometimes that might be overkill. But on the other hand, some people, you know, especially agencies, they want to know all the details and then they can figure out how to distill it down to, to, to satisfy their customers.

Adam Weeks:
It builds trust. And we all know that we don’t live in a perfect world where nothing You know, something is going to go wrong. There’s like, you know, these hosts that say we have 99.99999% uptime. Like, do you? Do you really have? I mean, like, I don’t know how you coming up with that statistic, but it feels overinflated. Things are going to be imperfect, right? What you do about it, how you communicate it. And I like how you’re saying this. The guy who is a host, he will be specific because that specificity tells me that he knows his craft, that he’s an expert.

Marc Benzakein:
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And, and I’ll be honest, he doesn’t have a filter. I mean, he doesn’t, he doesn’t try to polish it up or anything like that. He’s just, he’s an engineer. He talks like an engineer. And sometimes you have to, you know, put it through a thesaurus and translator to figure out what he’s saying. Yeah. But, but I’d rather have that, you know, and I think that most people would. I’d rather have too much information than not enough. But I want— I also at the same time want to know what’s relevant to me because I don’t have the time to figure it all out.

Adam Weeks:
And there’s a balance to be had. Don’t try to fluff me up and tell me everything’s fine when it’s not. Don’t— yeah, don’t— yeah, don’t try to just gloss over it and minimize it. Be authentic. But yeah, I don’t need the entire history of the server and how we got here to know that you know your stuff.

Marc Benzakein:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So and everybody knows that he knows his stuff. Every customer that he has knows that he knows his stuff. So but that’s, that’s an example. And I think that, that, that’s one of those things that anybody who creates agency tools needs to keep in mind is that if there’s anything that you provide to them that they’re going to have to disseminate to their customers, you make it as easy as possible for them to do it. Because the secret to any business success is scalability. And if you can’t help your customers become scalable, then you’re not necessarily doing them a service. And scalability can come in a number of ways. It can be in time saving, it can be in UX that works. It can be in, you know, in, in, in reports that, that take less time to produce. And it can be just a number of ways. It can be in how easy it is to update all your plugins and your themes and all of that. It’s just every little thing counts and it all adds up and nothing is too small.

Adam Weeks:
Right. I think you bring a really good point. Scalability is the key because if we could make a really good living off of just managing one website and that was great, then yeah, we would give all the like bespoke custom. This would be such a great thing. But like that’s— it’s hard to live off $150 a month engagement that way. Yeah, you can’t do that. So you have to scale. But can you scale while keeping the quality as high, right? And can you do that?

Marc Benzakein:
Right. And that has to do with, of course, the, the workflow of each agency and how they, how they build their agency and what’s important to them. Because generally, as, as a general rule, I would like to think in my ideal world that agencies will only attract customers that subscribe to the same philosophies as the agency. So if the agency says these are the types of people that are important to us, those are the people they’re going to attract. And these are, these are the things that are important to us as a, as an agency. Therefore, this is what— that’s when you have like, I hate using this word and I’m about to, it’s such a corporate word, but that’s when you have the synergy that you need between I hate that word.

Adam Weeks:
I got overused for a reason, though.

Marc Benzakein:
Like, I know it still means something. Yeah. And obviously I’m using it right now with a disclaimer. Yeah, but yeah, I’m— yeah, but, but that’s when you have— once again, those are kind of like those unseen things, but, but they’re important is that your customers need to have, you know, let’s say that I’m an agency and I have a certain political affiliation. And then I bring on a website where they’re pushing the other political, you know, which is complete polar opposite of what I guarantee you, eventually that relationship is not going to work out, you know, and that’s maybe something they never even discussed. But somehow or another, there’s these intangible things that, that interact with each other that give people longevity. But what you have to do as an agency is give them every reason in the world to want to keep you as an agency. And that means informing them. It means serving them. It means communicating with them while at the same time trying to scale.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. Yeah.

Marc Benzakein:
Building trust at scale. Building trust at scale. That’s a great way to look at it.

Sponsor Announcer:
Yeah.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. And, and yeah. And as we kind of wrap up, you know, I’m— MainWP has been around a long time.

Marc Benzakein:
You guys have been— 12 years. 12 years. This month is 12 years for us. And for an independent company like, like MaineWP to last, it’s not just that, but the staff still comes in. I wrote a blog post and the staff comes in every day and they’re like, we’re just getting started. We’re just getting started. We just like— and I’m like, how can you after 12? I mean, I’m kind of newer to the company. I’ve been here now 3 years, but, but I’m newer to the company and it’s like, this is amazing that they come in every day with that mentality, but I didn’t mean to— yeah, the enthusiasm is really kind of huge.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s great. And I love the idea that as, as people, you know, some people who are listening to this may have just started managing websites, some have been doing it for, for years and years and years. There is this like, when do you become an expert? When like, are you a professional in the craft? And that can be different, but everybody has if you are an expert, I know like if you’re someone who services air conditioners, like you have your tools, you have your tools that have been crafted over time. And it sounds like some of the things you guys are doing at MainWP with this version 6 that’s coming out that you want to continue to be that secret tool, maybe not so secret for—

Marc Benzakein:
doesn’t have to be secret.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah, yeah. For, you know, for your, for your clients so that they can service their clients and do that efficiently. So yeah, as we wrap up, is there anything— yeah, someone wants to know more about MainWP or the work that you guys are doing, how would they find you?

Marc Benzakein:
Well, really quickly, I want to address the thing about being an expert. I have two sayings that I like when it comes to being an expert. Okay. One is one that my dad always used to say. He’s a French professor, retired French professor, and it’s translated roughly as, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Okay. Yeah. Okay. But my, my philosophy of being an expert is you just have to know one more thing than the person you’re dealing with. Just one thing. Just one. Just one more thing than the person you’re dealing with. And you’re an expert. And I’m not saying you said— I’m not saying that you set the bar that low, but I’m saying that the important thing is the idea is, you know what that person needs, right? And you’re able to answer that. So that makes you an expert.

Adam Weeks:
And I think— and you can communicate it.

Marc Benzakein:
And you can communicate it. Yes, absolutely. So you can find me all around. I’m on LinkedIn and, and the socials, Twitter. You can find me at Mark Benzakein, mainewp.com. We have lots of— we have a Discord channel, we have a website, of course. And, and I’m not quite sure what my conference schedule is looking like this year, but I do— I don’t know. I will have to see what this year is like. I got a lot of stuff going on personally that, that kind of traveling.

Adam Weeks:
So, well, I’m going to try to twist your arm to see if we can get you to press conf here coming up soon.

Marc Benzakein:
You’ve already tried to twist my arm and I am seriously considering it.

Adam Weeks:
So it’s going to be a good one. But yeah, there’s lots of events, things that— but yeah, part of the beauty of what we do is that if we can’t see each other in person,, you know, we can hop on a Zoom, but you and I, we’re going to go have lunch here in a little bit.

Marc Benzakein:
Yeah, I’m looking forward to that. We need to do it more than once a year though, I think.

Adam Weeks:
We do need to do it more than once a year. Yeah. Good stuff. Well, Mark, thank you so much for sharing your expertise and knowing at least one more thing than me. Many, many, many, many things more than I. And I have learned from you.

Marc Benzakein:
So thank you for this. That’s called the wisdom from being a little bit older.

Adam Weeks:
See, there’s the wisdom, which AI will never do.

Marc Benzakein:
All right. All right.

Adam Weeks:
Thanks, Adam.

Marc Benzakein:
Bye.

Navigating the Future of Partnerships and AI in the Open Web

Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 01:01:56

In this conversation, Zach Stepek and Carl Alexander dive deep into the evolving dynamics of partnerships and community within the WordPress and broader web development space. Fresh off a talk at a major web technologies conference in Montreal, Carl shares insights about current trends like the overwhelming interest in AI and the ongoing evolution of industry conferences.

The discussion explores how traditional partner programs, co-marketing, and differentiated support are being reimagined, and why alignment and genuine collaboration between agencies, hosting providers, and product creators are more important than ever. As AI continues to disrupt and reshape the landscape, Zach and Carl ask: what does it truly mean to build sustainable, people-centered partnerships? And with the barriers to building software lower than ever, what new challenges does that raise for builders, agencies, and the WordPress ecosystem as a whole?

Expect a thoughtful, honest conversation about community, the impact of new technology on established players, and the essential human connections that keep our industry moving forward. Whether you’re an agency owner, developer, or product creator, you’ll find plenty of relevant insights in this episode of Open Channels FM.

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https://youtu.be/YyqCsZHEGyc

Takeaways

• Conferences and Community:
  • Carl Alexander discussed his recent experience at the Kung Fu conference in Montreal, highlighting its focus on web technologies, serverless PHP, AI talks, and the energetic atmosphere. He also touched on the challenge of attending international events like CloudFest due to costs, reinforcing how selective participation in events is a reality for many.
• Evolution of Partnerships in WordPress:
  • Zach Stepek emphasized the shift in the WordPress ecosystem, suggesting that the next significant era will be defined by alignment and strategic alliances, rather than just better products. Integration between hosting, agencies, and product creators is becoming critical for reducing friction and driving innovation.
• Traditional Partner Programs Need to Evolve:
  • The old playbook (affiliate incentives, discounts, tiered support, co-marketing) remains, but the hosts argue it doesn’t provide true strategic value or change the underlying business relationships. They suggest these perks should be bonuses, not the main reason for partnerships.
• Support as a Key Differentiator:
  • Zach Stepek critiqued the industry norm of giving agencies better support tiers, arguing this exposes problems with the base support model. Instead, he proposed all customers should receive great support, with only minor differences for special cases (like Slack channels for larger clients).
• Industry Shifts Due to AI and Automation:
  • Both hosts reflected on the rapid changes AI is bringing accelerating software development but also flooding the market with “AI slop” or low-quality products. However, they point out that the hard parts of software (support, marketing, differentiation) remain and may even be getting harder as noise increases.
• Builders Still Matter:
  • Despite increased automation, being a builder (developer, creator, agency) is more accessible and important than ever. The “entry” bar is lower, but deep knowledge, strategic marketing, and ongoing support still set successful projects apart.
• Human Relationships and Partnerships are More Valuable Than Ever:
  • With so much technological noise, authentic partnerships, human-centered events, and in-person networking are increasingly important. The hosts encourage a return to real human connections in parallel with technological advancements.
• Open Call for Community Input:
  • Zach Stepek and Carl Alexander want the broader WordPress and web communities to be involved in shaping the future of partnership programs, welcoming feedback and suggestions for future topics and guests.
• Ongoing Industry Disruption:
  • The web industry is facing more substantial disruption than it has in many years, largely due to AI and automation, requiring agencies, product creators, and hosts to adapt quickly or risk being left behind.
• Optimism for the Future:
  • Despite the challenges, both hosts express optimism: AI can be a force multiplier for builders, support and partnership models are evolving, and human connection in tech remains invaluable.

Mentoned Links and Resources

Kung Fu (Montreal Conference) – A web technologies conference in Montreal, previously known as PHP Quebec. 🔗 https://www.kungfu.co/
GitGuardian – Security-focused company, where Duane (mentioned in the episode) currently works. 🔗 https://www.gitguardian.com/
GitKraken – Developer of Git tools, mentioned as Duane’s previous employer. 🔗 https://www.gitkraken.com/
🔗 https://wpengine.com/
CloudFest – A major global cloud, hosting, and internet infrastructure industry event.
🔗 https://www.cloudfest.com/
PressConf – Referenced as an upcoming WordPress-focused event that the hosts plan to attend.
🔗 https://pressconf.com/
OllieWP – WordPress product and theme company mentioned as innovating in the block-first experience. 🔗 https://olliewp.com/
Harvard Business Review – The Elements of Style
Referenced as a resource for improving writing and understanding the value of “lists of three.” 🔗 https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Style-William-Strunk-Jr/dp/020530902X/ 🔗 https://hbr.org/
Laravel Cloud & Laravel Vapor – Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings for Laravel applications, discussed in the context of support expectations. 🔗 https://cloud.laravel.com/ 🔗 https://vapor.laravel.com/
Vercel – Platform for frontend frameworks and static sites, mentioned as an aspirational model for the hosting world. 🔗 https://vercel.com/
Cloudflare – Popular CDN and internet security provider, referenced in context of a recent outage. 🔗 https://www.cloudflare.com/
DNSimple – Domain management automation platform, brought up regarding challenges in marketing and funnel optimization. 🔗 https://dnsimple.com/
Tailwind – CSS framework, mentioned in a discussion about developer documentation and business challenges. 🔗 https://tailwindcss.com/
Indie Hackers – Community for indie product developers and entrepreneurs, highlighted during the conversation about building and launching projects. 🔗 https://www.indiehackers.com/

Timestamped Overview

• 00:00 Partnerships Insights and Reflections
• 06:13 WordPress Future: Community and Alignment
• 15:32 Building Mission-Critical Digital Experiences
• 20:26 Core Support vs. Agency Support
• 24:19 Hosting Challenges and Insights
• 30:30 Partner Support and Co-Marketing
• 37:28 Marketing Challenges in Software
• 43:13 Software Complexity and AI Tools
• 49:33 Future of AI and Builders
• 53:31 AI and Creative Building Today
• 58:19 Navigating Innovation in Web Ecosystems

Zach Stepek:
Hey everybody, Zach Stepek here with Carl Alexander again for another episode of Expanding the Stack. Carl, how are you doing, man?

Carl Alexander:
I’m good. I’m good. I’m, you in between conference days right now. There’s a conference in Montreal called Kung Fu, which is a bit of a weird name, but it’s like web technologies. So I gave a talk there yesterday on serverless PHP. I actually met up with an old school, he’s completely out of the WordPress space now, but his name’s like Dwayne. He used to work at Pantheon. You probably knew him, Zach. So yeah, Duane’s here. Uh, so we hung out yesterday. Uh, he works at GitGuardian now, so it’s like a security company. Like he’s been there for a while now. Uh, nice. So it was, it was fun to catch up with him.

Zach Stepek:
I think he was at GitKraken for a while before that.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, he was at GitKraken for before that, I believe. Uh, all Git, all Git all the time. Although like I, I’m. I’m not sure it’s related to Git. Like, I don’t know. I’m not even, I’m not exactly sure what the product’s about, to be honest. And yeah, and then, uh, my partner is there volunteering. She’s been there all week, you know, she is trying to like be really involved in tech stuff. So it’s just been really fun to, uh, for her to be there and like, um, see all this stuff and all that energy and all that. So it’s a pretty, it’s a pretty big conference, like almost 1,000 people. So, um, wow.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, that is pretty big.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, it’s pretty big. So they, they do it a bit differently. It used to be PHP Quebec. It used to be PHP Quebec Conference, but that was like 20 years ago. It’s been going on for a long time. It’s like probably as old as CloudFest actually, um, in terms of conference. Definitely not the same size, but, um, but yeah, they split up to do all of web development now. So, oh, cool. Interesting. Lots of AI talks were the most popular thing. Shocking to no one. Shocking to no one. The full rooms were all the AI talks.

Zach Stepek:
I can’t imagine why. It’s not like our entire industry has been upended by this upstart technology, right?

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Zach Stepek:
So. Um, that’s interesting. And are you headed to Roost next month for CloudFest?

Carl Alexander:
No, I, I honestly can’t make it. I got, I was waitlisted for the hackathon, which I love. Um, and I’m sad to miss. Um, but I honestly could not see it work financially to go. Um, it’s really expensive to go there.

Zach Stepek:
I get it. I’m not going either, so I totally understand.

Carl Alexander:
Uh, is anybody from Big Scoots going? I met, uh, I want to say his name was Zach. It was— is there a Zach that does— that’s like an engineer at Big Scoots?

Zach Stepek:
There are actually 3 of us in total with the name Zach at Big Scoots. Uh, so there’s Zach Aufort, who runs our performance and security team. Uh, and there’s Zach with a K who’s on our support and engineering teams.

Carl Alexander:
I think it was Zach with a K. I’d need to look it up, but there was a, I feel there was a Zach from Big Scoots that was there. Like his name was Zach. It was definitely Big Scoots. It was definitely Big Scoots, but I think it was Zach, but yeah, I met him on the bus back to the airport. I was talking about like serverless with, uh, Svilana from WP Engine. And like he heard me, but yeah, it was, it was kind of like interesting, but yeah, I, very expensive to go to even with everything that, um, the hackathon, uh, gives you, which is a lot. Um, but it’s still, you know, it’s still in Germany. Uh, it’s still outside a big city in Germany and it’s still because of that, you still have, you have to stay at like expensive hotels and stuff.

Zach Stepek:
So, um, and it didn’t make sense. Kind of a, you know, resort environment where—

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, I mean, that’s great. Like, yeah, yeah, you do all the roller coasters and all that stuff. It’s great. Uh, like, I, I mean, I’m bummed not to go, but like I said, it just didn’t make sense. And honestly, um, makes more sense for me to be at PressConf. Yeah. Uh, that’s my plan.

Zach Stepek:
I’m hoping to be at press conf. Nothing confirmed yet on my end for that either. Yeah, but we’ll get there. So I know that you’ve been working in partnership with the company, and I’ve— I’m in a partnerships role. You know, my, my day is basically consumed by building and maintaining and managing and and working with our partners and building those partnerships, making sure that they have the resources they need, making sure that they’re not, you know, treated like just a number. And, you know, I’ve been doing some writing lately, which has been happening mostly on LinkedIn about how I feel partnership programs should work. And I thought that’d be kind of— I thought that’d be kind of an interesting, uh, topic to dive into a little bit because, you know, when I was running my agency, I was in a few partner programs, right? And they were all kind of the same thing. None of them were bad, none of them were great. Like, there were, there were some things that were consistent across all of them, and A few had some unique features and unique things that they did. Um, most of those unique things that they did were more around, uh, swag that they gave out or opportunities at, uh, at different, uh, conferences to meet with people or to go have a dinner or a lunch, right? And those are all great things. They’re great things that create community. And I’m huge in wanting to foster community and ecosystem. And I think that’s a really important thing. So the first post that I wrote was about, um, about how the next era that we’re going to be in, in the WordPress space, isn’t going to be defined by people who are just writing better plugins or better themes or better software around WordPress. It’s actually going to be defined by this thing called alignment. Crazy, right?

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, of course.

Zach Stepek:
And, you know, for, for years we’ve had this ecosystem and it’s evolved in these layers that are kind of separate. We have hosting, we have agencies, and we have product creators, and they all kind of work separately from each other independently, you know, and they’re all innovating, but they’re innovating in their, in their lane and Because of that, a lot of times we see these points of interaction where one of the layers fails because of friction with another one of the layers.

Sponsor Announcer:
Did I—

Zach Stepek:
so whether that’s hosting having an incompatibility with how a plugin was built or a plugin having an issue in a specific way that an agency has implemented it. Right? These— or, or an agency not necessarily fully understanding how a product that they’ve added to a WordPress site interacts with the environment in which it’s hosted. Like, all of these pieces, they’re interconnected no matter what way we look at it. They all have to work as a whole in concert, like an orchestra. But we don’t treat them that way as a community. Uh, so, you know, we have hosting partner programs that are just about what hosting companies we like, right? And as agency owners, we join these hosting partner programs because we want to eliminate risk for our customers and ourselves. And that’s great. That’s, that’s a big part of deciding who you want to partner with is eliminating risk.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, of course.

Zach Stepek:
And, you know, the same on the, on the product side. Agencies choose products that make their lives easier and eliminate risk, right? They choose plugins or themes or SaaS products based on what makes their life easier and makes them consistent, consistently more money and with less friction. So what I’ve been thinking about as we were kind of moving into 2026, and somebody gave me trouble about this because I posted this post a week ago and they called it AI slop, which it wasn’t.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, that’s going to happen more and more. That’s going to happen more and more.

Zach Stepek:
It really is.

Carl Alexander:
I don’t think you can get away from that.

Zach Stepek:
And then they said, “And 2026?” It’s February. And I appreciate that. I appreciate that that was some of the feedback that I got because I get it. I get that it’s weird for somebody to post something about the beginning of 2026 in February. Uh, Carl and I both did it this year.

Carl Alexander:
You know, when’s the cutoff from the beginning? I mean, I don’t know, February seems fine. Like, it’s not like the first 2 weeks of January are like busy for people.

Zach Stepek:
Like, no, I mean, no, not at all.

Carl Alexander:
Maybe— I know, I know Americans have like a crazy work ethic and stuff, but it’s just like, I feel like the rest of the world just kind of like is slowly getting out of the holidays in the first 2 weeks of like January. Like, I’m like, so it’s, you know, I mean, I was very, I mean, it’s a bit different for the programming side just because of all the AI stuff. Like there’s a completely manic energy out there right now. That I’m also like, you know, into, but it— but I, I feel like if I look at it from like a normal trend, like, I’m like, yeah, like first 2 weeks of January, like, don’t expect much out of anything, you know? Like, you’re— we’re still getting back into it.

Zach Stepek:
Um, I agree. Uh, so I mean, that was just a piece of feedback I got, and I expected somebody to say something about it. Um, I also used em dashes before AI made them an AI tell, which sucks cuz I’ve had to remove them from what I do and what I write. Yeah.

Carl Alexander:
I mean, yeah, I, I’ve seen some people that preface it like, I use em dashes, so like, you know, deal with it. Like, you know, so I feel like just, you know, you can do it at the end if you want, but it’s just like, I feel like it’s always better to preface this kind of stuff because people don’t read to the end.

Zach Stepek:
Well, and I get that that’s a tell for AI, and I get that having lists of 3 is a tell for AI, but unfortunately all these things that are considered tells for AI writing are also just components of good writing.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, I mean, I did lists of 3s in my articles for fucking ever. Like I was just like, it can’t be a list of 2, list of 4 maybe, but like anything more than that, like you’re probably too long. You know, like 3 is like, 3 is a good number. Like it’s just like 3 points, 3 arguments, 3 this, like 3 is just a really good number when you write. Again, like I, I think this is like just, I think you, you’re alluding to it, but it’s just like a lot of people complaining about this stuff just never wrote.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, that’s true.

Carl Alexander:
They just never wrote. Like, you, like, if you’re like, I mean, the em dash, okay, like, I never use em dashes, but like, but I definitely complain about like lists of 3 being AI slop is like, wow, like, all that tells me is you like literally never wrote anything.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, I mean, what’s, what’s the 5-paragraph essay? What, what is the 5-paragraph essay? An introduction, 3 points, and a conclusion, right?

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, exactly. Like, it’s like mind-boggling to me. Like, that’s why, like, I’m like, I don’t think this is like the own that you think it is. Like, I think you like, this is like you owned yourself by just like saying that stuff because like, I, it tells me more about you than about my thing. Uh, anyway, that one, that one’s funny. That one’s funny. Like, that one, I, I’ve never heard, I haven’t seen it. Like somebody complaining about like 3 points. But if somebody told me that, I’d be like, maybe you should read, uh, anything. No, but I forget what the, the book, the book is called.

Zach Stepek:
But like, the Elements of Style, or any, anything from Harvard Business Review, or—

Carl Alexander:
yeah, yeah, Elements of Style. Like, I’m just like, yeah, yeah, get out of here, get out, get out, get out, you know.

Zach Stepek:
So anyway, Apart from that though, the conversation around all of this is really great and, you know, really that’s what matters.

Carl Alexander:
Honestly, that’s what matters is the conversation.

Zach Stepek:
And what I’m talking about in this first post was about, you know, creating strategic alliances in the, in the agency community and in the product community. So we have two partner programs at Bigsuits. It’s not just an agency partner program. We also have a tech partner program. And those are plugin companies and product companies that we bring into our ecosystem as well, that we know their plugins work at scale. We know that people can trust them. They’re plugins and products that we would use ourselves. And so, you know, it’s, it’s all about connecting these things together. So infrastructure that performs under pressure, that’s our job at BigScoots. That’s what we do. That’s what you do at Amir. Yeah, agencies building mission-critical experiences. That’s the whole agency role, right? Whether it’s a brochure site that’s designed to drive sales and provide information or an e-commerce site that’s doing, you know, $100,000 a day in sales, that is the goal. You know, we build mission-critical experiences for the businesses we work with and then product creators that are shaping what WordPress can do next. You know, folks like Alli, AlliWP, great product, great theme, pushing, you know, the block-first experience further than almost anybody else, in my opinion. Um, you know, these products are pushing what WordPress will become next, while WordPress is also pushing to what should be next as well. Things like collaboration and AI and MCP and all of the things around AI that are coming in 7.0. So, you know, really the whole point of this first article though was that we don’t want a logo wall. That’s— logos are great. We love having partners and their logos are awesome. Having them on the site, of course, it creates you know, this feeling of social proof, which is part of what a partnership program is supposed to do— provide social proof both for the host or the partner company. It’s kind of this let’s talk about each other agreement, right? But logo walls are just that. They’re a wall full of logos. You know, we don’t, we don’t only want to talk about marketing exchange, about co-marketing opportunities. That’s great. You know, it helps all of us to grow our businesses, but what really helps is strategic alignment across all pieces of the stack, all these three layers, right? Agencies reduce their risk, product teams innovate with confidence, clients experience performance gains, and growth from it all becomes sustainable. And that’s really kind of the, the crux of the first post.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah.

Zach Stepek:
And so we’re talking about how building an intentional ecosystem, yeah, is what’s going to define where the industry goes next. So I, I then posted the following week about how, um, there are some changes that I’ve been piloting around how we think about partnerships and I really want this conversation to continue with the community. That’s kind of why I’m bringing it up here, because I want to make sure that this is something that, you know, the community is heavily involved in shaping. I, I think that what we’re trying to do is great, but I am biased. So yeah, of course, I want the community’s opinion on what it is we’re building. So Um, and I think that this could be valuable to the industry as a whole, to the ecosystem of WordPress as a whole. Because if we have conversations about things that are truly transformative instead of just doing things business as usual, um, it helps all of us. You know, a rising tide lifts all boats, lifts all boats.

Carl Alexander:
Exactly. Yeah, of course. I love that saying.

Zach Stepek:
I do too. And so, you know, when we’re, when we’re looking at this, all these partner programs, like I said earlier, have a familiar playbook. You know, it’s affiliate incentives or free or discounted products or tiered support that, you know, we’ll talk about. And then co-marketing. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that. But it doesn’t change the underlying business relationship at all. It doesn’t change the agency. It doesn’t provide transformative power to, you know, partner companies that are involved in it. Yeah. So extra income from affiliate commissions, they’re great, especially when you’re growing your business. Right? I’m not going to discount the fact that they have value, uh, but they shouldn’t be the reason partnership exists. They shouldn’t be the core reason. They’re a bonus. Yeah, um, you know, so that’s, that’s one piece. Uh, free hosting, also an awesome thing. You know, when I was starting my agency, we had free hosting. We used it. Um, yeah, it’s nice to have Did it provide us any strategic value? No, it reduced our costs by, you know, the cost of the hosting plan per month, which really was a drop in the bucket compared to, you know, the value that other things in that relationship provided. Um, now differentiated support, I want to talk about that for a little bit. Um, I have a problem with hosting companies offering a higher tier of support to their agency partners than they do to their customers. Um, I’m not saying that there can’t be any differentiation, but my point is that if you have to provide a higher tier of support to your agency partners than you do to your entire customer base, what that exposes is a problem with your support. Not a need for agencies to have deeper support, right? It’s, it’s just there’s, there’s a, there’s a standard for support. And if the better lane that you’re giving your agencies is significantly better than the core support experience, then that’s just an indication you need to improve your core support experience. Not make it better for the agencies. Um, so, you know, the only difference we have is a direct Slack channel, uh, and all of our enterprise customers get that anyway. So it’s really not a differentiator, it’s just the same thing we give to larger customers that require that level of instantaneous support. So, um, So yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s a thing that I see kind of as a Band-Aid on a problem, that if you have to provide a differentiation to how you’re treating agencies in your support ecosystem, then I think that, that’s showing some underlying problems that you’re likely ignoring. Now, not everybody’s going to agree with me on that, and I know it. I know that that’s, uh, a take that may be considered not only wrong by some people, but actually rude, I guess. But, you know, I just think that we should make support. It should just be great for everybody. I think that’s the right way to move things forward as an industry. Support is where we fall over more frequently than not.

Carl Alexander:
And I feel that’s like the reality of hosting. Yeah, it’s absolutely business.

Zach Stepek:
Absolutely. It is.

Carl Alexander:
That’s how I feel about like this is why I look at, you know, Laravel Cloud a lot about what, how they’re handling, how they’re thinking, well, what they’re doing or slash not doing, which is because Laravel products have notoriously not had great support, which was fine when you manage your own infra. Uh, you know, if you’re using Forge or Vapor, you can always go in and fix things yourself. Um, it’s very different when you’re now a platform as a service and you don’t have access to things, right?

Zach Stepek:
So yeah, yeah, it’s hard to self-serve in that kind of an environment, right?

Carl Alexander:
Well, yeah, well, yeah. And it’s, um, you know, like, yeah, so I feel they think they can be Vercel, but I feel like Vercel is more like the exception that makes the rule than, uh, than the other way around. Like, yeah, like, um, so like, I’m always curious since, you know, we both have such a huge background in hosting. Um, like I was talking a lot about it yesterday at my serverless PHP talk because I think people aren’t fully grasping, like even when you’re doing cost analysis, like just for hardware and stuff, like I, like, like I told them, like, uh, you know, I’ve talked with companies that do like a hundred, like WordPress companies that do very large CapEx per year. And they can’t get servers right now. You know, they can’t get servers right now. So it’s just like, yeah, you know, anyway, but it’s just like, it’s an example of just like insider knowledge kind of, um, that I, and it’s just really interesting because we have a lot of insider knowledge about this business and I’m kind of seeing them, you know, it was the first year anniversary of Laravel Cloud like, uh, this week or last week. And it was just like, yeah, just thinking about how they do things. I mean, they, they’re nice, you know, they did a Cloudflare had a really big outage last week and then they discounted 10% on their next invoice and stuff. Uh, so I thought that was like really good.

Zach Stepek:
And it wasn’t even their fault. Like that was not Cloudflare’s fault that any of that happened.

Carl Alexander:
You mean Laravel Cloud, you mean, or Cloudflare itself?

Zach Stepek:
It wasn’t Cloudflare’s fault that that, that, uh, that outage happened either.

Carl Alexander:
Um, yeah, but I, anyways, it’s, but I think it’s like interesting, you know, when, uh, to see like how they handled things. Like I shared that they’re young, they’re young product offering. Right. So it’s just like how they, how they deal with that. Uh, I hang out in their Discord a lot. Just trying to help people on the Vapor side a bit and just looking at what’s happening in the cloud channels and stuff. But yeah, it’s again, but like you said, like I think, you know, the hosting is essentially a support business, you know, that I forget who told me, but I say it all the time. Like it’s just like, it’s a customer support business that happens to own computers and servers, you know, like, uh, it’s much more about customer service. Um, so yeah, how you make it consistent. I mean, even I struggle with Ymir, like how I want to do it, but my goal is to just funnel everything in Discord basically. Um, for now, and then do like higher, I think tiering support is interesting, at least on from my side, is just like, there is something about, like, I’ve spent, like, it happened again. I probably spent, you know, and it helps the product. So I’m, I’m not resentful about it, but it’s just like, clearly this person should not have signed up for Ymir. They weren’t technical enough., I spent probably 10 to 15 hours helping them and then they just basically told me like, I love it, but like, I, you know, they want to set it up and then maybe they’ll come back basically. So like they were on the free trial and stuff. So it’s like, that’s normal state of business. Uh, but there’s something, you know, when you talk with bootstrappers about like support is definitely like one of those levers that you want to be way more careful about, like how you offer it, what you offer it, things like that, because again, it’s not sustainable. And having stuff, whether it’s automated, like, again, like, if I had more time, like look into automation, AI bots, stuff like that to, you know, have better docs that AI can read. And help people and things like that through like Discord channels and whatnot. Like there’s a lot for me to do there, but part of it is to get me out of the loop. And then I like the dedicated channels a lot, like Slack Connect and stuff. Like I think that’s a really good value-add offer for like higher tier ups. Like, hey, do you want to like have like DM access to me? Like, cool. Like that’ll cost you extra. Like, for example, like I think I think even for partners at hosting space and stuff like that, like it’s just like such a nice value add that, you know, like I’m all for communication anyways. So it’s just like, I feel like anything that improves communication channels is great.

Zach Stepek:
You know, you’re a little bit of a different case than what I’m talking about here because you’re a team of one and support’s going to be hard as a team of one, no matter what you do., right? Um, but for larger teams, that differentiated support, uh, you know, sure, a Slack channel, great. Um, providing different support lanes that are completely separate from the standard support lane, just, it’s, it’s a symptom of a problem that is larger than just the need to show a partner a better experience, um, in my opinion. And then, you know, we talk a bit about co-marketing, uh, and I think it’s really the most meaningful traditional benefit of a partner program, um, because it tells stories, it shows alignment between the companies, it shows how two, or in some cases three or four companies, can combine their strengths to create an outcome, right? And those are all important things. I believe in co-marketing. I think it’s a huge, important piece. Yeah, but that by itself isn’t, isn’t a full strategy. It’s, uh, you know, we talked about social proof and how it has value, but what, what actually creates impact? Impact is leverage. Leverage should make an agency owner’s life easier, should remove their friction. It should remove decision fatigue. It should help them sell with confidence. It should strengthen their delivery and protect their margins. That’s the, that’s the table stakes for any partner an agency chooses to work with. The partnership should help an agency delight their customers. It should be a force multiplier. You know, these are all things that I think are important. Deep, deep trust is important in partnerships. It’s, it’s something that raises the standard on both sides. It’s that whole rising tide thing again, right? And so And what I’m building here, I’m trying to think not perks, not tiers, not surface alignment, but this focus on collaboration, a focus on what the outcome of that relationship is. So I think that’s really, really important too. So I wanted to bring all this up here because I wanted to have a conversation with the greater community. And I know that we have a great audience here. About what this all means, about what partnership means to them, because I may be completely wrong here. I don’t think that I am, but do we ever think that we’re wrong?

Carl Alexander:
Sometimes.

Zach Stepek:
But, you know, it’s— I don’t think that I’m on the wrong page here, but I want to know what the community thinks as a whole. I want to have a discussion about this because I think it’s incredibly important. As we continue to grow as an industry, as an ecosystem inside the overall web industry, we are being faced with more challenges, more disruptors than we ever have been, right? It had been business as usual for quite a while in the web industry. You know, we had a set of tools that we used and we had ever-evolving JavaScript frameworks that all did pretty much the same thing with varying levels of complexity that were all chasing the functionality of the Flex framework from Flash over a decade and a half ago. Um, you know, and we had all of these various tools and things that Um, we’re really just the same thing repackaged with a slightly different skin, slightly different API. And PHP itself hasn’t drastically changed. It’s, you know, it has changed, it’s evolved as a language, it’s, you know, able to do more now than it ever has. And the switch from, uh, the 4.x branch to 7 obviously was a gigantic landmark shift in performance. But we are faced with evolution at a level we haven’t had in probably 15 years in the web industry right now. We have people who think that they can, you know, just vibe code an entire SaaS product and release it to the public. Like, this is, this is a reality that we’re dealing with, that people are vibe coding entire products and then releasing it and charging people for it and then disappearing in some cases because they don’t know how to handle the support. They don’t know how the code actually works. They don’t know how to fix the bugs.

Carl Alexander:
Like, these are real things. I’m way more skeptical about that stuff, honestly. Like, I’m on X, the everything app. I want to use the same thing as Aaron Francis now, just to be like super ridiculous about Twitter, basically. But, um, because I can’t take it serious. I can’t take the name seriously either. Uh, but honestly, like, I haven’t— like, you see people that like are basically posting this stuff, but But like, nobody is like, actually, like, you know, like, like, show me, show me the result, you know, kind of thing is just like, it’s not there, you know?

Zach Stepek:
I mean, all you have to do though is look at Product Hunt and AppSumo in the last 6 months.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah. But I mean, I think those businesses are under direct, like, I mean, um, who’s AppSumo again? But he literally said like his business is like struggling, right? Like, yeah, Noah Kagan, like Noah Kagan literally said that his business is struggling, like, because there’s too much crap on that. And too bad, like, it’s not the platform. AppSumo is not the platform it used to be.

Zach Stepek:
No. And it’s mainly because a lot of this stuff is just crap, AI-built crap that, you know, is the beginning of—

Carl Alexander:
but I think it predates, honestly, I think it predates AI.

Zach Stepek:
Like, it’s just like it made to a point.

Carl Alexander:
Yes. Like, I’m in— like, this is like, again, like, I’m putting my like indie bootstrapper kind of like, uh, like whole thing hat on, but like even indie hacker and stuff, like, it’s just like, oh, it’s performance. Like, it’s just performance, you know? Like, it’s performance theater, you know? Um, like, like, my favorite takes is like the hard part of software was like, this sucks because I’m an engineer, but like the hard part of software was never like building the software, right? It’s the support. It’s the marketing. Marketing is still hard. Marketing is harder than ever, if anything, because it’s like so much more noise. Like I think about it like, Amir, like I like, you know, I struggle to find places to talk about it. I, and if I try to talk about it, like I had a really bad experience on the Laravel Discord recently, because I’m trying to help people and then I try to talk a bit about it, like on the DM side and then like I get trended with a ban, like it’s just like, it’s hard to like do this stuff. Like even the build in public stuff is like oversaturated. Um, and it doesn’t really help. Like it helps in the sense of like. Enterprise don’t die motto, right? Like the reason I got my partnership and I think people take me seriously at this point is because I’ve been like basically like hammering on it for like 6 years.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, but you were building in public 6 years ago. Like that was—

Carl Alexander:
Oh yeah. Like it’s my, I didn’t write my report yet, but it’s officially been like 5 years that I write reports. Like, uh, I’ve written like 95, 95, 96, like like I’m close to 100, you know, um, but you know, that stuff I thought would do marketing for me. It doesn’t, like it does some of it, but like that stuff’s hard. Like, like I said, it’s harder than ever. So it’s just like when I see this stuff, it, it’s just like I have like, as somebody that’s been in the trenches and follows people that are kind of in the trenches and are one-person shops and stuff like that, that are the people that would vibe code stuff, like, um, it just doesn’t work out in practice from what I’m seeing. Like, that— I think it’s like, there’s a lot of narratives like that are hard, right? Like, IBM lost 12% of its like share value when like Claude announced that it could like re— cobalt code, except like IBM could already do that with Watson. Like, it was just like, right. Um, like then on Monday, there was on the, well, it got published over the weekend, but like there was this Citrine 7 paper where somebody was like saying like the economy is going to crash. And then like, it caused like a 10, like a 2% drop in like the stock market on Monday. Like, it’s just like, people don’t under— like, people are just like, because we don’t know. And it’s so different and it’s so crazy that like people just react to everything. But the fundamentals that I see in practice is that yes, obviously this is a force multiplier. Like there’s no question, but like it, but I haven’t seen, like, there’s another guy, uh, Josh Pickford, very successful, like entrepreneur. Like he’s done like a bunch of, of pro— like a lot of products. And he started a site that was like basically Dutch auctions. He would like, He’s super good with AI. He would build a product in a week or two and then Dutch auction it. So you would take it off and then just like start marketing it. And he couldn’t get, I think the last one, he got $3,000 for it. Like he couldn’t, like the value of software goes to zero, right? Like it’s not that software engineering is worthless, but it’s just like, okay, cool. You have a product, but like it doesn’t solve the marketing, the customer support, the, all of this stuff, like AI doesn’t solve stuff for you. Like that stuff is still hard. Like it’s, it’s literally like the meme, you know, the meme with the guy with the gun behind you in space, you know, like that said, like, it’s always been like, oh, like marketing is hard. Like always been like this. Like it’s even harder than ever, you know? So it’s just like, it really is. Yeah. Uh, like that’s what I hear about, like people struggling. Like when I was at CloudFest in Miami, like I’m talking with the DNSimple CEO and his wife, who’s like the director of marketing and stuff. And they’re like, you know, like they’re struggling with their funneling. You know, you look at Tailwind who like was going to go like under because like their docs was their funnel. Like it’s just like, that’s the stuff that’s like difficult, you know, like, like the software part, like the, you know, everybody’s like freaking out about that, but it’s just like, I’m just not seeing it. Like, I’m not seeing like, oh, this is a vibe-coded product. It’s like killing monday.com or Workday or like—

Zach Stepek:
I don’t, I don’t think any of it’s killing anything. I think it’s a team. It, there’s, there’s a combination of things happening right now. One, the fact that people are starting to think that they can do the job of, uh, of software engineering without any formal background in software engineering. Is devaluing the work of software engineers. And I don’t think that that’s happening as rapidly as some people are claiming it is, but I think that it is creating this false narrative where it’s now easy to build software. I mean, there were multiple Super Bowl ads about using AI tools to build software.

Carl Alexander:
I’m still, again, like, I think it’s like Javon’s, like, paradox here. Like, I think it is making it easier to make software, but I think because we can make more software than ever, we just need people to be able to sort through that. Even if it’s just with AI and 5 agents running, like, it’s just like, look, I’m, I’m, I’m using Codex 5.3 right now. Like, I just switched over and I still have to do architectural stuff with it. Like, I’m like, why are you doing that? Why is this? Duplicated, you know, why is this code duplicated? Like simple stuff that like takes 2 seconds to review and see, right? And it’s like, obviously if you vibe code that you’re not going to get that, but that’s why those apps fall over themselves really quickly because it’s just like that stuff matters still. What ended up, which, what sucks is if you like typing the code. Yeah. If you liked typing the code, which I did, but if anything, I feel more productive because I’ve always been a two-finger typer, so I never could type. So I feel like I write more code faster. But yeah, that stuff, that’s why I think there’s a lot of pressures like vibe-coded sites, but hosting, nobody’s going to outsource hosting. I see, I see stuff on Twitter. I’ve had friends tell me like, oh, you’re just going to have Cloud Code, like connect to a server and set it up for you. I’m like, do you really want to be responsible? Like, you think a company wants to be responsible for that?

Zach Stepek:
Like, like, like at the end of the day, like, it’s just like, I actually, I’m aware of a couple of startups that are doing things like taking, uh, Lovable exports. And directly putting them on infrastructure, which is kind of cool.

Carl Alexander:
Like, that— yeah, of course, that’s useful—

Zach Stepek:
is kind of neat. Um, you know, deployment tools that take these AI-generated applications and put them in a place where they can, you know, actually grow, um, I think have some value. But my, my point here was that, you know, we’re seeing this shift and it is more of a shift than we’ve seen in over a decade and a half in the web industry. It’s, you know, we’re not, we’re no longer just saying, just talking about a backend technology paired to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We’re talking about those things being generated by these intelligent agents that we are driving.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah. I mean, that’s probably iPhone release, App Store release. Or like dot-com kind of like level disruption kind of thing. I wholly agree. Yeah. Like, I think that’s probably like the metric we’re looking at, but, you know, I read a lot of stuff and it’s like, you know, one of the, it was slightly depressing, but especially the title that his bunny was sick, but so he wrote a really fucking rough But it was like, it was the title was like, we’re no longer the smartest thing on the planet, basically. Like I’m paraphrasing, which is not wrong, you know, like, but it’s, it’s, you know, like the, the trend is like, we’re not right. Like, but that doesn’t mean that we’re like stupid either. Like it just means that there’s something that can do a lot more than we can ever do, you know? And that’s like enabling. To me, like, I don’t know, like, I’m enjoying it more than ever. But, but yeah, I think it causes a lot of disruption because, like, all the levers or where people think value is, is changing. Same way with software engineering, right? Like, it’s— I think, you know, now I’m starting to see graphs. I don’t know how accurate they are or late, but it’s like engineering hiring is up for the past like 6 months, right?

Zach Stepek:
Absolutely is.

Carl Alexander:
So when it shouldn’t be, right? So, um, because I think this is again the Jevons paradox. So like for, I think I’ve mentioned it twice basically, so I’ll just explain it for the listeners. But basically Jevons paradox is like, I don’t know the name or if I’m pronouncing it right, but basically it’s like, um, it’s a British economist, I think. But anyways, it’s during industrial revolution. And basically it was basically the paradox on how things, even though like things were getting cheaper and easier, like we needed more of it, like more workers, like, you know, like instead of like, you know, you had the industrial loom yet you needed more clothing than ever. Or like we, we had all these like accounting departments with all these people and then we invented Excel yet we have more people doing stuff than ever. Or like you think of Mad Men. And marketing, and now like you have more marketers than ever. And it’s the paradox of like how things become cheaper and more affordable and easier to do, yet we need more people than ever to do them. And I feel like I’m a strong believer that this was published by like the Box, Aaron Levy, who talked about it, like Box CEO, but I really think think a lot about that because that’s what I’m seeing more than anything else. Like, I don’t see companies that are like, oh, we need less engineers. They’re like, no, like, what we can do now is like way crazier. Like, more partnerships, more products, more this, more that. Like, we, we can do more. We need more. Like, we, we’re more enabled than ever. And then it’s, and it’s like, obviously you want to do more with what you have, but it but because the surface area of what you can accomplish as a company, as an individual, as everything has expanded so much, like it’s really like, it doesn’t feel like you need less. Like, I wish I had more time. Like, I wish I had more time, more this, more that. Like, I’ve like, just for me personally, but for everybody that I see. And so it’s very interesting for that. Um, and the space. Basically, like, that’s how I think about the WordPress space. And, you know, I don’t think we need less websites.

Zach Stepek:
No, no, I think we, we’re going to continue to need more websites. Yeah. Um, and so for anybody who is interested, Jevons’ paradox is, uh, as technology increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, the total consumption of that resource increases rather than decreases. Which is exactly what Carl’s talking about here with the need for more engineers because that resource is incredibly important in steering what these AI tools can do. That architecture piece is suddenly way more important than it’s ever been. It’s always been important, but now we have these tools that require somebody to drive. Now, my point— My point in bringing this up though is that this landmark shift is going to accelerate development, accelerate business for agencies at the top end of the spectrum, the enterprise agencies that are already equipped to immediately start leveraging these tools. Uh, and it’s going to accelerate the efforts of developers, but From this community, we started as a, as a community for builders, right? That’s what Do the Woo started as, was a community and a podcast built around this concept of builders. And where does this leave the builders? Where does this leave the people who don’t have the, uh, the background to utilize these types of tools?

Carl Alexander:
Are you leaving it open-ended or could I just give two cents? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, well, first I think it’s changing— I think where it’s changing things the most is like education. Like, like boot camps to teach you React useless. Like, who cares if it’s React? Like, this is not important. Like, you know, nobody’s going to watch it, like, a 20-minute video on a new React feature now. Uh, like, I, again, uh, I listen to Aaron Francis a lot, who does like a lot of educational material, and he’s like trying to pivot to products, but he’s trying to do a bunch of things. But I think he’s genuinely directionally correct. Like, even me with my blog, I stopped publishing articles like years ago because it was just like way, um, it was just pointless. Like, you know, one of my favorite, most popular articles was like an introduction guide to regex. But like, one, do you really need to know how regex works now? Like, probably not because like AI is super good at it. And honestly, AI can explain it to you better than I could. Like, it’s just a perfect tutor and stuff like that. So it’s not a diss on that, but my view is that it’s never been a better time to be a builder. Like, because the entry, the entry point is now just a prompt, right? Um, that’s why I feel so enabled as a builder is because it’s just a prompt now. Obviously, like, you know, I love the, the, you know, like I charge a lot for my consulting rate. Right. And like, you know, and probably everybody’s heard the plumber thing where he comes in and like fixes something. He turns a thing and he’s like, you know, fixes the thing and it’s like, it’ll be $100 and it’s like, you’ve been here 1 minute. It’s like, yeah, it’s $1 for the minute and $99 for my knowledge. Right.

Zach Stepek:
So it’s just like, uh, I’m perfect. The last 25 years of experience turning exactly this point in the pipe.

Carl Alexander:
Yes. But I really think about like video games and stuff like easy to learn, hard to master. Um, I think because of that, I think it’s never been a better time to be a builder because if you have an idea, you can get it done. And if you’re interested in learning on how to fix it, AI will help you fix it and teach you. How to fix it, right? Like if you, if you have like a vibe-coded Sass, for example, and it’s like slow, you know, or it’s like it’s falling over itself, like it can tell you what’s wrong. Like obviously you have to have some architecture, but like it’s, it’s like great. Like sometimes I wish I had as much like of that ignorance, as I see like some people, some vibe, some 17-year-olds like vibe code stuff with no knowledge because they just like figure out different ways to approach the problem. I mean, it doesn’t mean necessarily that the code they write— I’m looking more at like design, like website design and stuff like that. But I find that very fascinating to me. But it’s so accessible. You know, like you, it’s a $20, you can get it for free potentially, or it’s like $20, you know, and, and you can get started. So I just, I just think that people, it goes back to what I was saying, which is like, it doesn’t make the hard stuff go away. The hard stuff was never building the app. It was not the hard stuff even 15 years ago when I started. Marketing was the hard stuff and it’s still hard to market. Like I said, I think it’s harder than ever because the noise, the stuff that like finding channels, like all that stuff, finding people with all the AI stuff is harder than ever, you know? And I truly, truly think that. And I haven’t seen anything in practice that has changed my view of that. Like, I haven’t seen anybody that’s like cracked marketing to a crazy aspect with AI now. I haven’t seen anybody launch products and they’re able, like I said, launch consistently products and like kill it. Like, it’s just none of that stuff is easy. And, and I see it from people that have followings, so it’s not like they’re nobodies either. Like, it’s just like they have followers and stuff, and they still can’t get that done. So it’s just like, but for me, there’s a childlike love of it. Like it’s, like I said, it’s never been a better time because there’s nothing stopping you. Like AI is like relentless, you know, like it’s, that’s the crazy part for me because that, think of all the times you like, you like banged your head on a problem. Like for hours trying to fix something. And now somebody will— some, some piece of software will just do that for you and you can just walk away. You can go to sleep. You can just go do something else while it tries to figure it out for you.

Zach Stepek:
Just doing it all in the background while you like get some rest.

Carl Alexander:
Yes.

Sponsor Announcer:
Yeah.

Carl Alexander:
Like it— I have not been frustrated with software development the way I’ve been in the past since this has been around. So that’s why I feel really positive about builders. Like I’m super optimistic about it. Um, I just think it’s very, like we’ve talked about, like it, it upends about things and it puts even more, and to like loop it back to your, your, your thing is that because there’s so much AI slop, because there’s so much like fakeness in everywhere because of it. Um, I think partnerships and partnership programs and like the human aspect, the human-centeredness of it is important because I think there’s a shift back to that, shift back to, you know, in-person networking, in-person events, in-person this., because of that, right? And that affects partnerships too. You know, partnerships is about people at the end of the day, and AI focuses on that, right? it refocuses on the importance of that, I should say.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, no, I think it really does. And I think that, um, where we are going as an industry You know, we’re, we’re getting these tools that accelerate innovation, which is great, but understanding how to utilize those tools becomes something the ecosystem has to figure out how we’re going to do effectively and at scale. And so, you know, it all comes back to this concept of how we partner and how we create these strategic alliances that help us grow, uh, because agency owners are in a sea of possibilities right now. So how do you pick through all of that possibility and find the right things to focus on? And now, how do you even just looking at the WordPress plugin directory, how do you look at 70 plugins that all do the same thing and pick the one that’s going to operate at scale when millions of dollars are on the line? How do you do that? And so, you know, that’s where ecosystem comes in, that’s where community comes in. And I think those things are incredibly important as we move forward into this next era of what WordPress can be and what it can do. But not, not only that, but what the web industry can be and what it can do. So Really excited to get everybody’s thoughts on this conversation. Um, you know, we were actually intentional about not wanting to do another episode on AI, and then we did another episode on AI. It’s kind of funny how that works out.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, it’s hard to— it’s hard to avoid it.

Zach Stepek:
Yeah, it’s hard to avoid it. Um, so in the near future, uh, I’ve been having conversations trying to get us guests from companies like Vercel and Laravel and trying to get us more of a broad ecosystem. If you know people in those spaces as a listener, or if you are those people, please reach out that we are wanting to do that. And you can help. If you have ideas for what you’d like to hear us talk about in the future, let us know as well. If you think that we’re entirely off base, let us know that too. We want your feedback. We want to know what you’re thinking about these things because we know that we’re not the only ones in the industry having these thoughts and conversations. So feel free to, you know, reach any of us, either of us on our social media, and we will, we will be there to have that conversation and talk. But it’s been great, Carl, having this conversation with you again. Yeah, of course. Always talking about community and the importance of community moving forward. You know, I think that it’s going to be fun to see where we land in the next, in the next 6 months to a year. So, you know, keep an eye on this space because we’re going to be talking about it as it happens every month. Yeah, talk to you soon. Yep, awesome.

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