Osom to Know - a WordPress podcast

Robert Windisch [00:00:00]:
And Multisite was just merged into WordPress 3.0. I repeat WordPress 3.0. Like horrible data structure. Everything was in post when you disable the plugin you had like all translations. I it was a mess. The product part was so like pulling in this direction of like we need to do more products, we need to be a faster iterations on the market, we need more resources, we need more things and at the same time also the agency took off and so we had people that came into the agency and working for global global customers that then were like but we need resources at the product space.

Maciej Nowak [00:00:39]:
Hello everyone, my name is Maciej Nowak and welcome to the Osom to know podcast where we discuss all things related to building great websites. I've been recently curious about how agencies evolve into product businesses and what changes come up along the way. So today I've invited Robert Windisch to share his history. Robert is co founder of Inpsyde, now called Side, one of Europe's largest WordPress agencies and creator of MultilingualPress plugin. Robert will take us back to Wordcamp Berlin 2010 when WordPress Multisite first landed in core and he realized that running each language as its own site was the missing piece for a streamlined translation workflow. He and his team turned that insight into MultilingualPress, learned firsthand what it takes to manage an agency product and then in 2015 spun off their entire product division into a standalone company. We will walk through how an agency eats its own dog food by building a product it needs. Moving from an ad hoc feature hacks to a dedicated product team, massive business decision that split to split the agents and product businesses and why solving real customer problems beats chasing trends. Plus we will pick at what's the next for multilingual sites, WooCommerce integration and how to spot a plugin idea in your own client work. If you want to keep learning more about WordPress, please subscribe to our newsletter@osomstudio.com/newsletter. This is OsOmstudio.com/newsletter. If you are watching this on YouTube, give us a thumb and subscribe to our channel. This means the world to us. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Robert Windisch.

Lector [00:02:28]:
Hey everyone, it's good to have you here. We're glad you decided to tune in for this episode of the Osom to Know podcast.

Maciej Nowak [00:02:36]:
Hi Robert, how are you?

Robert Windisch [00:02:38]:
I'm fine.

Maciej Nowak [00:02:40]:
Yeah, great to have you on the podcast. And I wanted to talk with you about not entirely WordPress thing, but rather on a building side of things. Basically you've got your agency, plus the agency has released a couple of products, plugins and products. And I felt, okay, that's the, let's say, the dream of the agency to switch the sites into product, product company. And since you've done this, I wanted to talk with you about this, how this all started, how it was, the journey, you know, it started a long time ago, as I checked. So I would love to know a little bit more on the history of, of releasing products as an agency and nitty gritty and problems and challenges of that. And, you know, and ultimately I want to learn if the grass is greener on the other side and you are from side. So I will saturate this conversation with this side and the other side and grass on both sides, Right? So tell me a little bit more about this, how this all started, what was the product, what was the rationale behind it and how this all happened?

Robert Windisch [00:04:02]:
Yes. So the first, the first product we ever created as an agency was the thing that we are most proud of, MultilingualPress, which is a solution to translate WordPress into multiple languages by using WordPress Multisite as the core data layer. So that came about at WordCamp Berlin in 2010 when we were... when it was a small WordCamp not as a thing like, oh yeah, oh my God, it's WordCamp Berlin. It was 20, 19... No, no, no, it was the 12th one. So it was like let's say 200-300ish people. And there was a "Ask the Professional" panel where people can just like throw questions at the people attending there or like at the people at the stage. And we were, we were on then and the question that people throw at stage was how would you do a multilingual solution? And multisite was just merged into WordPress 3.0.

Robert Windisch [00:05:15]:
I repeat, WordPress 3.0. I'm not sure how many people that listen to that even know or even had experience with this number. But WordPress 3.0 had multisite merged from a fork before that was then merged into WordPress core. And we were already using multisite before it was merged to WordPress for us was the easy answer was like, yeah, use multisite for that. Because there was no product out there at that time. And then the follow up question, where is there a plugin for that? And we looked at each other and was like, not yet. So right after this conversation we were like, hey, that's a good idea for us solving that because we need multilingual solutions as an agency. And we need a solution to solve that. We checked, there was none. And so we got to work and created the first version of this plugin to make sure that we have a solution for ourselves and a solution that we deem to be the level of quality, the level of like using WordPress, the core structure of WordPress to its advantage as best as we could imagine a multilingual solution to look like. So it was the perfect product market fit at that time to simply create a product that we need, that people were asking about. And it also resonated with the people in the room.

Maciej Nowak [00:06:55]:
Yeah. So because you are the market, right. You started this to build this for yourselves because you were the market. Someone just hinted at you that you know, there's nothing like this and coincidentally you were in a need of exactly the same thing. Right. So like that light bulb has lit, and this was the trigger, right? So what was the market reception? Because you were the market, right, so what happens then? You mentioned you were in the need of something like this. So how were you solving that problem before that, before you started to working on the product?

Robert Windisch [00:07:34]:
Yeah. So at that time as an agency we still had very much focus on one language only because it was like as you know, when you are a young age agency and it was not the interconnected year of 2025. There you, you had like our clients were mostly only German language. So, when we needed some translation tools then there were like the known translations tools out there and like, and they look very different than the tools look right now because it was like 15 years ago. And there also were tools that are like plugins that are now no longer available. And we are all happy for that. Just to mention Qtranslate. So there were like, you know Qtranslate?

Maciej Nowak [00:08:25]:
No, no, no.

Robert Windisch [00:08:25]:
Oh you would never missed that. You would never go want to go back to that like horrible data structure. Everything was in post when you disabled the plugin, you had like all translations, it was a mess. It was just like to get things off the ground for translation areas in this space. So it was not really that we needed that for every client as we do it kind of right now because of all the interconnection and all the size we have as an agency and the potential clients we have. It's really something where we now need that for almost every client. And back then it was just like an occasional client where we go like oh no, it's such a mess with all these other plugins, and then having to build on the WordPress data structure and reaching out to other parts in the WordPress space. And we became a standard for the enterprise world, like the enterprise world shaped at that time. We became a stable there very fast because it was exactly the thing that was needed for people that didn't want to deal with the structure of data that a multilingual plugin that is not using multisite forces onto you.

Maciej Nowak [00:09:54]:
Okay, And I'm curious, you know, what happened? Like, you made the decision, you heard this on stage, then you went brainstorm within, internally with the team. And then what happened? Like, what was the process back then so many years ago to release such a plugin? Like, it's such a long, it was such a long time ago and you were small, so this is probably also difficult to revive these memories. But I'm curious now that initial moment when you have that idea.

Robert Windisch [00:10:25]:
So we sat down at the WordCamp immediately, open the pop up and were creating the plugin. So we were creating like the base data layer. We were like, okay, how can we connect like posts and pages? That was the first. We started with a very MVP like style. So we started with the thing that we need to have done to even start thinking about more features. So we got that done. And then that was like on the day of the WordCamp, for like let's say one, one hour or something like that, we just sat down, wrote a data layer, wrote the database connection between posts and pages and then we were like, okay, we could use this right now in a client. We could use this for other things. So we then put it out on WordPress or we put it out on GitHub, I think. And then we were going like, okay, we have something there that is something we could use easily. And then we were adding features that as you pointed out perfectly in our agency, they were like, we need that, we need this, we need that. And as an agency, we always need to extend other plugins. So we built in as much as hooks and filters as we could do to make sure that teams in our company or that other people can simply extend the way we work with the API or the API functions we offer so that everybody could simply extend that and build their own solution or like more and more sophisticated, like front end and whatever that they could build on the data that we, that we offer.

Maciej Nowak [00:12:20]:
You know, in product companies there are product manager, right? They manage the product, they don't manage the team, they manage the product and what's on the roadmap, how to develop the plugin. Was there back then anything, anyone like this who would take care of, you know, what are we going to ship?

Robert Windisch [00:12:39]:
Like, I don't know how many people we were. Let's say we were 10 people at that time or let's say, I'm not sure, maybe let's say below 20. I would imagine we were at that time. Currently we 120, so that's a completely different beast. So when we were at that time we were, we had people that we had, I think one person that was working then on the plugin to improve it and to get it forward. We had like issue trackers because the agency. So we had everything of that lined up and we had like already like then customer feedback of like people using our solution and giving us like feedback going like hey could you, could you. We need that, this is not working. So we were already improving that. So we very fastly were just like heading outside and inside stakeholders and we were bringing them together to make sure that we move in the right direction.

Maciej Nowak [00:13:45]:
You have all these tools to manage software projects for your clients, right? Because websites is just a software project and you can reuse all of these tools, and apply them to your own software project which is the plugin. And obviously the product evolved, you evolves as the agency, so you're not the same as you were before. And how is it right now, how is the product managed right now when you have, you know, so much different scale and the product is used by different kinds of organizations as well and on a different stack which is still WordPress. But you know that's not the same WordPress, right?

Robert Windisch [00:14:25]:
Yes. So we had, we created out of this one product, we had another, a few other ideas where we also created other products that we created. So we then had like a really a product team in our company and that then was got so big that it became its own company and we, we let it go and we were like okay, let's see that's. That is something that they can take care of it. And we kept MultilingualPress and other plugins and we kept the product team. So that's why we still have a product team in our company and that works simply with the products we create for the WordPress market. We have collaborations with PayPal, Payoneer and others that we simply create payment solutions for WooCommerce. And then we have also our Multilingual Press that is one part of the products there. And you have people that are responsible for those products. And we have a development team inside of the company that works on all of those things. And the benefit for us is that we also, because we also use MultilingualPress in our daily work, that we have people helping the product teams with their like agency knowledge and with the agency teams that then get people into the MultilingualPress team to make sure that can like solve problems, grow and have like features that people are looking for that we can move those things forward.

Maciej Nowak [00:16:11]:
All right, so I didn't know that you had a product that was encapsulated in a company and then let go, but was it sold? Was the company with the product sold?

Robert Windisch [00:16:27]:
Yeah, so we had one of our co founders that were really into growing all of those things. It did it the solution is called, or like the website is called MarketPress. The other products that we created were WooCommerce focused. So we created WooCommerce German Market, which was the one solution to get WooCommerce to sell things with WooCommerce in Germany. So that was the one and only thing in 2012 that you could use to, to sell, to use WooCommerce in Germany without potential getting sued.

Robert Windisch [00:17:13]:
So that was like imagine like with the growth of WooCommerce, that was really a thing that people like needed to buy. And we were really early on in this market. And then we had one of our co founders that has like all had all these WooCommerce shopping solutions, shopping like themes and plugins that then was. We were like, okay, we as an agency want to go in this route, and the products were not really the main focus we had there. And so we were because we had like a growth spur in the agency bucket. So that's why we were like, okay, we keep those products and the WooCommerce side of things will be, will be its own. And then we then MarketPress and us split ways and they are still up and running.

Robert Windisch [00:18:09]:
And we kept like the non WooCommerce Solutions and continued our way but with our knowledge of WooCommerce. We then like had the WooCommerce payments plugins coming in later after that because we still had the agency, we still had all this WooCommerce payment and shop knowledge so that we then could intensify our relationship with Automattic and with WooCommerce to really help like global providers like like PayPal, like Molly to get their payment solutions up and running. So that was for us because the knowledge of like how to build products were still, was still part of the company. So that's why we still kept like the let's say secret ingredients to what is the difference between an agency and a product was still with our company.

Maciej Nowak [00:19:05]:
Cool. That's super interesting. And when I'm listening to about listening to you talking about that maybe split, this sounds like a messy process because there were a couple of co founders, there was the agency, there were the products and this got encapsulated with one of the co founders and sold. So I'm curious, I don't know how much you can say about this, but how does this division go? Because my outside look is that it must have been messy. I'm not saying it must have been, I don't know very problematic. But this is not in like I know you have to estimate know how the worth of the company of the plugins, you know, how you will split and so on. So can you share a little bit more on how was it done?

Robert Windisch [00:20:04]:
Yeah, so the the easy answer is because we had that much teams already. It was very clear what team or like what people were like part of this, of this product company. So because, and the for us one of the reasons were like that we the same thing when we sold like other products later like later those years then like a few years ago we sold a few other plugins that we are not really paying attention to. The struggle that we, that we mostly faced were what direction should the company take. So it was like please stop working on all agency things or let's have not that much attention on all the products and potential products that will come up come out of that. So it was really like an, an internal struggle of like the struggle that every agency faces when they deal with products is like okay, how much attention do we pay to the product side of things? Because it's really, it's a gamble. And so that was really like the let's say the primary motivator of like okay, how can like because the, the product part was so like pulling in this direction of like we need to do more products, we need to be a faster iterations on the market. We need more resources, we need more things. And at the same time also the agency took off, and so we had people that came into the agency and working for global, global customers that then were like, but we need resources at a product space. And so the the goal for that to simply were like okay, we are not really, we cannot help this, this product, this product space or this product part that much as it, as it deserves to do. And the agency would also then has problems with clients. So we were like okay, we need to make a decision here and, and those two pulling forces need to be balanced out. And we were like okay, the best way is to simply set these like as, as you know that if you love something, you set it free. So we were like okay, the best growth path for this product space would be that it's be on its own and we keep the stuff that doesn't really make sense for the product space. That means like multilingual perspective. And like other solutions were staying with us that were not heavily WooCommerce focused. And then we were like, we then sold for example, we created our own site for MultilingualPress because before that MultilingualPress didn't had a website. So we, because we needed to sell it somewhere and the old like MarketPress space were gone. So we then created our own website and we also sold it with our partnership on WooCommerce.com because it had like WooCommerce, it had WooCommerce features to make sure that you can use translations and multilingual at WooCommerce. So the focus for us was really to make sure that our products then have enough room to go forward with that and to have the space of, to have the growing space to really move on as their own.

Maciej Nowak [00:23:47]:
My mental picture is that there were two forces in the company. There was the agency force and there was a product force. And maybe it sounds funny when I'm talking about this in terms of forces, but you know, when that force of product grew stronger like in Star wars or something, when it grew stronger, it started to make a like bigger, bigger influence on the company and started to like, you know, the ship started to drift a little bit. Something like this and for the, you know, profit and loss, you know, management control and the whole strategy, you had to encapsulate this in a company and maybe sell and have you been thinking about maybe not selling but you know, putting this as a separate company with separate set of people and you know, build a holding so that you know, there would be side holding and there would be side agency and there will be side products and maybe side more products. And maybe something else side hosting, I don't know. Like think of this. Like obviously you have to encapsulate this for the safety in a business unit, but maybe build a conglomerate of companies like a constellation of companies instead of selling it.

Robert Windisch [00:25:12]:
Yeah, that was 2015. And so when we split parts and we did not really had everything lined up for that. So because of this pulling force the easiest answer was just set them free. Because then all the things that we were talking about and again 2015 we were also, were also years where WordPress has a really like had a growth spur. So we had like the like let's move faster thinking of from all sides. So we were like let's move faster from the agency part, let's move faster from the product part. So the, so then the. Yeah you can say like in hindsight totally, totally understandable to do a holding to keep this all together. But for us at that time was just like the decision was to really encapsulate the moving force that we were up and going. So because we also lost like when we get them out, when we separated I think we were like 30 or 40 people and then we were back at like 25 or something like that. And we were like, we have clients, we have client projects so we need to like hire people to have like to get the pace up and running. And at that time we were internally only German speaking people. And so the, so the next growth spur were already ahead of us to really make sure that we as a company can grow internationally and grow in multi language so that we ourselves switch to English as a language. So like with, with that all happening at the same time, kind of for us to be like no, no, no, sit down, relax, focus on what do you need to do right now was not really in our head at the time.

Maciej Nowak [00:27:28]:
All right. Yeah, obviously you know, reading the chart to the left is always easy from the perspective, right? And I didn't know this was 2015. And since you were young agency, you know, this is less business experience, less life experiences, less talks with other founders and other agencies, and also not so interconnected as it's right now with so much more knowledge available. So that's true. And that's you know, easy thing to say right now, 10 years after the fact, right? But I want to know what were the like discussions happening around this? This is always interesting to see how the idea grew and got formed because we can judge from the perspective. But we, you know, we can't predict the future. What we can think about is how the decision was formed. I'm trying to understand you know, what was the thought process and the decision process?

Robert Windisch [00:28:38]:
Yeah, right now I could like yeah, we have lawyers, now as a 120 people agency we have like, we have our lawyers, we have like we can easily set up another company to, to like simply have something grow in there. But at that time it was simply so far out and again like, for us the moving forward with the speed of like an entrepreneur that was simply like a like kind of a distraction. We were not really paying that much attention to like okay, the possibilities we could have or we could not have. So we were simply going like - you do you, we do our thing and we don't need this product selling space anymore because we can sell it on our own because we simply set up like for multilingual person back to our VR and the others. We simply set up the websites for that because we are an agency and the shop needs to be in multilingual. So we simply use multisite and use. So for us it was not really like we lost an opportunity and more like the next logical thing from us working as we did was simply to simply spin up these new pages and to set up a shop and to make everything up and running. So we were. So that was for us really like the then at that time the next logical step to simply do and to start and to, to continue moving forward with those products that we kept.

Maciej Nowak [00:30:21]:
Cool. And you mentioned you've got lawyers and so on, and on the wave of a little bit of you know, US versus Europe kinds of jokes. Is this true? To set up a company in Germany you need a notary that will read the you contract for a couple of hours. Is it so time consuming to you know, when you sell a company, you know you had to form a company and sell it when you were excluding this from, from your original business.

Robert Windisch [00:30:54]:
So there are easy ways to do this. You can. Because we are, we are a remote business. So we have like other ways of, of like meeting. We have other ways of, of like doing our business. So, there are ways of doing those things and to selling things and to setting up things that are. There are not a, like a, that are not a caricature.

Robert Windisch [00:31:25]:
It's still like they are still like legal processes that you need to follow. But like right now if we would right now want to have another company, it would be as a company right now with our size and with our connections that we now have, it would be a very easy thing to to get this up and running. And if someone needs to sit somewhere, and depends on length of your contract and depends on if you. All needs to be read it or just like the notary just need to say like - okay, did you read that? Yes. Did you know everything in there? And they also might need to read it. But it's something that like, it's the same way of compliance wise. You need to have like certain things in place and if they sound tedious, there is a process how it could be done. It's again like it's a very different mind shift.

Robert Windisch [00:32:26]:
If you talk to an enterprise agency and going like yeah, that is a tedious project. And we process and be going like yeah, we know, compliance and other processes. So it's from a level of like not being bothered with like, let's say here from an like a three people freelancer that need to do something legally that's like it's tedious. And for us we are at that level as normal things need to go because with all the compliance with all the certificates we have that we really need to, that we really know what is the thing that we need to do to make something happen. So. But I don't, I never heard of like being read for many hours to do something. I can imagine that but it's not a thing that we are normally encounter.

Maciej Nowak [00:33:24]:
Yeah, I was just thinking that obviously everyone can now do a lot more things remotely. But if there is an article that you have to sit with a notary to form a new company and the notary is obliged to read the contract of that company, you know, the forming contract. I don't know, I can't remember the name. You know, you've got to suffer through it. So I was thinking about this, that in Germany it's so much more, let's say legalistic. So much more is required to form a company to do stuff and so on. You mentioned using WooCommerce was impossible until your plugin, right? Because you wouldn't be able to legally sell anything online. And I guess this is because of legal status of the legal quirks in Germany, right?

Robert Windisch [00:34:21]:
Yeah. At that time it was simply that for example there is one thing that Germany I think does and nobody else is like or like, I think it's a Europe thing, that when you check out something you need to have a final overview what you're currently doing with all the numbers up and like, with all the numbers, final numbers and with then going like - yes, I want to buy that. And WooCommerce itself never had that feature of the summary page that you then say, okay, I need to buy that. So that was one of the primary things we needed to add. And right now, for example, I think in Europe it is, it's at least in Germany that you need to tell people what is in the product. If you have, for example, clothing, you need to tell them what percentage of what is in this product and you can write it somewhere and then you have like this base number. If you sell something in kilograms, you need to tell. To be that people can compare prices, you need to tell them how much gram is, is like how much euros and gram this is. And that is also not something that WooCommerce brings in as a core feature. So those things were like, yeah, you can write them on your own, you can code your own way out of that. And you also have a little bit of like, let's say legally way. If you're saying like, I don't need this, my customers, that's my argument why I don't need that. And that's why people then still were coming to us going like, okay, we need to make sure it's easily, like you have a lawyer looked over that. So we easily had like those ground marks being solved for them to simply make them like make WooCommerce grow in Germany. And most people were like taking our product to make sure that they can sell something. But again, that's the global growth of WooCommerce where it's based on the easiness to add that to WordPress and the easiness of the product itself. And then you need to still deal with the local ramifications of having WooCommerce in your country.

Maciej Nowak [00:36:50]:
I think this is catching up but not in all of European countries. And if this was as early as 2015 in Germany, we are seeing maybe some hints of this in, you know, in other countries right now. Some, you know, to some extent like, you know, visibility of prices and you know, what's the lowest price from 30 days ago. But it, I know this is not the thing you're talking about, but this kind of transparency when you buy stuff online in Europe at least. Going back to our original threat of running a plugin or a product company, what's most difficult in this, in all of this, you know, things related to building a Product?

Robert Windisch [00:37:35]:
Best way to describe that is the learning. When you are agency and you think you know how to do products. That was for us in the early years, the best way to describe it is like we had people from our company or like from the agency business that were like, hey, we have a product for you. You can now like sell it. And we looked at that from the product perspective because we have like two, we had two perspectives in the company and we were like, no, no, no, you do not have a product. Like, it's a thing that were used for one customer. It's not broad enough as a product and you have no documentation

Robert Windisch [00:38:26]:
To getting from a very specific tool, let's say like a plugin. But it's a, if you look at it from a mechanical standpoint, it's a tool. So looking from a very specific tool to getting it to be a very generic tool, that is a very big shift. If you don't not know what you're doing, then it's like it feels normal. It's just like, that's the requirements this one customer had, please sell it. And then as a product company, you're going like, but that's one client. Like, do you know how many people use this? Do you know how many people are in the market for that? Should we now get out and check with the market if anybody cares about this product? So I tell you a funny story. We had a product that was multilingual Woocommerce. And that was the biggest idea item when Woocommerce were like voting for what do you want to have next? So we, as a multi, as someone with a multilingual plugin, we were like, yeah, that's a piece of cake.

Maciej Nowak [00:39:45]:
Something for us, sounds like fun.

Robert Windisch [00:39:47]:
Yeah, perfect, we're perfectly suited for that. So we were like, let's simply do the product. So we had the agency team work on the multilingual WooCommerce solution, and then they gave us that. They were like, done. We have one client that kind of like, that's the requirements they had, and we solved that and now you can use it and sell it as multilingual WooCommerce. And then we were looking at that and we reached out to other WooCommerce people, to other Woocommerce potential clients and to people that use this. And at the end we scrapped all of that, because it was not at that space where it solved all the problems that those people had.

Robert Windisch [00:40:35]:
It was solving like the biggest part that it solved was the way you store your stuff. Like, in which area in the world is this one product? And how can you sell? Like, how can you move this to other parts? And that connected with translations was then like, okay, in the French inventory, these are the five products. So if you sell those, then you can use them from there or if you sell in the French language, then you have like this product five times. So it was a connection of those things. And we then like moved it together to a product that simply syncs the inventory amount over all languages. But we didn't had this one solution that solves all multilingual problems for WooCommerce because that was simply too much of like, too much like requests in too much detail from too much different clients. So it was simply like people were looking for the holy grail of like translations of WooCommerce. So the state right now is we have our syncing of stock. That's a central stock. And MultilingualPress has features for WooCommerce built in. So that's the like the end of the story is we simply have like our translation plugin can now also do WooCommerce and we have a special product for syncing stock, and even debt is talked internally to be merged as one thing because it's simply kind of like belongs together.

Robert Windisch [00:42:32]:
But we like shied away from like solving this one big cluster of like, you ask 10 people and you get 11 things that they need to get to multilingual WooCommerce. So we were like, okay, that's not a product. And again, the starting point was we have this done for one client. Go with it. And the perspective of like having a plugin in the company and creating a plugin out of that or like creating a product out of that. That's a, like for us was a very a steep learning curve.

Maciej Nowak [00:43:16]:
Is this significant revenue stream for the company to keep the plugins going or is it more of a marketing exposure and, you know, kind of marketing activity which by the way, is generating some revenue?

Robert Windisch [00:43:42]:
It's both. So we, as being the ones with the most sophisticated translation plugin using multisite and using that for all the products like for all the solutions that we, for all the agency customers at least need multilingual. It's kind of like plays in both fields with us been remarkable and like the White House were using our website before the new administration. So it was really that our solution is the go to market solution in the enterprise world because it simply solves all the questions that they have and it's so extendable that other agencies can like build their stuff on top of that. At the same time we also use it for our solutions internally and we have customers that are onboarded throug their need for multilingual websites.

Maciej Nowak [00:44:49]:
What's in the future for these plugins? Is this driven still by the market demand, let's say, so conversation with customers and coming from within the company or more WordPress let's say project being developed? Like what's the balance?

Robert Windisch [00:45:11]:
Again it's both. We have customer because being the go to market solution in the enterprise world we still onboard new customers to this product. From WordCamp Europe because we are not really putting that much of like a marketing force behind it because it's simply, it's growing organically and if we have exposure to someone that never heard that and to for example when we talk with people and they never thought about multisite for multilingual and they know multisite, you had like almost religious awakening sessions with people where they go like - oh my God, this works. And if they never thought about that, so there is still so much market out there. We had it at WordCamp Europe where people came up to us for our booth for multilingual press and we're like awesome. You launched a product.

Maciej Nowak [00:46:17]:
10 years ago guys!

Robert Windisch [00:46:17]:
Yeah, so you see the potential that we could have if we bring this more in front of people. Because one of the biggest points we have, for example when talking with hosting companies is hosting companies always have the problem with multilingual solutions taking up too much of processing power because they are forced to do this because the single side plugins need to bend reality to make sure that you can load a language sounds weird, but that basically that's is how, how they need to be done this. And for us Core does all of that because it's multisite. So we have so much potential still out there to get this in front of people that people go like oh, that's an interesting take on that. I never thought about that. And then they reach out and they simply use our solution and they see the benefits they need to unlearn things because everybody is using all their weird single side hacks to make things happening at the right way. Like back in a time where widgets were like, oh my God, how I do widgets in other languages. And we were like simply go to the other translation and change your stuff there. So it's something from the product space where we still have that much of growth potential. So for us we are just kind of like in the middle of all of it because the potential for people using more multilingual, they need translations. Auto translations can help them to reach other markets, but they need to store their data somewhere and so let's use multisite for that. So there's still a very good plan to make out of right now to use like multilingual WordPress. And our solution as we know that from other feedback that we have, is the best. Like, I don't want to deal with the downsides of all the other plugins.

Maciej Nowak [00:48:35]:
When we say that, that like eyes are opening and new paths are opening. I have this kind of feeling when I'm listening to it because one of the projects we run could benefit from this solution. So that puzzle piece is now fitting very well inside that one project. We have company that could benefit from that. I'm in the business for a couple of years and you know, still something like this.

Maciej Nowak [00:49:05]:
I'm thinking about, you know, market education and how hard it is for WordPress. Like you need to educate people to use tools that are suitable for the task, and that, you know, that's not, doesn't mean you have to pick the, the first one from the plugins because this just, you know, the most popular or the most money went into marketing that and doesn't mean necessarily that this is the best tool. And this is super difficult in, you know, in such a huge number of plugins available and like, you know, how do you sift through this, through this mass, and that's one thing. And then a lot of people are just doing things like you know, punching keystrokes. So I think the education is difficult. It gets you the market, it gets you the sisibility. You can't overdo this in my opinion. There's always something you can do around education, around products and how to do stuff efficiently, at least in my opinion. I'm alluding to your booth where you were marketing but then the success of that both was because people were not aware of what can be done, right? So they were just not aware they can do stuff more efficiently or better. .

Robert Windisch [00:50:33]:
Yeah, the problem right now is also with everybody has their own personal assistant as an AI it's. And we also have that as I'm also being organizing a WordPress meetup. You have those people that do not attend like the exchange with people because they have their AI assistant helping them. And the problem with them is like they don't ask the right question. So if you ask an AI agent how can I grow this? And like staying staying at your, at your project that you, that you just experience. Oh yeah, multisite can can help with that. And that is the, that is one of the reasons where exchange with people is very helpful because if you be paired up with the right people and if you ask your question to the right room, there is challenging of your thinking that can really help you grow as a business where you need to really ask your AI assistant the right prompt and then the right prompt and then to push on that to get to the same - question, my business, what should I, what can I do differently?

Robert Windisch [00:52:00]:
Because if you simply ask AI to like hey, what is the best way to build this, build this website, it will tell you for multilingual solutions, for example, take the biggest one like, take this one thing and you're fine. And to then question it to go like okay, but what is the technology wise? I'm a developer, yada yada yada, what is the best angle for me to be in control of data, to be in control of the workflows and all of that and then at some point you will end up with the going like yeah, maybe a multi site could be a solution for you. And that's why it's really for us more from an education point and less from a hey, you need to see this cool product. Because we know there are so many people still out there who do not think about the possibility our product can bring to them.

Maciej Nowak [00:53:01]:
AI is a big topic and I always dig into AI area with my guests and this time I will pass because I can't talk about AI during every episode. But like I'm tempted to do this but I will pass this time so that we keep the episode more on the topic.

Robert Windisch [00:53:25]:
Later time. We can talk about AI in a different show.

Maciej Nowak [00:53:28]:
All right now. Okay. We both go for vacations very, very soon. I mean, you send me vacation and I go for a real vacation, but it's a vacation.

Robert Windisch [00:53:39]:
It's all right. One week of work.

Maciej Nowak [00:53:43]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, that sounds like a perfect vacation. No, I'm just joking. Don't take it, you know, the wrong way, you know. But as a sequel , we can maybe have a dedicated episode on AI on WordPress, because there's a lot of hype, as with every change and every, let's say, big step. Step in technology development like it was with crypto and other stuff and so on. So a lot of hype is there. No one is getting the full picture. And I would love to get to know more what is being done by other people. So that would be a cool sequel to this conversation.

Robert Windisch [00:54:21]:
Yeah, I'm happy. I'm up for that.

Maciej Nowak [00:54:23]:
All right, perfect. Thank you very much, Robert. It was pleasure to have you on the podcast and talk product and stuff around WordPress and building a product company. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye, guys.

Lector [00:54:38]:
If you like what you've just heard, don't forget to subscribe for more episodes. On the other hand, if you've got a question we haven't answered yet, feel free to reach out to us directly. Just go to osomstudio.com/contact. Thanks for listening and see you in the next episode of the Osom to know pocast.