The WP Minute Interview with Dave Martin, CEO of WordPress.com
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After some spotty patches announcing new pricing, WordPress.com released a new $5/month Starter plan.
I had the chance to send some questions to Dave Martin, CEO of Automattic, about the announcement, plus, some other areas of .com that I was interested in knowing more about. The questions are posted below. I'd love to hear your feedback on Twitter.
Questions (This audio interview was done asynchronously)
1. Congrats on refactoring and relaunching the new entry-level price point at WordPress.com. Will we see more plans come to pricing page in the future?
2. I notice higher up in the features list that the $5/mo plans come with payments for subscriptions/donations etc -- this is usually associated with the creator economy. Is the creator class community high on your priority of customer segments?
3. My running theory is your new plans are in preparation for a proper WooCommerce vs Shopify showdown. Can we expect to see competitively positioned WooCommerce hosting plans this year?
4. I'm curious to learn if there are any partnership channels or programs being developed for premium theme/plugin authors to work more closely with .com customers? Again, something that one might see from Shopify partnership programs.
5. If I take the biggest offering of Jetpack, it costs me 509.36 after tax for year one, then 1,199.40 pre tax every year after.
.com is 191.50 after tax every year. Both are Automattic offerings, so I'm curious, is this Automattic's way of saying .org sites are really expensive to manage and maintain come to .com or is there room for both to serve a large set of customers?
6. Can you comment on the services side of .com and potentially how big that line of business is? Specifically the "we'll build your website for $499" offering. Having run an agency for 10 years, I know how complicated things can be when you try to productize a service
7. True or false "WordPress.com is the best place to experience WordPress"
8. I have to keep you honest here: The H1 of WordPress.com reads: "Welcome to the world's most popular website builder
"43% of the web is built on WordPress. More bloggers, small businesses, and Fortune 500 companies use WordPress than all other options combined. Join the millions of people that call WordPress.com home."
That's taking some creative freedom in the wording to say the least since other hosts + .org version is what makes up the 43% part. How do you see the division of .org vs. .com and sharing the spotlight?
9. I think VideoPress might be one of my favorite features of Jetpack and .com, can you share in any other really interesting features coming to .com that other platforms would struggle to compete with?
10. My audience will be furious if I don't ask: Will we ever see a .com Super Bowl ad or _any_ consistent advertising on YouTube/Podcasts like your competitors? Hint hint wink wink, there are a lot of WordPress podcasts that you could sponsor :)
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