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In this LMScast, According to Matt Medeiros, The WP Minute is changing profoundly from being a WordPress news and community site to a resource for agencies and freelancers that is more value-driven and instructive.

At first, The WP Minute concentrated on reporting on upcoming WordCamps, community conversations, product releases, and WordPress-related information. Though such information is useful, Matt found that just a small percentage of people roughly 10,000 English-speaking WordPress aficionados worldwide are really interested in this kind of “inside baseball” news regarding Automattic, leadership changes, and local politics.

Matt made the decision to return his attention to the primary audience WordPress freelancers and agency owners with whom he had initially established a connection through his previous project, The Matt Report, after realizing the limits of that specialized audience. He wants to help these professionals navigate challenges in today’s landscape, especially as artificial intelligence and economic pressures change the way agencies and independent creators work.

The first course created using LifterLMS for The WP Minute, which focuses on assisting users in selecting the best WordPress hosting company, was released as a result of this development. By actively assisting individuals in learning and applying the knowledge he shares, online courses allow Matt to develop a deeper connection with his audience.

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Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m a little rusty because I’ve been doing a lot of solo episodes, but he’s back on the show. I think this is appearance number six, seven, or eight. It’s Matt Maderis. He’s from Gravity. He’s from the WP Minute. Matt has a lot of projects and has been a big personality in the WordPress community and entrepreneur community for a long time.

Before we get into it, just first welcome back on the show, Matt.

Matt Medeiros: Thanks for having me, Chris. I was here on episode 500. I think we were talking about podcasting and the value of that. So excited to dig into a different topic today.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I noticed you launched a course with lifter LMS on the WP Minute.

I believe it’s the first course on the WP Minute. It’s about. Hosting and how to choose the right and best WordPress host. Before I summarize it, why don’t you tell us all about it? What’s the story? Why courses for the WP Minute, which has always been more of news newsletter kind of stuff, like where did this need for courses emerge?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, there’s a few challenges at play for my business at the WP Minute, and of course with WordPress content and with WordPress. And so I’m trying to tackle all of that with this slow, methodical shift with what’s happening at the WP Minute. But you’re right, it’s always been about more like that community focus, like what’s happening in WordPress.

A lot of it lent to news. A lot of it lent. To what the community’s up to what’s happening at Word Camps, product updates, et cetera. But WordPress News Media is a challenging space to say the least. The WP Minute was supposed to be a reprieve for me. When I got into back into the workforce page, Lee Casto and now gravity Forms, I was trying to dial down all of the overhead of running.

A bunch of content while having a day job and having kids. And it started off really small and then as I do with a lot of things, it just piled on the snowball effect of rolling down the hill and doing more content, doing more media started to expand. And the challenge with WordPress news and content is not a lot of people really care about it, right?

Not a lot of people really care about. The inside baseball of what’s happening with automatic and leadership and what’s happening to the community. Those of us that do care, really care. But I’ve always said there’s like this 10,000 English speaking people across the world who actually care about the type of content that I’ve been producing With the WP Minute for the last, I don’t know, three and a half-ish years, four years.

There’s been this shift halfway through the year of getting back to, or a little bit more than halfway through the year, getting back to the roots of what I was doing with the MAT report, which was like really focusing on. The WordPress freelancer and agency owner and diving back into that space because when I started the MAT report, the big thing that was happening and why I was really covering agency life and WordPress was massive financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, and a bunch of people started getting into services and WordPress.

And WordPress was really becoming this. Go-to CMS now. The, I don’t wanna say threat, but the big thing happening now is of course ai. And what does that mean, not only for the freelancers business or the agency’s business, what does that mean for WordPress? So I really want to turn my attention of content and effort back into number one, unapologetically supporting WordPress.

Like why we should all use WordPress at its core and its fundamental use case. Two how do we get back to talking to agencies and freelancers again to encourage them to use WordPress in the face of AI and in the face of continued economic challenges? So the course is a piece of that. My overall strategy, I’ve never been an, I think you and I have talked about this a lot.

I have never been really good or focused on SEO. Or paid ads or like any kind of gray area promotional sources. For my content, it’s always been I’m just gonna publish content and keep doing that and hope people come to engage with it and it’s worked, right? So it’s worked for, the last whatever, 12 years.

But now with. Content being so competitive and AI being able to serve up answers or even news updates really quickly, and so many WordPress content creators out there. My only thing to help the business forward is how do I even get clo? How do I get even closer to the audience, right?

This is why I do the blog, the newsletter, the podcast, the videos, and I have the community, the course to me. Is, how do I get closer to that person to actually help, educate them and they’ll just care a little bit more about the total offering that I’m putting out there. So I’m trying to lean into that real like human approach.

We have some more courses coming soon and some other ways to get education and stuff like that, that I have noodling around. But this is me saying. I want people to care more and I want to get closer to them and help educate them and solve their problems with the WP Minute and the community and the courses and such.

So that’s the quick overview of like how we’ve got there over the last four years.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And just a quick side question. You mentioned there’s about 10,000 people in the English speaking world that care about WordPress, community news and content. Do you have any sense on the size of the freelancer market that is somehow related to WordPress?

Like how much bigger of an opportunity do you think that is?

Matt Medeiros: On the freelancer side, the freelancer or agency side, in my opinion is far greater. Than than that number, but a lot of them, don’t really care about. They don’t really care about the automatic and WP engine lawsuit, right?

They often don’t care about the word camp event happening or who’s speaking and, what’s the interesting angle on that? Like a lot of people because they’re so busy or they’re not aware of it, they just want to use WordPress. They know and love the tool. They just might not be exposed to the community yet.

And WordPress is, again, it’s just that tool to get the job done. So I think that number is far greater. I think it’s the people like you and I who fall into the ca into my own category of the 10,000 people, and I work that number backwards from whatever the 50,000 people that are in wordpress.org, slack.

Then you work that back towards like how many people we see in the post status Slack, how many people go to Word camps and who’s showing up on podcasts and Listenerships like that, who really care about, what has Matt said today? And what’s automatic rolling out for a new like feature on wordpress.com?

There’s only so few people who care about that. But lots more people to your point, who care about, how does this affect my. Freelance business, or how do I launch this new website with lifter LMS or whatever.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So why is how to choose the best host for WordPress the first course you did and you also did it with Eric Kovac, did I say his name right?

Yeah. Yep. And you also chose to I mean you have an intro video and stuff, but it’s e mostly Eric’s content.

Matt Medeiros: Yep. Yep. So Eric is the instructor as lifter, LMS puts the title on. And I do the intro video of who this course is for. And I do the there’s a final video there that, like how you can apply this to your agency or freelance business.

I ran an agency for a decade worked at a, worked at Pagely for three and a half years, and I’m two and a half years into Gravity form. So I know the ecosystem really well, so I’m. And then Eric has 20 plus years of being a web designer and freelancer runs his own freelance agency. And this course is the business side of hosting Andrew Agency, not like the gigabytes and bandwidth side of hosting.

So we are looking at it from the perspective of how do you evaluate. Your WordPress project, just a tiny little five page site. Like where should you host this? That if all of a sudden you’ve got this, medium to large size business knocking on your door and they’ve got these real customer requirements, what, where should you host that type of customer?

If you have this big learn lifter at Learn Learning site, e-learning site with WooCommerce and Lifter, where should you host that kind of site? So we’re putting that into the perspective of the business owner. Because we really feel that the bad rap that a lot of clients have with WordPress is mostly rooted in hosting too Slow it, it got a security breach.

Too many popups like, every time I logged in, it just took forever for the screen to load. These are all rooted in hosting issues, and we wanna solve that. WordPress client experience with the boots on the ground who are deploying these sites, right? That’s how we see that. So we teach people how to level up their game, how to build these relationships with clients, and how hosting is very important to that whole paradigm.

So that’s why we started with this course first. And yeah, in terms of like how we do things at the WP Minute, Eric is my editor at the WP Minute he puts, does a lot of content for us. And he’s always wanted to teach and be like a coach deal. So yeah, it was his opportunity to build the course and be the instructor.

And I just come in as the guy that sells it on the front end and closes it out with like how I would apply this in my agency. But we both collaborate on it for sure.

Chris Badgett: I wanted to ask why you made it free, and if for those of you out there listening, particularly if you’re a freelancer or run an agency and help clients with websites, I recommend go going to the wp minute.com, find their courses and enroll.

But why free? Why not a paid course and try to monetize your brand or that the WP Minute audience?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I don’t know if I’m ready for so if I just look at like how I run. A content business with the asterisk that I do this on the side. This is a side hustle. It’s not full time right now.

The revenue stream for the WP Minute, and the best way for me to create content is through sponsorship. It just so happens that a lot of our sponsors are WordPress web hosts and I’m constantly pushing. Our, our own abilities to provide more value for our sponsors. So it’s not just the podcast ad read, it’s not just the logo in the newsletter.

Now we’re trying, like I said before, we’re trying to get closer to the WordPress user with education. So it’s a, so the course is free because sponsors. Appear in logos at the bottom of each lesson. This course, the hosting course, hosting Decoded is not we don’t point to any one of our sponsors.

We’re not showing any dashboards from our sponsors. We’re not saying use this coupon code for, pressable, GoDaddy Kinta, whatever. We’re just saying that this content is supported by these great hosts. Maybe you want to check them out. Maybe you go and find a host that fits, the needs for your projects.

Like we’ve taught you. It’s free because that’s like the model that I’ve been on so far with doing sponsored sponsored supported work. And it, that’s what’s working for now. We do have some ideas for paid courses, maybe some cohort learning in the future. And I’d rather focus my time on paying for those types of services versus me trying to sell, a $200 course, at least at this stage in the game.

Not, never say never but, that’s where we’re at right now.

Chris Badgett: So you mentioned you have a day job and. It’s interesting what I’ve seen you do with the WP Minute in terms of bringing in other personalities and personal brands and thinking about the WP Minute as not just Matt Madeiras tell us about that line of thinking and how you got to that place of having multiple people working on a project from abr personal branding standpoint.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, so that’s always been a challenge. So as I mentioned before, and people that have. I’ve seen my work before. No, I started a podcast called Mat Report. I did that for 10, 12 years or whatever, and it just became at some point in my life right around COVID, I was like, I’m an artist and I like to just destroy my art.

I like to build it up and just say I’m done with that, and now I want something else. And that’s that like moment where I was, I really started to say, look I’m doing this thing called myPort. It’s got my name in it. It’s fun. I really enjoy it. It’s valuable, but it’s not a standalone like business asset.

Like no one wants to own MAT report. But if you do call me up and so I was just like, Hey, look I, if I’m gonna keep doing this content thing I want to, I wanna really see if I can do this as a sustainable business. So the brand ma the brand WP Minute took over those efforts.

And of course it was supposed to be much smaller but it expanded which was great. And the challenges has become, has. Has been like, how do I continue to produce this content? But also, like I said, providing value for sponsors and finding new sponsors. And finding, and like in thinking about the business and how to like, grow the revenue.

So you have the memberships, you have classified ads, you have sponsorships and stuff like that. But it just doesn’t sell itself. And at some point, like you start, like I bring on Eric. He’s my biggest expense, of course, and it’s, paying him to create the work and or create the content, and he helps me produce a lot of the podcasts and the newsletter and all this stuff.

He’s taking on more responsibility, he gets paid more, and I need to keep continuing to build that funnel, right? Or just build that support. So stuff like the Agency Action show that we just launched, which is with Kurt and Toby Kres, Kurt v Onan, and Toby Kres. That’s another step forward in saying.

I wanna serve agency owners again, but I haven’t sold a website to a client in, I don’t know, seven years, right? Like I haven’t run an agency in about seven years and I want to put out valuable content that people trust. So I brought those two guys on to talk to that audience. ’cause I trust their work with agency and freelance life.

They’re doing it day to day and they’re going to speak to that audience. So that’s like that. Sort of first expansion of, I don’t wanna call it a podcast network, but it’s a first expansion to address that audience. I don’t want I don’t want to talk about agency life right now ’cause I haven’t done it in seven years.

Do I talk to agency owners all the time? Yes, I do. Every week I talk to an agency owner and, or a freelancer, but I’m not writing contracts and doing deliverables anymore. So I don’t want to say that I’m the expert in that anymore. So it’s just how I, I’ve approached tho those topics.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned future courses. I don’t know if you want to get into some ideas you have, but I really admire in a given topic area, the best courses are built around pain. And there’s a lot of pain in like the hosting, like you mentioned, creating challenges for clients and straining the client agency relationship.

And as a former like yourself, agency owner, I remember a lot of pain. Like I could find a lot of different topics to maybe zero in on. Yeah. But can you speak to the future courses or even just some of the pain areas of agency life or freelancer entrepreneurship that you find particularly challenging and needs a fresh take and some training around?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, certainly. You know that was the reason why we started with hosting because I was a system ad administrator. 25 years ago, and I was, running cPanel servers when cPanel first came to the market. And then I took that knowledge and brought it to my agency and I was like, oh, I’m gonna, now that I run an agency, I’m just gonna run the hosting myself.

’cause I, I know what to do. And it was fine in the beginning. You have a dozen customers or 20 customers and you’re like, oh, look at this. I’m making, nearly a thousand dollars a month in hosting. And if I just. 10 x this or a hundred x this, like this is gonna be great. And then, as soon as you start having the first security breach on your VPS server or there’s you have to update MySQL and PHP and then you realize, oh wait, I’m the one holding the bag here.

And if. All of this fails, which it did a few times. Like now your customers are looking at you going, you told me, five nines of uptime. And I’m like, I’m just a, I’m just a WordPress agency. I’m not a web host. So I learned those lessons early on and I wanted to make sure that of course, technology’s different these days, but I wanted to make sure that folks.

Know that experience for your customer really makes or breaks a deal. You’ve already built the website fine, but if you want to, them coming back and, growing as you grow your agency, you gotta make sure that this whole experience is good. So that’s like the pain point that we’re trying to solve too with the hosting course.

The next course will be about running that agency. And much more from the pre-sales process. That’s always been a huge issue that I’ve heard with other freelancers and WordPress agency startups is how do you, like, how do you do pre-sales? How do negotiate with the customer?

How do you present to the customer? How do you qualify them as a lead? How do you follow up with them, like this whole pre-sales process? At least I haven’t found a lot of content around that. And that’s one thing that we want to help freelancers and agency owners understand when a lead comes in, what happens next is do you just sell it and you think that’s it?

Do you just give them one price? Do you give them multiple prices? So we’re gonna approach that topic and that probably won’t come until, after Thanksgiving. ‘Cause what we found with this hosting decoded course, it took about, I wanna say two and a half months from Hey Eric, we’re gonna do this together to, hitting publish on.

The courses page on the WP Minute site and then realizing oh my God, I don’t have a login link on the WP Minute. ’cause it was never meant to be, a membership site. So it was like, oh God, I gotta do all that now. I have to set up the emails, I gotta set up the login link, I gotta do all this stuff.

So what we’re finding, it’s, that first process was, two to three months and hopefully, based on what we know, maybe this one will take a month or so. So

Chris Badgett: I think that’s really smart. I like to think about a niche audience through time. And like the hosting challenge is at a certain point in time, a lot of a question I ask on this podcast all the time to serve, particularly the agent agency, the builder, the WordPress blue collar professional, as you call it, is how do you get clients?

And I think that lead generation. Is a topic that’s covered a lot. There’s all these different things, but as you were talking, I was listening to oh, the presale. We’ve got some leads, like what do we do here? And Matt also comes from a offline sales background. So you have you’re a great salesperson.

Matt sold lifter Old Mess on Pagely. We’re still there. That was like seven years ago. But helping agencies close is like a, that is underserved the more I think about it. Yeah. And you don’t need general sales closing, objection handling advice. That stuff’s important. And you can read about that in bookstores and articles, but let’s talk about the blue collar WordPress professionals specifically.

There’s some unique variables there. Yeah, so exciting.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I’m trying like again, like I’m, we’re always pushing for value. I won’t go on the soapbox of WordPress media and WordPress content businesses here, but we’re always trying to push for that higher level of value for our sponsors and our, and the members of our Slack community and, web hosts.

Love agencies naturally because they bring sticky customers and they bring big accounts. And multiple customers and mul and multiple customers. It’s not rocket science. Anybody who knows like the networking space in WordPress like web hosts have or tend to be the ones that sponsor a lot of outlets and we really appreciate ’cause they help us get the work done.

So if I can create content that helps them and their customers, like how to choose web hosts. ’cause remember, we’re only partnering I’m not partnering with every web host. Certainly. There’s a lot of web hosts that come to us that Hey, we wanna be on. And it’s no, I don’t. I don’t think you’ve, you meet the criteria for a lot of WordPress professionals that are looking for great hosting the WordPress way.

So we only partner with those types of hosts. And now if we can also bring in the agency owners and put them side by side and put them literally in the same virtual room, then like everyone wins because the hosts get to talk to these agency partners. Agency partners are always looking for more leads.

Hosts have leads, right? And then like somewhere in the middle, since we know a lot of people in the WordPress space now, the product people are also in the WP Minute, and all three of these parties are congregating in the WP Minute. And that’s the secret sauce right there.

Bring folks in get them talking to each other. Hopefully our work that we do at the WP Minute is raising value for all three of those parties.

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A question about your course. I noticed you added a certificate or certification at the end of the course. I feel like I’ve thought this for a long time in the LMS space certification is totally underused.

It’s not just about getting continuing education credits or doing some kind of micro credential like you can certify, you can gamify like a lot of different things. On a full level of a full spectrum of completely serious corporate business to, we’re just having fun here and this is like a game, but what, tell us about the decision to add a certification to the free hosting course.

Yeah. What’s your vision for the freelancer agency owner to be able to do with that? Like why do that?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. It’s weird ta talking to you about it since you’ve, you’re the mastermind behind the software. Yeah, but I’ll show you, I’ll tell you how I’m thinking about it. And actually we did two things two kind of like unique things, right?

So obviously the cert certification is there, and that’s like a built-in feature to your product, which is great. But on the checklist side. We don’t have to talk about this right now, and I, but I’d love to hear a little bit more about it. We have a, one of the lessons is a checklist in, I think resources, I forget what the title is.

‘Cause we were thinking like, how do we make the course tangible other than the certificate? So before you go through the whole thing, pass the quiz and get the certificate. What else can we provide as tooling or like utility around this education. So I built a. Hosting calculator using automatics, nut telex, ai, block builder. And a user can go in and put in the requirements for their particular WordPress project, and at the other end of the calculator, it’ll spit out which level of hosting is going to be the best fit for the requirements entered into the calculator. So that was really cool. But to answer your first question about the certification.

Yeah, right now it’s fun. Like Eric and I talked about it. We’re like, Hey, we should, at the end of this, you should, we should have a little little certificate that somebody earns by passing a quiz. I thought about it for a little bit. I was like, I don’t know if I want to do that.

’cause it just becomes fun. Just becomes a fun thing. But then the utility of that sort of dawned on me like, you know what, there’s a lot of WordPress companies. Specifically agencies and product companies. When you’re the size of like gravity forms at my day job where you have 50 plus people working for you, not everyone knows everything about WordPress, right?

These, a lot of like developers that you hire or project managers. It’s not like they’ve been in WordPress for 15 years. Wouldn’t that be great? But a lot of them don’t understand and they’re just coming from other parts of the technology world. Can the WP Minute. S certifications serve as a training tool for other agencies and other WordPress product companies, right?

Hosting again, is super important. If you’re a bigger agency or you hired somebody as like a project manager and they don’t know anything about WordPress hosting, but they’re talking to your clients and, potentially your clients are asking them like, where should I host this site?

Don’t you wanna make sure that your project manager or the face of your business understands. Some fundamental lay of the land in WordPress. So I’m hoping, I’ve already started talking to a handful of WordPress agencies to say, Hey, bring your staff in. It’s free, right? And have them pass the certification.

And if they show you this certification, maybe you buy them lunch or maybe the WP minutes, splits a lunch with you or whatever. We’ll buy them like a GrubHub card or whatever, like some way to bring, the company’s already in WordPress, leaning on the WP Minute as a resource for fundamental, WordPress training, which, you’d have to be in the space for 20 years to really understand.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I think that’s a great opportunity to explore for certification. Like I think about, I began with the end in mind, and I think about in your future course about pre-sales. If somebody is on a sales call with a prospective client and they’ve taken your course, they’ve printed it out, it’s in a frame in the background behind them on Zoom, and they’re certified in WordPress hosting, they’re certified in like customer experience, happiness or whatever.

And you know what other, what whatever other like tech or sector innovations that this agency does, could be marketing automation, could be. Graphic design could be a lot of different things that even though it’s not like an official accredited school, that certification is really valuable. And you’re literally helping your people close deals.

Yeah. And become better at what they do in the process. Who doesn’t want that?

Matt Medeiros: Yes. Yes. That’s the. That’s the hope anyway.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned wanting to go back to something about the checklist or Yeah. What were you thinking there? What’d you want to explore?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, just like the calculator.

So that was fun. That was, we’re just trying to find ways. Of course we have the slide deck which. PDF, whatever. It’s 90, 90 slides across the entire, course. But we were just trying to find ways of like, how can somebody, how can we tangibly get somebody to interact with this course so that they could.

Because I’m a visual learner, I’m a hands-on learner. That’s pretty much how I do it. So like how do I apply these concepts? And this is a very beginner level course. Like I think anyone who’s been in WordPress for more than five years might understand how to, pick the right host.

But if you’re brand new to this, like you might not know that, a customer may eventually ask you for. A specific SLA when they get to their host. I didn’t know, and I ran an agency for a decade, not until I got into Pagely, 15 years into my WordPress career that I ever hear. A web host customer say, yeah, and we’re gonna also need to modify your SLA and give you our terms on, like, how are you gonna support turnaround?

I was like, wow. It’s gonna come with a lot more zeros at the end of that hosting bill to do that kind of thing. But it’s certainly a thing that happens in bigger enterprise, more bespoke solutions. So yeah we came up with that calculator idea as something that was a tangible way to interact with the course.

Chris Badgett: Just to brainstorm on that, this is a beautiful thing. This is why I like to use the metaphor of putting your customer at the center of your business, not your product. So if your product, in this case is a free training course, there’s only so much you’re gonna think about, but when you put the customer at the center, they’re like they need training.

They need videos, and I love that you also have some text with your videos and stuff, but you did something really cool, which is provide a tool. A tool is not content, it’s not a video, whatever. It’s like its own type of thing to learn with and get results. You have a quiz, which is like a knowledge check and a certificate that’s like something else that helps them, but you could provide templates like in your future pre-sales course, like having call scripts.

Things like that. Those are templates that people could use. Yeah. Even things like perks, like discounts, like coupon codes that you negotiate with vendors that they’re likely to use. There’s so much you can do besides just course content. Coaching, you mentioned potentially some cohort based stuff.

That’s a whole other thing.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And if you really map it out, you could probably come up with 20 different types of things that could be helpful in addition to just content. Yeah. ’cause people are coming for transformation and learning and content isn’t really the only thing there. Plus you layer in the learning styles where.

Some people are more tactile learners, which means they want to get busy with their hands and like they some are visual and auditory and all that, but the tactile learners I’m sure they love the tool and like giving people an assignment like, go do this. Or if I was doing a marketing or outbound sales course would be like, before you go to the next lesson, do three cold outreach emails.

I don’t care how sloppy it is, just do it. So I’m like getting the learner taking action. Oh, and by the way, there’s a template here to make your first attempt like probably go a little smoother.

Matt Medeiros: Yep. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Those great ideas we’re definitely gonna apply some of that stuff in the future course.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Now you got my brain going, so I gotta turn it off. But invoicing stuff, invoicing templates, and milestone markers and common objection handling, cheat sheets, like all kinds of stuff there. Speaking of that, one of the things that I’ve always been impressed by you over the years, decade plus that I’ve known you is your versatile on your content types.

Podcaster YouTuber, course creator, blogger, newsletter writer. You’re a vibe coder. You’re an agency guy, and do you build sites, you do your own, you do great design. So you have like. All these different skill sets, and you’re putting it around your ideal customer and the niche and all that stuff.

And I think that’s truly unique because a lot of times people will lock on to, oh, I’m a course creator, I’m a newsletter entrepreneur. Or I’m a podcaster, I’m a YouTuber. I’m a coach. But you do all that. And I was just looking for some advice you would give somebody on. Maybe getting outta their comfort zone, but trying on these different channels for size.

What, how do you think about that? I think you do it naturally just ’cause you’re interested in a lot of things, but maybe one of those things feels harder to you than the other. Or you have more fun when you do video or something like that. I don’t know.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, it’s a great question. I was actually thinking about this, and I’ve thought about this in the past before, but I was definitely thinking about this yesterday because.

I did a video that I specifically, I only put on LinkedIn. This is a bit of a tangent, but hang with me. It’s a video that I put specifically on LinkedIn for Gravity Forums. We launched a new podcast called Crew Collective. It’s about storytelling and we interview a lot of people who are filmmakers, authors, musicians.

It has nothing to do with software and tech has everything to do about like space, but creators and how they made that piece of art, right? So I did this whole like behind the scenes video of how we came up with the cover art. How that cover art in branding transcends the rest of the website, right?

Like how it affects the episode images, how we use our guest images in that cover. Art, and Travis and team did a fantastic job with it, right? I’m not the designer behind it, but I wanted to tell that story of what it’s like to launch. A podcast that is virtually unknown and how to do it the right way.

’cause we were asking people that have like agents to be on the show. Like not AI agents, like media agents that we had to go through because they’re, they’re not a-list celebrities, but some of ’em are b’s, and a couple C’s. So we had to knock on the door of a publicist or an agent.

And we can’t just be like, we’re a software company with a podcast. Come on. Like we needed to show them. Our own artwork to say we’re a legitimate entity. Asking your customer, your client, to be on our podcast to talk about their stuff. So I went through this whole behind the scenes thing.

The point of that is, is I show people off how we did that and what our approach was, yada yada, as supplemental content to the podcast. And I just started thinking social media and algorithms has no idea where to place me. Which is my big, which I’ve, this is the point to your thing is I do so much that social media has no idea how to amplify my stuff.

Because on one day I’m talking strictly about WordPress. The next day I’m talking about how to do a branded podcast. The next day I’m talking, I’m like sharing my insights of whatever marketing at gravity forms, it becomes a challenge, but. I can tell you with certainty that being able to launch this course that we just did with Lifter, I have never felt the thing that I’ve always missed in a lot of these areas because I’m a utility player.

Let’s say I’m a, I don’t wanna say I’m a generalist, but I, okay, call me a generalist. The thing that I’ve always missed is the thing to, to say, here’s what I sell, here’s what I offer. And yeah, the podcast like, come and listen. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Join the newsletter to say stay subscribed to the WP Minute.

Okay. But the course has built so much confidence in my ability to clearly say we’re helping the WordPress professionals. Now my customer might be a web host for sponsorship, and I can use the course. With my sponsorship customers, like I feel way more confident now saying, please support the WP Minute.

Please sponsor the WP Minute because I have this course. And on the audience side, I feel more confident with a call to action to say, come on in. We’re helping educate you. It’s not just me saying, follow the podcast. Join our newsletter. Come on in. Take the course, join our community, which is also now free.

And let’s get better at WordPress together. So at least on the WP Minute side, launching this course has anchored me in a more confident way that I feel like I provide value to the sponsors and to the audience, if that makes sense.

Chris Badgett: That does make sense. And I think one of the cool things that course creation will force you to do is.

They’re bigger content items than like an episode or a newsletter or a single video. And then you have to, it forces you to be like, what’s the learning objective here? Who’s the ideal learner? What’s the shortest path to outcome without overwhelming them? I’ve been in this industry 20 years and I have this giant cup, but my student may be a newer freelancer and their cup is smaller in terms of what.

They can absorb and what they need to hear. So it just forces you to create something that’s, it’s more complex, but it’s also in some ways more complete than a one-off newsletter or video, even though those things may fit in a broader offer. The other thing I wanna mention here is I’m a huge fan and it’s totally underused of the free course lead magnet, right?

Yeah. You can do a PDF or a white paper. Or even like the tool you built, you could create like a calculator tool and somebody has to opt in to get the answer. But when you do a full training and just give that away for free. And if you’ve built a brand and an audience that already knows, likes, and trust you, and you have some longer form content, which tells you they have the attention span to invest in a course is so powerful.

A free course lead magnet shouldn’t be your only lead magnet. But, and it’s not just to get leads, but it’s very powerful when you have a tight audience tied off or a tight pain point problem you’re solving. Yeah. So I think that’s smart and always encourage people to give away more than they’re free for, free than they’re comfortable.

Also, somebody may not hire you, but could still work with you and get benefit from a free or paid training. I could go in a lot of directions here, but in my opinion, every company is a media company or sorry, an education company. They are a media company and they know that, that’s why they have blogs and podcasts and YouTube channels and whatnot.

But they’re also an education company. And making some of that education very free is super powerful. And in software specifically like hosting or. Any tool, like there’s training and we all used to unfold, like you get something and you unfold that little thin white instruction manual that sucks and you can’t read, like you have this huge opportunity with an online course to make something way better than that.

The digital version of that little paper thin instruction manual that doesn’t really do the job.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. And immediately I was able to close deals. This is gonna sound like a testimonial for a lifter, but I have no problem giving you a testimonial. But I was immediately able to close deals with hosting sponsors when I launched the course.

Which I knew was, it was part of the strategy here. It, I was able to, people, I had two customers sign up, for the for our sponsorship spots that are hosts. Because I launched the course and they were like, they saw the, my existing sponsors alongside the course and they were like we wanna be there too, alongside these other hosting companies that you have.

How do we get that? And it’s just oh, okay, here’s, here’s the path to, to getting sponsorship, which was, fantastic. So when you do put out good. Great valuable content. When it’s free, it raise it depending on what your industry is, it raises some eyebrows and helped me close deals ’cause my model is sponsorship.

So people didn’t wanna miss out with that. And this is not my first rodeo. I launched academy.caos.com using Lifter. When I was at CAOs, I launched learn.gravity.com, which is lifter. When I first joined Gravity this is the first time that I, I did it under my own brand of stuff.

But I’ve been using Lifter a lot to do a lot of this stuff.

Chris Badgett: You’re exceptional in that, you’ve, you’re just such a great content creator and you’re doing it and you’ve done it before, like inside other companies like Gravity and Casto and so on. But in most of the case, most software companies, the best training on the software is made by some independent party.

So if I look at the hosting decoded course, if you ask the question, why hasn’t this been made by the hosting industry or a player in there? It is an interesting question. One, they’re biased to their own solution, so they, that’s just an issue. So they’re not really incentivized to do the bread basket of let’s look at all the options and stuff like that.

Some of that is a limited limiting belief, but for the entrepreneurs out there listening, there’s a huge opportunity to create training. On your favorite softwares and those companies, like you mentioned, getting sponsorship will help promote it, promote you. It’s needed. It’s needed. We all know as, particularly as agency and freelancer folks, sometimes when we talk to a company for support, we know more about the tool than the support rep we’re talking to.

Yeah. And if you’re, if you find yourself in that position, maybe you could create a training on your own for that. Yeah. Whether it’s free or paid or whatever.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. And a lot of, the hosting companies to be fair, ’cause again, I worked at Pagely, so I totally know, like a lot of that marketing and advertising is spent on saying things like more gigabytes than the competition, or faster support time, because their buying cycle or their customers in that buying cycle moment okay, this is the one I want. Or it’s here, first. Year is 50% off and next year, the price goes up. We looked at it as, okay, that’s great. And certainly, look at the gigabytes and the disc space and the data centers and all that stuff.

But at the end of the day, how are they supporting WordPress? And through that, is that helping your agency and your customer? One, I don’t know what we have for time left, but I do have a bonus story on we had the course name and we launched it and I emailed it, and then I was contacted that I had to change the name.

Oh. And we had we had to change the name the next day of launching the course.

Chris Badgett: Because it included a name that there was already a course about or something, or what was the.

Matt Medeiros: No. I was contacted that from Automatic, or yes, I was contacted by Automatic that it infringed on the trademark because the course name was WordPress hosting Decoded.

Yeah. And that was clearly against the terms and conditions of the trademark. So for the course creators who are out there, who are watching, luckily. I definitely would’ve lost my mind if Eric wasn’t helping me put this whole course together, because there’s a lot, like you might just see free course, nine modules, a quiz, that’s it.

But there was just a lot of stuff that went into play, including all, like the copy, the slides, the featured images, and all the course I had to go through and change all those the next day. So all of that stuff that, went into launching a course, I had to like quickly redo it again over the, over a weekend.

And change all that stuff up, change that links and things like that. But yeah, so we couldn’t use that name WordPress hosting, so we had to change the whole name, which caused us to go through and change all of our assets. So definitely keep all of your course stuff and your assets organized and easily changeable.

I guess if anything like that happens to you,

Chris Badgett: First. Welcome to my world, Matt. So with with plugin names and things like and when you, a lot of plugins involve multiple brands for example, like a CRM brand but we’ve learned over time through automatic and other companies and other I don’t know if it’s a cease and desist letters or whatever, but if you’re gonna make a course about some other brand.

Putting for that brand at the end, like you have pivoted to here, you tend to be all right. Yeah. But if you start with the brand name, yes. You get you’re rolling on the dice. But I also want to admire you for something I noticed that all successful course creators have, which is forward and perfect action.

So you didn’t get hung up on the name forever and all that. You did it. Oops. You crossed a line you didn’t realize was there. You got a letter, you corrected it, you’re fine. But that’s how it goes. This is entrepreneurship, this is life.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. That, yeah, it was certainly something that I definitely wasn’t gonna battle use it as a training lesson.

And, it’s the part of the entrepreneurship stuff and it was to, it’s fine. And in fact maybe even the course name ends up being better in the long run for visibility and. Searchability and all that stuff, but definitely like when you’re you first launch, you send it out to your mailing list, you put it out on social, you’re hyped up, you do a podcast episode about it, and you’re like, you’re way up here.

Then all of a sudden it’s you gotta change the name and you’re like, like there goes all that energy, out of the room. But it’s fine. And I am feeling a lot better about it now.

Chris Badgett: Just to close it out with one final question, and it could be I’ll challenge you to. To put it down to one word, but if you need three or four sentence, it’s fine.

One of the things I notice with successful course creators and content and creator entrepreneurs is that there’s some kind of through line, yeah, you do a lot of things. You set, podcasting, YouTube, you work at these companies, you do all these projects and stuff. You collaborate with all these people.

What would you say is the through line? Because I see people come and go in different spaces and that’s fine. Maybe you enter a new season of life or your interests or focuses change. But what’s your through line? Because I’m really glad just to see you continuing on the journey and just being around and your different forms and evolution.

But what’s the through line for you?

Matt Medeiros: The through line is definitely WordPress, right? It’s the only thing that has kept me. Kept me going and in various firm forms, right? So it started as an agency, as an agency owner. Then it turned into like the podcast stuff. Then it turned into a more official career as I, transitioned from Pagely to Casto, which is a WordPress company as well to where I’m at with GRA gravity forms.

And that’s the thing that makes me continue to put out this content. If it was something where, had I been a agency coach 15 years ago, would that have lasted the stand of time for me? Probably not. Like the foundation for me is WordPress for what it stands for in open source and what it empowers people to do.

And that’s my foundation. Then I have these different art forms, on top of it, over the course of many years. So that’s what’s kept me, consistent and kept me going because I do love WordPress and what it can do for an individual. Right now.

Chris Badgett: That’s Matt Maderis. Go to the wp minute.com.

You’ll see the course on there. Hosting Decoded, how to Choose the Best Host for WordPress. Thanks for coming on the show, Matt. Really appreciate it. And I love what you’ve built here. I’d encourage anybody listening to go check out the course and can’t wait to see your future courses and how this evolves.

Matt Medeiros: Thanks, Chris. Thanks so much.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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