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description=CEO Matt Mullenweg on what it’s like to run Automattic— a collection of small companies that includes WordPress, Tumblr, Pocketcasts, Simplenote, and others;

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Text of the page (random words):
you these cool tools it s not just news there s a ton of personal sites out there a ton of personal blogging so much art so many artists that are sharing beeple who sold an nft for 69 million has published on tumblr every single day that s where he published that s where he got started that s where he still posts every single day i apologize the name escapes me but the biggest movie star in india is publishing to tumblr every single day he s done like 4 000 days in a row without fail there s people that are sharing that s really really exciting to me because it s kind of like the personal web it s different it s unique i go to a medium article or even a substack article and i read the article and i just remember medium or substack i actually forget the author because the sites all kind of look the same how do you bring that not just the editorial voice but also the visual personalization that you can really have your own home on the web you don t just look like everything else i buy all of that i guess news is too flat and too narrow of a description there s just not a lot of the weird web the web that you would ve thought of where i made a little web tool that mashes up a map with another map that early web2 spirit seems to have faded away into apps or features of social networks i m just curious where do you see the growth for wordpress some weird stuff we hope maybe a lot of artists are going to sell their nfts but i just think about where your money would come from it seems like e commerce is actually the place that you would be most focused yeah we re doing a good job at democratizing publishing wordpress is on the right path there like i said i think it ll get to an 85 share i now feel so strongly about them doing the same thing for e commerce because i think that we need those same freedoms freedom to publish freedom to transact freedom to use any payment system freedom for the transaction fees to be just as low as humanly possible versus going up every year we need open source alternatives not just to shopify but also amazon and etsy and everything else those are still great services by the way i give amazon a big portion of my paycheck i love it i actually would argue that it s making the world a better place but we still need an open source alternative to serve as a check and balance in the free market towards these successful companies what does woocommerce do for somebody you have a snowboard store that s the famous shopify origin story instead of having to build shopify you decide to use woocommerce how does that work it s a plug in for wordpress you could go on your wordpress dashboard search woocommerce one click install it and then you d be taken through a workflow that ll help you set up a merchant account set up your first products and connect it to shipping commerce is so complex you have taxes shipping inventory management but because wordpress is open source there are a ton of extensions built for it you can pick and choose and put things together to have your own store on the web even now you can have a point of sale if you have a physical store you could have a woocommerce little reader integrate for stripe et cetera people can tap to pay and that will synchronize with your online store you can do some pretty fun stuff actually a store we just launched kind of secretly for tumblr s 15th anniversary is shop tumblr com we re putting virgil abloh inspired very limited drops of cool high quality stuff we were able to launch that on woocommerce in about two weeks which shows you can really do anything now why would you choose it versus one of these other ones shopify by the way is an awesome product and an awesome company toby s an inspiring leader i really like them a lot we had harley on the show a few months back i ended up being like well i m going to go work at shopify they re big personalities i do also think that you re starting to see at the edges the complaints of their ecosystem they re having so much of the revenue flow through them and their commercial embedded growth obligations are driving them to conflict with their community more and more the community is what really made them i think basically what we did with wordpress is what we re doing now with e commerce woocommerce is free it s open source at the low end we just ruthlessly commoditize it the average person on shopify is paying 1 200 per year that s really expensive it doesn t need to be that expensive it can be one tenth and then someday one hundredth of that to have all that functionality woocommerce is one tenth that today and it s going to get cheaper and cheaper every year when you say it s open source can i just take it and use it for free yeah but no one does that most people are paying you 120 we try to make it easy to pay us woocommerce is also different from wordpress in that woocommerce is wholly owned and run by automattic it s not primarily a larger community it does have its own community but it s owned and run by automattic the other reason people leave shopify and go to woocommerce is at the high end we have this guardrail approach where we get to ruthlessly commoditize the low end and on the high end we allow customization ultimately a saas product will always hit a ceiling you might run into something that is different about your business model versus the saas provider open source is true freedom especially once your store starts to make a hundred million dollars plus per year even small things that could be a half a percent or a percent on every transaction start to really add up and be millions of dollars of value that s why very high end stores switch to woocommerce i m super interested in that kind of competition you re not head on shopify 2 this is a different model and you can make a series of business and personal and philosophical choices that lead you to our model versus theirs but then broadly you have some of the same challenges apple turns off app tracking transparency facebook s ad rates plummet because it s harder to target customers i get a lot of ads for spoons lately i don t know what s going on there but it s hard to find me the one person in america who s in the market for spoons on facebook the little e commerce store that has the one hot pink spoon i m looking for doesn t find me as cheaply they fall apart at the end of all that shopify stock prices crashed you can see that apple turning off ad tracking transparency had this big ripple for the e commerce stack did that hit you woocommerce stores who advertise on facebook probably were impacted but the reason why people go to wordpress or woocommerce is to build a direct relationship with their customers and not be entirely dependent on or mediated by google facebook et cetera so they build mailing lists wordpress has the best seo in the world and woocommerce inherits that these woocommerce stores are findable on an organic search not just paid search and because they integrate so well with wordpress they develop amazing blogs and people follow these blogs these are the things that make woocommerce stores hopefully more resilient to these types of changes over time as part of being developed primarily in an open source way we really err on the side of radical user privacy radical ownership of data we end up being on the right side of history when regulations or new things come in where open source gets in trouble is when the regulations are essentially written by the incumbents something like a gdpr which is written in a way that really benefited google and facebook and penalized every other person in the marketplace that s tricky when you have that sort of regulatory capture but again i always think about these things long term that could happen for a few years but if you look out five 10 20 years ultimately consumers and economics will drive these decisions let s talk about tumblr real quick i think i have a handle on wordpress which at this point is kind of like a b2b product some individuals are using it but the thrust of it is that lots of businesses are using it they re paying you it sounds like whatever amount of money they want to pay you at whatever time you ve got a big commerce stack next to it that feels pretty enterprise y i ll tell you a stat most people don t realize half of all users who sign up for wordpress com every day are there to blog that s amazing they re still doing it to be honest even internally we assumed everyone was coming to us for cms features and i think we over indexed on that more business y side that you just described that s also because we thought more revenue was coming but when we sliced the data differently we actually found that more than half of signups were there primarily to blog i think it s cool that people are still blogging yeah i do too we could end it here my heart is warmed no further questions that s great i m happy that s still happening enterprise ish is what i would call wordpress it is more enterprise y one caveat i ll say to woocommerce is that it s a developer product right now it s like a stripe or twilio it s really developer first right next to that is tumblr which is the most consumer product that has ever existed it s super consumer but it s also super consumer in the sense that it s a playground for artists and musicians taylor swift is reading tumblr and that shows up in the lyrics there s a feedback loop between the lyrics and the tumblr people it s nuts it s incredible the things that happen on tumblr are utterly unique to any other social platform you bought it out of the wreckage of yahoo in 2019 back then i asked you what are you going to do with it you replied we ve got some great ideas but the first thing you had to do was ban all the porn so you could get the app in the app stores that happened before we bought it that was actually under verizon that was under verizon but it was going to happen no matter what if they hadn t done it you were going to have to do it i think verizon is super conservative if you look at apps like twitter and twitch they actually do have an astounding amount of adult content but they do it in a way that is compatible with apple s rules so i think verizon took an extremely conservative approach to try to get rid of even borderline things things that i would call art from the app they did it in a way that penalized a lot of legitimate users one user contacted me after the acquisition and said i posted a picture of my manicure a picture of their hands some algorithm thought it was too much skin tone their account got banned then because the support was so backlogged no one responded to them for months what s a good way to kill a social network ban your most active users and don t reply to them for months what s a good way to kill a social network ban your most active users and don t reply to them for months people will go someplace else and find someplace else to publish but i m just looking at our conversation from back then you re correct verizon had done it but your position back then was that verizon might have been more conservative but you said to us if you want big policy changes here put pressure on the app stores no one has any leverage yes still true tumblr was in the news in december we were scrambling right before christmas because apple came to us you probably saw where we had to ban these random tags the app store review process can be very inconsistent sometimes something you ve done for years and years they ll come to you and say that s not allowed anymore or we searched for this search term and now your app is banned unless you make these drastic changes very quickly right before christmas it s very tricky that was really the heart of my question you bought tumblr in a moment of crazy back and forth with app stores tumblr has had a bit of a renaissance in the pandemic people are using it again there have been glowing write ups of it here and there but it s still in this weird spot because its brand is so consumer and so arty and wild it runs into app store moderation policies maybe more than any other product that i can think of that is like it i think we talk about it more than other products which is maybe why we get into trouble more maybe it s retaliatory if you have drinks with anyone who works on this process at pretty much any large app based business including twitter they ll tell you the same thing apps can get blocked randomly one day things you never even thought of and your team s scrambling to address it there s been a lot of noise there have been hearings we have had david heinemeier hansson ranting and raving on our shows there s been a lot of scrutiny of apple there are potentially some bills in congress now is the posture changed at apple and google about this stuff or is it still the same as it ever was hmm you don t hear about this stuff with google very much so i will say that the play store is a lot more consistent in their application of things honestly apple has a tough job here so it s not dissimilar to trying to moderate user generated content it s that they re moderating hundreds of thousands of apps and the team that does that i have no idea how big it is but let s call it at least 1 000 people i literally have no information that s just a guess you re going to get new people you re going to get mistakes that s just part of it i do appreciate that we ve been able to resolve everything so far all of our apps are still in the app store sometimes we disagree but we re usually able to talk our way into following what we think are the rules and it seems reasonable but sometimes it delays features weeks or months to be honest it slowed tumblr down particularly the last three or four months we re trying to launch a lot of user features like tipping and post which are subscriptions we re trying to get some of this stuff in there and we re trying to follow what we think the rules are if the tips go 100 to the users we don t need to charge an app store fee which is in many other apps i actually did not know that if you don t take a cut apple won t take a cut that s the idea but that feature has been stuck a little bit so we re trying to reconcile the ui for that and how it s presented and everything it s just the reality you live by the app store you die by the app store back in that interview from a few years ago you were like look i know people say just make it a web app and screw apple but apps are it the first half of this conversation we talked about the glory of the open web and making the open web weird again making these open source competitors to these proprietary solution vendors are you of two minds do you walk around your house just arguing with yourself that you run an app based business at the mercy of apple and you also run a completely open source publishing business over there yeah i m a pragmatist everything we build is going towards this future of an open web but also you have to work...