We welcome Brian Hogg, he is a course, plugin and podcast creator. He fit’s in eating and breathing amongst his many projects and today unpacks his experience of launching premium plugins. Thinking of launching one? This is the episode for you!
Get your content out there – don’t sit on it for too long.
Wordcamp Hamilton: Click here
Working with WordPress and JavaScript: Click here
Website: Click here
Twitter: Click here
Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast, the podcast for web designers and design agencies exploring the world of WordPress and online business. And now your host, Lee Jackson. Hi and welcome to episode number 67 of the WP Innovator Podcast. This is your host Lee, and in today’s show I’ll be talking to a WordPress genius and all-round busy guy who does an awful lot of stuff, including creating courses and coding and creating podcasts and content and all sorts of stuff. Really cool guy, Brian Hogg. You’re going to have great fun listening to him, and I’m pretty sure you’re going to be inspired to go ahead and do all of your own things. Remember, some of those ideas that you have, thinking is not really the best thing to be doing. Actually, acting is the best thing to be doing. I thought about starting this podcast, you know, guys, for about a year. I, when I actually launched the podcast, that’s when things started happening. Hopefully that’ll encourage you. This is a great show. Head on over to the Facebook group if you want to talk about the show or have any questions. It’s anglecrown.com/group. You want to go and cheque out the new brand?
Lee Matthew Jackson
It’s still new, still our baby. It’s over on anglecrown.com. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. And if you’re driving, please do not sit back and relax. Please keep your eye on the road. Thank you. This is a safety message. Sponsored by Elite Jackson. Hello and welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast. I’m really making an effort because today I have a podcast creating addict on the show called Brian Hogg, who has an amazing voice for radio. Buddy, how you doing?
Brian Hogg
Why, thank you. I’m good.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s an amazing voice. You sound brilliant. Do that again. Do that again.
Brian Hogg
Do it again. Hello, how are you?
Lee Matthew Jackson
Could you like record my podcast intros for me?
Brian Hogg
I really want to be the voice of an elevator one day, right? Going down. I’ll make that happen one day.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Lift going down. Third floor.
Brian Hogg
Exactly. Going up. Hopefully I never say that.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Door is jammed. Cables are breaking. Say your prayers. Oh, that would be so terrible and funny all at the same time. Anyway, guys, I’ve just been having a pre-podcast chat with, with Brian, and we’re just having a chuckle because Brian does so much. I mean, he, he is a course creator, he’s a, a plugin creator, he’s a podcast creator. I think it’s safe to say, in a nutshell, he’s a creator. So mate, I’m going to shut up for a second. Could you just introduce yourself to everybody and just give us a bit of background about who you are?
Brian Hogg
Sure. Um, so I won’t go back super far, but yeah, I mean, I started, I guess, creating when I was, uh, 12 or 13 when I started software development and actually created a startup before startups were this, you know, cool thing to do, uh, back when I was like 15, 16, an online bingo game, uh, called Draw Bingo, which actually got pretty popular, uh, 800 simultaneous people playing at a time back in the dial-up days. So that was really That was super cool. Um, so ran that for a bit and then yeah, kind of started uni and put a bit of it on hold. Still did some stuff on the side but kind of burnt out a bit trying to, you know, work almost full-time on, on side projects while doing uni at the same time. But did software engineering, like a formal training with, uh, with some business stuff. And then from there, yeah, I was pretty much the only one who graduated and didn’t go into a full-time job, uh, right after. I have done a couple stints here and there, but Yeah, I was pretty much the only one who didn’t do full-time stuff after that.
Brian Hogg
So I’ve done a lot of pretty cool projects for universities as well, like on the consulting side and startups and other businesses. But lately, it’s been a lot more course creation, like you said, and kind of growing the plugin business on the side of all that, which is becoming more and more the focus.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So I’m thinking, if you created a business when you were 15 in online bingo back in the dial-up days, That ages you. Yeah, that puts you in the late 30s, am I right? Uh, ish.
Brian Hogg
Is kind of really—
Lee Matthew Jackson
yeah, I’m 34, but like—
Brian Hogg
oh, there you go.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I was getting broadband when I was— yeah, the broadband was around.
Brian Hogg
Yeah, I was— to be honest, I was fortunate that we had, uh, broadband early in our area, um, because yeah, I know a lot of people didn’t have that option for, for a few years after that.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So I suppose America was behind, wasn’t it? I mean, good old Canada and Great Britain were we were actually ahead, I think. ASDL was rocking and rolling.
Brian Hogg
Yes, exactly.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Guys, if you hadn’t have picked up as well, you might have heard the odd aboot. That’s because Brian is Canadian and from Hamilton. Mate, tell us what you get involved with in Hamilton because I believe you do two really exciting projects. I won’t spoil it. I’ll let you tell us about those two projects.
Brian Hogg
Well, the podcast, I’m not doing any new episodes for the foreseeable because I live just outside of Hamilton. I’m still there all the time. I was just there yesterday and I do, I have led the WordCamp Hamilton for the last couple years, which we’re not able to do this year as well just due to the plans and travel and stuff of myself and the other organisers. But, um, but yeah, so I run the WordPress meetups or help, help keep that community going, and also that podcast, plus this group that’s almost 700 people now. I haven’t actually checked recently, but the Hamilton Freelancer Meetup. So that’s for designers, developers, and writers and any other people who are either freelancing now or consulting or want to do that and get support from a community. So yeah, that’s been a great group that we’ve been running for the last 3 and a half years.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Wow. Is that a Facebook group or is that some sort of—
Brian Hogg
No, meetup. Oh, it’s a meetup. So it’s an in-person thing that we do, try to do about once a month or so.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So with regards to meetups, I mean, obviously there’s that meetup, but you said you’re a part of the WordPress meetups as well. What sort of value are you getting yourself from those, from those meetups. I’ve never, never been to one.
Brian Hogg
No, really?
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, there’s like, uh, there are meetups going on around me, but they’re all like 100 miles away. And, uh, yeah, you know, it’s quite a trek.
Brian Hogg
So it doesn’t really help. So yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a WordPress meetup in the UK. Well, it’s, it’s nice because, I mean, you— it can be a challenge because, um, you know, say you have half developers, half people who have never seen code and never want to see code. It can be tough to keep them engaged if you’re just doing presentations on high-level blog and how to use plugins from the front end and everything else kind of talks. So we have done a couple developer-specific meetups, which has been great. But no, it’s just good to connect in person with people who are using the platform, either new to it or they’ve been using it for years, and just get either their kind of firsthand thoughts on what they think about WordPress and the challenges they’re facing, right? If you’ve been using WordPress for years, you know, and you have clients who probably never used WordPress and you’re creating a project for them, you forget how hard it can be for even some of the simple tasks. I think they counted what— if you open the dashboard in WordPress, you have what, 75 options you can choose from, you know, to click from, including all the menu items and all that stuff.
Brian Hogg
That’s all the widgets that are on the dashboard when you first load it up. How people will use that, you know, thing that you can dismiss, right, to create your first post and everything else, and then they dismiss it and they’re, oh crap, how do I create a new post? It’s gone now, right? So, um, yeah, it’s neat to see that firsthand and just try and help them. and you get a lot out of the— I get a lot out of, uh, trying to help people, um, with, with everything I do.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So that’s insane. I didn’t actually realise there was that many potential touch points on just when you land on the dashboard.
Brian Hogg
Yeah, you’re gonna go count now, aren’t you?
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, I was, I was, I was doing it in my head whilst you were talking. I just kind of phased out. I have no idea what you said for the last 2 minutes. I’m just in my head. All right, there’s the screen options, there’s the settings that expand, and then, and then, oh, even on the dashboard you’ve then got the WordPress news widget Yep.
Brian Hogg
Yeah, you’ve got— oh yeah, it’s crazy.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah, I actually, uh, I actually had to restore, you, you know that thing you dismiss? I had to restore that for someone once. No, no, I found it really handy and I’ve dismissed it. I’m like, oh, okay.
Brian Hogg
It is true. It’s like everything you need is there. It should be maybe a default thing as opposed to, yeah, the WordPress News or whatever other widgets that some hosts will kind of inject in there, right? It’s—
Lee Matthew Jackson
yeah, yeah. Well, WP Engine, in their defence, actually allow you to turn theirs off, which is absolutely Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I like them.
Brian Hogg
I approve. Me too.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So mate, I mean, so far you’re starting off 12, you’re a geek coder, if you don’t mind me saying. So was I. Nerd.
Brian Hogg
I prefer nerd. That’s fine.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Nerd’s fine. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you were a nerd and that’s awesome. And you made this popular bingo game. So far I’m not hearing WordPress. What happened? How did you get into WordPress?
Brian Hogg
Yeah. So I mean, even while, whilst, sorry, living in the England, I met Mike Hooville and got to know him. A bit. So co-creator of WordPress, uh, grabbed a couple coffees and met him at a PHP conference and stuff. Even after that, I still didn’t start using WordPress just because I thought, oh, whatever, I can, I can code it myself from scratch, you know, using some random PHP framework.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Same thing, I made my own CMS.
Brian Hogg
Ah, why not?
Lee Matthew Jackson
I called it Sexy CMS. What a stupid name.
Brian Hogg
Are you serious?
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s exactly what I called it.
Brian Hogg
Yeah, that’s amazing. I did not, or maybe I created one, but you were a wise guy. But yeah, so even after, you know, meeting him and getting to know him, I still didn’t— the first project that really kicked it off, uh, was taking a Joomla extension. It was just like a contract, uh, work, and taking that and spinning it into a WordPress, uh, plugin. So I mean, I’d been developing in PHP for years and years, but I just had never used WordPress as a platform. So yeah, from there then we created this thing. It was a startup that, you know, didn’t really do too much in terms of marketing it. So then went to the first WordCamp shortly after and started meeting some of the people there. And I was kind of getting to know them, whereas they were just throwing around business cards, which is really not what you do at a WordCamp at all. So, uh, yeah, so I just— I got to— yeah, had a lot of great chats with a lot of people who were coming in from, from far. I mean, there were people from Portland and, and even further out that were coming to Toronto to get to know people in that community.
Brian Hogg
So, um, yeah, that really just kind of snowballed. Into where I am today.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I don’t know what I echo what you just said about the WP meetups or WordCamps, etc., meet or any sort of networking environment. It is totally about building relationships.
Brian Hogg
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And certainly not throwing the confetti of cards, as I like to call them. No, out there. And we’ve touched on that quite a lot of times over the course of the last kind of year and a half on the podcast about networking, because we get so much business from networking and we’ve— we don’t even have any business cards. We have nothing printed.
Brian Hogg
No, I haven’t had business cards in a year and a half, I think.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Brian Hogg
It’s like, whatever, you know, oh, if you’ve got a card or I can, you know, use my electronic note-taking device, AKA my phone, and write down your card.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, thank you for being really sarcastic if you say it like that. I will use this electronic note-taking device.
Brian Hogg
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Get a punch in the face. Like, whoa.
Brian Hogg
Okay. Yeah. They did turn into a client, but that’s fine.
Lee Matthew Jackson
It sounded so sarcastic.
Brian Hogg
Oh, love it, mate.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That was awesome. So, uh, all right. So you got, you get into WordPress, um, with regards to your background as well, are you 100% self-taught in, in, in programming or—
Brian Hogg
uh, no. So I mean, I— well, before starting uni, yes. But to be honest, most of the people who I know who, you know, are quote-unquote good developers, whatever that means, really took their, their learning outside of the classroom. And especially with software engineering at, at this uni in, uh, in Hamilton, it was really less about, you know, learning the ins and outs, you know, the specifics of one specific language, was really just the overarching concepts and things you would use to, you know, build software in general. So yeah, no, most of the kind of, I guess, hard skills that I learned were self-taught, uh, for sure. I know people who’ve graduated from that and never— still don’t know how to programme at all, which is kind of frightening.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s insane. Well, the reason why I asked you, and I was kind of hoping you were going to say that, and if you didn’t say that, I kind of backfired on me. But the idea is, is I’ve, I’ve had no formal training, and yet I run an agency as a development agency, uh, and it’s all self-taught. But I do know, and I’ve heard conversations in the past with listeners, etc., where people have that kind of complex about themselves where they feel like they’re a fraud or they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing. But self-teaching is one of the best ways, I think, of learning programming. And there you are, you know, despite the fact you went to university and did a huge course on, I guess, the overarching theory, etc., the actual real-life work of you learning how to make good plugins or learning how to work with JavaScript, etc., was actually you trial and error, reading stuff online, making mistakes, learning from them, and and wanting to get better. Putting words in your mouth, but it’s kind of, that’s kind of what I experienced. So I’m assuming it’s similar for you.
Brian Hogg
I’ve done a presentation on stress and imposter syndrome. So yeah, no, it’s definitely something that’s the forefront of not just myself, but a lot of people who, and I mean, even just creating, like, we haven’t gotten to it yet, but I created a course on making premium plugins and the stuff that I’ve learned. But for years or months, I would say, I’m just like, who, why, why am I doing this? I’m not Pippin Williamson. I’m not, you know, this, this, this, no, known person for doing plugins, right? But I’m so happy that I had the encouragement and of people in the community that, you know, we’re just like, no, like, you, you’ve done it, you know, you’re doing it, you, you know what you’re doing, you know, go out and do it, right? But, and it took a lot of that encouragement to, to do it. So yeah, no, it’s definitely a struggle with a lot of devs, unfortunately. Um, they, I just don’t think that, uh, that they’re good enough for a lot of things. So that’s too bad, folks.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Just listen to Brian right now. He said, you know what you’re doing, just go ahead and do it. I think that’s a cool tweet. It’s true. You know what you’re doing and go ahead and do it and don’t listen to the I can’ts and sorry, the you can’ts. I watched a really cool video actually. I’m going to have to share it in the show notes. Someone shared a video of a guy who essentially is doing everything that he can’t do, i.e., that everyone’s telling him he can’t do because we are now in a digital age where Actually, you can do whatever the hell you want. You can create whatever the hell you want, and none of the old rules need apply, and none of those negative kind of sayings, whether it’s someone else saying it over you or you saying it over yourself, need apply either. Now, talking of working with code as well, but can you tell us about this course you’ve got going about working with JavaScript and WordPress? Because we’ve got quite a few listeners. We do have design agencies listening. We’ve got hardcore developers. Hey, Greg, you’re a hardcore developer. But we also have a whole load of folks who are WordPress power implementers, I guess they would be.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Sure. And they all want to get into actually getting into the code a bit more and actually be able to do a lot more than they’ve done in the past. So can you tell us kind of generally about your, your current course offering that you have as well as price points if there are any and all that jazz?
Brian Hogg
Yeah. So I mean, there’s the two, but yeah, we’ll, we’ll start on the WordPress JavaScript one. So that was one that I actually created for Pluralsight, which is a platform similar to Lynda or Udemy and, and whatnot. So they commissioned me to create that. Um, but there is a way to watch it for free if you just go to brianhawke.com. /jswp. You can sign up and grab a code for that and watch any other courses that they offer as well within 30 days, which is great. But that course is— it actually took a while to figure out what the content would be because you have to— well, A, I can’t make any changes to that course afterwards. So I couldn’t even really get feedback from people on it except for like one editor and a couple people at Pluralsight that kind of watched it. But essentially, it’s, you know, for people who know a little bit of programming, but it does walk you through. Like, you can, you can kind of still watch it and get the gist. But it’s how to work with JavaScript and WordPress together. So how to add the JavaScript files in the right way, you know, so you’re not adding it everywhere on the front end and the back end of the site and mucking up other plugins.
Brian Hogg
A lot of people do. A lot of people do.
Lee Matthew Jackson
It’s a very common thing.
Brian Hogg
Huge. Yeah. Same with styling too, right? Like, you know, you Oh, I’ll just— oh, this looks great on my page. Awesome. And then, you know, it just blots over everything.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I’m just gonna load Bootstrap on every single page of the WordPress.
Brian Hogg
I’m sure there’s no issues with that. So it goes through some of that, uh, and it also has a whole— actually kind of pushed to have a whole module on the WP REST API. So I’m sure a lot of people have been hearing about that, especially with some of the security issues that have been happening in 4.7. Now it’s included in core and everything else, but that goes through how to create your own endpoint, how to use it on the front and in the backend. And so to be able to pass data back and forth between your plugin and your theme and kind of the WordPress database and stuff. Plus there’s like a, another module on how to like compress your JavaScript and some stuff like that. But there are some plugins like WP Rocket that can do a lot of that for you as well. So, um, yeah, that’s the course in a nutshell.
Lee Matthew Jackson
brianhogg.com/jswp. You’ll get more information on that as well as you said a way of getting it for free.
Brian Hogg
Yep. You just pop in your email address. I’ll send you a code. I created this whole MailChimp thing and Yeah, you can just pop that in and create a Pluralsight account for nothing.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Nice. And then you get to watch, you get 30 days access to that course. That sounds good enough to me.
Brian Hogg
Yes. Now I might need to get more codes. I think there’s only 100 codes, so we’ll have to—
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, you never know.
Brian Hogg
That’s all right. That can happen.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, I’m going to do it before this podcast goes live.
Brian Hogg
Go for it.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Just to be selfish. Tell us about the Pro Plugins course as well.
Brian Hogg
Yes. So again, that was one that took, you know, a while to do. It’s— I have 3, now 3 premium plugins. Actually launched the third one as part of this course. Um, but yeah, it’s really just a lot— it’s just my experience, not just my experience but also the experience of a lot of people who I’ve had a chance to talk to at WordCamps and other WordPress meetups and stuff like that, and, and online, about what they’ve learned about building, starting, growing, running a premium WordPress plugin business and how to do it. So I’ve tried to compress that in kind of as, as short of videos as possible. I thought I could get it under 2 hours. That That did not happen. It’s just under 4, but it’s still much shorter than it would be to kind of go around and go, “Oh, should I use this thing? Should I do this thing? How should I separate my free and my pro code and everything else?” But yeah, but it’s really just a course on how to get up and running as quickly as possible and grow it on the side. It’s not something where, you know, you’ll make millions tomorrow if you sign up for my course right now.
Brian Hogg
It’s really to build it up, but it’s something that I’m just really hoping I can help you know, a lot of people, either mostly developers, either new to WordPress or currently in WordPress, or, you know, agencies that have created stuff for their clients and, you know, realise that a lot of people can use this. But just by building kind of some product income and growing it over time, it just gives so many more options where you don’t need to kind of be hunting for that next consulting gig or that next custom job. You can just really start to help, you know, a tonne of people. In a predictable way, right? You know that if they get your plugin that they’ll get these benefits and they’ll be able to help their site and their business as a part of it. So yeah, I’m hoping I can get a lot more of these things launched.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Cool, man. That’s makingproplugins.com. How long has the course been around?
Brian Hogg
Not long. I launched about 2 weeks ago or so. So yeah, it just— well, as of the time of this recording. I don’t know when this will air, but yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Right. But we’ve got such a huge backlog, it’ll be in at least 6 months. No, I’m joking. I think it’s around 2 or 3 weeks, I think, before yours will be live.
Brian Hogg
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So it’s 4 or 5 weeks old by then. MakingProPlugins.com. Mate, here’s a question for you. This is totally not really related to— well, it’s kind of related, but I’m looking at Making Pro Plugins and this is the biggest landing page I’ve ever seen. Well, it’s not really, but these massive landing pages, do you find they work and convert better than the smaller ones?
Brian Hogg
They seem to. I mean, it gives a sense of, you know, and I almost, I actually had more of those kind of launch your plugin buttons and call to actions kind of midway. And through a lot of assistance with people who have been doing this for longer than I have and creating these sorts of landing pages, they’re like, no, no, like most of the time people will, like you said, like a short one, they’ll decide pretty soon. Emotionally, they’ll make that emotional connexion with, oh yeah, you know, I’ve always wanted to launch and run a plugin business.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Brian Hogg
Oh cool. Within 4 hours, boom. Okay. I’m, I’m pretty much sold at that point. If not, they’re probably going to need, you know, they’re going to want to dig in. They’re going to want a lot more detail. They’re going to want to see what’s included even though that shouldn’t be the focus. But they kind of just want to have a sense of, okay, this isn’t like 2 videos on, you should start a plugin. Yay! You know, like, and there’s no actual detail that there is some stuff in there and who’s it for. So no, I mean, for the amount of traffic that I’ve got it, the conversion rate has been quite good. But I mean, I’m not trying to— I’m not A/B testing, I’m not doing all that stuff, but I have tried to follow kind of the general flow and design and information that’s in there that I’ve seen on a lot of other successful courses that are out there. So yep, that’s where I came up with that.
Lee Matthew Jackson
[Speaker:TYRONE] No, it’s good. It’s just the reason why I asked is in the past, I’ve only ever created landing pages which are usually a paragraph long, etc., or a couple of paragraphs long at most and maybe a video, etc. But I’ve just seen a trend maybe over the last year or two and we are also working now with, we work with a company that creates courses and they’ve been putting landing pages our way and they’re really long. Like one was this humongous PSD that we were converting into a full-on landing page into WordPress. And I think it was 3,000, it must’ve been 3,000 words or more. And I couldn’t believe it. It was insane. And I didn’t know, like for me, I’m lazy. I don’t read any of that. I go straight to the pictures. I go to the, I go straight to the pricing, look at what’s included. But I think you’re right. I think I do make an emotional decision based on the fact that I would have read within 4 hours, you’ll have everything you need. I’m already sold. I’m down at the bottom seeing if I can afford it.
Brian Hogg
Yep.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah. Exactly. So yeah, I get it. But I suppose there are other people who are going to be like, well, all right, well, what’s involved in this? What exactly, what am I going to get? And then they might be convinced halfway through because suddenly there’s Jonathan Stark saying how awesome you are. And Pippin. No shit. There’s Pippin. Oh no. I swore I’m going to have to put an E on that. This unless we beep it out later.
Brian Hogg
You can muffle that.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Explicit, explicit podcast now. Yeah, that’s nice though. You’ve got Pippin on your, uh, on your, uh, on your landing page there. That’s pretty cool.
Brian Hogg
Yeah. So no, I mean, I’m super— I mean, it’s— I’m sure you’ve probably seen that, uh, you know, product creation emotional trough that happens, right? Where at the beginning you’re like, oh, it’s amazing, you know, I’m gonna, gonna do this, it’s gonna be so cool and whatever. And then you start, well, this is a lot of work. Yeah, I’m gonna have to do it. Oh, and then the doubt starts to kick in at the bottom and then come back up But it was great getting the support from people like Jonathan Stark and Pippin just to A, push it forward, and then yeah, B, be a supporter during the launch and after and before. So yeah, it’s—
Lee Matthew Jackson
I wish you were around a year and a half ago. I launched a plugin called Sociopress, which is a WordPress plugin that allows people to—
Brian Hogg
Sounds kind of like sociopath.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Exactly what we thought. We had the conversation. We just thought we’re just going to go with it anyway. And it automated people’s Twitter accounts. So it would allow you to create libraries, you know, like similar to Meet Edgar maybe, where you can create a library of reusable tweets, etc. And it would also, also tweet out your posts and everything else like that. It was fully automated. Freaking amazing. Serves a need, serves us perfectly fine. It’s brilliant. We loved it. But, you know, I, and I built it, I built it internally like years ago and as a standalone product. And then we kind of put it all into WordPress and used post types and all sorts of clever trickery, etc. Yeah. Um, but had absolutely no strategy to building it properly as a nice user interface. It was just something we understood and had no strategy either for actually marketing the thing at all. I sold maybe 5 licences, if that, and I think I ended up refunding some of the licences just because I felt bad that it wasn’t that popular. I was like, what? I really thought I’d hit the nail on the head.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So I’m just looking at this thinking, damn, where was this course a year and a half ago?
Brian Hogg
Well, that was— that’s one of the Twitter things at the top. Yeah, I wish this course was around 2 years ago. So is it?
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, you can add me to that one then.
Brian Hogg
Yeah, there you go. Yeah, that would get really long. Yeah, there’d be a bunch of them.
Lee Matthew Jackson
But I mean, this, this isn’t meant to be an infomercial, guys, obviously, but you know, courses like this are really few and far between when it’s so specific. I was really excited about this. Uh, this is, you know, it’s our niche. It’s WordPress. It’s creating WordPress plugins. It’s all of the knowledge that young Brian, obviously young Brian, has gleaned from access to WordCamps and, and kind of rubbing shoulders with some, some of the behemoths, the big guys and gals of WordPress. So I’m pretty excited about it and definitely wanted to obviously unpack this and talk about it with you and share it with everyone else who’s listening. So I do hope you get a few bites from this, mate, because this looks exciting and it is super niche.
Brian Hogg
And I love that. It’s been super awesome seeing the plugins actually being launched. So, yeah, you know, you’re just like, oh, thanks, you know, @brianhogg for, for helping me launch this. I’m like, geez, I didn’t write the plugin. Like, what did I do? Right? So it’s, it’s really cool just to have people go through it and yeah, without too much thought, actually get that, that plugin out there and in the wild and then get feedback from real users because the biggest thing that can happen is you just don’t launch your plugin either as a free or pro, whatever.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Brian Hogg
And then you sit on it for ages and you’re like, oh, this isn’t good enough. I’m going to add, you know, 20 more features and no one’s asked for it, but I just feel like it should be in there because otherwise I’m not giving enough value. And then before you know it, you’ve got this behemoth plugin that, yeah, people don’t understand, don’t know how to use, and, and, and, you know, just can’t even get started with and give you feedback on. So yeah, just getting it out there as soon as possible. Obviously it should, you know, do what you say it does and do something, but it doesn’t need to do absolutely everything that, that you think it should right out the gate. So yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
All right, well, okay, let’s try and get some free information out of you then. Yeah, what would be— I don’t know, I’m, I’ve got an idea for a WordPress plugin plugin. Okay, so, yep, and it’s been driving me crazy for 2, 2 years or 2 months, whatever. I’m just like, this is hypothetical now because I’ve done this, I’ve got burnt and cried.
Brian Hogg
No, we just went through the fact that you’ve done it before. This isn’t hypothetical anymore.
Lee Matthew Jackson
What, what are the 3 things I probably did wrong?
Brian Hogg
Well, did you have a free version? I guess for one.
Lee Matthew Jackson
No. So number one, did not have a free version.
Brian Hogg
I mean, and it’s not required. I actually don’t have one for the plugin that I launched during the course yet, just because if you do a free version, you never ever want to take away a feature that you included in the free version and be like, ah, you know what, this isn’t free anymore, I’m going to pull it into the pro. Could you imagine, like, you have a plugin that you installed, you love it, and then you update because you trust the author, and then all of a sudden that thing that you use and rely on is gone? So it’d be horrible.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So yeah, pretty sure that happened recently, not to us, but it was, it was on, uh, I think it was on Post Status or somewhere. I read it and there’s a load of people really cross. Yep.
Brian Hogg
So never do that. I did it once on a very, very small feature just because I’m like, oh, this is something that, you know, people who have a lot of events would probably want to use. And, uh, yeah, I got called out and it felt so bad. Within like 30 minutes, I think I’d put it back in because I’m like, oh, what am I doing? This is horrible. So I specifically say do not ever do that. Um, so yeah, having a free version— yeah, do no evil, be good to your fellow users in WordPress. Yeah, something. So yeah, but essentially, I mean, the free version for the other two plugins that have one have been the best and most qualified traffic. It’s not like I’m getting, you know, thousands and millions of site hits to the plugin site, but the people who do, they’ve used used your free version, they’ve tried it, they’ve got some value out of it, and then they see— and, you know, they build that trust, and then they get to see that, oh cool, okay, so this one additional thing that I want to do with this plugin, cool, I just need to click here, buy, you know, buy it for whatever the price is, and I know it’ll work.
Brian Hogg
So I mean, it’s just— it’s by far the best and most qualified traffic that you can get, and just the easiest kind of marketing machine, right, that people can find it just by going to Plugins, Add New, again instal it, learn about it, it and then be able to find you without you having to come up with this whole huge marketing plan and push to drive traffic to your site yourself. So yep, that’s definitely number one.
Lee Matthew Jackson
All right. So yep, so number one check, failure for me, but that’s fine because failure is good. We can learn from failure. I’m a big advocate of that. So what’s the second thing I probably did wrong?
Brian Hogg
Well, probably— well, it sounds like, I mean, these— I don’t go through, and that was a bit of a struggle with coming up with the content is, you know, where do I draw the line? Like I don’t go through the specifics of Bill ’cause there’s so many different plugins you could build. And I am actually thinking of doing like an intro to WordPress plugin development course shortly just to get people who maybe aren’t in WordPress right now. ‘Cause I know so many people are like, yeah, you know what, I’d love to, I was just at a meetup last night, Coder Camp, where none of them were WordPress developers,.NET and Python and all these other languages. And they’re just like, yeah, you know, it sounds really cool, but I’ve never done WordPress development and I feel like it’s gonna be so long for me to get started. I’m like, no, you just create a header at the top cop, and then you’ve got a plugin. And they’re like, what, really? And then I could put whatever code I want in there? Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s all you got to do.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah, hello world, you’ve got a plugin.
Brian Hogg
Exactly. Or die. Uh, just kill the site. Please don’t ever do that. Or instal my Write Meow plugin. I don’t know if you saw that during your, uh, pre-thing. It’s a plugin that’ll replace all the instances of now with meow.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yes, yes, I saw that.
Brian Hogg
That was, yeah, it’s a joke, and I can’t believe they Approved it. So whatever. It’s on the WordPress.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Brian Hogg
It’s on the WordPress.org.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Right.
Brian Hogg
Cause I remember that.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I mean, we’ve shared that on the LeeJacksonDev.com/group guys. It’s where we share great resources, including that was shared about, I don’t know, 6 or 7 weeks ago and we were all laughing about it.
Brian Hogg
That is hilarious.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And saying, how the hell did this get passed? So, uh, yeah.
Brian Hogg
Yep. I was surprised as you guys. So that’s cool, but it works and it works great. And I forgot I had it installed when I had my shortcode events listing plugin. So it had register now and it turned into register meow. and I’m like, this is amazing. It’s cross-compatible with my other plugins. I love this.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I hope you wrote that cross-compatible.
Brian Hogg
Yes, I did actually. I put links to my other plugins and be like, fully compatible with ChimpBridge and Event Calendar newsletter. Uh, just in case people were wondering.
Lee Matthew Jackson
It’s gone viral, mate. All right, so that was the second mistake I made, was it? I didn’t instal Write Me Out.
Brian Hogg
Uh, yep, that was pretty I don’t want to mention. Okay. But no, I mean, I guess getting it out there sooner. It sounds like you had it internally for a while, which is fine.
Lee Matthew Jackson
We had it internally for 2 years. We totally sat on it way too long.
Brian Hogg
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, just getting it out there sooner is definitely number 2. Because I’ve already gotten, like from Chip Ridge, I’ve got some people who are huge in the WordPress thing or MailChimp scene and have very much larger lists than I do. And they’re just like, you know, this is awesome. I love it. But I can’t do this thing, so without that I can’t use it. I’m like, well, geez, of course I need that thing, right? But it’s not something that I thought of, uh, right away, and I didn’t need to. That’s fine, you know, like, still grab the interest of them and they were able to try it, use it, and then provide some feedback. And they’re an actual user and not just me guessing. So, uh, yeah, definitely getting out there, uh, sooner would be good. And then I guess having a system as well for, for dealing with support, and, uh, which, which usually is a pretty slow build. That’s a super common fear where people will think, oh, like, I’m gonna put this out there and like hundreds and thousands of people are going to be emailing me day and night and I’m never going to be able to get my actual work done, you know, supporting this.
Brian Hogg
Maybe if you do a free version first or whatever, but it’s, it’s pretty rare. Like even with plugins that have almost 20,000 users, it’s— and you just take the feedback and the support that you get and you spin that into either better documentation or trying to make the plugin itself easier to use. So it’s not even a question anymore. And you just again chip away pay at it over time. Like, you can’t— you don’t want to just, you know, please no agencies just be, oh, we’ve got this great plugin idea, let’s fire all the clients and then just focus on this 100% of the time. Please do not do that. That is super risky. Uh, you know, start, start slow and just get it out there.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Beaver Builder is a great example. They were an agency, they created something for themselves, they launched it quite rapidly, and it grew so quickly, or at least over time, where they were able to fire their clients— want to fire, but hand them over to other people because because their business model had changed. But yeah, they didn’t go the whole, all right, let’s drop everyone now and go for this amazing new idea.
Brian Hogg
Not a good idea.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So I think number 3, I did quite well. I was super responsive on support and made tonnes and tonnes of really short videos on all sorts of stuff to make that super easy, like even a quick start guide. There was notes and comments everywhere. So that was good. But I think as well, I actually made it before Meet Edgar launched. I made it when Buffer was in its infancy, you know, and yet I only launched it a year and a half ago. So that was one of the biggest mistakes I think I made, you know, and I hear the quote so many times, you know, if you’re not embarrassed by the thing you’ll launch, then you waited too long and I totally waited too long.
Brian Hogg
I mean, to be fair though, I mean, there’s like a friend of mine’s got the ultimate coming soon plugin, right? I think if you do a search, it’s like what, 900 100 or something results for coming soon plugins, right? Like there’s so many of— I know he was earlier out the gate, but I know people who’ve launched things in a pretty— well, Beaver Builder is a great example, right? There’s so many page builder plugins and, and well-established ones, but they just saw that need. And, and even if it does a similar thing but in a different way, because obviously won’t be the exact same, uh, implementation and way of doing things, there’s— the market is quite large. There’s a lot of people who can use something that’s similar to that. So yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a free version of, of that plugin that, uh, you get some more traction on it perhaps, but it, uh, it can be a slow build for sure.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I think, I think, cause we were, you know, we essentially were going to go the open source route. We’ve not pushed it out yet, but we were going to go, I mean, I mean the code’s at GPL anyway, so if someone buys it, you can access the code and all that. But with regards to what we were thinking of doing was splitting out into, and we’ve already split it out. We just couldn’t decide whether or not we wanted to go into the repository or not. So I think based on this chat, probably we’ll end up launching, launching that in the next couple of months. We’re just finishing a massive rebrand of the company and the site goes live. Like the site anglecrown.com will be live when this episode is out.
Brian Hogg
So yay.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Um, but yeah, so we’ll probably go and, and, uh, I’ll keep everyone posted because I, I, I imagine being in, in the WordPress repository is just such an amazing way of getting traffic. Traffic. Um, and I’ve heard so many people talking about it before, even like people like Troy Dean got masses of success for his courses and his own product, uh, with the video, uh, plugin that they created by offering— I think it was the admin brand, uh, they had like an admin branding plugin or something that allowed you to make the admin, uh, have its own custom logo and look like a, um, essentially hide that it was WordPress. And loads of people, uh, agencies and that wanted to do that to give their customers this nice feeling of this is my CMS, et cetera. Uh, yeah. And, uh, he obviously then put advertisements in the right-hand side for his video plugins that then pushed tonnes of traffic in that direction and grew a massive audience and then launched WP Elevation. And I’m pretty sure I’ve, you know, he’s got now Rockstars going on as well about video because the guy is like doing so well.
Brian Hogg
Um, good for him.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Oh yeah. Yeah. I’m jealous.
Brian Hogg
I’d be surprised that, uh, so that was a free version that took over the admin. Like I haven’t actually seen this, this plugin, but, um, the free version of something like admin brand or something.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Something like that. Oh, it was a plugin they launched years ago, um, and that was what allowed them to push traffic over to their video plugin, which obviously then that started building up traction, which then meant he then launched WP Elevation. Uh, it’s kind of just all snowballed from there, really.
Brian Hogg
Yeah, no, it’s surprising.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I think it was of the WP Innovator Podcast where we found all that. So if anyone wants to go and hear a young, wet behind the ears Lee Jackson doing a podcast, episode number 3 or 2, I can’t remember, with Troy it’s quite funny.
Brian Hogg
That’s awesome. But no, I’m surprised that like, uh, they could actually get something— well, similar to how Write Meow was approved. There’s so many restrictions on what you can have in the.org, for better or for worse. Um, you know, you kind of have to play by the rules of that, uh, which, which I go through in great detail. But, uh, yeah, if your plugin is a fit for it, uh, which, which the majority are— like you said, it needs to be 100% GPL, and that includes the images and, and CSS and everything else that you have as part of that, and any libraries obviously that you include as part of your plugin. But, um, yeah, if you’re able to get that, yeah, again, it’s, it’s just one of the, the best and most reliable sources, uh, and, and just easiest. So easy to tell people, oh yeah, go try the free version of my plugin, just go to Plugins Add New, not go to my website, download the zip, upload the zip, figure out how to do that, you know. Uh, it’s just a much easier experience for people to, to get started.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s awesome. I really appreciate that. I feel like I’ve just got a whole tonne of free consultancy from you. Well, there you go, which was totally my goal. Success!
Brian Hogg
I figured that was the only reason I’m on here, so I guess we’ll end it now. We’re done.
Lee Matthew Jackson
No, I’m messing with you. Uh, Between Two Posts, are you doing anything with that? Because it’d be great to see another WordPress podcast on the scene.
Brian Hogg
Yes, we’ve got, uh, I’m sitting on about 5 or 6, uh, episodes right now. My, my other post, uh, you know, is unavailable, uh, to do kind of new episodes and stuff, so it kind of fizzled that way. But I am on the look perhaps for another post. So yeah, I at least want to get— because there’s some great chats that haven’t been edited and released yet. So I definitely like to get that out there. So yeah, if you had to— between2posts.com. It was trying to be Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis style, where we just had the two people kind of on with a guest in between. And we, you know, just kind of keep— try to keep it light and cheerful. But there’s some great, uh, great chats already there.
Lee Matthew Jackson
You did say some words I didn’t understand just then, but yeah, something or other.
Brian Hogg
Zach Galifianakis, he did the, uh, The Hangover movie.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Oh, I thought you were— I thought you were saying like— I didn’t know what the hell you were saying.
Brian Hogg
We’re half Canadian, fellow half Canadian, half British. I don’t understand.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah, wait, are you British living in Canada then or something?
Brian Hogg
Uh, well, I have My mum is British.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Half of your mum is British?
Brian Hogg
No, my mother is British. My mother is British, so I am half British. Yes, but living in Canada now, yes.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And I was born in Canada but live in England. And I have English parents. I’m basically English, but I have a legal right to be a Canadian citizen as well, which is pretty cool.
Brian Hogg
We won’t turn you away.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, if you know, with Brexit happening, it’s very tempting.
Brian Hogg
Yeah, I got to vote in that. That was good. Did you? Yes. I got there within the last 50— oh yeah. I don’t know if my mom’s gonna listen to this, but she’s like, oh, you can, I can be the proxy or whatever. And I’m like, no, no, I’ll mail it in. That’s fine. Just to make sure that the vote— I’m sure she would’ve done it, but yeah, I just, I definitely did vote. And yeah, I’ve heard it’s unfortunate that a lot of friends have actually moved of the UK. But anyway, don’t need to get into this.
Lee Matthew Jackson
[Speaker:JAZ] If you voted for Brexit though, you’re still my friend because to be honest, it doesn’t really matter. It’s not the end of the world. Obviously, my opinion was to stay, but many people’s opinion was to go. The only advantage that I’ve seen, which I’m actually quite enjoying of Brexit, is the fact that the pound has weakened so much against the dollar that our US side of the business is growing significantly because we’re a hell of a lot cheaper. Now for our US clients, which is flipping awesome. So for us, we’re actually, as a surprise benefit, and me feeling wounded about the fact we’re leaving Europe kind of not, doesn’t feel quite so bad anymore. I’m like, oh, this is kind of an advantage. Selfishly, obviously.
Brian Hogg
That’s right. Well, same with the, you know, most of the plugins are in US dollars and the exchange rate is, well, I don’t sell plugins in US dollars, thankfully. So absolutely.
Lee Matthew Jackson
It means they’ve got more expensive for me, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah, it used to be, I’d be like, ah, $100, great, that’s 50 quid. Now it’s like, ah, $100, ah, that’s like nearly 100 quid. Damn it.
Brian Hogg
The million pounds. This is crazy. This is crazy. I blame house just like Donald Trump.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s what I blame.
Brian Hogg
Sure.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Let’s just blame him.
Brian Hogg
Let’s, yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
This has got like a politics show. We could like do a spinoff show now, couldn’t we? All about politics. Politics. I mean, crap, you’ve got, you’ve got all these podcasts going. What’s another one?
Brian Hogg
Whatever. Yeah, that’s fine. I don’t need to sleep. Um, that’s cool.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I don’t need to sleep. Well, here’s a question. Uh, I do, I’ll have to let you go soon because, uh, we’ll be coming up to our time. But you know, one of the things that’s interesting me is, uh, you’ve got all of the premium plugins, you’ve got the courses, et cetera. Are, are these your sole sources of income therefore, or are you also running Agency Life as well?
Brian Hogg
I’m doing a little. Um, I’ve basically got some maintenance contracts with projects that I’ve done in the past, and I am actually starting to do some, uh, talking about the specialisation thing that you touched on on some other episodes, uh, doing consulting related to the plugins. So it’s really cool. Um, so for example, uh, finding out what events are running and being able to get an email when events are running in your local area, right? It’s pretty archaic right now with a lot of municipalities and regions to be able to figure out what’s happening in that area. You know, we’ll often walk out on the street and go, “Oh, the road’s closed. Why is the road closed?” “Oh, because I don’t listen to the local radio and I don’t get the newspaper and read that, so I don’t know what’s happening,” right? But being able to actually get it by email and stuff. So yeah, no, I’m still doing some consulting, but it’s very choosy as to what I do and really trying to make it related to the work that I’m doing either as part of the course. So, you know, some consulting on getting people up and running and getting their plugins launched and contemplating doing kind of a do-it-yourself service, you know, maybe helping hire developers and help set up that support for people who are kind of too busy and almost want to use it as like a branding exercise.
Brian Hogg
But yeah, mostly the plugins and the courses now. So it’s been a slow build to get to that point, but pretty happy with where it’s at.
Lee Matthew Jackson
You’re living my dream. You say a slow build. One year, two years?
Brian Hogg
Couple years. Couple years.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I’m impressed, man.
Brian Hogg
Well, thank you.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Everyone here at Angled Crown applaud you.
Brian Hogg
Oh, thank you.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yay.
Brian Hogg
Is that actually them or is that just you?
Lee Matthew Jackson
That was everyone, yeah. It’s just me and Larissa in the office today. Karthik’s on his honeymoon.
Brian Hogg
Oh, nice.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Actually, funny storey about that. I’d forgotten he was going on his honeymoon.
Brian Hogg
Oops.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And he went yesterday. Was it yesterday? No, he went today. That was it. Yesterday was the last day. Day that he was in the office, he was like, hey, just remember, I’m, I’m off now. And I was like, what? There’s all this stuff you’ve not done. Oh my gosh.
Brian Hogg
Oops.
Lee Matthew Jackson
No one died. It was fine. We’re all good.
Brian Hogg
That’s good. That’s good. Well, yet. By the time this is— by the time this airs, this could be a different story.
Lee Matthew Jackson
It could be like a scene from The Walking Dead in this office by then.
Brian Hogg
What was his name again? Yeah, you should feel really bad for, for leaving, for sure. Yeah, he caused a lot of mayhem.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, um, oh well, is it— how can people contact you and what would be a wonderful piece of advice for anyone thinking of launching a plugin? There’s two questions.
Brian Hogg
Sounds good. So yeah, um, brianhogg.com pretty much has the links to all the courses and the plugins that I have and, uh, how to get a hold of me is all there, plus a nice learning centre. I do a lot of— try to do a lot of blogging on, you know, things like Easy Digital Downloads as a platform to sell stuff and just whatever else I can. Anything that tries to take me, or, you know, takes me over 20 minutes to do, I try to push out a blog post on it to help other people do that. And yeah, I don’t know, I think it’s just if you’ve got an idea, or especially if you’ve got something that clients are already using and are happy with, like especially if you’re an agency and you’re, you’re, you find you’re installing this thing that you created on everyone’s site and they’re loving it, like get it out there. So either, either through my course or just, you know, talking with other people who have done the same and just get it into and even just direct. So if you know people who you think, oh, this would be a great thing for you to use, like after speaking with them at whatever networking event, you know, put it in their hands even for free, right?
Brian Hogg
And get some, get some feedback and get that validation and then just get it out there sooner. Yeah, I wish I would have. So I sat on the free version of my one plugin for a year and a half before creating a pro version, and I could have done it much sooner. And it was great that again, to have that encouragement and that support from people who have done it before. And they’re just like— I’m just like, oh, this is like a little feature, it’s only a few lines of code, that can’t possibly be enough for a pro version. They’re like, yeah, yeah, it is, it’ll save people a lot of time and it’s good. I’m like, cool, thank you. So yeah, it’s not about— it’s not about the code, uh, and the amount of lines of code and, and how difficult it is. Because yeah, one of the plugins that I’ve got is, is much simpler than the other one and, and has been selling much much more than the other. Um, so yeah, technically, which is funny as a developer, right? You think, oh, like, people should appreciate this crazy amount of code that I’ve written and everything else and the technical whatever that it took to— no, nobody.
Brian Hogg
It’s just, they just want to get the value out of it. Yeah, exactly, exactly right. So, uh, yep, no, that’s, that’s my advice. Get it out there sooner and, and get feedback from, from real customers.
Lee Matthew Jackson
If I remember, I feel like I should paste the Shia LaBeouf um, video in.
Brian Hogg
Just do it.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That sounds like impose your head over the top.
Brian Hogg
Perfect. Done.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Actually, that’s gonna come— actually, I could probably find someone on Fiverr to do that, couldn’t I?
Brian Hogg
Uh, probably. Or I could just do it.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Okay.
Brian Hogg
A 3-second video where I’m just, uh, pointing into— just do it now.
Lee Matthew Jackson
You’re gonna get a green screen.
Brian Hogg
Do what? I don’t even know what I’m doing. What is this?
Lee Matthew Jackson
I don’t think anyone’s read actually that— sorry, anyone actually knows the Shia LaBeouf, what it’s all about necessarily. They just all know that clip of him going, just do it.
Brian Hogg
I don’t even know that clip. So I think I’ve been isolated.
Lee Matthew Jackson
You will be educated.
Brian Hogg
Yes. Show notes. Put it in the show notes.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Mate, you’ve been an absolute legend. Uh, it’s an honour to meet you. I would love to get you over on my other podcast as well to talk about the event calendar. I run the Expo and Event Podcast. Uh, we talk about WordPress for the events industry. So here you are. I’ve, I hopefully have nabbed you live on this podcast so that you’ll say yes.
Brian Hogg
Can’t you just splice out the stuff that I said in this one and just possibly do that? Lee is amazing. That’s it. Like, I didn’t say that at all. I don’t know.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I will give him all my money.
Brian Hogg
My money. Yeah, actually someone who helped me with the logo for one of the plugins, he’s like, I own your business now. I’m like, this Is that what— is that how that works? I don’t—
Lee Matthew Jackson
you know, the guy who designed the ABBA logo, he didn’t think— well, no, you don’t know him personally. I don’t either. Yeah. If you know him, LeeJacksonDev.com/group, that’d be a great story. No, he forgot about like he designed the logo for ABBA and forgot about doing anything about retaining the copyright. So, you know, because he could licence his design to them.
Brian Hogg
He—
Lee Matthew Jackson
so he didn’t do that. And obviously ABBA, the, the, the, you know, the, the back, the back-to-back Bs has now become synonymous with the group ABBA. I hope you’ve heard of ABBA, by the way. Yeah, yeah, I assume most people in the world have heard of ABBA. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, so there you go. So he could have owned and got loads of money out of that but didn’t.
Brian Hogg
Oops.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So you do have to be careful.
Brian Hogg
Yes.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Brian Hogg
And it is different, right, in the UK versus Canada? Uh, doesn’t the copyright automatically go over to, uh, your client as opposed to retaining with you if it’s work for hire? I think, I think it’s the opposite.
Lee Matthew Jackson
It depends if there is a contract. So like in my contracts, I stipulate all of that anyway.
Brian Hogg
Yeah, so yeah, there you go.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Look, there’s just like a whole other podcast about contracts.
Brian Hogg
Have contracts.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah, contracts.
Brian Hogg
Maybe we’ll do it one day. That’s important.
Lee Matthew Jackson
But anyway, you are a legend. I would talk to you for another hour. You’re really good fun, mate.
Brian Hogg
Cheers. It’s been great. Thank you very much.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Looking forward to getting you on the other podcast as well, and any other excuse I can get you back on here, because you’re a legend. I appreciate the time.
Brian Hogg
No problem at all. Thanks again, Brad.
Lee Matthew Jackson
All right, bye.
Brian Hogg
Bye.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And that wraps up number 67. Next week we’re gonna have Mr. Yorkshireman himself, Mark Asquith, and I’ll give you advanced warning, unless I can be bothered to bleep out all of the swear their words, I’m afraid it’s going to be a bit of an explicit show, but it’s also explicitly awesome because he just drops knowledge every single second, and that is absolutely an exaggeration. But there is, you know, quite some good content in there. I enjoyed being on the phone with him, and he’s a great guy. And Larissa is currently trying to pull out a tissue from a tissue box and be super quiet, and now she’s giggling, and I’m gonna leave this in. Now guys, I actually did my my first foray— it’s a posh word, foray— into the world of YouTube. I mean, I’ve tried before with like doing the whole selfie camera, going for a run and pretending I’m super fit and awesome. Now instead, what we did was we got my iPhone and we created a bit of a studio here in the office. And if you head on over to YouTube and type in WP Innovator, you’re gonna find my first video.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So we’re just waiting for the green screen to arrive so we can improve the quality. One of the things we did find was when you’re filming with an iPhone, you get this kind of speckle going on. So if you’re using like a big DSLR or something with a higher sensor and all that, you don’t quite get this little fuzzy speckle. So we were having to put all of our video files through Premiere Pro, and it takes ages to render. So hopefully with the green screen, we can get a few more cranked out quicker without having to go through the process of all this extra rendering to do special effects to remove all of that speckle. So really excited, loads of great subjects. So some of the subjects we’ve kind of covered in the past in the podcast. But the idea really is to try and create a kind of a 5 to 6, maybe 7-minute tops video that’s really helpful and really just to expand our reach as well. So there’s loads of wonderful listeners to the podcast, but we really want to be able to reach people through video as well. I do have a face for video, so I’m told, although I always thought I just had a face for podcasting.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So if you could do us a favour, head on over to anglecrown.com/vlog as well. You can cheque them out as they come through. And if you know anyone, do share them. If you get value from these, please do share them. And also do go ahead and comment on any of the videos we do post. Let’s have a bit of a laugh on there. Alright guys, have an awesome day. I’m gonna have one, so I hope you will too.
Brian Hogg
Cheerio!
