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.
Verbatim text
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 43 of the WP Innovator Podcast. This is your host, Mr. Lee Jackson. Accent. Sounds nice. I like that. Anyway, guys, this is a great episode. We’re talking to Chris Van Patten. I’m not going to spoil this. I’m not going to give you like a preview. I’m just going to let you sit back, relax, and enjoy. But trust me, this guy is really wise. Ah, just loved talking to him. And I had several aha moments whilst he spoke. So really appreciate Chris taking the time to talk to us, give us his story, his expertise. We do cover SaaS as well, software as a service. So it’s definitely worth listening, especially if you’re considering putting out a SaaS product at some point. So before I go and hand over to other Lee for the interview, don’t forget to pop along to the Facebook group at leejacksondev.com/group. You’ll be redirected there and come and join in the conversations that we’re all having. Again, no more cat pictures.
Lee Matthew Jackson
We’ve had no cat pictures now for 2 weeks or 3 weeks. And, and I kind of feel weird me posting cat pictures. I actually hate cats, by the way, as a true storey for you. Anyway, if we can get some cat pictures going, that would be great. A little shout out to the cat picture lovers out there. But also we’ve got some real conversations going on in there as well, like contracts, I think is still something that goes on in there. And also people talking about, you know, how do they deal with clients in certain situations, what frameworks are people using for development, etc. So really good conversations and great to be a part of. So we’ll see you over there, leadjacksondev.com/group. I am now going to shut up and over to you, Other Lee. I have Chris Van Patten in the room. Mate, how you doing?
Chris Van Patten
Doing well, thanks. How are you, Lee?
Lee Matthew Jackson
I am doing so good. And you’ve got a really good kind of deep American accent there. I’m loving it. Me as a Brit, I just love the American accents and I’m dead lucky at the moment. I keep getting all these cool American accents on the phone. And originally I thought you all sounded the same, but actually you don’t. It’s just this beautiful musical landscape of American accents. You’re from New York area, is that right?
Chris Van Patten
I am, yeah. I’m based in New York, but I do a lot of travelling as well, so semi-nomadic.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Semi-nomadic, that’s nice. Does that mean you’ve got like a plethora of different accents all kind of mixed in as you’ve travelled the world?
Chris Van Patten
Oh, I wish that were the case. My accent work is terrible, so this is kind of what you have.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well guys, let’s do the “this is your life” bit just to kick off the podcast with Chris Van Patten. He is a professional WordPress developer. WordCamp speaker. I’m so jealous, mate, I wanna be able to do that one day. And also an agency owner turned SaaS entrepreneur, that’s software as a service entrepreneur. So mate, how about I hand over to you and you just say hi to everyone and tell us all a little bit about yourself.
Chris Van Patten
[Speaker] Sure, so hi listeners, great to be here on the show. I am a, kinda like Lee said, I am a WordPress developer and agency owner, and I’ve been doing that for a while. I’ve been using WordPress Right around the time, either just slightly before or just slightly after, Kubrick became the default theme. So that was—
Lee Matthew Jackson
A while ago.
Chris Van Patten
That was like version— yeah, like over 10 years ago. It’s like 1.5, 2.0, something like that. And have been kind of using it constantly ever since. So started doing very simple websites, kind of hosting my own blog, and then brochure sites, and then recently more complicated apps, playing with the REST API, all that kind of stuff. I’ve been working with clients for just around 10 years now. Then on the other side, like Lee said in that intro there, I am a budding entrepreneur in the SaaS space, so developing a software as a service product that’s not connected to WordPress, but I think has a lot of potential use cases within the WordPress community. We’re excited to get that launched very soon.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s really cool. Let’s just first of all examine the agency then. When did that start? So you say you came in the early Kubrick days. I remember loving that theme when it first came out because I think it was— wasn’t it WordPress Classic beforehand? It was kind of like a—
Chris Van Patten
Oh, it was just pretty awful.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah. And then Kubrick came out and then I just remember that every site for a while just was Kubrick.
Chris Van Patten
It kind of transformed the landscape and was like, oh, hey, this WordPress thing could be beautiful. Exactly. I don’t think that really been kind of a widely felt thought before that.
Lee Matthew Jackson
No, I just remember eventually I got sick of the theme and I thought I can’t launch another site with this theme as much as beautiful as it looks. But I mean, how did you get from kind of somebody who was experimenting with WordPress to somebody who was beginning to build WordPress sites as an agency? What was the transition there?
Chris Van Patten
Sure, I mean, it was entirely accidental. I would say it was something where I had been sort of playing around myself. I started learning web development with FrontPage Express in the late ’90s, like the free version of Microsoft FrontPage. And I just kind of doing things for myself, you know, coming up with little projects and, you know, fan websites for this or that and all that kind of stuff. And then there kind of came a turning point right in like 2006 or so, right around that time frame, where it was right around when Twitter had become a thing. Twitter launched in, I believe, March of ’06, and I joined in December. So it would have been right around that kind of time frame that I joined and started connecting with other people who were doing interesting things and it became this kind of a thing where, “Hey, I make websites.” “Oh, you do? Great. I’ll pay you to make me a website.” And so I kind of stumbled into it where, “Oh, hey, people will pay me to do this thing that I’m kind of already doing for myself.” And that was a really unexpected to me, perhaps naively, but unexpected and kind of exciting turn of events.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Wow. Dare you admit what your fan sites were about?
Chris Van Patten
Sure. Mostly Star Wars and Star Wars related things.
Lee Matthew Jackson
There’s no shame in that.
Chris Van Patten
No, not at all. It was right around the time in the late ’90s there when I was playing around with that kind of thing. That was right when the Star Wars Special Editions had been released into theatres, so the restoration and re-release of the original trilogy. That was sort of fresh on my mind at that time.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I do remember when they came out. That was actually my my first experience of Star Wars.
Chris Van Patten
Oh, the scene as well.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah. So I was, I must have been what, 16, 17 back in that time. And yeah, just watching them was just a complete eye-opener. I was like, this is incredible. And then obviously Episode 1 happened and I still don’t know how I feel about that, to be honest.
Chris Van Patten
So yeah, we’re all still parsing through those emotions.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I actually showed my daughter, who’s now 9, Episode 1 and she kind of like got bored halfway through. I was like, oh, I tell you what, I tell you what, let’s watch A New Hope. And she was like, this is amazing. I was like, see, even a 9-year-old gets it.
Chris Van Patten
Yeah, they can tell.
Lee Matthew Jackson
They can tell. But this is obviously not the Star Wars show. But like you, I got into— I did a fan site. Mine was for a PCW-16 computer, which I don’t think— I think only like 5 people in the world have heard of. So that was my fan site.
Chris Van Patten
I think we’ve all sort of come up and done those kind of sites at some point or another. So I think it’s probably pretty common to have that experience.
Lee Matthew Jackson
It’s cool, isn’t it? We all have these similar storeys where something starts as a hobby but then it becomes a business. Now I noticed on your site you’ve kind of— whether it’s fallen or on purpose, you’ve gone into a niche of kind of lifestyle entertainment businesses as your client. How did that happen?
Chris Van Patten
Well, sure. So in full disclosure, we’ve kind of pivoted out of that within the past year, but—
Lee Matthew Jackson
Okay, so you did. Sure, yeah, yeah.
Chris Van Patten
But it was definitely the bread and butter. Butter for a long time, for most of the life of the business. And it mostly came out of the types of people that I was interacting with online. So actually, I have a background in theatre. So I went to college, I studied theatre design, which is basically creating the sets and the lights and the costumes and all that kind of stuff that go into a theatre production. And I had done that through most of my high school as well. So kind of the people that I was interacting with were in that space already. It was sort of an easy sell for me to sell a project to those people because I understood that language. I was in that industry myself. And so it just became kind of an easy sell to go to actors and musicians and other artistic types of people in the entertainment business and pitch to them because they kind of We could get along really easily and I wasn’t some technical nerd who just spoke in code and all that, which I think a lot of artists are kind of intimidated by. And then over time I developed a reputation for that, so it kind of became a thing where I’d do a website for one person, they’d recommend me to 3 friends, and somebody else would see a site that I had done for a professional actor or whatever, and that would kind of spiral in another direction.
Chris Van Patten
And so it became over time a sort of an— again, like, it wasn’t really intended. I didn’t go into it thinking, oh, I’m going to be the guy for the entertainment business. It just sort of— it happened kind of organically.
Lee Matthew Jackson
It’s something we talk about quite often with other developers where often we’re tempted as an agency to be all things to all men because— and women, sorry— because we think we’re gonna miss out on some other type of business. But it’s really cool to, to listen to someone who accidentally fell into a niche, but you talked about how you’re not talking zeros and ones to those people. You’re talking the same language. You’re in that industry, and there is such comfort, I think, for people to commission websites off people that they know and that they know understand their industry, that talk the same lingo and they can connect with. That’s interesting.
Chris Van Patten
[Speaker:TYLER] Totally. Something that I think made it particularly a good fit is that I think all websites are— it’s all the same under the hood, right? It’s all HTML. It’s all CSS, PHP, whatever. But this was a case where, particularly for actors, their website needs to serve a very specific purpose. It needs to have a very specific set of information available, and it has to be— even the design sort of is very important in the way that it showcases an actor. So that was something that sort of on a high level I became very good at knowing, you know, I could kind of look at an actor’s headshot and very quickly envision what the site would look like in a way that would kind of promote their best side and have the information that— because really it’s a tool for a lot of actors. It’s something they’re showing to casting directors, to producers, so it has to have that information presented in a way that, you know, is going to sell them. So that became something that, you know, part of the reason I think I had success in that area is because of my experience in the industry.
Chris Van Patten
I kind of knew what those pieces needed to be, how they needed to look and had kind of a good eye for figuring out what the best way to present that was and sell the actor basically. It’s a sales tool for them.
Lee Matthew Jackson
[Speaker:TYRONE] So true, and if you’re listening, you’re trying to find your niche, where is your passion, guys, and see if you can follow that. Where is your passion? Where can you speak that sort of lingo? Where do you understand an industry? And that could be potentially where you find your leads. And that is such a cool story, buddy. I appreciate you sharing that. Now, you’ve just said that you’re pivoting out of that. What’s the pivot, and what kind of started that?
Chris Van Patten
Sure. So this is kind of a more ambiguous pivot. We’re basically pushing into more complicated projects. So it’s less like being in a specific niche, but a type of project. So we’re doing things that are, you know, with the actor sites or the other sites we’ve really done for a long time, they’re very simple. It’s kind of a couple pages. We were able to kind of have a base theme that we were kind of using because it kind of all followed sort of the same structure, and we’d obviously redesign each of them, but kind of the, you know, the pieces and parts are basically the same. And so the shift has been kind of away from that into very, very high, like, high-end custom projects. So usually there are a lot of API integrations involved, integrating with third-party API providers, pulling in information, syncing that into WordPress, transforming that, that data, and Then also building our own APIs, so leveraging the REST API now that that’s become a thing. Before that, developing our own APIs within WordPress without the help of the REST API because it didn’t exist. Then also integrating other technologies outside of WordPress.
Chris Van Patten
We’re starting to do a bit of work with React. We’re doing work with Laravel. Usually the projects have WordPress components to them, but it’s shifting away from let’s build you a WordPress site to let’s build an application, and part of that application might include WordPress, it might not, but usually trying to fit that in there somehow.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So you’ve kind of transitioned from building WordPress websites into much more of a complex problem solving for businesses, and you’re creating solutions using a wider variety of products, be it WordPress, be it WordPress APIs, REST API, or even using other platforms as well. Would that—
Chris Van Patten
Exactly. Yeah, totally. Also, the other side of that is because we are developing, it goes back to what I said about theatre, this sense that I was speaking the language that the actors were speaking. Because we’re now developing these more complex projects, we’re speaking the language of a lot of what I’ll call “hardcore developers” out there or people building these complex applications. So on the other side, we’re developing these applications, but we’ve started to work with people who are developing the applications themselves and coming in and providing sort of a UX consulting design element to that because we’re able to design things and develop front-end stuff in a way that kind of fits very nicely with what these development teams are putting together. So finding a lot of partnership opportunities there where they might handle the back-end, but we’ll kind of handle the front-end interfacing with our customers, trying to understand what’s the best way to build this feature, what’s the best way to design this feature, and sort of plugging into their teams that way as well.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So I could be— I could have a product that I’ve developed and you guys would then be able to review the front of what I’ve been doing, kind of the user interface, etc., and then build upon that as well, give us advice from your experience, etc., and evolve that?
Chris Van Patten
Exactly, yeah. And a big part of that as well— so there are kind of two approaches. The first is kind of what you said, so taking something that exists and refining it, making it better. The other thing that we’ve done a lot of is kind of starting from baseline from starting from zero where we’ll come in, a client will— they’ll probably— usually these clients have had existing projects they’re working on, but they’re starting up something new and they’re really excited and they’ve got a team that’s going to handle all the backend, but they don’t really have an idea how the frontend is going to fit together. So we’ll come in, we’ll find potential customers, we’ll interview those potential customers, you know, what do you need from this product, and basically serve as kind of an outsourced product manager or, you know, developing what are the flows looking like, what’s the feature set that we would want to have on launch day, what does the product look like itself. So putting together wireframes, doing usability testing on those, turning those eventually into mockups, full fidelity into HTML, and so on and so forth. And then ultimately turning those over to the client to integrate, to have their team integrate.
Chris Van Patten
So kind of, you know, serving as an outsourced product design and management team in a way.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah. That’s freaking amazing. How— I mean, one thing I’m thinking is this all started as you, and now it sounds like you’re working on some very complex projects. Are you still there for one of the developers, as in you like to lock yourself away and do development, or are you now the person who is mainly interacting with people, account managing, being the sales force, or have you been able to outsource that? Area to other people? I mean, how is your agency structured now that you’ve gone from just Chris to what looks like a global team of developers?
Chris Van Patten
Yeah, so I’m still the primary guy. I’m the main person that a client interacts with. Usually I’m doing the sales calls, I’m interacting with leads, things like that. And then even when the project is going, I’m still kind of the primary point person. Within the past year, I’ve also brought on a project manager. So she’s around as well to facilitate bug requests and make sure that those get to the right people. She’s in there in most of our meetings making notes, making sure that if the client says, “Oh, hey, I think we should do it this way,” or something, making sure that that gets recorded and stored in our project management system because I would otherwise forget. I’m still kind of the point person, but we do have a project management who takes up a lot of that slack. And then I’m also still doing development, but it’s less and less development. I’d say it’s probably about 50/50 right now. 50% in the account management side, 50% in development. But that’s decreased from being 80% of the development was me. It’s definitely shifting downward over the years.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Now, that sounds very similar to quite a lot of people who start off as maybe a freelancer or as a one-man and then start to grow the business. I mean, I probably— I think I’m at the same position as you right now on the amount of development versus the amount of account management I’m doing. It’s about a 50-50 split and I’m really— I’m at that point where I don’t know which way I want to go because I love both. I really enjoy interacting with the customers, but I also kind of miss the programming and just like sitting geeking out all the time. I mean, do you kind of empathise with that or are you wanting to get more into one of those areas?
Chris Van Patten
No, I would totally agree. I’m kind of, you know, not sure which way to go. I do enjoy interacting with the clients and brainstorming and kind of, you know, all that kind of stuff, but I do enjoy that kind of problem-solving element as well. Where I’ve kind of seen myself shifting is kind of in the role of a product manager. Still involved, I would say, in those day-to-day decisions, still reviewing code, making sure everything’s up to snuff and working the way that it should. I’m satisfying that desire to be in there and be in the nitty-gritty of things and get my hands dirty, but not necessarily being the one doing the coding, only coming in to pinch-hit when necessary. So that’s where I see myself moving. In the next 6 months to a year or so. But I think right now the balance is pretty good. I’m not feeling like I’m doing too much of any one thing, which is nice.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s good. One of the reasons why I love interviewing people from around the world is the phrases they come out with, and I think you’ve just said up to snuff. Is that what you just said? I’m totally writing that down and using that one in the future. I’ve never heard of it. So it’s really important as an entrepreneur, because you are an entrepreneur, you may be an agency owner, but By, by in that you are therefore an entrepreneur and it’s good therefore to have multiple streams of income. So I assume therefore that is why you’ve also gone down the, um, the, the channel of creating a software as a service product as well, which is Chatwire. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about that?
Chris Van Patten
Sure. So Chatwire is sort of the latest incarnation of an idea that I’ve had for Nearly 2 years now. It started out as a travel app and it somehow sort of over time shifted into a customer service product. But the basic idea is that we’ve got tonnes of stats that basically prove that live chat on websites is really successful, especially e-commerce. If you’ve got a live chat widget, any customer who interacts with you through that is dramatically more likely to make a purchase on your website. It really helps increase trust, increase conversions, all these different factors. The problem is that live chat experiences by and large are pretty terrible, especially on mobile websites. And most of that is because you’re installing this kind of clunky, slow JavaScript widget, and if somebody tries to load your website on their smartphone, and we know that they’re doing that, the statistics have shown that mobile is increasing rapidly even in e-commerce, which I think the common mindset is, “Oh, mobile users don’t shop on their phones.” Actually, they do, and it’s about 50% of e-commerce visitors are on mobile. But those live chat experiences suck because it’s slow.
Chris Van Patten
If you close the tab, the live chat disappears, and it’s kind of like it never happened. There’s no way to contact that customer again. So there are all kinds of problems with that experience. And so what we’re doing is we’re leveraging mobile messaging apps. So things like Telegram, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, SMS, so just plain old text messages. And we’re using, we’re basically serving as an integrator. So we take all those messages that come in via those different channels, and you can configure which channels you want to use, and then we route them into your team’s existing help desk software. So basically the workflow is somebody messages you via Facebook, you know, they go to your Facebook page, they click message, they ask a product question or whatever it is. We route that question into your helpdesk. Your team sees it. They, you know, they get the question as if it were an email or any other support mechanism. They can go in, they can reply to that message right within the helpdesk like they’re used to, and when they reply, it goes back out to the customer via Facebook Messenger or whatever channel that came in on.
Chris Van Patten
So the basic, the win there is that it lets customers contact you the way that they want to contact you. So if I’m a diehard Facebook Messenger user, it’s annoying to me to have to open up a different, you know, open up an email or something like that to get a simple question answered. And it also means that it works great on mobile because instead of trying to do it in this clunky little JavaScript widget that pops up in, you know, mobile Safari or Chrome or whatever browser you use on your phone, that’s slow, and if I go underground, the signal gets lost and the chat gets disconnected and it’s just a whole messy experience. Instead of all of that, you can just open up a native app, whether that’s iMessage or Facebook Messenger or whatever. That means that chat doesn’t disappear. It means if I lose connexion or if I close the tab, it doesn’t matter. That chat is still open. It engages the customer over a longer period of time in a way that they’re comfortable with.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So in theory, I would hit your website, there would be a message us on Facebook Messenger button that I could tap on my phone. I’m chat— I’m typing your message whilst I’m in London. I walk down into the underground, I’ve lost my signal, I’ve hit send, which is cool because Facebook’s just going to hang on to that until I’m out the other end, and then it’s going to send you the message. So I’ve not lost anything. You guys will get that in your, I know, Zendesk or something, whatever your, whatever your system is, and you can then reply to that, and I’m going to get a reply next day via my app or whenever, within a few minutes or whatever kind of resource you have at the other end. That is awesome.
Chris Van Patten
[Speaker:JASON] Yeah, and really, that kind of basic description of it, which I realise was probably like 2,000 words or something, but that very basic version where it’s a message that goes in and then comes back out, that’s really only the start. The next step for us is to use things to add automation rules. So we can actually automate certain replies. If you message a business outside of their business hours, you can get a message back that says, “Hey, we’re looking into this, but you won’t get a response until tomorrow morning,” whatever it is. And then kind of evolving that into the next step. And the next step there is then using machine learning, using text processing algorithms, and all these kind of advanced, you know, what we kind of call AI, to not only make sure that we’re providing you with the best answers, but also making sure that your human support team isn’t doing more work than they need to. So using AI really as a tool to assist the human agents on your team, not necessarily replace them, but make sure that they’re doing the things that they’re good at and the robots are solving the things that the robots are good at.
Chris Van Patten
So, you know, if we say— if you send a question, something like, “Where’s the status of my latest order?” That’s something that a bot can pretty easily answer. A bot can say, “Okay, order, they want their order, they want the latest order, let’s go into our system and pull that information and we can send it back.” And that way, you know, it happens instantly and your human agent doesn’t have to do it. So the human agent can focus on, “How do I assemble this product?” or, you know, “I’m missing a part.” can you send it to me, or whatever the case is. The more complex questions go to the people who can actually solve those.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s so exciting. You’ve had this idea and now you’re making it happen. You kind of remind me right now of Walt Disney because he’s able to see the entire thing before it’s even built. And you can tell with the passion that you’re talking about this, you’ve literally got this entire system in your head. You can see it happening, you see it working, and you’re actively making it work. Um, how, how long has it taken kind of from the day you finally decided to sit down and get started on this to get to where you are at the moment? Because I understand you’re in beta, that people can go cheque that out and sign up for beta pricing. But how long has that process taken you from I’m gonna do this to getting a beta out there?
Chris Van Patten
Sure. Well, I mean, like I said, the original idea kind of came out of a travel app 2 years ago, or almost 2 years ago. So that original app idea was basically basically the same thing where you could send a message via Facebook and get a response back, except in this case it was we would route your question to a local guide in whatever city you were in. So if you’re visiting London and you want to say, “What’s the best place to get fish and chips?” we would route that to somebody who lived in London and who could give you that response back out through Facebook. So sort of having a guide at your fingertips. We realised that that was kind of problematic. There were some issues in terms of operating in an international scale, dealing with the local guides and things like that. It was really more of an operations challenge. We decided not to pursue that for a number of reasons. That’s kind of the main one. But we had this software that we had kind of built and said, “You know what? This is kind of interesting. Would it be possible to make this work for other business businesses.
Chris Van Patten
And this was just about a year ago. And that’s when the process started where we were like, what could we salvage out of this? And it turns out, we started experimenting about a year ago, spent a few months where I was kind of the only person working on this in my spare time, and kind of hit January, February of this year and realised everything that I’ve done is terrible. It’s not salvageable. But it’s still a good idea. What’s the best way to recover it? That’s when I started bringing on some outside developers who had experience building similar types of platforms with messaging and APIs and things like that. That’s when day 1 of the current iteration of what we have started. That was like the February timeframe.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s cool. I love your honesty, mate. I’ve done things like that where I’ve tried to build things myself and then got it to a state where I think, you know what, I need to just get someone else on this. “Because otherwise I’m just going to— it’s just going to keep going forever.” So you’ve got people in who’ve got the skills and then you can push this forward.
Chris Van Patten
[Speaker:JASON] Yeah, and I mean, I like to look back at that like— I think it’s easy to be in the mindset of like you spend 4 or 5 months on a thing, whatever it was, and get to the end of it and it’s like, “This was all a waste of time. This is unsalvageable.” But actually, it taught me a lot. And a lot of the things that I learned doing that development myself, even though the code ended up ended up being crap and had to be thrown out, I’ve used a lot of the lessons and a lot of the— literally the software that I used to build that, I’ve used in multiple projects for clients since. So it was kind of, you know, it didn’t make any money those 4 months. I didn’t, you know, I wasn’t attracting customers and things like that. The code had to be thrown out, but I was still able to pivot that knowledge into other projects that I was working on or have worked on since, which it still stings to have spent 4 months there, but it helps it sting less.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I’ll put it that way. It’s a refreshing attitude. You’re looking at that and you’re thinking, okay, I can reuse the work that I did. But also, if you imagine, this is 4 months’ worth of work that you did that helped you envisage the future of the project because I imagine you were doing stuff and that actually helped evolve your idea more. So just by nature of of doing some hands-on work that kind of helped you refine what you knew you wanted and needed to develop when you then got to hand that over to the other guys as well? Because I’ve done something very similar. I built the thing myself. I never actually marketed the thing. I never sold the thing. I spent a long time on it, but I’ve used that code multiple times in multiple places. And then when I got someone else to do the development, I was just able to give them exactly what they needed to build, and they built it within a month, and I was like, oh, this is amazing.
Chris Van Patten
Totally, which is why I think on the agency side of things, we were talking about shifting into different roles. I think even if you plan to shift out of development, I think it’s important to kind of keep those skills fresh. Even if you’re not using them on a day-to-day basis, even if you’re not the one actually committing code to the repo for your client’s project or whatever it is, I think it’s important to continue to read up, continue to be informed, attend WordCamps, listen to talks, attend other types of programming conferences, whatever it is, because even if you’re not in there on a day-to-day basis, those lessons are really valuable in terms of how you spec out a project or how you approach a project that you’re just starting.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s awesome. So WordPress, what would you say are your 1, 2, or 3 most favourite recommended WordPress plugins?
Chris Van Patten
Interesting. So I think I only have one. Um, I’ll be honest, I don’t use a tonne of plugins and that’s kind of by design. Um, you know, like I said, our projects tend to be a little more complicated, so it’s most of the time we need to build things from scratch just because the things that we’re trying to build don’t exist in the world. I would say, but the one that I use all the time, and in full disclosure, I’m a contributor to this plugin, but it’s not my plugin, I just do some work on it, is Custom Field Suite by Matt Gibbs. It’s basically a, it was originally a fork of a very, very, very early version of Advanced Custom Fields. I don’t wanna, get too far into it, but one of the problems in the early days at least of Advanced Custom Fields was that you were getting probably 4 or 5 releases a week, and at least, you know, half of those releases were breaking things. I understand it’s gotten a lot better since, but that was kind of what spurred the creation of this fork. And so we really focus on creating a plugin that is super stable, like hyper stable.
Chris Van Patten
We don’t want to break things. The API hasn’t really changed. In the past few years. We’ve added new features, but kind of the core way the plugin worked hasn’t really changed. And it’s just a really, really simple way to register, you know, custom fields like select fields or whatever within the post editor in WordPress and then use that data in your theme or your project. So I use that on almost every project that I work on. And I guess kind of related to that is that we’ve, we’ve also developed a bunch of, not a bunch, but probably 2 or 3 different plugins ourselves, which are available on GitHub, github.com/vanpatenmedia, that are designed to integrate with Custom Field Suite. So we’ve released our own custom field type, we’ve released a tool that lets you add like special options pages, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, I guess that I’d say that’s my plugin of choice.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So I’ve used Advanced Custom Fields for, for a long time. We, as we’ve gone more complex, we’ve kind of headed over to Pods for their table structure because we’re usually dealing with huge datasets which do not work with the kind of the default post meta structure, because otherwise you’re just going to have millions and millions of records in the database. So we kind of, we’ve headed towards that direction. But I’ve, I’ve certainly found Advanced Custom Fields to be quite heavy. Is this kind of a more lighter weight product —as well? It is.
Chris Van Patten
It’s very lightweight. And actually, that’s something— it’s interesting you bring up Pods because Matt was also the founder of Pods. Really? Yes. He’s no longer the lead developer. That’s Scott Kingsley-Clark. But Matt was, you know, the original guy for Pods. So they’re very different plugins, Custom Field Suite and Pods. They’ve diverged very wildly, but it’s the same guy, the same kind of mindset there, just a dramatically pared-down version of that.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I have so got to cheque me out Custom Fields Suite then. I’m always open to just learning, learning your systems and trying new things, especially with WordPress builds. So that’s the Custom Fields Suite by Matt Gibbs, and I’m going to make sure that that goes in there as well. That’s a real good call. It’s great as well to meet someone who’s actively contributing yourself to WordPress plugins. I did notice you had, I think, about 5 or 6 that you were contributing to or had launched on the WordPress plugin directory as well, which was pretty awesome. I think you’d done— was it Total Slides? Yeah, yeah. So that’s—
Chris Van Patten
I wouldn’t call it abandoned, but definitely it’s not getting the love it deserves. But we did build a slider plugin. It’s still in use on some of our client sites, so it still works. But yeah, I mean, really—
Lee Matthew Jackson
There’s a testament to your code quality if it still works.
Chris Van Patten
That’s pretty cool. Exactly. I mean, I think, I think it’s, it’s easy to build code that’s going to last a long time as long as you kind of use the core functionality in a very smart way. Yes. You’re not trying to replace pieces of WordPress. You just kind of— this is how it works and you’re going to use it the way that it’s designed to work. But yeah, I mean, for me, it’s— I think it’s important to contribute back to WordPress the way, you know, a lot of people contribute to core. That’s really great. I choose to contribute to plugins and to develop plugins and all that kind of stuff. But I think no matter what, whether it’s doing plugins, whether it’s releasing themes or contributing to core or going to contributor days at WordCamps and things, I think it’s— as long as you’re making some kind of contribution to the community that is in the spirit of the open source that WordPress is in, I think that’s essential. No one’s going to force you to do it, but I think you can sleep better at night doing that. Amen, brother.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s awesome. I love that. Are there any online resources that you’re a big reader of, be it WordPress or be it any kind of industry that kind of inspires you that you would like to share with the listeners?
Chris Van Patten
Yeah, I mean, I don’t actually read a tonne of WordPress news. My kind of— the limit of my WordPress news is what I see on the dashboard when I log log into a WordPress site, which I think is usually WP Tavern. I think Post Status is in the mix there. I don’t subscribe to any of them, but I do read them when I see interesting things come up. I actually try not to read a tonne of web development news. I read CSS Tricks. I read A List Apart, but beyond that, I like to sort of be reading sort of things in other fields that might inspire creativity. I’m an avid reader of Design Milk. I read a lot about art, so I subscribe to a few blogs about the art world and things that are happening in different countries in art space. Yeah, I mean, ultimately just trying to broaden my horizons because I think something that I found at least is that you can you can very easily get into a trap where you’re kind of always focused on the same sort of community, the same people, and you’re not hearing different ideas. So I try to read a lot from a wide range of ideas and a wide range of industries.
Chris Van Patten
So, you know, whether that’s about travel or art, or read a couple meditation blogs, things like that, just different types of things that are kind of more liberal artsy, right? So not so much getting focused on one idea but trying to get into a bunch of different ideas.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That is so wise what you’re saying as well. Not just reading WordPress stuff but reading all sorts of things that will help inspire you. And they do, they recommend that to entrepreneurs, don’t they? They even say if you’re going to read, even read fiction because that, you know, there’s nothing to do with your industry, it’s nothing to do with what you’re doing. Totally. But even reading Fiction, the act of doing something, consuming that content, thinking about it, it can spark the imagination, it can spark ideas, you can learn even from fiction. I’m going to put Design Milk in there in the links as well because I’ve actually had a good— I’ve looked at that quite often. There’s some really cool articles and I’m kind of there more for the pictures. I’m a pictures guy and I just love looking at things and putting in Pinterest.
Chris Van Patten
Totally. It’s interesting too that you mentioned fiction. Something that I’ve done and I think is kind of uncommon among entrepreneurs is that outside of things that I find on the web, when it comes to actual physical books, it’s very rare for me to read nonfiction. I actually try to read fiction primarily. It’s kind of what you said. I think it jogs a different part of your brain. It also helps you rest. I think it’s hard sometimes for entrepreneurs to kind of let the business go for a little while. Helps you do that, but also you can bring some of those ideas back into your work when you do revisit it that can kind of inspire new ways of looking at the world, which I think is kind of the number one thing you need to do as an entrepreneur. Amen.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I think me and you are going to get really well when we go and have a beer one day. We’ve got a lot in common there. We can compare fiction books as well. That’s freaking awesome. So, buddy, you’ve been brilliant. Unpacking your storey has been fascinating. I’ve learned quite a lot from you and I know people listening will have learned a lot from you as well. So, really, really appreciate you being on. We try and keep these to kind of like 40 minutes max because it helps people with their commute or their run unless they run for 2 hours and then they’re just really impressive. So, what we like to do is kind of obviously thank you. Thank you so much. And then we kind of ask our visitors, is there one piece of advice, something that you’ve learned, maybe a saying, a quote, or something that you’re apply to your life regularly that you would like to share with people that you think they could benefit from and maybe they could apply to their lives, and then we’ll wrap up.
Chris Van Patten
Huh. That’s a good one. It’s a big one. Yeah. Here’s one. This is something that one of my college professors always said. She was the— is, I guess, still the head of the theatre design programme at my school, and something that she always hammered into us is that especially when you’re collaborating with someone— something and you’re trying to get through a situation, it’s important to state the problem, not the solution. So it’s very important to understand what are you trying to solve rather than coming at it with, I have a specific way that I want to solve it. And I think that sort of helps keep people from getting defensive because they don’t feel like they’re being pushed into a certain idea. And it also kind of lets everyone approach a problem in a very neutral way. So I would say that’s kind of the main thing that I would advise the listeners.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That is brilliant. State the problem, not the solution. So as an example, if somebody says to you, I need an email server, you actually need to find out what the problem is. It might be— Exactly. Yes, exactly. Because they might not need an email server. It might actually be something completely different. That is such a good saying. I’ve never actually heard that saying. I think she might have coined it. Yeah, cool. I’m just going to put a quote unknown, but yeah, that’s really wise. I love it when you hear a phrase that just encapsulates so much wisdom in just one sentence, and that’s something that’s going to stay with me. That is: State the problem, not the solution.
Chris Van Patten
We were approaching it from the perspective of designers working with directors, but I think it’s just as applicable to client work because like you said, How many times have we had clients who come to us and say, I need this thing, it’s got to work this way, and it’s got to do this, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s like, well, do you actually need that? And a lot of the time, no offence meant to the clients listening out there, but much of the time there are other ways to solve the problem you’re having. And so it’s really important to dig into what that problem actually is. Absolutely.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I think this is going to have to be the podcast title as well, mate. I think that’s going to pull people in. Well, you’ve been a legend. Thank you so much for being on the podcast, guys. If you want to follow Chris, you can go cheque him out on vanpattonmedia.com. That’s V-A-N, then Patton, that’s P-A-T-T-O-N media.com. And also cheque out Chatwire HQ as well. Go get on the list there for the beta. Go cheque that out because that sounds revolutionary as far as I’m concerned, and I can’t wait to learn more about that. Are there any other ways that people can connect with you, buddy?
Chris Van Patten
Twitter, always on Twitter, twitter.com/chrisvanpatton, C-H-R-I-S-V-A-N-P-A-T-T-E-N. That’s kind of my main channel, and I’m just about to celebrate 10 years on Twitter.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I saw that, that’s freaking amazing, mate. Basically, Twitter launched, then you joined it.
Chris Van Patten
Pretty much, yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Wasn’t it like July 15th or something like that? I think I know, that’s stupid trivia. I don’t know why I know this. I think it’s July 15th, 2006 they launched, or the first tweet went out.
Chris Van Patten
I was there December 12th, 2006.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Oh, you remember the day?
Chris Van Patten
Yeah, yeah, which is kind of crazy, but yep. So, so yeah, come hang out, come chat with me. I’m always happy to answer questions and give advice or just banter.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, thank you, Chris, the Twitter veteran. Really appreciate your time. You’ve been a legend. You’re full of wisdom. Appreciate that. Have a freaking awesome day, mate.
Chris Van Patten
Thanks, you as well. Take care.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Cheers. So there you have it, the end of episode 43. Told you it was good. If you made it this far, you’re my best friend. If you didn’t make it this far, I’m going to say lots of nasty things about you that you’ll never know because you never made it this far. So I’ll just, I’ll just think them. I’m joking. Anyway, I would really like to give a big shout out to one of our listeners who has been a real great encouragement to me over the last few weeks, and that would be Ashley Longmire. Ashley and her husband run Peak Solutions, so go ahead, cheque Ashley and her company out. You can find them in the WP Innovator group, and that’s on leejaxondev.com/group. Ashley’s been great. She sends me messages of encouragement and also sends really cool Snapchats of her listening to the podcast on the radio in her car. And there is nothing more inspiring and encouraging for all of us here as a team to see the podcast playing in somebody’s car in the US of A on an open road. That is just like mind-blowing. So if you guys want to send me pictures of the podcast playing in your car, please do so safely and send them to Snapchat, Lee Jackson LTD.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That would be freaking awesome. So thanks, Ashley. Really appreciate it. Next week we’ve got episode 44 because I can count and we have Ben Pines from Elementor. Yes, I’m actually going to interview somebody from a different visual builder and it’s actually really good, although I still love Beaver Builder. So, you know, please don’t panic anybody. I love Beaver Builder, but I can’t speak that much in love with Beaver Builder. But anyway, Elementor is pretty damn good and I enjoyed checking that out. And I’ve really enjoyed interviewing Ben. He’s a great guy, and I know you’re gonna enjoy this podcast. And he’s got some strong opinions as well about W3C validation and also SEO. So it’s worth going in and listening to that next week because I think it’s gonna start a whole conversation that I really want to see what the results are. So I’m definitely gonna shut up because I think I should just put my intros as hashtag spoiler alert and maybe just shut up and get someone else to record these. Anyway, that’s me all done on my ramble.
Chris Van Patten
I hope you enjoyed this podcast.
Lee Matthew Jackson
If you didn’t, then do let me know privately in an email. And if you loved it, then why don’t you go on like iTunes and Stitcher and the internets and the interwebs and tell everybody how awesome this podcast is, how much you love it, how much value you’ve had out of it, and share, share the love. Okay, take care, keep innovating.
