00:00:01.11 evergrowmarketing because I didn't even check my mic to see if it was the right one, but YOLO. 00:00:05.87 Cody Yeah, I mean, you sound good to me. 00:00:09.06 evergrowmarketing Thank you. You sound good. 00:00:11.94 Cody Thanks. I had a weird thing. weird thing happened. And it was just so bizarre. I'm still kind of kind of shook from it. So there's this guy in one of my classes. And I mentioned, I can't remember how it came up, but this was a while back and I just said, yeah, I run an agency. 00:00:41.10 Cody You know, the things I usually normally try to keep quiet about because I don't want people to know because then they start asking questions. It's, I mean, you've experienced it, right? When they're like, what do you do? And then you're like, uh, you know, I work in marketing and then you do everything. 00:00:53.45 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:00:54.69 Cody Yeah. 00:00:55.00 evergrowmarketing I know exactly what you mean. We we talked about this during the, when the girls were on in Japan and like Lauren met me and she was like, I'm in marketing. 00:01:01.79 Cody Yeah. 00:01:04.52 evergrowmarketing And I'm like, I own a business. And she goes, you are definitely in an MLM. 00:01:08.98 Cody Yeah, it is. Yeah, there's no real great way to to explain this stuff without getting yourself into a situation. So that's what I did. I got myself into a situation that I got at the class and he kind of just hits me with a quick like, hey, listen to the podcast. 00:01:25.49 Cody And I'm like, OK, I don't even remember talking about a podcast. But I did give him I give my guard, though, because I figured that was, you know. 00:01:35.55 evergrowmarketing Like before or like after he listened. 00:01:35.61 Cody Yeah, yeah. yeah I figured that was the proper thing to do. And from there, it just got kind of weird. um There was critiques in general from him about different stuff that we were doing. And he said lots of nice things, too. um But, you know, the first time you kind of have a conversation about that sort of stuff, that's not really what sticks in your brain. You don't really remember the the good things. You just remember the stuff where you're like, that's kind of weird, man. 00:02:08.17 Cody um and 00:02:09.94 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:02:11.45 Cody And I sent it to you. So you've seen it too. I'll let you kind of decide how much you care to talk about when it comes to the details of it. But I ended up just responding to him because he mentioned he'd be like, you know, it'd be cool if we could meet up and talk about things. 00:02:28.92 Cody And it's it's really hard to 00:02:30.60 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:02:35.15 Cody I think I sent this to you earlier. We never really talked about it because we had other stuff going on. Sorry to talk about this without making it just use buzzwords. um But I think the word closest to it is just it felt toxically masculine. Right. When when guys are trying to flex and and feel like they're trying to put themselves on the same level and one, it doesn't work for me. It never has. I never vibe. I have never vibes with those people who are trying to, you know, they entertain to the world. um And on top of that, if you're studying Japanese, it's really not going to work for you. Right? That is not the culture to to try and ah do anything other than 00:03:30.49 Cody accept your fate and position in the hierarchy, right? That is your role is you have a place and be respectful of the place that you're in. And I, I, I'm half and half about this. I recognize that I'm a sensitive guy when it comes to what people say on solicited to me, because I genuinely don't care what 99% of them say. 00:04:00.20 Cody So my default reaction when I get feedback and advice that I didn't ask for is thanks man, but I don't remember asking. 00:04:10.42 evergrowmarketing Uh, you said, so like this all popped off because you were like, you're like, yeah, so I had a weird experience in class. And then, um, you told me, uh, about like how you're like, yeah, he kind of like dissed the podcast. 00:04:23.10 evergrowmarketing And I'm like, what? like He goes, he said it was, I thought you said he said it was boring. I guess he said it was bad. 00:04:30.85 Cody Well, he started with bad. 00:04:31.18 evergrowmarketing Um, Hmm. 00:04:32.62 Cody That was all I got to start with. He's like, yeah, it was just bad. So I laughed it off because I, what else do you do? 00:04:35.53 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:04:38.43 Cody Right? You're just being polite. 00:04:38.76 evergrowmarketing It. 00:04:39.76 Cody This is the other thing too, is look, I, because I don't expect this from other people and I get shook when it happens, when I just like come at me with, with negativity, I don't do it back. 00:04:51.38 Cody I really don't. I just, I, right, 00:04:52.81 evergrowmarketing But my first response was like, man, let me hear your podcast. 00:04:57.81 Cody right. I mean, I, I could go and I, I did eventually start going down that route. But again, I mean, I, I just don't default to in real life to, to saying those things back because it feels so confrontational. So I did laugh it off and then I went next with, well, what didn't you like about it? Right. 00:05:19.66 evergrowmarketing Yeah, you asked him to submit feedback and he said he was busy and you're like. 00:05:22.94 Cody Right. So then he was like, you know, it was just kind of boring and ah we can talk about that too, because demographically we know that there are things different about this, but then one of the things you want them to say was, you know, you could create content a little bit more. 00:05:36.74 Cody Um, and, and as I say this, you, and and I imagine people listening to are going to be like, look, there's just a lot of misunderstanding here, but that's the, that's the point about the misunderstanding is I was never asked. 00:05:46.12 evergrowmarketing Yeah, this, this all started, yeah, this all started with total misunderstandings. And so, so basically, like the so that's Kay, call him a kid. 00:05:51.42 Cody Right. 00:05:54.17 evergrowmarketing He's 19. So, um, yeah, three more years and you could like, literally be his dad and, uh, and, uh, 00:05:55.81 Cody He's a kid to me, right? Yeah. 00:06:03.64 evergrowmarketing He, yeah, so he started off and said, I'm just going to recap my recollection of us from my perspective. 00:06:08.20 Cody Yep. 00:06:08.18 evergrowmarketing They recapped and he's like, the podcast is boring. Like you're like, well, why don't you submit some feedback? And he said, I'm too busy. And you go, well, not too busy to listen to the podcast. And which is, I thought was funny. 00:06:17.76 Cody I did say that. 00:06:19.00 evergrowmarketing I thought all of this was actually funny when you sent it to me. 00:06:19.33 Cody Yeah. 00:06:22.46 evergrowmarketing Um, because like yeah like you said, demographically, it's not just like, we're not targeting the 19 year olds that the 16 to 20 year olds were targeting. Like I sent you the demographic chart too. That was like. 00:06:33.41 Cody Yeah, I wanted to say that out loud. 00:06:33.82 evergrowmarketing Wait. 00:06:34.98 Cody So our biggest demographic, we know, tell me if my numbers are wrong. Cause I just know that the loose split, it's the 25 to 34, right? That's the primary number one demographic. 00:06:42.84 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:06:44.90 Cody But the second one goes up from there. Our age group goes higher. It it slants higher than it, than it does lower. So the second biggest is the 35 to 44 crowd. 00:06:53.93 evergrowmarketing Yeah. Because we cater to the like legitimate agencies like that, that are actually doing things versus the ones that talk about being agencies or talk about scaling. 00:06:55.04 Cody Um, 00:07:02.49 evergrowmarketing Um, like that, that's like your Eman gadgets. That's your, I mean, even I wonder what Alex or Moses demographic split is. Cause it's gotta be all over the place. Um, but, um, 00:07:13.49 Cody Yeah, I, I described it to Jenny when I was talking to her about it. I'm like, you know, we, we go after a post-masculine crowd. We're not trying to get these guys that are flexing with the cars and all that stuff. 00:07:20.96 evergrowmarketing yeah 00:07:26.18 Cody Um, we're here to talk to people who are doing real business and want to do real business, ironically, calling ourselves the bros, right? That's the joke. We know it. That's we we did it on purpose. 00:07:36.90 Cody It was strategic. Um, but yeah, that's that's our, but again, this was never asked. 00:07:46.04 evergrowmarketing Yeah. So he, he was like, you know, you should, you, your iteration of this is like, you know, you, he said that we should do more like, uh, content like Alex or Mosey and all this. Like, why don't we do Alex or Mosey style content? And then you're like, look, man, you're not the kind of guy I really want to hang out with because like you're, you're already kind of like giving us advice without even knowing who we are. Um, and, uh, and you're like, if I'm misinterpreting something, let me, let me know, which is, which is great. And. 00:08:16.29 evergrowmarketing i I thought for a second that this guy was like, like when you sent this to him without knowing any context, I was like, I guarantee this guy is like the Iman Gaji kind of like Alex Hermosi watcher doesn't actually do anything. 00:08:31.17 evergrowmarketing He just wants to talk about doing things, um which is why our podcast turned him off is because like we actually do things. And, ah but then like, yeah. 00:08:39.43 Cody Well, yeah, that's half, right? Another half is that he's in the college of business, right? Which is surrounded by it. And i'll I'll say it again out loud. I've never taken a business course. I've never never taken the marketing course, right? But I know that the college of business usually in any college is filled with very smart people who are not running their own businesses. 00:08:59.51 evergrowmarketing Right. Yep. I was in the college of business. None of my teachers were business owners. 00:09:03.21 Cody yeah 00:09:05.77 evergrowmarketing Um, okay. So that was like two full screenshots of text messages. And then you like, just randomly out of the random part of the day, I think the next day you sent me five full screenshots of messages from him. 00:09:18.97 evergrowmarketing I'm like, whoa. And it added so much context. It was insane. So. 00:09:23.64 Cody it was nice yeah 00:09:25.32 evergrowmarketing um I'm going to, I want to read snippets from it because he makes some assumptions about me that are like flattering, but totally untrue. And so he's like, Hey, I totally get it. 00:09:32.32 Cody yeah 00:09:34.33 evergrowmarketing Like if you don't want to spend time with a me, but I want to clear things up. And he goes, I shouldn't have used the word bad when describing your podcast. Um, because it's not bad for three months of experience. It's impressive. 00:09:44.48 evergrowmarketing Okay. So some of these questions I didn't ask you about because I have questions. I'm like three months of experience. Then i and I thought, I'm like, okay, that's weird. Let's let's put a pin on that. 00:09:52.79 Cody Yeah. 00:09:54.11 evergrowmarketing Hold hold on to that. The reason I clicked off of episode 36 was because yes, you guys did have a hook in the beginning, but then I got totally off-boarded by the cup noodle talk. I'm like, okay. So he got off-boarded by the um the cold open. 00:10:08.25 evergrowmarketing I'm like the hook at the beginning. And then I thought, oh, he's on YouTube. So he's what he's watching our podcast on YouTube, which is two years behind. 00:10:17.08 Cody Right. 00:10:17.71 evergrowmarketing And I said, and which is why we're releasing episodes twice weekly on YouTube. 00:10:17.97 Cody Yeah. 00:10:22.05 evergrowmarketing And if you're not on YouTube, go subscribe to us. Um, but he said, it's not bad for three months of experience. It's impressive. I'm assuming he means the three months our videos have been on YouTube, not this. 00:10:35.99 evergrowmarketing and He doesn't know the podcast is two and a half years old. Does he? 00:10:40.78 Cody I had no idea. Don't know. Don't care. Right. ah Again, I wasn't asked. 00:10:44.65 evergrowmarketing Well, when you hang out with him, you might, you might want to know like, you we're on episode 126 and we just talked about you or 125. 00:10:51.00 Cody the This is, 00:10:51.84 evergrowmarketing I don't know what episode this is. We've got some in the pipeline. 00:10:54.31 Cody this is the thing I just don't, I don't proactively volunteer information unless I, I have nothing to prove. I really cannot care less about trying to assert myself with these things. 00:11:06.03 Cody So when, when it comes up and like, well, you know, do they know this or, or whatnot? And to a fault, right? Cause generally we'll be like, did you tell them like now they didn't ask, right? 00:11:16.56 evergrowmarketing I did it, that's just a guy thing. 00:11:16.80 Cody So we'll be like, okay. 00:11:17.95 evergrowmarketing I do it all the time. Just like, she'll just be like, I'd be like, yeah. So anyways, Brandon broke up with his girlfriend and she'd be like, why? I'm like, I don't know. 00:11:27.01 Cody Yeah. Like I figured if he, if he wanted me to know, he'd tell me. So yeah. 00:11:31.25 evergrowmarketing Yeah. But, so, um, he's like, I wasn't super, he's like, I'm not insanely invested as a, and don't really listen to marketing podcasts. So just business podcasts, I guess that's Alex Hermosi and, and, um, 00:11:44.62 evergrowmarketing Iman Gaji is not a marketing guy. Well, he's not even a podcaster, so he doesn't have one. So I guess that makes sense. And then, um, he said, when I was, said I was too busy to submit submit the feedback, just like going on my personal life, which wasn't really an excuse because you were like, I run a business, own a podcast or have a podcast and am doing Japanese. 00:12:03.25 evergrowmarketing So, um, so let's skip, let's skip ahead. 00:12:07.00 Cody Yet. Well, I think I want to say it out loud. 00:12:08.60 evergrowmarketing Uh, okay. 00:12:10.72 Cody I think people don't recognize how. um Again, you can look at it either way. You can say, well, you read into that. Right. Or you can say, I think these people often don't know when they're being insulting. 00:12:23.69 Cody Right. The busy thing. I think you got to be careful when you're saying that when you're saying I'm busy to a busy person. Right. It's, it's indirectly an insult. 00:12:34.28 Cody Like, I'm sorry. I'm just busy. It's like, okay, cool. Well, we both have to say 24 hours. So, um, yeah. 00:12:39.29 evergrowmarketing i I take it as them insulting themselves, kind of. So I'm like, when, when a non-busy person says, Oh, I'm just really busy. I just go, all right. I just kind of like laugh. I'm like, you just called yourself like lazy. I know you're not doing anything. 00:12:56.76 evergrowmarketing ah 00:12:56.98 Cody Yeah. 00:12:58.63 evergrowmarketing Okay. So he wanted to talk and brainstorm with you and he goes, um, okay. Uh, let me right here. Okay. I didn't mean for you to think I was indirectly criticizing your business partner because I guess he ah offended me in some way in some capacity that i I don't know. But, um, he said the type of person that he seems like the type of person I want to be like, all right, strike one. You're already not, you should not want to be like me. Um, 00:13:26.13 evergrowmarketing I now ah see that comment that comments like flying by the seat of his pants and jumping from thing to thing could be seen as insults. So this is new context for me. I'm like, Whoa, like he said this about me. 00:13:37.22 evergrowmarketing um Yeah. 00:13:37.48 Cody It's just basically something you jump around a bit topic wise. 00:13:39.58 evergrowmarketing Yeah. He said, yeah Oh, topic wise for sure. Yeah. Um, could be in so like, that's not what I meant. Sorry for the confusion. ah It goes on, uh, which is the next part. I want to finish this thought. What I meant by this is it seems like the type of guy who can run into things without a plan. I was like, hold up, wait a minute backup. 00:13:58.22 evergrowmarketing I, I don't do anything business wise without a plan. I always have a plan. I am so meticulous when it comes to, um, this podcast or ever grow or literally anything. The thing that I do is I jump around from idea to idea, but I never execute that idea without a very solid plan. So ever bros is about to have a rebrand. Um, same, same name. Don't don't gotta to worry about it. That's the same. Um, but colors and logos and things like that. 00:14:27.28 evergrowmarketing Like that's going to change and I, and Cody and I have been working on this for months and just kind of like under the radar, but then there's also like other things happening with the podcasts and the things that we're going to be doing too. Um, that is all very carefully calculated. So when I jumped from top to topic topic, yeah, I have ADD. 00:14:48.86 evergrowmarketing Um, and in the podcast, I do that a lot, but that doesn't mean I actually do that. Um, so ah having a plan is very important. In fact, if you listen to the episode about like, I can't remember which episode it was, but it was ah about like having a plan or just doing things, like just, just do things. Um, Cody and I are actually opposite Cody will start things before, like before me, um, or that's, that was what your advice was. Your advice was like, just start. I'm like, well. 00:15:17.70 evergrowmarketing Like I like, it was weird. It was a weird kind of like change of hats. 00:15:21.61 Cody Well, I think it's because of, based on both of our experiences and who we talk to, what we want to tell people is the the opposite of what we would normally think. Like most of the people I know that I ended up talking to are just, they're more engineer type. 00:15:35.51 Cody So they're, they're over planning. Like look at, at some point you just got to draw a line and then jump because you can plan forever. 00:15:41.84 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:15:43.36 Cody Right. 00:15:44.68 evergrowmarketing He said one, go ahead. 00:15:45.00 Cody But yeah, yeah you talk to the people who are the opposite. 00:15:46.02 evergrowmarketing Sorry. 00:15:48.10 Cody They're like, they're doing all these things and you're like, well, you just got to slow down. 00:15:48.37 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:15:51.46 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:15:51.80 Cody Right. Slow down it and figure one thing out, but good. 00:15:55.15 evergrowmarketing He said, he said one more thing and then we'll move on. Um, which I thought was weird. Uh, but he said that I was so comfortable on camera and he strives to be like that. I'm like, you're so wrong about that. Like I have never once filmed a YouTube video. I'm, I'm, I'm going to, well, like I'm, as so I'm saying I'm going to here soon and we'll get that to that and the rest of the podcast. But. 00:16:16.23 evergrowmarketing Right now, i am not i don't mentally, I'm not on video. I'm on a video chat with you. And that's all this is. There just happens to be a camera recording the conversation. 00:16:27.16 Cody Right. 00:16:27.26 evergrowmarketing And when we first recorded episode 36, I had no idea when that episode was going to air. and so um then now that they're just on, like it's as if it wasn't even recording. So that's how I treat these now. And and I'm going to attempt to record my own video on YouTube. That's like looking at the camera. And I even got like a second camera right there um for the, for the angle shots. So I'm like so terrified, honestly. So cool that he thinks that, but that's not the case. 00:17:02.60 Cody Yeah, it, uh, it reminds me, I think about it a lot. You know, Mark used to say, it's the phrase that I repeat a lot, but the first six months a new employee is an attack on the culture. That that's the business context, but I think it it applies everywhere in your life. You know, when you have, when you bring new people into your life anywhere, 00:17:30.53 Cody They, and it goes both ways, right? If you don't have strong convictions about yourself, then, then you might find yourself changing too. But what you accept and deem as normal or healthy, right? If you're not paying conscious attention to it, it'll start to slip and slide. So we've had lots of times where we have to just do self-corrections. Self-corrections or, sorry, I guess, corrections to other people. Um, to just point out, look, I know that's normal. 00:17:59.89 Cody Uh, but it's not healthy. So we don't do that here. Right. It's like the, the meme. Like we don't do that here, but, but for real, um, ah some of that stuff and people could say I'm hypersensitive to some of it. 00:18:06.36 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:18:15.42 Cody Negativity really gets me. the I think the biggest one is complaining. I really don't like complainers. 00:18:20.11 evergrowmarketing i Yeah, that bothers me. um There's that quote, I can't remember who said it. It's like a Ben Franklin thing. And it was, or James Madison, one of those guys, one of those old dead white guys. They said, what was it? It was something, ah like, I can't remember exactly, I'm terrible at quotes, but it was like bringing up something without a solution is complaining. And anytime someone is like, this sucks, and they leave it at that, I'm like, dude, but go away. 00:18:49.03 Cody Right. Yeah. the I guess clarification, because in one way, this sounds like we're just complaining about complainers. um There's they're saying, I don't like this or I hate this or this sucks. 00:18:57.14 evergrowmarketing Shit. 00:19:01.11 Cody And ah that if you just leave things at that. I don't know what to say. I'm like, this is this is weird. This is a weird way to to make friends if this is just how you go about talking about things, because everybody I surround myself with now We're talking about the things that we're doing. We're talking about things optimistically, what we're working on, where we're going. I mean, there's nothing but time and room and space to talk about those awesome things. So when you default, and for a lot of people, it's not even their fault. It's just what they were surrounded with. I was surrounded with it growing up. You don't talk about what you're going to do, what's possible, because when you do, you just get hit with, well, yeah, but is that going to work? Are you worried about this? I'm like, 00:19:47.10 Cody Okay. There are people I want to listen to about that. And it's probably not you whoever's, whoever's saying that there are times for legitimate concerns and things like that. 00:19:51.38 evergrowmarketing yeah 00:19:55.51 Cody But from people I barely know, or from people who really, I think this is the biggest one, the people who just don't know. Right. If I'm taking business advice from people, it's not people not running businesses. 00:20:09.68 evergrowmarketing That's I think that's fair. 00:20:11.09 Cody Right. I, I'm, I don't care. I don't care. It's not that. and Mike Andes once said this, he had a really good point too. if he what did What do you say? If he only listened to people richer than him, he wouldn't listen to anybody because he's one of the richest guys in the room, wherever he goes. 00:20:27.57 Cody um 00:20:27.67 evergrowmarketing That's such a flex. 00:20:30.16 Cody He's like, but, you know, people just because they're not as rich as me doesn't mean that they have important points in different parts of their life. But that's where I think you you do a critical evaluation of their lives and think, is that something that I want to take and adopt because it's a good thing that they're doing. 00:20:49.66 Cody Right. Cause I agree with that. Nobody's, some people are so specific about it where they're like, I don't want to listen to anybody who's not a hundred percent better than me and everything that I want to be. Nobody is, you're not going to find that it's not realistic, but you can take bits and pieces of people that you admire and um respect and integrate those things. And I think that's a better and healthier approach. 00:21:13.56 evergrowmarketing I did that in a lot of ways. 00:21:16.63 Cody Yeah. Sorry. 00:21:17.70 evergrowmarketing Wow, that was long. 00:21:18.36 Cody ah yeah That it was like, we had a guy complain about a cold open and we just want 20 minutes. 00:21:18.38 evergrowmarketing All right. 00:21:23.43 Cody Okay. 00:21:23.75 evergrowmarketing yeah 00:21:24.62 Cody News headlines without details. I pulled this one up. I thought this was fun. Uh, this is from the verge. Google maps is cracking down on fake reviews. 00:21:32.82 evergrowmarketing Another knot. 00:21:39.00 Cody How does that make you feel? 00:21:41.46 evergrowmarketing Uh, so yeah, so I haven't read this article, but, um, 00:21:47.48 evergrowmarketing it makes me feel like it's just a statement for the purpose of being a statement because they've been cracking down. They've been quote crack cracking down on reviews for a while now. And it's not just like, um, 00:22:03.66 evergrowmarketing It's actually doing, I think it's doing more harm than good because it's like shielding actual legitimate reviews from being published. And then on top of that, they don't have a support team to really support the actual review process. So, um, reviews get removed or like, you know, legitimate ones get removed and it's kind of like, you guys don't even know what you're doing. Um, but I did read the sub header under this though. So I kind of cheated and it says the service will now restrict reviews on places that post fake and warm users about such behavior. 00:22:33.09 evergrowmarketing So, um i actually i so I actually already know what this article is about because I read it in I think search engine land, and like a couple of days ago. And I think this, I think that is, we'll see because um how does, how is Google determining potential fake reviews? And if it's about like, and like a super huge increase in consistency, 00:22:58.71 evergrowmarketing or frequency, then review platforms or review ah tools like nice job or even like high level or bird eye are going to have to put implementations in for like how many reviews you can get in a certain amount of time before you get this like a warning label on your Google business profile. 00:23:18.91 evergrowmarketing um If it's like Google is just allowing reviews like to, to stick, um, versus like holding them in purgatory, like they were before to to justify, um, whether it's like good or not, then. I guess this is this review is better than holding like, or this thing is like better than holding legitimate reviews in purgatory. Cause I assume this label is only going to apply to like fake positive reviews. 00:23:49.15 Cody I mean, in theory, right? Who can say, um, I don't know. I, I think my gut is that this is probably going to be more good than bad. Although the people that it is bad for and does hurt will be especially bad. Um, because I think they haven't really done enough up until recently. Right. 00:24:12.15 Cody Um, we've all seen it where overnight somebody gets 80 reviews and you know, they're incentivized, right? We've gone to restaurants where they have like a leave a five star review and get a free something, right? Like you can't and people have been. So. 00:24:30.18 Cody They have to do something. And I guess this is one way to I think it explicitly calls out something really close to that. um I was reading it. I'm doing a bad job. 00:24:40.94 Cody It's not even long, but. 00:24:43.56 evergrowmarketing Well, it's the Verge, so... 00:24:45.43 Cody Yeah. Yeah. 00:24:47.51 evergrowmarketing Oh my God. 00:24:47.94 Cody ah 00:24:48.11 evergrowmarketing It is super short. It's like three paragraphs. 00:24:52.42 Cody It's probably just a rehash of another one somewhere else, but yeah. 00:24:56.57 evergrowmarketing Yeah. Oh, it was, yeah. I see a round table. I think it was where I saw it, which they linked to in it. 00:25:03.55 Cody Yeah, we'll see mixed deals. Could be good. Could be bad. I guess it's kind of cool to be doing something. 00:25:06.61 evergrowmarketing This is like when, this is like when Amazon started labeling and they started putting, um, frequently returned labels on items by Amazon sellers. 00:25:14.68 Cody I said that Jenny got really mad because I was looking at something. 00:25:16.09 evergrowmarketing And so like. 00:25:19.91 Cody I was like, but it says frequently returned. She's like, don't listen. Don't trust. Don't listen to that stuff. I'm like, I don't, I'm just a guy. 00:25:26.27 evergrowmarketing I think that's, so I think that's really bad for like clothing because like Lauren and I will, we'll buy, um, like we bought our costumes, we spent $1,800 on our costumes for Halloween and okay. 00:25:28.03 Cody I don't know. 00:25:39.11 Cody That's disgusting. 00:25:40.11 evergrowmarketing But, but this is why, because we bought like three different sizes from like six different retailers for two different costumes. And then we're going to where try the ones on that actually work and then send all the rest back. 00:25:54.52 evergrowmarketing So. That that's just like what everybody does if you're an Amazon. 00:25:58.21 Cody So you didn't really spend it because you're going to get, okay. 00:26:00.54 evergrowmarketing Right, right. But but all of those got returned. 00:26:02.95 Cody I was worried, dude. 00:26:03.44 evergrowmarketing Right. So. 00:26:04.23 Cody I was like, how much that is in Vanguard that could have been. 00:26:08.00 evergrowmarketing So all of those got returned, which means like that just clothing in general runs the risk of having having that frequently returned label on it. However, if I am looking at like entertainment centers or furniture and it says frequently returned, I will be listening to that. 00:26:27.70 Cody Yeah, she said don't I don't know why ah I should probably ask her. 00:26:29.89 evergrowmarketing Because she sells things on Amazon. 00:26:32.60 Cody Well, I think her point is that it's not reliable. um But I don't know why she'll say so after. 00:26:38.00 evergrowmarketing I, well, I, I just, I have a rule now. My rule is never buy furniture on Amazon. That's that's the rule. So I had to return, I had to return to three TV stains in a row because they were either broken or damaged or they didn't like assemble properly. 00:26:44.78 Cody Online furniture and job. Right. 00:26:54.72 evergrowmarketing And then um I bought a couch on Amazon, which I still have, but it's just awful and terrible. And in fact, my review had like 3000 like votes on it. Cause I was like, it's just so bad. But, uh, then I actually spent the same amount of money on that couch. It was like 1200 bucks. I so spent the same amount on like a two seat or a love seat for upstairs, but like from an actual furniture company. And they sent the whole thing in one piece. I'm like, this is the way to go. This, cause it's, it's so nice now. 00:27:22.19 Cody Plus you can always use it as an excuse to go to Ikea. You can have some meatballs, wander the maze, try to find. 00:27:28.24 evergrowmarketing We haven't, we've been in Minnesota for three years and we haven't been to the IKEA once. 00:27:34.72 Cody It's fun. 00:27:35.60 evergrowmarketing I know what I, we went a lot. Um, just walked around in Kansas city, but the, it was closer. 00:27:43.31 Cody I think that's the only one. No, no. Cause I think I've been to the one in Chicago too, but that's the one I've been to the most is in Minnesota. 00:27:50.03 evergrowmarketing Yeah. Th th this one's right across the mall of America, like right across the street. 00:27:53.36 Cody That's why. Yeah. 00:27:54.11 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:27:54.37 Cody Like you can just walk there if you go to mall of America. 00:27:57.49 evergrowmarketing Yeah, and we can pretty much walk to Mall of America. 00:28:00.76 Cody Yeah. 00:28:01.35 evergrowmarketing No, that's 20 minutes away, but... 00:28:03.16 Cody but It's a hefty walk. 00:28:05.73 evergrowmarketing All right, let's talk about some drama. 00:28:10.86 Cody so 00:28:11.43 evergrowmarketing So there's been some drama in the WordPress community, and I'm assuming the list... You guys know, listeners, because you clicked the the title of this. It was very indicative of the WordPress drama. 00:28:25.68 evergrowmarketing But this like all started with, it came to my attention because one guy I follow posted something from Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of automatic slash wordpress dot.org and was like totally dumping on WP engine, which I thought was weird because I'm like, WP engine is like the WordPress host. That's like, that's like, when you think of, I want the best WordPress hosting, you go to WP engine. 00:28:53.40 Cody It's in the name, right? 00:28:53.63 evergrowmarketing um 00:28:54.81 Cody I mean, WP. 00:28:55.14 evergrowmarketing Right. Well, that's the problem, right? Uh, so, um, that was like the first thing I was like, well, that's weird. Um, you know, then I didn't really think anything of it. And then I saw an article that WP or that the CEO, Matt Monowag at word camp 2024 in, in the U S on the 20th. 00:29:20.58 evergrowmarketing Like literally had like 14 slides, just throwing WP engine onto the bus and literally calling them a cancer to WordPress. I'm like, okay, we're getting a little spicy here. So, um, there is a lot to unpack with this. And this is what I want to do on my video about because it, it. 00:29:39.88 evergrowmarketing I went a bit deep on it, like there were cease and desist sent and there were some receipts and this doesn't feel like the typical big company punishing a smaller company. um This feels like a child throwing a temper tantrum. And with with how it was, how it was. um Um, I guess brought to the public. 00:30:04.38 evergrowmarketing So Cody, you know a little bit about it, but then I went deep on it and I remember we were having our meeting last night. I'm like, I can't say too much about it because I, I wanted to save it for the podcast, but you already know, like a very healthy amount because I just, I just couldn't stop myself from, from telling you. 00:30:12.57 Cody He wanted to just save it. Yeah. 00:30:21.58 evergrowmarketing Um, so. 00:30:22.08 Cody Yeah. I did basic research too. I mean, not as nearly as much as you, but I got the general premise and then I just checked with you like, am I getting it right? you're Like, yeah, you got like 90% of it. So. 00:30:32.27 evergrowmarketing Yeah. So, okay. So I'm going to, this video that I'm going to do, I'm going to set the stage. Like what is WordPress? What is WP engine? I'll do like a brief overview here for those of you who aren't um in the web design space or in like the WordPress space. Maybe you do Wix and you do whatever, and this is just not in your realm. So we's we'll back up for a second. 00:30:51.72 evergrowmarketing So um for starters, WordPress dot.org is an open source platform for web creators. That is like, um it's free. And there's a difference between WordPress dot.com and WordPress dot.org. So the dot .com version is like a, it's kind of like a Wix, but WordPress owned. So like they have free sites and they make money by selling advertising and things like that on your free sites. 00:31:13.07 evergrowmarketing ah WordPress dot.org is like basically a foundation. it's ah it's a not It's a nonprofit where you can literally download WordPress, ah the CMS for free, and you can upload it or you can use it on hosts like Bluehost and GoDaddy and um HostGator. ah We use MDD, shout out MDD. and 00:31:32.20 Cody shout out 00:31:33.11 evergrowmarketing um And you can modify those files any way you want. That's the point of open source. So another really good, two really good examples of open source technology is Android. Android was created by Google, but Samsung uses Android, HTC uses Android, Motorola uses Android, Google uses Android. And when you get a phone from those providers, um it always comes with different things. So like Samsung always comes with Yahoo stuff. Google phones always come with Google stuff. 00:31:59.33 evergrowmarketing And that's because they are baking that into the open source operating system. Same thing with, um, Chrome. So Google Chrome. 00:32:05.21 Cody Let's say Chrome. 00:32:06.15 evergrowmarketing Yep. 00:32:06.29 Cody Yeah. 00:32:06.94 evergrowmarketing That's built off of chromium. So Firefox and edge are all built off of those. 00:32:11.28 Cody Wait, Firefox, isn't that right? 00:32:11.32 evergrowmarketing Um, yeah, it's built off of chromium Mozilla. 00:32:14.46 Cody For real. 00:32:15.20 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:32:15.23 Cody I thought that was the big thing. I thought that was our whole thing was that they're, they're not off of. 00:32:20.93 evergrowmarketing Firefox platform. um Um, I'm fairly certain it is because I googled. So like here, what? 00:32:28.79 Cody It's Firefox. Oh, it autofilled. 00:32:31.91 evergrowmarketing Oh, I thought it was the Google's. 00:32:32.71 Cody Firefox is not based on chromium. 00:32:36.41 Cody Yeah, because i they're taking over. 00:32:37.25 evergrowmarketing I got that from Google's AI overview. So I'm glad we, I'm glad we talked about this before I filmed my video because I'm like, I would look like an idiot. 00:32:45.24 Cody Yeah, no, I remember reading article a while back that talked about basically why Firefox is so important. um When it comes to browsers and stuff, because everything is, if everything keeps going with being built off of chromium, that's really dangerous internet feature, right? 00:33:00.79 Cody Or 00:33:00.85 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:33:01.62 Cody Google maintains so much control. So support Firefox. um I say that. 00:33:05.28 evergrowmarketing Well, that's very, this is very poignant than this whole WordPress thing because WordPress, um, wordpress dot.org sites are 40% of the internet. So it's pretty huge. Um, so, uh, moving on, I'm just looking at my notes for the video that I'm going to, I want to record. So, um, anyways, um, 00:33:26.44 evergrowmarketing So the only thing WordPress asks you to do in order for them to make money is to contribute to the community, or not even make money, but contribute in some way. And they define contributing by like donating time to WordPress support forums, developing WordPress software, testing WordPress, um reporting bugs, contributing codes, things like that. They don't ask you that of users or people who are building WordPress websites. They ask that of like hosts and developers and people who are using WordPress to make money off of it. 00:33:54.66 evergrowmarketing Technically, we fall into that category because we're building our sites off of WordPress, but we're not developing plugins or like contributing to WordPress's own servers, which costs WordPress money, um or I guess automatic, the the parent company. um So the way that they make money, the way that WordPress makes money or automatic is they have other, they own other plugins that are paid like a Kismet and Jetpack. 00:34:20.98 evergrowmarketing um They make money on advertisements out of WordPress dot.com, and they even have the WordCamp's annual event, the WordCamp convention in which they make money off of sponsors and things like that. Interestingly enough, they have their own host, which is a direct competitor of WP Engine called Pressable. We'll put a pin in that and come back to that later. 00:34:42.52 evergrowmarketing Okay. So WP engine, what is that? Uh, it's WP engine is a hosting service. It's like, like I said earlier, it's like the WordPress hosting service. That's like where you go and you want the best. Of course you pay a premium for that. The other thing that they do is they, they take your control away. So, um, they take the, the only thing they allow you to edit C panel or anything like that. Um, and you're going to say something. 00:35:08.49 Cody Yeah, it's, I think the, the two words, if I had to sum it up, it's managed and it's skinned, right? So it's managed in that it's managed hosting. They charge the premium and then they take care of the the other things. 00:35:19.95 Cody So you don't get to see panel or anything like that. You just contact them if you need to. And they also take care of the things that you don't need to worry about with that. And then it's also skinned, like Jake was saying. So you log in and you're like, this isn't a WordPress it is. 00:35:32.90 Cody Right. But they've personalized it and made it unique to them. 00:35:33.33 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:35:36.53 evergrowmarketing So this is a, this is a perfect platform for like small business owners, um, or, um, like agencies because WP engine also has like an agency management dashboard where you can, um, access all of your client sites, super easily log in custom login, um, pages and things like that. Um, 00:35:59.77 evergrowmarketing And just for size perspective, WP engine is, uh, does 400 million in revenue. They have 1100 employees. And, um, what, what automatic is like four or five times that size, like they're here, the automatics and the billions and revenue, um, the company that owns, uh, wordpress dot.org. 00:36:22.03 Cody Wait, wait, hold on. ah So automatic owns wordpress dot.org or .com. 00:36:26.09 evergrowmarketing Yeah, both. 00:36:29.94 Cody Really? 00:36:30.70 evergrowmarketing Yeah. So we're, so WordPress, the WordPress foundation is what is the nonprofit that owns wordpress dot.org, which is the nonprofit entity underneath automatic. 00:36:41.32 Cody Okay. 00:36:43.13 evergrowmarketing Yeah. So if you go to automatic dot.com with an automatic, that's three T's that's auto. And then Matic is two T's. Um, so they say we can, we also contribute to a number of nonprofit open sources like wordpress dot.org, but that is their nonprofit. 00:37:01.17 Cody That's kind of funny. 00:37:02.47 evergrowmarketing Yeah. So, um, yeah, I mean, they own, I mean, everything, everything WordPress dot.org, they automatic owns the copyrights to the trademarks. 00:37:12.91 Cody Geez, wait, they on tumblr. 00:37:14.37 evergrowmarketing Yeah. They bought, they bought Tumblr a couple of years ago, actually during our podcast. I think we talked about it, um, in a cold open. 00:37:19.77 Cody Geez, I have not. I don't know. I don't know this stuff. I'm like really out of my, out of my depth here. 00:37:23.25 evergrowmarketing Yeah. Yeah. They're, they're, they're pretty big. 00:37:25.54 Cody Long reads. That's fun though. 00:37:27.76 evergrowmarketing Um, okay. So what's the beef? Uh, well, basically, um, automatic wants WP engine to contribute more to WordPress. Given that given their size for a million dollar empire. But according to Matt Mullenweg, they only contribute 47 hours to back to WordPress that, um, but, uh, or for the things that I previously mentioned, which are. 00:37:56.89 evergrowmarketing community building documentation, training, and education. Um, there's five of those, five of those things. They call them five for the future, um, that they want people to, or hosts and developers to contribute back to. Um, so Matt's argument is that WP engine is only contributing 47 hours per week, which is basically two full time employees, um, or one full time and like one part time. 00:38:20.71 evergrowmarketing um Despite the organization having 1100 people in the organization, while automatic is contributing about 3900 hours. And my like, my side note on that was like, well, I hope so. Because that is your thing WordPress, like five of the future in WordPress dot.org is your thing. If you're not spending the most amount of time on it, like why are you even comparing yourself to other companies that are just using the product that you gave out for free? 00:38:47.43 evergrowmarketing Anyways, back up for a second. So it gets really juicy, because WP Engine sends automatic a cease and desist for these statements that Matt said on stage that I previously mentioned. But um I think we want to back up. And this is a good part to, ah ah here we go. OK. 00:39:15.74 evergrowmarketing um Basically, this all starts out because all the public knows at this point is that Matt went absolutely nuclear on stage at word camp and during his keynote speech on the 20th. And public was like, whoa, what is going on? 00:39:34.79 Cody Well, to say, to say you went nuclear, I did watch the video. He does. He's not, he doesn't sound crazy or anything. 00:39:41.17 evergrowmarketing Right. Yeah. 00:39:42.12 Cody It's just what he's talking about. 00:39:42.11 evergrowmarketing It's. Yeah. 00:39:43.52 Cody You're like, whoa, this is kind of weird. 00:39:45.31 evergrowmarketing Yeah. So. 00:39:45.62 Cody Right. 00:39:46.24 evergrowmarketing um Um, but he, yeah, yeah, it goes, so it's not nuclear in the keynote. 00:39:48.63 Cody He sounds chill. He sounds calm and collected. 00:39:53.26 evergrowmarketing What's nuclear is the text messages and the receipts and the cease and desist, which is why I like reading these notes. It seems weird that I'm going from like, what is WordPress to what is WP engine to like season desist, but like the season desist lays out the timeline of like, what's what has actually happened. 00:40:10.37 Cody Right. Who sent it to who? 00:40:11.62 evergrowmarketing So WP engine sent it to, um, uh, automatic. 00:40:16.74 Cody Kind of weird, but okay. 00:40:18.09 evergrowmarketing Yeah. So, um, basically in the season to says it starts out by started by stating that on September 17th and 19th, one or on one of a few calls automatic CFO Mark Davies told a WP engine board member that automatic would quote, go to war. If WP engine didn't agree to pay automatic a significant percentage of its gross revenues, tens of millions, apparently. 00:40:48.42 evergrowmarketing So this is, so automation or WP engine wrote, quote, tens of millions in, in the season to assist. And so when I read that, I'm like, well, okay. Maybe that's just like their interpretation of what that is. Um, I'm not going to, I'm not going to take that at face value for right now, but I'll come to that. We'll come back to that. Anyways, this sounds a lot like extortion. So, um, Mark suggested, uh, 00:41:13.46 evergrowmarketing that this marks, so Mark Davies, the CFO, he suggested that this was for the use of trademarks like WordPress and um and WP Engine is saying that it's it's not needed for two reasons. One, it's under fair use in the US trademark law as they use the platform within their services. I'm not a lawyer, but the way I understand it is if you use a service in your services or if you use a software and as part of your services, you can you you can say that you do that And, um, on your website for whatever reason, but I don't know, maybe it was a great area. I'm not understanding. 00:41:48.29 Cody and Well, I, I imagine, yeah, I guess I don't know fair use. I don't know it. It's weird to me. I think to me, it sounds like you register a trademark and then you get to decide what happens with it. 00:41:59.86 Cody Right. But maybe not. 00:42:00.42 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:42:01.11 Cody Maybe if it's, maybe if it's fair use, then you, but it seems weird to register it then. I don't know. I don't know. 00:42:08.91 evergrowmarketing It's fair. It's not, I mean, you can't say you are WordPress or you can't pretend you are. And like, that's, you know, like if someone wrote an article about us and they were like, ever go marketing does this and we, or like we white labeled services and like, yeah, we use ever marketing. 00:42:22.25 evergrowmarketing They put our label, our logo on the site. Then it's kind of like, it's kind of fair use because you're informing the public. You use us as a service. 00:42:30.08 Cody Mm hmm. 00:42:30.72 evergrowmarketing Um, I don't know. 00:42:31.44 Cody Hey, I want to ask you to. 00:42:31.73 evergrowmarketing I, that's how I interpret it. 00:42:34.68 Cody When you and I might be making you jump around, but so he said, hey, we need money. As has this happened before, are there other companies that they've worked out with and been like, hey, look, just the the whole situation of you need to pull your weight? 00:42:54.17 Cody Has he has this mad guy or the rest of the peeps there? gone to other companies and said, listen, like they they show up in the suits, right? They look like FBI. 00:43:04.26 evergrowmarketing And the baseball bats. Yeah. 00:43:05.79 Cody Yeah. Yeah. And they're like, Hey, you're not really pulling your weight. You gotta, you gotta start helping out. Or is this like a new precedent? 00:43:13.94 evergrowmarketing Not to my knowledge, to my knowledge, this is like the first time it's happened. So it it could have been, but I doubt at the scale that this is, because this, again, this is allegedly tens of millions of dollars. 00:43:26.33 evergrowmarketing Um, however, let's pretend like the fair use thing didn't even apply. It's literally in WordPress's own guidelines that they can use WordPress and the logos provided they contribute again, quote unquote contribute, but it's subjective. There's no like precedence and how much they need to contribute. However, it gets a little juicier. So in the letter it stated from September 19th to 20th, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of automatic. 00:43:52.31 evergrowmarketing Threatened WP engines, board members that he'd go quote nuclear. So that's where the term nuclear comes from on WP engine. 00:43:57.91 Cody Oh, okay. 00:43:58.48 evergrowmarketing If they didn't meet automatic demands by Matt's keynote speech at word camp at 3 45 PM on September 20th. So, um, this started on the, according to this, it started on the 17th. 00:44:09.19 Cody So how many days? 00:44:13.91 evergrowmarketing They gave him three days, which is insane. 00:44:15.44 Cody Three days. 00:44:17.59 evergrowmarketing Um. So dude, yeah, this is like some Dr. 00:44:18.95 Cody That's like a movie like a 00:44:21.90 evergrowmarketing Evil shit. 00:44:23.08 Cody It's like the Zelda, the one the in time one or whatever. 00:44:23.37 evergrowmarketing like 00:44:26.37 Cody Isn't that all you have is you have 72 hours or whatever and the whole thing. 00:44:28.59 evergrowmarketing Oh, your Majora's mask. 00:44:29.98 Cody Yeah. You got to keep turning back time. 00:44:30.42 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:44:31.34 Cody It's not enough time. 00:44:31.73 evergrowmarketing Yeah. So, so normally what happens is, is like in a normal business is. You, you recognize a problem. You meet with the owners and then there is like a ah long window of like, okay, we need to make some adjustments here. Like we need to see improvement from you or you need to contribute this. There's not like, and it's usually like 30, 60, 90 days. There's a timeline, but this is like three days. You're going to pay us tens of millions of dollars or like we're going to destroy your brand. 00:45:00.22 evergrowmarketing And like that on its own is insane. Um, if there was a misalignment and how much they should contribute, that should have been discussed. And maybe it was, maybe there was conversations before September 17th that we're not aware of. 00:45:13.08 Cody Right yeah. 00:45:14.21 evergrowmarketing However, none of the date dates or receipts or anything like that extend before September 17th that I found. So maybe more will come out once they go to court because they most certainly will. 00:45:27.17 evergrowmarketing Um, but. Okay, go on. So it mentions things in here, um, that like, uh, so automatic, they came with receipts and they provided screenshots of texts. And, um, this is, oh, I should just, I should pull up. I didn't even have the, uh, um, the cease and desist pulled up. Here we go. Okay. So. 00:45:53.95 evergrowmarketing Uh, the first seasoned assist or the first screenshot says, if I'm going to make the case of the WP community about why we're banning WP engine, I needed to do it in my talk tomorrow. So this, and this is on the 19th. Um, your delaying is just trying to remove that. So like before WP engine even responded to this, they got another text. 00:46:17.76 evergrowmarketing And it says, I have four, this is from Matt, CEO of automatic about to go on stage. He goes, I have 14 slides so far, working title for the talk, how private equity can hollow out and destroy open source communities. A story on four parts. I've got quote quotes from current and former employees. Some may even stand up and speak as well. Like imagine you're the CEO of WP engine and you're like, what the hell? Like out of just nowhere. And so, um, 00:46:45.96 evergrowmarketing Um, so that morning of the 20th, um, Matt texted just called, should I run these slides or not? So assuming you guys voicemail is next week in negotiation on the percent or, or it happening at all. I'm not going to be able to walk it back. I know this, I know that this is the nuclear option. It sets us down a specific path. 00:47:09.26 evergrowmarketing So then there's like some, some context on the season basis right after that, where it says when WP engine CEO and board member offered to speak with Mr. Mullenweg, the following week to have a business discussion, Matt refused instead electing to manipulate WP engine into but paying automatic by using fear-based pressure. Those are this the words in the season to assist. Those aren't mine. Um, so. 00:47:32.61 Cody So according to the CS&SS, the WP Engine wanted to meet with them at all. 00:47:38.16 evergrowmarketing According, yes, according to WP engine, CSUN desist, WP engine offered to meet next week, um, ah to, to talk. And then Matt refused and said, this is another a screenshot. If you're saying next week in quotes, that's saying, quote, no. So I will proceed with the scorched earth nuclear approach to WP engine. Thank you for the clarity. It gives me time to work on things and hone my message, which like this. 00:48:02.75 evergrowmarketing Those two screenshots next to each other seem weird to me because the previous one said, is next week a negotiation on the percent or it not happening at all? And then the next one says, Oh, you, if you say next week, that means no. I'm like, you literally just asked him if next week was a negotiation on percentage. 00:48:21.07 Cody Mmm yeah. 00:48:22.65 evergrowmarketing And so, um, the final message he sent, the final two messages he sent was a, a picture of the audience as he's about to go on stage. And then like, this is in the season deist to assist too. And it says that the caption under it is I'm literally waiting for them to finish the raffle. So my talk can start. I can make it just a Q and a about WordPress very easily. 00:48:48.34 evergrowmarketing I'm like, this is so psychotic. like I just feel like it gives it like a whole new context watching this speech again, just seeing this and knowing this is going on behind the curtain right before it comes on. 00:49:04.49 Cody Yeah, that's that every point and every step along the way, I'm trying to flip this and look at the, the inverse story and timeline here. Right. Because WP engine is, is VC backed. No, they're not VC backed. They're owned by private equity. 00:49:26.15 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:49:27.92 Cody I'm already skeptical, right? I mean, that right there makes me just wonder how much is not being told or how much of this story is manipulated or right. And this is, this is what we know so far, right? And I'm not saying I disagree with you. I think everything that you're saying makes sense. Um, but I wonder, I wonder why, right? 00:49:56.02 Cody Why did he choose to do it this way? I think everybody's wondering why he chose it to do it this way, right? 00:50:00.42 evergrowmarketing I talked to Lauren about this and I, and she goes, and she was like, um, she goes right now. I don't really care about the timeline because the, the way that this was done is already indicative of somebody who needs money for the sake of needing money. And this, this isn't like, this isn't a business decision. This is, this is automatic or WordPress dot.org is scared of something and they're trying to extort money. 00:50:26.33 Cody Yeah. um Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that we all are concerned about WordPress at the moment. And I am. 00:50:40.12 evergrowmarketing Yeah, I don't know about all. I don't know about everybody, but I know we are. and 00:50:43.49 Cody I think people should be if they're not. 00:50:43.85 evergrowmarketing um 00:50:45.49 Cody There's a lot of things that we've been asking for ah and they're not happening or not happening fast enough. And um Part of me wonders, I don't know if, I don't know if this is right or good. Um, and I don't mean like legally or ethically. I mean, like just for the company and what needs to happen to, for the future of WordPress to be in a good position. We talked to Wix and this was what I said was I'm like, look, I think the Wix is of the world. They're having a opportunity right now. The commercial solutions are having the opportunity because people aren't getting what they need as fast as they need it anymore. WordPress isn't adopting. 00:51:22.88 Cody the things that it needs quickly enough, in my opinion. 00:51:25.90 evergrowmarketing but privacy first compliance, native CDNs, things like that. 00:51:26.49 Cody Um, exactly. Yep. I mean, to me, the privacy thing is just what blows my mind. I mean, how is that not built into WordPress by now? 00:51:37.36 Cody Some sort of, some sort of, uh, privacy solution, right? How is that not, how is that not a thing already? 00:51:43.38 evergrowmarketing Yeah. but And the argument is that like it's going to require money to... um They're going to be charged by data to store all of that information. 00:51:54.86 evergrowmarketing But that doesn't mean you can't bake something in and then. 00:51:58.39 Cody I just mean a configuration, right? 00:51:59.73 evergrowmarketing Yeah. And yeah, turn it on and off, put your credit card details in or whatever, and use WordPress's native plugin. 00:52:05.73 Cody They have a privacy page setting in the admin, right? I'm just saying something like that, right? A switch that says, yes, I want to turn on a cookie banner. Right? 00:52:15.94 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:52:16.49 Cody That's not crazy. That's not. um So I, and I think 00:52:26.23 Cody There's an angle at this that says making this spicy and entertaining brings attention to this from people who normally wouldn't pay attention. And maybe that's what they need right now because they've been going down this current path and they haven't been getting enough of, I don't know, support money, whatever. And that this approach could. 00:52:50.54 Cody do that for them. Of course, the, the quote, responsible adult way that you do this is you contact your lawyer and you say, Hey, um, we got a problem. And then they talked to their lawyers and they say, understood, received, we're going to do some talking. And then of course it's really long and bureaucratic and a waste of time and money. But. 00:53:14.06 Cody it prevents things like this from happening. Um, that's kind of the, especially, especially if companies are their size, right. 00:53:24.09 evergrowmarketing Yeah. 00:53:24.94 Cody Um, this is weird to to hear this sort of stuff of somebody that big. Um, but also I think the internet is what enabled some of this to happen. Right. Um, because this is, we're still living in the age where people who were big internet entrepreneurs who came from, you know, relatively little and became massive, huge, just insanely wealthy or important, popular, famous, whatever the word you is you want to use. And. 00:53:55.23 Cody Maybe they're not prepared for the level of success that they have. Um, or, and I'm saying this, I also recognize a deep irony of like us talking about this when I just talked about a guy saying, giving me critiques and advice about things that he knows nothing about. 00:54:13.81 evergrowmarketing from 00:54:16.67 Cody I don't know either, man. I don't want, I don't want to run a $400 million dollars company. I just want 10 million Vanguard, right? 00:54:22.91 evergrowmarketing um Well, Matt runs an over billion dollar company. his Allegedly, according to Google, Matt's net worth is $400 million. 00:54:27.72 Cody You. 00:54:31.24 evergrowmarketing dollars 00:54:32.48 Cody What are you doing, man? 00:54:34.42 evergrowmarketing Yeah, I know. 00:54:35.12 Cody Go buy, go buy a surfboard, go buy a surf shop, go buy Hawaii. 00:54:36.09 evergrowmarketing Isn't that worth hitting on Google? I know and know those and know those um figures are always wrong, but like but if his net worth is $400 million, dollars his net worth is bigger than the worth of WP Engine as a company. 00:54:49.98 evergrowmarketing So um there's two really there's there's two important things i want to I want to call out because the counter argument is that WP Engine needs to pull their weight. 00:54:51.44 Cody I can't, I can't relate to. Okay. 00:55:00.19 evergrowmarketing and um 00:55:02.13 Cody He's trying to muscle them to do it because they haven't been. 00:55:03.43 evergrowmarketing So, so Matt said that WP engine has spent 47 hours contributing per week on WordPress foundation, the of the five for the future. Whereas automatic spend 3900. I don't care what automatic spends because their project it's it's their thing. Um. 00:55:21.29 evergrowmarketing And in this cease and desist, there's like a bunch of defamatory statements that they call out and say like, you said this and like, that's not true. So like the one thing that Matt said was that WP Engine is is a company that feeds off of the WordPress ecosystem without giving anything back. And they, WP Engine responded and said, um well, contrary to that, WP Engine does in fact contribute quite a bit and said and so i'll read this statement here yeahbp engine has contributed tens of millions of dollars in ongoing support for the broader community through events 00:55:55.67 evergrowmarketing sponsorships and the development of educational resources including sponsorship of word camps worldwide and producing decode educating and empowering the WordPress community through content like WordPress, Roundup, and building WordPress series, hosting, funding, and actively maintaining multiple open source projects like ah ACF, so Advanced Custom Forms, w WP GraphQL, Faust that.js, with the ecosystem used by millions of websites around the world and producing informative webinars, podcasts, and tutorials. So, even though it's can even considering Mr. Mullenweg's incorrect statement that contribution is only based on hours worked and contributors defy for the future, 00:56:31.24 evergrowmarketing Matt stated, falsely stated that WP Engine is failing on this metric. In reality, WP Engine is ranked 30 out of 189 in hours contributed and 16 out of 189 in contributors. Now, the first thought is, okay, but given your size, you should contribute more. You should not be at 16 or 30. You should be at like two, three. 00:56:52.46 evergrowmarketing But they put in here significantly outpacing multiple other contributors relative to our revenue. So they're like, they even called out in their positioning. and Like there are other contributors who are the same size of the revenue as us who are not contributing or who aren't contributing as much as us, but you're coming after us for some reason. 00:57:10.36 evergrowmarketing So, um, so I, I don't, So though, so they're, they're ranked 30th out of 189 and hours contributed. 00:57:11.27 Cody Okay. Well, hold up there. They're 30th and they're 30th. And then you have Matt saying that you've hardly, you've worked a little bit of overtime this week for one person because that, that seems like there's a ah real lack of development and support happening that should be happening. 00:57:33.60 evergrowmarketing So an overall hours, but then what? 00:57:35.11 Cody So less than 50 last week, according to Matt. 00:57:38.70 evergrowmarketing Yeah. Less than 50 of the last week recording that. 00:57:39.00 Cody What? 00:57:40.79 evergrowmarketing So. 00:57:40.92 Cody Which is insane if, if you know, cause I'm just thinking, right? 00:57:43.60 evergrowmarketing Mm-hmm. 00:57:44.73 Cody Cause I know how, you know, lawyers want to phrase things and word things if they're saying, yeah, we're so good. And then they did 50 hours. 00:57:55.15 evergrowmarketing Yeah. So then they say, um, and they're ranked 16th out of 109 contributors. I don't know what that means. I don't know if that's like, like impact or like what the difference between 16 and 30 is. Um, however. 00:58:11.75 evergrowmarketing I, it could be like monetary. So like they might not be putting in the hours, but they're putting in the money. And like, whether that's like sponsorships or events or things like that. um And maybe that doesn't directly go into like automatic's pocket, but it goes into the WordPress community. I think that's what they're trying to say is like, yeah, we're we're not allocating resources to like specific WordPress community support, but we're we're allocating money. 00:58:38.11 evergrowmarketing Um, to the community. Um, so having said that, um, based on like, okay, so word or WP engine has 1100 employees. Um, oops. Uh, if you take it 1100, if you take that and you divide or you multiply that by. 00:58:58.80 evergrowmarketing What 40 hours per week divided by 52, uh, times 0.05. So Matt is now saying online that they need to contribute at least 5%. So they needed it. So a WP engine needs to be controlled and contributing 423 hours per week, which I guess makes sense. Like, like only on a, on a peer hourly basis, that makes sense. Like that's how much they should, but counter counter argument. If I was WP engine, I would say. 00:59:28.95 evergrowmarketing It's an open source project. Go screw yourself. like Like you made this open source so other companies can profit off of it. And we are contributing back to it. 00:59:40.17 evergrowmarketing The other, the other argument on that is how many people have, has WP engine brought to WordPress and as a platform? How many people have they brought to WordPress and as a consequence purchase WP or WordPress products like a Kismet or jetpack or, um, what other, what, or attended word camp because they're agencies that wanted to use WP engine or because they're business owners that didn't know WordPress, but wanted WordPress and not moved to WP engine. 01:00:07.66 evergrowmarketing That's just it's all subjective, but I think those are things that aren't being called out either. um And this is a consequence of being a an open source project is you will have companies that really contribute to the community, but you will also have companies who, I guess, quote unquote take advantage of it, but there are also consequences or unintended positive consequences of bringing people to the platform because of a perceived good business model. 01:00:38.32 evergrowmarketing And so that's like the main, that's that's my main point there. 01:00:42.47 Cody Mm hmm. 01:00:44.34 evergrowmarketing I had something else in here. So a lot of it, a lot of this is basically just misusing the WordPress trademark, which that's gonna be a whole litigation thing. um 01:00:53.63 Cody That feels like a different thing completely and from what he was talking about and then what what that would be. 01:00:56.18 evergrowmarketing Yeah, well. So they're basically saying that like you can use the trademark as long as you contribute. but they're saying you're not contributing so they can no longer use the trademark. 01:01:08.92 evergrowmarketing ah And that's kind of, yeah, that's, yeah, I know. 01:01:11.14 Cody That'll be real fun in court. Yeah. 01:01:14.15 evergrowmarketing It was it's all subjective. Like I think this, to be honest, I think this is a slam dunk case for WP engine because um WordPress's own policies state that they can use it as long as they contribute and they don't put they don't put any goalposts or anything on on how much they need to do it. 01:01:32.22 evergrowmarketing So, um but again, I'm not a lawyer. So the fallout of this basically is like, there are like people who are just in love with WordPress and don't care about WP engine as much who are like leaving WP engine and stating this publicly online that they're moving their services away. And this is like, so this is super detrimental to WP engine, but more importantly, what I think is this is like what WordPress did. So once they get received this cease and desist, 01:02:01.57 evergrowmarketing they then blocked WP Engine from accessing WordPress's servers. So they've just banned them. And one some things that you get from WordPress's servers are like their security or you get like automatic plugin updates or theme updates, like all that runs through WordPress servers. 01:02:18.48 evergrowmarketing And so when you when you're blocked from that, all of the sites that you now host can no longer be updated. And that is prone to security risks or just issues all across the board, plugin conflicts, theme conflicts, and thousands and thousands of sites are disrupted and just like like overnight. And Matt like posted this state this this blog post and was like, 01:02:45.63 evergrowmarketing If like, I can't remember, uh, have it in here. Um, I have a link to it and I'm like, that's insane. He's literally like, uh, blaming WP engine for all of this. So he said, um, WP in his post, it's called, uh, the pension is banned from WordPress.org. This is published two days ago, September 25th. 01:03:10.27 evergrowmarketing WP Engine needs trademark license. They don't have one. I won't bore you with the story of how WP Engine broke thousands of customer sites yesterday and their haphazard attempt to block our attempts to inform the wider WordPress community regarding the disabling and locking down of WordPress core feature in ah order to extract profit. So that's a chunky statement. So I'll break it down in a second. 01:03:28.75 evergrowmarketing um When WordPress went quote nuclear, or when Matt went nuclear on stage, WordPress has this like this news feed in the back of all WordPress dashboard site. It's building the core a theme of WordPress. It goes to their servers. So what what WP engine does is they're like, well, we provide a stripped down version of WordPress of the core files. And what we're going to try to do is we're going to filter or block that feed out from negative press about us. Because we don't believe that press is accurate. That's why we sent to cease and desist. 01:03:58.75 evergrowmarketing So when Matt found out about this on Twitter, that's when he decided to block WP engine from the servers, like, Oh, you're trying to block this negative press from our newsfeed into your websites. Then we were just going to get blocked from our servers. So when they did that and they were updating the site, it just blocked everything because now nothing could update. Um, so now they're saying WP engine broke all that. So what Matt, like this is like, um, 01:04:28.36 evergrowmarketing It's like the hero trying to play hero, but in a, in a way, like actually cause them more collateral damage. Because now all these businesses now had their sites just not decimated, but like interrupted because of this childish fight. Um, not doing things the adult way. So, um, 01:04:50.37 Cody Yeah, I don't know. It's like the stock market. The people who get screwed aren't the people trading. Um, the people who are hurt here aren't. I mean, ah yes, WP engine is in trouble, but you know, it was real trouble. Their customers. 01:05:10.29 evergrowmarketing yeah there's like i don't like going Going further from here is just going to be weird. so Do you want to take a wild guess at how ah WordPress automatic responded to the cease and desist um besides banning them? 01:05:29.89 Cody It was like Elon was it just on Twitter with a meme or something. 01:05:32.89 evergrowmarketing It was pretty close, but they also sent their own cease and desist. 01:05:35.97 Cody um Okay. 01:05:37.35 evergrowmarketing Um, which the only thing in their season to assist is the unfair use of their trademark. That's it. Um, they don't call out anything else in WP engine season to assist or anything like that. In fact, they validate a lot of the things that WP engine claimed in the season to assist. So when we back up and I say a lot of this is just like wording they're using like tens of millions. I don't know if that's true or not. And. 01:06:04.36 evergrowmarketing And WordPress's cease and desist, they say that they are asking for 8% of WP Engine's revenue of their $4 million dollars revenue for the use of their trademark, which is $32 million. dollars And so that tens of millions number is the thing I said was actually accurate. And what makes it like, what makes me want to cite a side of WP engine here is that they were trying to be like modest in their, um, in their, uh, season to assist by not naming figures, but they're just like tens of millions. Cause I know this is going to be public, but then like W or WordPress was just like, yeah, it's thirty we want $32 million dollars from you. So my notes on this is that. 01:06:50.40 evergrowmarketing If you're a WordPress host, I would be terrified right now um because at what point are they gonna come for you? And that goes like for any like WordPress developer or anything like that. And it just, it defeats the, this is literally like the opposite of capitalism. And now it's like going into communism. Like that's how I see this. I'm like, okay, now you're like, you created this free product, but now I actually have to pay for it. 01:07:19.64 evergrowmarketing um And you're setting arbitrary rules on how much I have to contribute. So but that's just all the context that we have, but um that's essentially the gist of this whole this whole fight. 01:07:35.52 Cody I'm going to hold out, hold now. I mean, I think that I don't think anybody's questioning whether or not, I mean, whether this was the right way to do it. I think that there are probably better ways. I think most people would say that there are better ways, but also maybe it was strategic. Maybe he wanted the attention for it. Maybe this is the attention that they need. 01:08:00.88 Cody maybe they've been lacking attention. And by doing this, they'll get more attention and that's kind of the big thing. And I don't know, there might be more to the story and I'm gonna hold out for it because I can imagine, I mean, the guy's frustrated, clearly. And if he's just slowly bleeding out here, not getting what he needs in order to keep things growing and he's just watching this dwindle, 01:08:30.79 Cody got to do something. Um, I don't think it was the right way to do it. Probably not. 01:08:35.69 evergrowmarketing So yeah, I think there's a couple of things that's that's weird that i'm I'm wanting to know. 01:08:36.06 Cody But 01:08:41.83 evergrowmarketing Here's what mine and Lauren's prediction is. I think it's gonna come out that automatic owes people some money, um whether it's the government, whether it's like other companies or whether whatever. I think that um that'll probably come out. 01:08:54.17 evergrowmarketing Maybe they're in debt um for some reason. and And this was like their attempt to make good on that or get get some fast cash on it. The other thing that's going to be really weird is like, this is WP engines, business model, like WordPress. 01:09:10.21 evergrowmarketing That's it. So if this relationship sours, like what are they going to do? Are they just going to be like, are they going to become, um, ghost engine? Like are they going to go to another open source? 01:09:21.73 Cody I do like Ghost. I find Ghost very interesting. 01:09:23.01 evergrowmarketing yeah 01:09:25.35 evergrowmarketing Uh, but are they going to go to another open source platform? Are they going to build their own CMS? Like what are they going to do? Um, and let's say that. They, let's say, let's say this blows over and they continue the relationship with WordPress and they decide to either pay the fee or WordPress decides or they, or they decided to contribute more hours or whatever. 01:09:50.92 evergrowmarketing That's a really toxic relationship to stay in. And that is really weird. So. 01:09:56.96 Cody Yeah, they definitely got to go on like a weekend retreat or something up in the mountains, cook some marshmallows, make some s'mores. I don't know. Tough to come back from that. 01:10:08.77 evergrowmarketing this is our This is our whole like like ah whole thing on like why you shouldn't build your playground and are you you shouldn't build your business in somebody else's playground. But this is like one of those unique cases where like someone was like, hey, I have all this playground a cri equipment you can have and you can build your own playground. 01:10:26.75 evergrowmarketing um I'd really love to see what you do with it. And then they're like, yeah, okay. And then like they built it and then charged people to use it. And then like the playground equipment people were like, oh, we want all that back. 01:10:35.31 Cody hey 01:10:35.71 evergrowmarketing And then you're like, wait a minute. ah so 01:10:37.92 Cody um I think the other side is I I get the sentiment. I think WordPress is. WordPress is the Wikipedia of websites, right? Wikipedia is vastly underappreciated for how awesome it is, right? It's it's amazing. It's magical. You want to know anything? Just hop on over and you'll find out like I used to have, we talked about it. 01:11:03.87 Cody I used to gotta have to go to the the library and open up books and then look up a solution or something. And Wikipedia in particular and makes it a piece of cake, whatever it is that you want to know. And of course people will be like, it's not accurate. 01:11:15.81 Cody It's not legitimate. 01:11:16.11 evergrowmarketing Mm hmm. 01:11:16.88 Cody Okay. Like I get it. Right. But it is, it is amazing. And yeah. So every time you see it every year, they they have the huge banner that pops up and it's like, Hey, I know you don't want to give us money, but we need money. 01:11:29.60 Cody I don't know what the situation is for WordPress. I have to imagine that they're majorly underappreciate 40%, 40% of the entire internet, right? That's huge. 01:11:39.88 evergrowmarketing They're underappreciated because they piss everybody off. Like 40% of the internet and you don't have a content or consent management platform, any any cookie banners native, you don't have any of this. What are you spending your 3,900 hours on building block editors that everybody hates? 01:11:55.10 evergrowmarketing like 01:11:55.63 Cody Does Ghost have one? Does Ghost have a... 01:11:57.33 evergrowmarketing I don't know. 01:11:58.80 Cody I'm like, I'm a ghost cookie banner. 01:12:01.72 evergrowmarketing I just remember when Gutenberg came out, they're just like, are you serious? And like the last WordPress update where like it screwed up, like everybody's theme and it changed all links to blue with underlying text. And you're like, wait, like it totally defied the theme defaults. 01:12:18.17 Cody Sorry, I wasn't listening for a second because I wanted to know that they have a cookie. Yes. Integration. So I don't think they have anything native either. 01:12:25.32 evergrowmarketing No. Yeah. Again, I think it's just open source because it's going to cost money to store that data. So in order to have something native, you have to have a paid service for it. 01:12:37.35 Cody Why doesn't Google cook something up? 01:12:41.31 evergrowmarketing they they They have the infrastructure already. 01:12:41.69 Cody Right. 01:12:43.39 evergrowmarketing like They have the um but Google Cloud that stores the data. 01:12:48.62 Cody Right. 01:12:49.23 evergrowmarketing so 01:12:50.54 Cody Yeah, they just don't want to do it for either. Nobody wants to. But nice. Then what do I what do I know these these are bigger problems for richer people and all that stuff. 01:13:03.68 Cody And I don't. I'm glad we're not with WP engine. That way we could just kind of point at the people and be like, Hey, that sucks. Sorry. You're going through that. 01:13:14.26 Cody You know, I'm sorry. 01:13:14.99 evergrowmarketing Oh, no. I wonder how many of our listeners are on WP engine though. 01:13:20.43 Cody I'm sorry. If you are seriously, that's rough. 01:13:22.64 evergrowmarketing But Hey, that sucks. 01:13:26.25 evergrowmarketing You should switch to MDD host. 01:13:26.69 Cody That sucks, bro. 01:13:27.97 evergrowmarketing Oh, I forgot the most, like the craziest part. So, um, I mentioned earlier that WordPress has a or automatic has a hosting platform called pressable. 01:13:41.15 evergrowmarketing And Pressable is basic is a managed WordPress hosting, but it's basically the same thing as WP engine, except owned by automatic. If you go to their site, this is like the most insane thing to me. But if you go to their site, pressable.com, they have a banner at the very top that says looking to switch from WP engine apply here. 01:13:59.55 evergrowmarketing And I'm like, okay, this was what I just thought of this, but this is the most, the most, so in, in the season desist from automatic, it states it like takes screenshots of every time that WP engine mentions WordPress on their website. 01:13:59.74 Cody Yeah, it's wild. 01:14:16.74 evergrowmarketing Do you know what I think the VPN should do is they should send another season desist to automatic that takes a screenshot of this banner at the top of pressable that says, by the way, you're using our trademark. 01:14:19.84 Cody What? 01:14:32.98 Cody That's funny. 01:14:34.80 evergrowmarketing So, uh, yeah, I just think that's crazy because like how this at first, it seemed like automatic or pressable or all these you companies owned by automatic are scared of WP engine. Cause this is like a very, like I'm scared of my competitors tactic here, but hey at the same time, I think, I think automatic just needs money. 01:15:01.38 Cody All those yachts get into him. Does he have a yacht? I don't even know. I'm just saying that. 01:15:05.65 evergrowmarketing you said in our You said in our meeting the other day, you're like, this is what happens when nerds get too much power. 01:15:12.90 Cody I did say that. I said that. Yeah. oh What a world. 01:15:18.84 evergrowmarketing I'm putting that in my video and I'm quoting you. 01:15:18.94 Cody I think. the I'm cool with that. That's fine. I think. 01:15:29.29 Cody You know, people like to talk about business as if it's just this all-encompassing thing and that people in at the top look business the business owners or the even if they don't own it right the the decision makers and all that sort of stuff that they have a lot in common but then you get into this and you start spending time with the different business structures and then you find out No, you really don't. There's a lot we, I don't vibe with a lot of business people because I like that this is you and me, Jake, you're 50%. I'm 50%. We can do what we want. We make our own decisions. We're not accountable. And I don't mean that in a bad way, right? Cause I think that there's, I think the best part about it is that we feel accountable, right? We're the ones who have to go to sleep at night. 01:16:23.56 Cody We have to live with the consequences of of our decisions knowing that people will blame us. And that's a lot of weight and it's scary and it's fun. It's both of those things. 01:16:35.08 Cody And then you have these other ones, right? I don't know. I mean, Matt's the guy who's under heat here. I don't know what their structure is, right? 01:16:44.41 Cody WP Engine has a board, right? That's already enough for me to be like, eh, for that reason I'm out. You say board and I'm like, eh, surfboard? 01:16:48.90 evergrowmarketing Yeah. and not every time know Every time I hear bored, I think of Spider-Man with Willem Dafoe. 01:16:51.72 Cody Nope. Okay. 01:16:59.73 Cody Yeah. 01:17:01.44 evergrowmarketing You can't fire me. I made this company. 01:17:05.37 Cody Yeah. Like white enterprises too. 01:17:06.17 evergrowmarketing and so but but like I feel like i like feel so bad for um Harry there because I'm like, if I was in that position, yeah, I would be like, what? 01:17:17.91 evergrowmarketing what 01:17:19.03 Cody Yeah. 01:17:19.49 evergrowmarketing I am the CEO and founder. You can just kick me off of this. And then to think that that's actually how business is done. Like once you get to a certain size, I'm like, no way I'm out. 01:17:25.95 Cody Yeah. 01:17:28.51 evergrowmarketing Pass. 01:17:28.78 Cody Yeah, it's a real thing. I mean, people in I don't I don't know if I ever told you about Aaron. um We have a friend. She's she's brilliant. She's disgustingly smart. It's amazing. um And she like I hadn't checked in with her role for a while. We went to her wedding in Texas. It was very cool. um And I just checked in and she's like. 01:17:52.27 Cody I don't know. She's on, I'll have to look this up. She's on the website and she's like a top dog. And I just told her, I'm like, Hey, I don't know if anybody's told you this recently, but you need to know you're really cool. Right? Like I'm looking at all this. I'm like, you did it. Like you're playing, you're playing ball with the boys. You're making the key decisions. You're, you're doing the board thing. And like, it's amazing. And I don't want to do anything like that. 01:18:15.70 Cody Like it is such a a difficult and unique skill to combine all of those things together and and do it well. And I admire it. And I think it's not it seriously, it's so cool. 01:18:28.01 Cody And it is not for me. 01:18:28.61 evergrowmarketing At what size do we, like, do you consider adding a board? 01:18:29.53 Cody Right. 01:18:34.84 Cody Well, I mean, you can do it from the beginning, right? If you want to. 01:18:38.77 evergrowmarketing What big, what, what like 50 million, a hundred million dollar companies don't have a board. They're just like two dudes. 01:18:47.06 Cody Menards. 01:18:48.22 evergrowmarketing Is Menards that way? 01:18:49.55 Cody Let me check. They're they're private. 01:18:51.01 evergrowmarketing I was, I just, I just deleted a Menards email, like while you were talking. should 01:18:55.56 Cody um Does. 01:18:57.85 evergrowmarketing butards Menards for our non-Midwest listeners. 01:18:58.59 Cody and 01:19:01.18 evergrowmarketing ah Menards is a ah ah very big ah hardware and home improvement store. It's like a Home Depot Lowe's competitor, but it's it's all through the Midwest. 01:19:07.83 Cody Yeah. 01:19:09.91 evergrowmarketing I don't know how much further out they've expanded. 01:19:13.97 Cody Well, this, this is not, this is a great example of Google AI says, does Menards have a board? Yes. Menards sells a variety of boards, including lumber, trip boards, and paneling. 01:19:26.29 evergrowmarketing No. 01:19:26.62 Cody That's not what I meant. 01:19:27.80 evergrowmarketing cool 01:19:28.32 Cody I'm pretty sure it's just, it's just a family, right? 01:19:35.19 evergrowmarketing I guess. Oh, I'm in. So I use Bing because I use Edge. And I typed in, does Monards have an executive board? 01:19:46.00 Cody Oh, there you go. 01:19:46.78 evergrowmarketing And well, the first the first result is like their homepage or their about us. 01:19:47.17 Cody That's the smarter way. 01:19:50.52 evergrowmarketing And then and there's ah there's a site link extension underneath it. And it says company information. And then it just says the meta description is, uh-oh, your browser version is no longer supported. 01:20:02.29 evergrowmarketing What? 01:20:02.73 Cody But what does that mean? 01:20:03.49 evergrowmarketing I don't know. 01:20:05.53 Cody Menards company information. Let's try that. 01:20:10.70 Cody About S Menards. 01:20:11.48 evergrowmarketing Every listener just tuned out. They said, I'm out. 01:20:14.85 Cody But they're huge. They're massive. They've got to be a multibillion. Right. 01:20:20.00 evergrowmarketing Yeah, they have, yeah, they have to be, uh, Menards revenue. 01:20:24.48 Cody Says history, a family owned company. 01:20:25.98 evergrowmarketing $13 billion. dollars 01:20:27.90 Cody Jeez. 01:20:30.79 Cody Yeah. 01:20:30.99 evergrowmarketing Yeah. Well, there's a Forbes article here. 01:20:31.50 Cody They're all over the Midwest. 01:20:33.94 evergrowmarketing Um, 300, 300 stores, 15 States, uh, here, president executive chief or president and chief executive officer officer, Jon Minard. 01:20:46.10 evergrowmarketing Um, I don't see anything about any other boards, just CEO, Jon Minard. 01:20:52.60 Cody I think it's just him. Just john. You got to probably go to john john sorts it out. 01:20:55.42 evergrowmarketing He's like, we're gonna have a board. He goes, we're not, it's in the name. 01:21:01.82 Cody Yeah. 01:21:01.87 evergrowmarketing It's like, it's like that, uh, that Ben Shapiro meme where she's like, of course where does it say it? And the Boy Scouts, the only boys are allowed. And he goes in the name. so but Why don't you have any other other people on the board? It's like, uh, 01:21:20.69 Cody I just looked at this, I realized they're doing some weird, weird footer stuff. Weird. 01:21:24.98 evergrowmarketing I know. Should we reach out to them, see if they want to be a client? 01:21:26.77 Cody Keyword. 01:21:29.35 Cody ah That sounds like a lot of work, a lot. 01:21:32.10 evergrowmarketing Yeah, I'd say, I'd say no. No, thank you. 01:21:34.69 Cody Oh, they're definitely doing some footer stuffing anyway. 01:21:38.48 evergrowmarketing Oh, all right. 01:21:38.58 Cody Anyway, anyway. That's all I got. 01:21:41.75 evergrowmarketing Yeah, same. Well, everybody, I know our podcast episodes have been getting a lot longer. Our average podcast episode is 56 minutes. And I'm like, we haven't done and a podcast in under an hour and forever, which means that our averages are just being drowned down by like the beginning episodes. So eventually this is going to keep going up and up and up and we got to find a way to limit these. 01:22:02.47 Cody Yeah. Yeah. Or make money like Joe Rogan, right? But we don't have that yet. 01:22:07.98 evergrowmarketing Yeah. Yeah. Well, everybody, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. 01:22:15.01 Cody See ya.