Dave Foy’s switch to Webflow

[00:00:00] Dave: switching tools is, is not for the faint-hearted, it’s quite an expensive process, isn’t it? In terms of well sunk cost in terms of what you’ve already.

[00:00:08] Put into the amount of time and energy that you’ve put into learning tools that you’ve previously used. I also had have still, a multiple six figure a year business teaching WordPress teaching, very specific tools, WordPress and elements are, that combination elements or page builder.

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[00:01:27] As designers or developers, even product makers when WordPress is your hammer, everything looks like a nail. WordPress is certainly in an inflection point right now. Whereas the software is evolving Reed Gutenberg in full site, editing the community of users grapple with what WordPress really is. I feel like that’s a statement which has lingered in the air for a few years.

[00:01:50] When you unlock its power custom post types and fields with a dash of rest API magic, the CMS can become a neural network for your data yet with an interface that I struggle to drag and drop a single block into a third column of my page layout today’s guest has mastered the teachings of WordPress specifically with Elementor for his students over the last few years.

[00:02:12] But the usability struggle that I just met. Yeah, that’s caused him to pivot his teachings to a hosted platform. You may have heard of before on the show web. Welcome today’s guest Dave Foye, as he unpacks the challenges of not only learning a new CMS, but the challenges of devising a curriculum for new students seeking to become proficient in it.

[00:02:34] You’re listening to the Mer report, a podcast for the resilient digital business builder. If you’d like to support the show, please visit buy me a coffee.com/matt report. And buy me a digital coffee or joined the membership to jump into our private discord server with others. Chatting it up about the.

[00:02:48] And greatest in our crazy WordPress world, that’s buy me a coffee.com/maryport. And thanks to Fu plug-ins for supporting today’s show. Check out food gallery food art gallery for more. Okay. [00:03:00] Here’s my interview with Dave. 

[00:03:01] Dave: I had a lot of resistance, a lot of inner resistance to partly because, switching tools is, is not for the faint-hearted, it’s quite an expensive process, isn’t it? In terms of well sunk cost in terms of what you’ve already.

[00:03:15] Put into the amount of time and energy that you’ve put into learning tools that you’ve previously used. But I mean, I also had have still, but, I had at the time, like a multiple six figure a year business teaching WordPress teaching, very specific tools, WordPress and elements are, that combination elements or page builder.

[00:03:35] And so it, it really was kind of. It, it, it was, it was a real kind of crunch time for me for thinking that I have got to the point where I cannot use these tools anymore. I’m finding that I actually I’m finding that. I’ll talk about the details in a moment, but I can’t in all conscience recommend this particular combination of tools that I am well-known for and, very well paid for I can’t carry on.

[00:04:05] So, believe me, it was quite a, quite a risk. I think I remember one of my students say, and I’ve mentioned it’s something in, in the, in the little private Facebook group that I’ve got for one of my courses. And he just said career suicide. Nice. So,

[00:04:23] Matt: for thanks for the vote of confidence.

[00:04:25] Dave: Awesome. I mean, it, it probably had a point, you probably had a point 

[00:04:29] Matt: What was that? Oh, just real quick. What was that concern for you to say? You know what, I don’t feel like I can recommend these tools anymore. Was it more a, an ELA mentor thing? Was it more a WordPress thing? I mean, we’re in this chaotic times where it’s like, Gutenberg is still trying to get better full site editing’s coming in.

[00:04:48] You layer on the complexity of a piece of software that wants you to build a website a certain way? Are we just hitting a perfect storm here? Or was there something specific?

[00:04:57] Dave: Yeah, possibly. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I had got to the point where I started, well, I’ve, I’ve been using WordPress since 2007, something like that, so for my own personal projects and my own client projects, I’d use WordPress for, for a good long time. It was when I actually decided to teach online. I long story, I think we’ve covered this plenty of times before, but for 10 years I was actually a school teacher.

[00:05:23] I’m a, I am a qualified teacher, so I was a qualified teacher, teaching young children in the, in the UK. Like in the nineties and early two thousands. And I then got into web design and build up a great business, but it just decided that I just miss teaching so much. So for me, around 2016 ish, I decided I actually want to get back into teaching, but I want to teach the thing that I’ve been, I’ve been working with the web design tools that I’ll be working with for, for, for many years, what, what a perfect combination.

[00:05:54] So, I did a lot of research, long story, but I’d discovered elements or which was [00:06:00] just in its earliest stages at the time. And thought this combination of tools is brilliant for, for my target market. My target market is always non coders. People who don’t want to code and probably feel a bit nervous about the prospect of.

[00:06:14] Th they, they want to build websites, but web design technology, web design tools, web development, isn’t something that is natural to them. It’s not something that they are completely off-air with. And. So I always see my job as taking people who look at all this stuff and think, oh, wow, this is so complicated.

[00:06:35] And possibly quite scary. It’s my job to say, it’s all fine. Just do this, this and this. And it all works out. So in a sense, I’d particularly chosen WordPress and elements or that particular combination, because it just seemed right for my target. Now over the gears, elements or has added on features and features and features WordPress itself, as you say, is changing dramatically.

[00:07:02] I think ultimately that will be for the good of WordPress. Definitely. I know a lot of people complain about Gothenburg, but I think it is getting there, but it got to the point where I started to think would I in, in, in all kind of conscience, I suppose, would I, conscious now. Recommend to somebody who once frost-free hassle-free stress-free web design experience, where basically stuff just works.

[00:07:30] All of the scary kind of hustle behind the scenes all the kind of configuration, all the. The, the stuff that people complain about WordPress, which is actually a strength at the same time, which is it’s plugin plugin system, plugin architecture, but I’d got to the point where, for my own use of WordPress, but also just being sensitive to the needs of my students and the needs of the people who I work with day in, day out to help with this stuff.

[00:08:01] I just saw massive frustration. Massive massive frustration with constant plugin updates, constant issues with plugins. It’s not new in WordPress at all, obviously, but you know, updating plugins to find that something’s broken, there’s a conflict with something else, finding websites that now this is, I think, quite a bit of elemental issue cause they do, they have had a history of releasing some quite buggy releases in in more recently.

[00:08:30] But you know, finding that a website that worked perfectly well, last time they logged in now, suddenly it doesn’t work in, in some way there’s some functionality broken or there’s a, there’s the layout that’s suddenly off. Issues with hosting and all the RS, all manner of different things. It’s kind of like that little drip, drip trip, the, the Chinese water torture, I think is called, the, the drip, drip, drip, drip of, of, of, of constant issues where I just thought there’s, there’s gotta be a better [00:09:00] way.

[00:09:00] I know that, for instance, like I use Thinkific for my online course. And it’s just all done for me. I can get on with actually creating courses, uploading the courses and teaching, there are, there are, I don’t know, email marketing platforms where that the heavy lifting and the stuff that I don’t need to know is done in the background so I can get on with my job.

[00:09:22] And I started to think that there must be something better than this constant stress and worry and, and hustle. And maintenance and all of these other things, which is what led me to start looking at other possible or the solutions. 

[00:09:39] Matt: I’ve seen the love, hate relationship with Gutenberg, how fast this piece of software has been iterated on. And just all the changes you couple that with ELA mentor, which is also on a rocket ship ride, they’re growing, they’re adding new features. They’ve hit a bout of turbulence, I guess is probably the nicest thing that I could say.

[00:10:01] I know I’ve seen you and Paul on Twitter really hammering it home with element or for good reason. And they have to be conscious, I think, of element or they have the conscious of just not throwing the kitchen sink at everything for the sake of the kitchen sink. 

[00:10:17] I feel like folks who are looking for a web flow solution understand that they should invest some money in a platform. That’s just going to do it without the FOS updates, hosting issues. Incompatibilities with other plugins, like I will pay the, have that done on Webflow versus the WordPress side of it where it’s like, man, there’s so many variables that, that can be thrown at this.

[00:10:46] Where are you getting that feedback from your audience? 

[00:10:48] Dave: Yeah, it was it was, as I said, at the beginning, it was a very, very reluctant look looking for something else for very, very lots of, lots of reasons. I didn’t want to be looking anywhere else. Yeah. Partly it was, it was my. And it was partly because of elements or boogie releases. So I got on with, for instance, I needed to build a new website for myself late last year, and they installed a new instance of WordPress and elements.

[00:11:14] I was like, global colors just didn’t work at all, just broken. And so, so w there were several issues like that just personally for myself, as it was like, oh, what, what is it now? There was not, and it’s not just, it’s not just elements or, I think. Lots and lots of other, other plugins as well, but let’s, I’m probably focusing on elements are maybe a bit too much, but, but yeah, it certainly wasn’t a good feeling from my audience and students by, by any means.

[00:11:43] I mean, my, my group, I sort of private group was just every day there was just something of like, why isn’t this working? Why is this thing broken now? Or it wasn’t just necessarily as WordPress. It was like hosting as well, or. I think because. Because the, [00:12:00] because of the plugin architecture and there are plugins coming down the pipe every single day as you.

[00:12:04] And I know constantly with, with new features and, potentially solving problems with SEO and page speed and everything else. So th th there were those issues with stuff just being broken and being hard. And, people struggling just to keep up with a frantic pace of change. I think that that was partly the thing, but I think also it was just, I think, yeah, just, just, I, I suppose people just I’m just trying to think of the best way to put it really.

[00:12:33] Yeah, just, just gen general kind of anxiety about, about stuff being broken and stuff. Just not being easy, I think is the easiest way to put it. Yeah.

[00:12:43] Matt: I want to ask you this question. This is going a little bit deeper in sort of like the creator in the, in the creator mindset, the, the business of being a creator and monetizing on, let’s say YouTube and affiliate sales. It probably wasn’t an easy decision to make either because one would imagine knowing what I did with affiliate sales, for elements.

[00:13:06] Which was a flea on an elephant’s ass, probably compared to what you and maybe others have done. It was probably a tough business decision to write, to be like, look, I’m making money. And I think you and Paul and, and, and the other folks that I communicate with on, on YouTube, you do affiliates. Right. I think of immediately when peoples think affiliates are like, oh, what are you trying to sell me?

[00:13:29] What kind of cloaking device are you using on these, on these links? Like at one point in your, in your career, you’re like, Elementor is a fantastic tool at this time. And they have an affiliate program. Why not recommend this and make money? It’s a legit way when you’re doing it a legit way. I don’t have any other better way of saying that.

[00:13:49] So I’d probably, at some point you were like, oh man, like I will be turning off this. Potentially of money. What was that like? And did you have, do you have any thoughts or feelings around affiliate sales and how this helps make the decision 

[00:14:01] Dave: Yeah, well, I mean, affiliates, the affiliate business model was never ever my intention when I first started my thing was I’m going to sell courses and affiliate sales were have always just been a bit of a nice to have. When I first started my YouTube channel started making videos about this fairly brand new tool called elements or at the time I happened.

[00:14:22] I mentioned my affiliate link. I think it just dropped it in the description. Sometimes I would, occasionally when elements I had an offer, I would let my email list know which was regrowing. My, my business model was growing my email list to sell courses in a nutshell. That’s it. And it still is. Grow the email list to sell courses.

[00:14:41] But thank goodness that I was an affiliate for elements or in those early days, because in the first kind of nine months of me getting to the point where I even had the confidence to make a course and to feel like I could sell it at all, we’re going back to 2017 now, which seems so long [00:15:00] ago, it was only a few years, but yeah, the, the, the, the affiliate income from I was an affiliate for very, very few.

[00:15:07] Elements or generate press. I don’t know, maybe a hosting platform as well. Well, the income from that was better than I’d been making, working full-time as a web designer. And it absolutely saved my ass because if I hadn’t have had that income I think the whole online course thing probably would have failed.

[00:15:28] Now. I say that because I. Way too long to actually make a product and offer it to my, offer it to my audiences, to my MLS. So these days when I mentor and help people create products and make online courses, one of my first things is to say, is this a build. As a small and email list, as you can get away with find a hundred people and sell something, make something to sell.

[00:15:55] It can be very low value, not low value, low, low price. It doesn’t matter, but start making something and start selling something straight away, because it’s only then that you can start getting true feedback about what people actually want, what they’re prepared to pay for and where you?

[00:16:11] should put your energies.

[00:16:13] But yeah, the affiliate thing was, was massive, but. W my, the income of saying about, I’m not, I’m not saying it’s a brag, but it’s a multiple six figures a year. Business is mostly from courses. It’s mostly from selling courses. I’d say 90% is from selling courses about WordPress and elemental, specifically about using those tools.

[00:16:36] And yeah, to say that it’s career suicide, there’s the phrase, career suicide.

[00:16:42] Matt: And you were, you were lucky enough to get to a point. Did you turn ads on, on your YouTube 

[00:16:48] Dave: No, no, no, no. Never never had no, no, no, 

[00:16:51] Matt: Just because you didn’t want the experience or the user to have that experience of ads, or you were never looking at it 

[00:16:59] Dave: I think, I think what I wanted to do was just to make sure. The foolishly probably, this is, this is not a savvy business head talking, but I think I just want to, just to make sure that when people watch my videos, that we’re just not being interrupted by ads and, they could just actually enjoy the experience of, of watching the videos.

[00:17:18] And I suspected that probably the income from that wasn’t particularly going to be too great anyway. So I just always kept monitorization off for that reason. Really. 

[00:17:27] Matt: My YouTube story is like, how do I get into this game? How do I create this content? And I quickly, but I don’t say quickly, it took me six months to burn out, doing like three videos a week or maybe three or four videos a week. I had this ambitious goal of doing it like every day. And I just flatlined burned out.

[00:17:46] I didn’t literally didn’t touch it for a year. And then all of a sudden. Ad sent, sent me the first check for a hundred bucks. Right. Then I logged in and it was, I had tripled my audience without uploading a video in a year, just because of SEO.

[00:17:58] The light bulb went off. [00:18:00] Like you fool, you shouldn’t have given up, you should have done it less. So you didn’t burn yourself out, but you shouldn’t have given up. And again, like life gets in the way YouTube stuff is so far away. My daily routine that I haven’t uploaded episodes. And, but I still am making three or 400 bucks a month in ads.

[00:18:19] And I have a lot of kids, so diapers are expensive. So I leave the ads on, but I, I, I can certainly, I can certainly see in your world where these bigger products, bigger prices, the brand, the value, there is a target for you to focus on.

[00:18:34] Dave: Yeah.

[00:18:35] definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I was the one that I think I wanted that sense of kind of trustworthiness. Yeah. just that experience. Really. I was not to say that people with ads, I watch, oh, I’ve got YouTube premium now, so I don’t see any ads, but seeing ads on people’s videos, I actually don’t, I don’t personally tie that into a decision that’s made by the creator of the video at all.

[00:18:55] It doesn’t, I understand how it works as well, but I don’t ever think, oh, they’ve, they’ve got ads turned on. They obviously don’t care about my experiences as a viewer. It doesn’t enter my head, so 

[00:19:06] Matt: side note, I also signed up recently for premium, like late was finally one of those things where, you know, before you sign up for premium, every time you logged into YouTube, they’d be like, do premium, do premium, do premium. And I’m always like clothes, clothes, clothes. And I tell you, Dave, I am like, screw it.

[00:19:23] I’m going to do it. Right. Like finally, you got me YouTube, literally a thousand pop-ups later is probably what my conversion metrics were. You finally got me and I signed up and I watched my first video with no ads. And I was like, wow, 

[00:19:41] Dave: Yeah, well, consider the side. 

[00:19:43] Matt: brain, because my brain was trained so much now with like their three pre-roll ads and then the, the pop-up in the middle of the banner and then like the mid roll.

[00:19:53] And when I’m doing work for Casto, sometimes I’m in the Castle’s account and I’m uploading my videos for Casos and I’ll be watching something. And I’ll be like, what is this ad? Like, my brain is like, what is this? Like, it was happening. And like, oh yeah, I’m not in my premium account.

[00:20:08] Dave: It is awesome. I think it’s. worth every single 

[00:20:11] Matt: It is, it’s. it is. 

[00:20:13] Dave: Yeah, definitely. 

[00:20:15] Matt: when I go on vacation with my children and recently w we’re going to, we were in Florida and they’re watching TV, cable, TV, and there’s commercials. And my kids are literally asking me what dad, what is this? Why, why isn’t the show playing? Because they’re so used to Netflix and Disney plus.

[00:20:33] Dave: Yeah. 

[00:20:34] Matt: And they see a commercial and they are freaking out. They’re like, what, what is a show? Where’s the show? And I’m like, it’s just a, it’s a thing called commercial kids that you didn’t grow up with. Welcome to my world. 

[00:20:46] Dave: Oh, wow. 

[00:20:46] Matt: All right. As we get into the back half of this conversation, web flow, did you, you said like, I want to find a platform that is easy, all encompassing.

[00:20:59] Was Webflow [00:21:00] is in the back of your mind or did you start doing some homework and then you settled on Webflow?

[00:21:04] Dave: Yeah, Well, I had, I’d actually been recommended Webflow several times over at least two years, probably more. And every time somebody said to me, you’ve got dude, you’ve got to check web flow out. And these were people that are trusted and respected friends of mine, colleagues, people all over the place.

[00:21:19] And people who had never looked back, it would just adopted it for their agency as their go-to tool. And they moved from WordPress. And every single time somebody recommended it. I said, well, yeah, I’ve heard of that. I’ll check it out. And then I would immediately toss the idea in the bin and think there is literally no way I am looking at any of the tools because I’ve got a lot of, as we’ve said, a lot invested in, in WordPress and everything.

[00:21:44] So yeah. Yeah. So, so actually choosing Webflow. I, I had a little look around to see anything else. I obviously don’t, didn’t bother looking at the Squarespaces and the Wix and things like that. But yeah, the web flow was pretty much, pretty much the only one that I considered now, I actually tried it and gave up three times, like completely just thought, right, come on, come on.

[00:22:07] You can do this. I mean, how hard can it be and gave up three times because it’s not actually. It’s not actually, it’s not a beginner’s platform. It’s not designed for people who that, that Squarespace is designed for. You don’t get a lot of pre pre-made designs and in fact, it’s harder to use done.

[00:22:26] I would say a WordPress page builder, probably not oxygen because oxygen is based very, very, very much on web flow as I understand. But yeah, it was, it was hard. And what I also found as well is. I well, partly so, so what would happen is I’d give it a try and think, oh no, no, no, no, no, no. I just, haven’t got time.

[00:22:46] I’ll persevere with what I’m using. And it was the third time there was like the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’ve got to figure this out. And in some ways it really appealed to me because when you start, well, we’ll go into the details too much. But when you style anything in Webflow, you literally click on it.

[00:23:04] A podcast doesn’t make this a very good visual medium for me to explain this. But when you click on anything in web flow and you want to style it, it could be literally any element whatsoever. You give it a name, like a class, a, you give that class, whatever styles you like. You’ve got all the styles at your disposal, really easy, nice UI.

[00:23:23] And then you just use that class on anything else that you want to give that, that that’s those, those same styles. The sense of having literally on, con on limited global styling, not having to go to some separate styling panel somewhere to constantly kind of keep going back and sort of adjusting things.

[00:23:46] And also not being out there, I suppose. Th the page, whatever the page builder developers decided the global styles are that you’re going to have is what you’re stuck with. You’re limited by that. [00:24:00] Usually we web flow. You can just do what you like now as a, as an, actually like a dinosaur old school, HTML and CSS hand coder back in the day, this really appealed.

[00:24:12] Because I used to write CSS and I’d have one single CSS file, which I could just create as many styles as I liked, and I could control them all from one place. So it was that particularly about web flow. That just super appealed to me, the lack of the lack of limits, really. I’m not being, I’m not being, I’m not being hampered by.

[00:24:32] I mean, it’s great. For instance, elements are just as an example, the whole load of widgets and know there are probably a million different third-party add-ons as well. It will all bring a load more widgets as well. And it is amazing. You can drag a widget on the screen, just onto the canvas. It just produces, your tabs or your, your posts Lao or whatever it is.

[00:24:53] But you still fairly limited by the styling options that that developer has decided to give you where it was with Webflow is just completely open-ended. The problem, the problem it’s like everything in life, concentrate offs. The problem with that beautiful open-endedness is that you can make a real mess.

[00:25:14] If you’re not careful, if you’ve not kind of got a system and a workflow and a, an a way that you decide that you’re going to name classes and use them and reuse them, it can be a bit of a mess. And that’s the issue that I hit immediately. The wet floor. The Webflow university, which is web flows own a free training is absolutely brilliant.

[00:25:36] I mean, as, than, as an educator myself, as a teacher myself, I mean, I, I just think those videos are astounding. They’re incredible. And I think it speaks volumes about a company like that who have invested so much time and energy into training their users. So that stuff was helpful. and it kinda got me got, definitely got me so far, but I was, I think because my teaching in WordPress and other mentor was all about, you’ve got all these tools, you’ve got all the colors in there, all the crayons in the box, but you need a system, you need a workflow, you need it.

[00:26:16] You need, you need to set yourself limits. So. Yeah, you can produce sites really quickly, really productively, profitably and not have to think too much, you’ve got a system and you just do it and you just build them. So I, that was, that was the, that was the sticking point with Webflow. And it’s what I ended up actually building a framework myself though.

[00:26:36] There isn’t anything really, there are web flow frameworks out there, but they all had issues for me. So I ended up building my own,

[00:26:43] Matt: I’ve tried Webflow before. And me it’s as much more of a like shiny object syndrome and a little bit of like this whole, like no code. Movement where it’s like, I don’t know. Sometimes I’ve thought of sat back and be like, man, if I could just have like a database that I use, like connected with Zapier [00:27:00] and I could like automate these things, I see all these other people do it, like in two seconds on the back of a napkin.

[00:27:04] And I’m like, I want to do that too. And then like, I jumped into like web flow and I’m like, oh God, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m just going to sound, I’m going away from this, this leads. And what I’m getting out of here is like, You tried it three times, whatever failed. And you’re like, ah, somebody could just teach it my way you built it.

[00:27:22] Right. You built the course to like, get people over that hump quite literally coming from WordPress to web flow. The name of your course is there a particular. Cut like a WordPress user or WordPress stack that somebody might be using. Who’s like the perfect fit to, for your course number one, but for web flow, like certainly somebody who’s us, I’m just a simple lowly WordPress blogger is probably not gonna need your course is probably not going to need web flow, but is there a certain, a certain avatar that is a perfect fit for your course, but for also to, to, to reap the benefits of web.

[00:27:59] Dave: . I would say that people who I mean, if somebody is a WordPress developer, right? So we’ll, we’ll, we’ll discount those people immediately, people are building their own themes and things like that then. Absolutely. Definitely not. I’m sure that WordPress gives you all of the, all of the control and the power and everything that you need.

[00:28:14] So I would say more people who are trained to be. I’m trying to build full, fully functional websites using WordPress under page builder. I would say the people who definitely need a page builder of some kind. Now, when I’m in Gothenburg , is a page builder and it’s developing fast as well. So I would say people who are using those tools particularly you, I, as I said, in a sense, web flow is a bit more complicated.

[00:28:42] So it’s, it’s not just the. It is in some ways, but there isn’t, the, the pre-built here is everything done for you. Aspect of quite a lot of the stuff that comes with a page builder. So there are certain things that you need to understand in the background. You need to understand what’s going on. You need to understand a little bit about.

[00:29:03] HTML and CSS as well. So just an, an understanding of just like how HTML interacts with CSS, just on a very basic level to understand things like inheritance, so when you set a style on the body, for instance, that is going to trickle down to everything underneath it, all the content and everything underneath it all, unless you override it.

[00:29:26] So there are, there are concepts like that, that in a page builder, those people. I don’t really even need to ever think about particularly, you can just eat just budge, something together quite, quite easily. I would say though that I, I do know of quite a lot of, of from end developers I suppose, backend developers as well, who really enjoy using web flow because it allows them to effectively write HTML and CSS without having to actually write HTML and CSS.

[00:29:54] Cause like a graphical user interface for, for. Well, for me, [00:30:00] I am more than happy to recommend web flow to my audience, which are, as I said, non coders, they need a page builder and they’re a little bit nervous about, all the multitude of different tools and, and, and things that they need to know.

[00:30:15] Matt: I’m curious. I mean, I know the, as of, as of this time, which is September 17th at 11:30 AM Eastern standard time in new England, which is where we, we won’t get into the 

[00:30:28] Dave: I mean I’m in the old one. 

[00:30:30] Matt: in the old one. You’re in the original one. The, I know the course is not for sale yet. I’m curious. And I’ve seen it.

[00:30:37] I think I’ve gone through the first two modules and, and, and, for the listener out there, like when Dave says he takes time, like it took me so long to do this. Yeah. But the quality is just mind blowing and I can’t even imagine Dave, how much time you’ve spent on it. I don’t, I don’t know if you have a number of hours counted or if you even want to admit how long you’ve been into it.

[00:30:57] I know it’s not for sale yet. Do you, as of this recording, but maybe when we launch this recording do you anticipate. The some turbulence there. Right? So people in WordPress they’re very much used to free or low cost web flows, paid the pain for your course. What are your thoughts? What’s the gut tell you on promoting this as a business owner.

[00:31:17] Dave: The first thing I would say is that when I started thinking about building a business, making online courses at all, my first thought was who on earth is going to pay any money for the learning, any of this stuff? And there’s, there’s this thing called YouTube. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it’s just full of all the free advice and tutorials and walkthroughs.

[00:31:37] You could, you could ever hope for I purposefully, actually, I got over that mindset issue quite quickly, it’s nonsense, but people are prepared to pay and they’re prepared to pay good money as well for an investment in their career and their time and their stress levels and everything else. So, in terms of me worrying too much about people paying for a course or even paying for a platform, doesn’t really worry me too much because the people who buy.

[00:32:04] My course is our people. They are. I always think that out of my email list, probably, I don’t know what the numbers are. 5% will buy something that I’m I make and those people are prepared to pay. I don’t know how much my courses have been. I think, I think, I think the highest price, no stress WordPress was, which is discontinued now.

[00:32:26] Not in know fairly indefinitely. I think there was about 800. For that. So, between sort of 4, 5, 6, 7, 800 bucks for a course, those people are absolutely. I mean, the web flow, cause it isn’t that at all. I think it starting at two nines. So that’s, that’s, that’s a bit lower just to, just to get started with at the moment.

[00:32:48] But I’m, I’m, I’m fairly convinced and I am delighted to appeal to people who are willing to invest in their education and their professional development and the tools [00:33:00] that they use as well for an easier life. And so actually ultimately get a return on that investment, in terms of faster builds and not having to worry.

[00:33:10] About updating plugins and maintenance and stuff, breaking and having to fix things and all that sort of thing. So, yeah, it doesn’t, it doesn’t really worry me. It’s all.

[00:33:19] Matt: Yeah. I mean, when you have somebody who’s already, I did an article. I, again, if I was a professional podcaster, I would have this up, I think element or web flow. Let’s just see if my site ranks first. It 

[00:33:31] Dave: Oh, oh, harsh, 

[00:33:33] Matt: Element or web. Oh yeah, it does. I’m on the first page. Okay. A little, a little bit down on the first page, if you Google element or web flow, but I say in defense of element or versus web flow, and this site publish this February of this year, God man, you just, I didn’t even understand time anymore.

[00:33:48] February 11th, 2021. When folks were talking about the price hike of element, or now I’m not here to argue whether or not the. The approach of what Elementor was doing with bugs and features and whatnot is fair or not. I didn’t have anything against the price hike, if you will, for ELA mentor, because man, I feel like so many people are making money with elementary or.

[00:34:12] That even if you bought their $1,000 a year for a thousand websites, I mean, if you’re somebody who’s producing a thousand websites, you’re at least charging $2 for one of those websites, right. You’re selling these websites for at least $2, you’ve doubled your money. Right? So I was never against the raising of the price because hopefully that raises value of all things WordPress.

[00:34:34] But my point here is people are already spending money in the web flow world. Whereas. Hats off and kudos to you. You’re selling courses in the WordPress world where a majority of people are used to free. So you already were fighting a battle that I’ve not been able to solve 

[00:34:51] Dave: Yeah, there is. I mean, there is a sense isn’t there because WordPress is open source. Everything should be. And you, you hear that all the time. And I think that’s just going to be a constant issue. Really. One thing that when I actually looked at certainly for, certainly for the people that I’m M in my course out, and the people that I kind of want to help when you actually look at the price of Webflow, cause people say, God, man Webflow is so expensive.

[00:35:13] I think, well, if you look at it, you pay an account. I won’t go into all the massive details, but you pay an account plan fee, which is basically a single monthly families, about 24 books. Which allows you to build, buy all, to build onstage on a, on a web flow.io domain all your web flow sites you’ve got in development, and you can share those with clients and you could even just make those live on the S on the staging sub domain, if you didn’t want to point a live domain of them.

[00:35:41] So that’s 24 bucks a month. It’s basically similar to, if you’ve got like an Adobe creative cloud subscription or you’ve got an elemental license on it and a theme license, and it just allows you to use the platform. So that to me is like, well, that seems perfectly fair. And then you [00:36:00] pay a per site site plan fee as well, which I think is about 20 bucks a month.

[00:36:05] Now people who are hosting. Crumbing websites onto, I could attend books a month hosting plan, and they’re quite happy with all the configuration and the setup and everything that, that entails and possible performance issues and whatever, then absolutely. I mean, knock yourself out.

[00:36:23] Brilliant. But if you compare to, I mean, let’s just take a WordPress managed host, like Insta, for instance, I think Ken stir last time I looked, it was 20 bucks a month. Now w so, so for each live site, you’ve got a domain pointed to, to web flow. You’re paying 20 bucks a month for that. I mean again, if you’re not making at least $20 a month back from the website, then there’s something wrong.

[00:36:48] You, you, you really should be a book. Also with that. You also get like the CDN, you get all of the page speed stuff set up for you, and it’s all done for the, the sites are blazing fast, absolutely brilliant. All green, like top of the range, kind of page speed scores, the host inside and out for you.

[00:37:07] Security. So sorted out for you. All of the functionality seems to me in many ways, if you were a person who would appreciate managed hosting, and it seems to me that that is actually a pretty good deal overall, 

[00:37:21] Matt: I tend to agree things get a little crazy when you start getting into the e-commerce world with web flow the way that they do pricing, I broke it all down in this, in this post. Although this post is now a few months old and I’ll link that up. I’ll try to link that up in the, in the show notes.

[00:37:34] But 

[00:37:34] Dave: was a simplified. 

[00:37:36] Matt: Yeah. At the end of the day, like the trade-off again is support all in one platform. If you really wrestled with, I want to own everything for the sake of owning it, and it’s a whole mind, it’s hard to make that mental leap and appreciation leap. I don’t have a better word right now, but like, it’s hard to make that leap from WordPress if you’re really stuck in that, in that 

[00:38:01] Dave: Yeah, absolutely. And I would, I would say to anybody that it’s not like, I certainly don’t set say to everybody, you must use Webflow is far better than WordPress. That’s actually not what I’m saying. He probably comes across that way. There are trade offs with everything, and if ownership. Or certainly a feeling of ownership anyway and having control over every single aspect of that, of your website and website workflow and everything else, if that is important to you, for whatever reason, that’s great, but there’s a trade off in the maintenance and the plugin updates and stuff, breaking and everything else.

[00:38:37] That’s the that’s that’s, that’s the deal, you w you can’t have your cake and eat it kind of thing. I think he’s just true of everything in life. Same with Webflow, yep. You don’t have all of those hustles, but Yeah.

[00:38:48] you’ve got a platform where you are in a way renting the site from, from Webflow.

[00:38:53] What if Webflow disappears overnight? There were all these concerns. I mean, I’ve got, I’ve got kind of, answers for all these [00:39:00] objections, but There are also just very, very quickly. One of the biggest objections is she’s quite funny to me is about recurring income from care plans.

[00:39:10] So people will say I’ve got a pretty good business making recurring easy money every month by charging clients to keep the website updated the WordPress website update. And make sure it doesn’t, it doesn’t break for them. What am I going to do about that with Webflow? Because he just works, what’s the, what, what, what, where am I going to make this money?

[00:39:29] My short answer is always, well, first, if all things were equal and you could build a website in WordPress or web flow, and let’s also say that either of them would be appropriate for the project, Really recommend WordPress because it’s prone to problems, it’s prone to problems and it, and it breaks.

[00:39:51] And you can charge the client forever in order to, just to be basically lightly. No, let them have a working website. It sounds a bit harshly. It sounds like I’m kind of over again things, but that’s kind of how it is really. Now my view is the client, your clients don’t care. About how you did something, all that, how long it took you, all the steps you took, they are, they only care about the result on all the clients are paying you for, for, for a care plan, just in terms of the maintenance side of it, not talking about anything else.

[00:40:24] Well, the maintenance side of it, they are paying you so that their website is rock solid. Isn’t down works perfectly, and it just doesn’t have any issues. Well, why can’t you charge the client for the. You’ve found a better or the best platform that you think for their particular needs for their project that has all that in place.

[00:40:46] You’ve spent all this time and money learning the platform. Why not charge clients for that? I, I don’t think clients particularly cared that you’ve got to update plugins. You’ve got to spend X amount of time doing that. I think it’s a bit of a non argument, rarely. 

[00:40:59] Matt: I think at some of the tiers on web load, there’s a little phone number you can call, right. So good luck. Yeah. Calling yeah. Calling you got a dozen plugins doing. Things, you’re not going to call PIP in and, and, WooCommerce, you’re not going to call these people and get them on a conference call to figure out what your site is at the end of the day.

[00:41:18] You look, you’re paying for that support. And web flows. As far as I know, in the news web flows slated to be a IPO and, and be a publicly traded company here in the states. And they’re a private company now, but they’ve raised over 140 million. So they’re probably valued at billions. I don’t even know what money is these 

[00:41:33] Dave: Probably, yeah, exactly. yeah, MailChimp is worth what was it? 12 billion, or something like 

[00:41:37] Matt: half the half the banana industry or the entire globe? 

[00:41:41] Dave: So, so w what is money. 

[00:41:43] Matt: yeah. What is money via Canva? Just raised Canva just got another 400 million [email protected]. It’s just, I don’t know, Dave, what are we doing wrong here?

[00:41:57] Dave: Well, I’m I think I’m going to hang these [00:42:00] headphones up. 

[00:42:01] Matt: I’m going to make a canvas course. What am I doing with Webflow? Here’s how to make a template in Canva. Oh man. It’s called WordPress to web flow. His name is Dave Dave for you can search for Dave for you can go to date for.com. You can search him on YouTube. You can go to WP two w f.com or pressed a web flow.

[00:42:21] Dave, anything else that any other place that people should find you? Yeah.

[00:42:24] Dave: The other thoughts that you’ve covered up. So everything there, my friend. Yeah.

[00:42:27] Brilliant. Thank you very much. 

[00:42:29] Matt: Fantastic stuff. It’s my report. My report.com my report.com/subscribe. Hey, if you want to support the content happening here at the Matt report, go to buy me a coffee.com/matt report. You can join the membership there and be part of the, the news right now. It’s about the, the WP minute. If you want to be involved in the news, you wanna have your hand in shape.

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