2021·11·21 · 35:28
Eclipsing 33% of the Web (Joost de Valk, Yoast and WordPress)
I talk through the origin of the Yoast name, how the company started from SEO consulting, and how WordPress grew alongside the business. I cover what it means that WordPress has reached roughly a third of the web, the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, and how smaller companies can meaningfully contribute to pushing the platform forward. I also discuss the bootstrapped model at Yoast, including why we never took outside investment and how that shaped our growth.
0:05 [Music] hey folks and welcome back to the wpmrr wordpress podcast as always i'm joe and i'm qui-gon and you're listening to the wordpress business podcast we have a uh og jedi on the podcast hey what's going on qui-gon well i'm still trying to find my next padawan but uh other than that things work quite well as long just make sure the name of your new padawan is not anakin skywalker as long as we can avoid an anakin that turns into darth vader we're going to be
0:36 all good i i can't make any promises there but we'll see there you go yeah history has already told itself i think we that we have made your selection um very cool to have qui-gon on the pod this week not actually qui-gon jin but we actually have the one and only yost de valk uh and i actually had to ask uh yoast when we jumped on i was like okay then the company's called yoast your name is spelled j-o-o-s-t what's
1:08 the is it are those the same did as your name different and then you had kind of a funny story behind that yeah yeah it's actually uh a friend of mine now ryan fishkin of moz and now sparktoro we when we first met 12 years ago and uh at a conference in stockholm he asked me hey so how do i pronounce your name and i explained it to him he's like so it's toast with a y and he's like he was saying that to me and and as he said that i was like yes and i turned around and registered joes.com
1:40 and well that's where it started this is when i started using the nic for myself and later on for the company very nice that's cool that you uh you you know rand pretty well uh i i'm a big fan of of rand and everything that he did at seomoz and now it's bark toro uh and i've also uh read his book a few months ago it's right when it came out uh and honestly couldn't put it down it was one of the most kind of you know you read a lot of stuff in the startup world it's a it's a very good read actually spoke at our conference last week uh
2:11 and and i was chatting with him like i read your book and then i saw that you got funding for your new company and i couldn't reconcile so uh now he has done that in quite a different way for his new company but it's still it's always funny to to us because at yoast we don't have any funding we've always grown basically on our own cash there's no outside investors whatsoever
2:42 so it's my wife myself and uh omar and michael our our management team we own the company with the four of us and yeah it's it's weird to me to look at all those dynamics of outside investors and and and all these things it it feels unhealthy yeah i uh wp buffs is similarly bootstrapped uh and not quite the scale of yoast not yet but um i am i feel the same way you know it's so it's so important when you're you know if you're raising money to have
3:13 really really the same not only the same kind of value structure as the people who are investing in your company but the same idea and where the company is going and even if you do have that i think the chances are still high that you know you're getting into a marriage at that point and it's uh if there's something that's you know they're different thinking between the two parties then there's gonna be trouble down the line and you can you can avoid all that although maybe moving a little bit slower uh if you bootstrap and self-fund i mean now that we're kind of diving into this i have some questions i kind
3:45 of want to talk about in the interview but the uh now we're talking about this i want to talk about this a little more what did yoast look like at the at the beginning of the company you know 10 years ago uh if that's accurate uh well it's not even it's not even 10 years ago yet so i founded yoast the company in may 2010 basically to do consulting i was doing seo consulting for some of the largest brands in the world and basically started doing that on my own so i had a couple of clients that i could take along from my previous job
4:16 including ebay so i had a very safe salary based on that but it was just me there was no wordpress seo plugin yet i mean i had some plugins but it was all relatively small and there was certainly no money coming from that and over time i made a lot of money on affiliate for hosting stuff and hired my first employee um hugh who's now one of our partners to help me in doing consulting
4:48 and then in 2012 we started selling plugins and only early 2014 we started selling wordpress seo premium uh so that's five years ago yeah so that's really four or five years the that uh you've really started to see some you know more financial success i think that's an important lesson for people listening to sometimes it takes time why we were already growing we were doing well i mean we we can seriously could not complain the step from being two people in 2012
5:21 to being uh over 100 people now is it was quite a step yeah that is that's it's fast gross growth for a bootstrap company for sure um one that's self-funded you know i think there are a few funded companies out there that's that can can grow that pace but it's that's a very big challenge for someone who or for a company that's self-funded yeah it's it's always cash flow is always a challenge at the same time it's also like that challenge also keeps you on your edge and the fact that there's no unlimited amount of money but you have to make like smart decisions about your money
5:53 and because otherwise you will not be able to afford what you're so you have to predict all the time like how much of this growth that we've had over the last few months is sustainable we've basically grown between 50 and 70 per year over the last seven years so um i mean that is in many ways ridiculous if you look at it and we've just been all lucky in a way and we were and we were quite quick into a market quite well i think
6:24 it's always it's a bit more of a challenge when you're completely self-funded and when there's no external money so there's not there's never there has really never been like a couple of million in the bank to to feel free on yes makes it a very a very different story um but cool it's interesting to hear about how yoast came about and um now kind of yourself you're moving in a in a slightly new direction uh you're now the marketing and communications lead for wordpress tell us a little bit
6:56 about how that transition transpired i just used two keywords uh there's that might be a little confusing how did that all come about uh has it been kind of a little while you've been thinking about this for the last year or so or is this something that's been more recent well now so i've been working on like what is seo for wordpress and what is marketing for wordpress in general for quite a while already matt and i have been talking about that topic for three four years and over time we've been investing more
7:29 and more time into wordpress as used so last year we had like 10 people working full-time on wordpress core and i started feeling like hey i want to be involved closer myself i've been a fan and user of wordpress for over a decade i feel like i have something to add to the project that developers do not necessarily have to add because we had marketing but it wasn't really
8:00 like coming into full free fruition and i it i felt it needed more and more power and well talked to matt about that and um [Music] at a certain point we decided like hey this is um we should probably do this um yeah and that's i mean going into it now has also been very fun because there's a lot of work to do but there's also been such a gigantic positive response from the community from agencies et cetera reaching out and
8:33 offering design time and uh and help to to fix things on wordpress.org and and more you know in a slightly broader spectrum so we're redesigning the showcase at the moment we've already rewritten like five or six pages on.org that were really old we now have a roadmap that's up to date it's like it's all that simple stuff that feels simple but that i felt needed more attention than it was getting and it's yeah the positive response from everybody has been awesome so i'm it's a lot of work but at the same time it's also i feel
9:05 like i'm mostly unlocking other people to do the work and yeah i know it's really cool to be able to work on that i think that's a it's an underrated skill of a leader that they unlock the ability of other people to be able to do an awesome job right your job is leading the marketing team is to optimize the whole team it's not just you doing all the work or executing on everything you have a whole team under you to do all that you mentioned the road map which is which is which is pretty exciting i'm sure so a lot of my questions i have today are
9:36 coming from your blog which is just yoast.blog which it's not yoast y-o-a-s-t it's it's your actual name j-o-o-s-t dot blog so you can check out the blog there for people who want to follow along kind of while you're listening but the road roadmap there's a link to the roadmap there i think the first step for us now is to get wordpress.org to be more reflective of how good a cms wordpress is um i think we're not always doing a very good job telling that story and also of telling the story of which
10:08 use cases wordpress is good for so that starts with a redesign of some of the corepages on.org and a redesign and refilling of the showcase then i'd like to add an enterprise section to wordpress.org to to highlight a bit more where how wordpress is used in the enterprise and what kind of things there are there because i think it's really undervalued in that area and then on top of that one of the the longer going plans but that'll take a lot of coordination
10:40 is we have we have all these word camps worldwide and if i can make all those word camps reach one or more journalists that they can actually tell about wordpress and and and tell the story of both wordpress to platform and wordpress the community if i if we can reach that then we'll suddenly have a reach that's like very hard to to beat so i want to really involve the community a bit more in marketing wordpress as a whole and use all these events that we have
11:11 not to just talk to ourselves but also to talk to the wider community cool i mean in a way we we're we owe it to ourselves to have that kind of quality and it's also a matter of uh that's something that matt started last year by by starting the growth councils and by ground by getting the agencies and the hosts more involved i think all of us have a combined well we we all benefit from from uh from wordpress and girls and and telling that story better together and
11:44 using our combined resources to tell that story better is incredibly powerful yeah i very much agree i think the communities is clearly one of the strongest aspects of wordpress um and to continue to grow it we'll have to do it together yeah we've done a relatively good job of telling people what the software could do and don't even think a really good job but a relatively good job we've done a pretty shitty job of telling them the power of the community and why there's so much more than just the list of features that that they should pick
12:15 wordpress for the fact that you can start using wordpress and find developers whereas for a lot of other cms's finding developers already is a big problem simple stuff like that that that can make a whole lot of difference when somebody needs to make a decision yeah agreed i think that uh you know chrissy and i talk a lot about products in the wordpress space and you know obviously like as you know you have to create a great product for to for people to want to buy it for people to to want to be involved in your
12:47 community under wordpress all that stuff but the other side is the business development is the marketing is the communication side of things i mean those things have to be strong if you want to see growth like you've seen it yes right like 50 growth year over year for seven years you know the if we want to continue the growth with wordpress that's that seems like it's going to be key yeah to be fair wordpress already has the type of market share where that kind of growth is no longer possible right i don't think 50 percent uh year over year is going to be quite possible if we're going to go from 33
13:19 which we're currently at to 48 in a year i think i'll i'll call it a success i'd also think that's rather scary no i i mean let's be uh realistic the the amount of time it takes for websites to switch over to another cms's is it's not a year anyway i think people build a website for three to five years and uh so you're not going to get like that massive amount of growth on the cms side switching out a plug-in is relatively
13:50 easy so yeah i i think there's a we we should aim for growth we've had growth over over the last few years it's not like the growth for wordpress has has really slowed down but yeah i mean we'll just have to keep an eye on it yeah definitely i i think it's really it's really important what you said about the growth of wordpress powering the growth of all of our jobs as well at the end of the day everybody who works in wordpress does owe it to wordpress uh to for you know
14:21 our financial freedom for us i mean i could have built the most awesome seo plugin for joomla i've been absolutely nowhere now right i mean and that that would make the market that uh that we could reach like 11 times smaller than wordpress without even a lot of my own doing at that point so it's like we all have benefited from the gigantic growth of wordpress over time and that's also why i want to give back now and
14:54 and be involved in helping sustain that growth very cool speaking of joomla speaking of wix and squarespace and all the other cmss out there you have a very interesting post on your blog on juice.blog uh just blog yoast.blog that talks about some of the relative growth of some of these cmss compared to others um obviously everyone knows the de facto line you know wordpress power's a third of the web um i guess almost a third of the web we're just about there but uh
15:28 yeah 33.1 now it's like so close but you talked a little bit about in this post very er it definitely piqued my interest because i didn't know about a lot of this relative growth and so from your calculations you've kind of looked at how much growth not just total market share each of these cms's has but how their growth has looked over the past years compared to the growth of the other cms's around them well and to your own size yes yeah right exactly from
15:59 what you've uh kind of discovered here in a few of your calculations it looks like wordpress is it looks like the open source market or the open source market share is growing but most of that is powered by wordpress um the other kind of fast-growing cms's out there are not they're they're they're closed so it seems like although open source is still technically winning a lot of people are moving to these it just works
16:31 closed systems because they want to get on they want to build something they just want it to work what do you think the future looks like in terms of like how does how does wordpress play a role in that future is wordpress continue to be the leader or and what does it have to do to to remain there so i think we'll probably remain the leader we we can't grow at those rates anymore simply because we're already as big as we are and so relative growth is also a weird metric because if you're our size you'll never have the relative growth that is
17:03 the squarespace had um certainly because you saw like over 100 growth or something for squarespace i think yeah yeah wait for which was 150 it's it's high but i mean we can't grow 150 simple there's no there's not enough web for us to do that so it's a flawed metric in that regard but it is good to look at it to just realize like okay some of these guys are growing harder than you that you'd think if you just look at the small numbers because the numbers are all relatively small a squarespace has
17:35 like what 1.5 market share now and shopify has something like that too that's relatively small but if you don't look at their revenue numbers and see how much money they are making by hosting 1.5 percent of the top 10 million websites in the world because that's what all of this is based on and that doesn't mean that they have only 1.5 percent of of 10 million sites they probably have more but they just don't fit into that top 10 million sites in the world because there's a lot more than 10 million sites in the world so in
18:06 itself that's a flawed metric yeah that's probably important just to touch on for people because i think a lot of people say this stat like wordpress powershell third of the web technically not correct or just to make sure that people know that when they're saying that it does come from this w3 score uh w3 tech score of it so we're talking about the top 10 million sites online uh and we're talking about market share of those sites yeah yeah so uh what they do and uh built with another uh statistics provider does something similar they scraped top 10 million sites as provided by alexa
18:38 um which is a well it's basically a flaw a flawed metric but over time it gives a good view of market share because you're comparing it to itself that doesn't mean that it's definitely the truth to be fair i think that if we measured the entire web our market share would probably be higher because i think we're we do better in smaller sites wordpress when they when you look at these numbers you're looking at wordpress.org and.com
19:09 and wordpress.com probably does better in the smaller section as well so there's not a whole lot of dot com sites in that 33 percent i don't know i agree like if you look at the 10 million to 20 million i think you'd see higher than the 33.1 percent of wordpress share there so what's that look like well in my perspective there's a couple of things to to note there one is that squarespace and wix and weebly
19:40 got acquired by uh square they all have a lot of money spent on marketing and they do things like super bowl ads and uh pre-rolls for every bloody wordpress video on youtube and i get a lot of youtube ads for shopify and wix and weebly and i've like never been to their sites but somehow they find me anyway yeah well they target you based on your wordpress preference probably so yeah and they have a lot of money to burn on that stuff and we don't
20:11 so we need to be more creative but apparently that method of marketing is working because they're growing fast now all of them are burning money i think wix is profitable i don't know about squarespace but it they all look relatively okayish but it but they also look like they're beefing up their numbers but yeah we'll have to see over time whether they can keep that growth up but it's good to realize that you have a couple of competitors in that top 10 of cms's in the world they're spending tens
20:43 of millions if not more marketing and that you have to be creative and outdo them in another way to keep up otherwise our growth might turn negative or even slow down yeah yeah i think that there's a lot in there it seems like wordpress yeah i have a hard time thinking of it you know declining in market share but it's with the with the fast growth of some of these other companies i think it's possible i do i don't think that's a that's a likely
21:15 outcome i i don't think that will will quickly go to a decline but i also i mean and it's it's one of the questions that i get asked the most when i took this role is like how are you going to look at wordpress.com versus.org etc i actually think that wordpress.com plays a role in this because it allows us to compete with squarespace and shopify and wix and i'd hope other people would build something similar on wordpress
21:46 multi-site and use that wisely etc but i i think that that allows us to compete with those sas kind of services that people apparently want while also maintaining the strength of dot org and the fact that you can go to a full install for yourself on a on us on its own server etc i mean in the top 10 million sites the vast majority is dot org sites why is that well because they're all too big to be run on uh on a dot com instance because they need more than that but that's fine i mean
22:18 there there's there's probably a lot more vip customers in there or other like large hosting company uh customers in there i know you're in that top 10 million with yoast.com uh i can assure you that we don't run on once one small server is a lot more than that and i think it's good so it basically adds to each other and it makes sure that we have both the sas side and the self-hosted side of uh of this market that we can cover now do you think though that wordpress.com
22:50 is the is is going to be the main kind of tool we can you know that that'll be battling against the wixes in the squarespace um i think that people usually go to those for their built out you know to to for the not just the drag and drop functionality and the simple functionality but just the fact that they can push something up pretty easily and i think wordpress.com is probably more comparable than wordpress.org do you think that the dot com is is what's gonna help us to continue to gain market share there do you think it's more of the dot org i think it's both to be honest i think both are still growing and i don't know
23:21 the dot-com numbers so i could i couldn't even tell you but i think we need both i think we need i have the fact that we have both makes us stronger and and the fact that we can add to each other because it powers.com and matt spends so much of his money and people on making the product better i don't think a lot of people realize how many people that really are i mean it's it's it's not one or two developers it's it's entire teams of developers that are working constantly on making wordpress
23:52 better for both.oregon.com and that has been the investment that has sustained this ecosystem which is also i'm like there's there's this dichotomy that people make from it that i just don't think is true it's one and the same thing in many ways and of course there are differences and those are fine but we're all using wordpress yeah i i agree with that i think a lot of people have this like what is wordpress.com and what is wordpress.org and what is the difference and it's
24:25 confusing and i think that that is true i think there's is there somewhat of a like what is what what are my some people don't know what they're on but i think for the vast majority of people it's just wordpress is a publishing platform um you mentioned this kind of before the show yeah and and and we see people move from dot com to self-hosted and then because they want stuff that they can't do on.com yet and that's fine i mean that's the ecosystem allows for that and i think that's the strength of the ecosystem you don't have you it's quite
24:56 hard to outgrow wordpress and i think that's a strength i i think that uh wix and weebly and and shopify will have a very hard time competing with the fact that you can't outgrow it yeah that does seem to be why people would move from somewhere else like a wix or a shopify to a wordpress because well if you can't do something on their system that you want to do that's somewhat custom or that they just don't offer then you literally have to move if you want to do that yeah and then and usually in our case it just requires a plugin that's already there
25:28 so there's a vast majority of functionality that we already have that they that they have to spend money to build where we just have like this these 40 000 plug-ins in the plug-in repository that offer all sorts of functionality i think that's the strength of wordpress it's what i love about wordpress is that you can basically use it to build anything yup i agree with that when i heard that you were going to be the marketing communications leader wordpress i thought you were i thought you were the perfect selection for a position like
26:00 this having run a company like yoast because if you look at if you if you do a search for seo on google and you look at all the top websites they're all wordpress sites there are no squarespace sites or no wix sites and yoast as the you know majority yeah having the most market share of seo plugins in wordpress you know you're significantly responsible for a lot of that and i think that because we've been so sick wordpress has been so successful as a publishing platform not just because of things like gutenberg where
26:32 you can publish easily and it makes it and actually writing content is not difficult but how do you get that content out in front of people how do you make yourself visible online i mean that's just as important as the writing part and so i think that you've helped us get this far and yoast as a company has helped us get this far only in even the last five six years but really over the last even longer than that you guys been working on it so having you having gotten us this far i think you're you're the person to help us help us move forward i think you have a you you you i feel like you have a very good knowledge of where we are and where we
27:03 need to go so i just wanted to throw that out there well thanks for the compliment i hope to live up to it yeah no pressure no pressure at all um the the one of the last things i'd love to dig into a little bit is for the rest of us here uh for me and other listeners for the podcast um you know you have a team of 100 plus people at yoast um which i guess now is is technically your wife's team uh at yoast but uh y'all's team ed yoast i'm still i i still work at yoast for like so i i'm
27:36 in the yoast offices right now i mean i uh for four out of my five days a week i spend on yoast and one of those days i tried to spend on wordpress that's about the share of time it gets uh that's good to know i didn't know that um in all honesty right now it's it's one day and all of my evenings but i mean there's there's a choice there i do both so i'm i'm still the chief product officer just too and i and there's a lot of cool things that we're doing at yoast so it's
28:07 i i just want to keep on doing both very cool the question i want to answer about the company is that you guys have 100 plus people you've said you've kind of dedicated you know double-digit people full-time working to to be dedicating their time to wordpress development or pushing wordpress forward whatever area it's in like what advice would you have for people who are working at smaller companies um or even kind of doing solo work uh you know working with themselves or working you know as freelancers etc how can people
28:39 help to push wordpress as a whole forward without some of those bigger resources that a bigger company might have um there's a lot of ways actually um i i would always recommend you go to a word camp that has a contributor today and start there and see which themes that you like and there's a lot of different teams at contributor days that basically add new people and and help you get set up to do to do work on wordpress and that can be a whole lot of different
29:10 things so if you're a developer you can work on core but you can also work on a team that i spent most of my time in in the last decade called meta which is like the team that maintains wordpress.org itself and everything around it and but there is also a design team there's a marketing team of course there's a docs team that's that's just writing docs so if you don't have a whole lot of time but for instance uh you could help us move some of the docs on the codex to the new health hub that we're working on
29:41 simple stuff like that even moving one doc a month over from one to the other would already be like awesome if a hundred people do that we'll be done in a couple weeks from now so there's a lot of small jobs that need to happen and it's a great way to meet new people and also to build yourself a a backbone of people that are very knowledgeable about wordpress so that you can reach out to them if in your daily job you run into problems with wordpress that you can't fix yourself i for us one of the reasons we spent so much time on wordpress core is because
30:13 it's just really helped us a to know where wordpress is going and to even guide some of that but be also to to make sure that we we can integrate better than anyone else because we know the system better than anyone else i mean for gusenwork we built all of the apis that plug-ins need to integrate we built those because we needed them of course that's a huge contribution to wordpress but it's also a contribution to us being able to maintain the quality that we wanted to with gutenberg for our own product so it works both ways
30:45 yeah i think that's a very fascinating point i think a lot of people think about a contributor day is like okay i have to go and i have to spend time an extra day to like help wordpress and how much is it really going to help my company or help myself as a freelancer and i think it's actually just the opposite like i think like the more you go to contributor days the more people you get to know the more closely you get to know wordpress the core contributing teams how wordpress really works and functions especially if you're someone technical you're going to
31:16 really understand how to build software or build plugins uh or run a marketing company or any or anything like that you're going to be able to do it better because you understand the network better you understand you you know people in the space better you understand a little bit better how the community is yeah you're learning from others i mean that is i think that's the the biggest strength of all of this is if you can learn from other systems and learn from other people and that really is very worthwhile and you don't have to be a developer for
31:47 that i mean one of the biggest teams at a lot of these uh contributor days is our support team that answers questions in the forums that might seem very benign but it's like the backbone of everything that we have so i yeah i'd really urge people to start there and then figure out okay which team is my do i feel most at home in and can i learn most in and then start there and then if a year later you want to do something else by all means go do that yeah very cool i dig it yes this has
32:19 been a blast i appreciate you jumping on this has been a lot of fun uh happy to come back any time cool uh let's see we usually close the show out why don't you tell people where they can find you online twitter or website et cetera so i'm at j default on twitter j d e v a lk uh i on yoast.blog snj of course on on yoast.com yoast.com and then well if you if you've got all
32:51 three of those you're probably sick of me already so let's stick to you can always look out you always know yoast from the uh the their style of uh of uh cartoons and animations there online so i'm on your twitter profile right now and i'm like yeah i see this all the time because it's very distinct they always know it's yeah one of our illustrators does those it's a lot of work but it's very worthwhile yeah very cool i've been thinking about doing more custom you know or customizing our brand a
33:22 little bit more with our design style uh and one of the main drivers is you guys because i'm sure a lot of people see you guys are like yes we know yoast through the animation but of course it takes a lot of time to put all these together a lot of resources but at the end of the day if you're at the size where it makes sense then well to be honest i think it's the other way around um if i can be real quick my third higher designer my fourth hire was a illustrator uh so it's the other way around building a brand is more important than anything else and looks like i have some work to do after i get off this
33:54 call with yeah okay any illustrators listening to this podcast reach out to me please yeah i mean building that brand is really important hey that's an excellent place to finish i think for anybody listening because hey the you know from someone who's built a company of over 100 people uh that brand was central in that so design and illustration should be a first uh uh think about it sooner rather than later absolutely cool yost the last thing i always ask guests is uh if you wouldn't mind just asking your
34:26 audience to give us a little five-star itunes review that'd be awesome if you could just kind of like hey ask people if they would mind doing that hey if you've just listened to this awesome podcast and you know that it's worth a five-star review right go do it now there you go uh and uh if uh if you have any questions for the show you can feel free to email them in yo wpmrr.com uh we answer questions on the show every once in a while so shoot those in uh if you have any questions for yoast you can shoot those
34:58 to us or you can shoot him to him on twitter but if you shoot him to us we'll forward him to him so we can uh take a look the what else did i have do i have anything else i think i'm good we asked for reviews we asked people to email us questions that's all we'll have another episode next tuesday yoast again thanks for jumping on love hearing about where wordpress is going uh excited for what's next [Music]