Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re a course creator looking to build more impact, income, and freedom. LMScast is the number one podcast for course creators just like you. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of the most powerful tool for building, selling, and protecting engaging online courses called LifterLMS. Enjoy the show.

Chris Badgett: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today I’m joined by two special guests, David Vogelpohl from WP Engine and Rachel Gogos from the brandiD and also behind the Course Maker Pro theme. Welcome to the show, you guys.

Rachel Gogos: Hey, Chris, thanks so much for having us today.

David V.: Absolutely, thanks, Chris.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s great to have you guys, I’m super excited. We’re going to be talking about how to launch your online course the easy way, and one of the things we see in our space is that there’s a lot of tech pieces that course creators need to get right and stuff they need to set up that isn’t necessarily super easy. I talk about a lot on this, on this podcast about what we call the five hats problem, which is to be a successful education entrepreneur, you need to be five people at once. So you have to be a technologist, an entrepreneur, a teacher, an expert, and a community builder. And oftentimes people get stuck in the weeds on the technology and then they’re unable to execute on the other hats.

Chris Badgett: So I’m really excited about this because WP Engine, managed WordPress hosting, I’ve been using for a long time. We used to do a productized service where we would build Lifter sites on it and do transferable installs. I used WP Engine myself for some projects, and then even in the very beginning of LifterLMS for our original demo, we actually demoed on the Genesis framework. So we have a long history with you guys and I’m really excited to get into how people can make the technology part a lot easier by choosing a good stack to get started with. So, David, I want to start with you, what makes WP Engine awesome?

David V.: So from my perspective, I think most people come to WP Engine first for performance. We spend a lot of time investing in our infrastructure, making sure our caching and traffic routing roles are optimized and supporting our customers with helping make sure their sites are configured to take full advantage of things like our caching. So I’d say that’s one thing that makes us special, but I think once they come on board, I think the other thing a lot of people will gravitate around are our development tools and how they support our customers get work done quickly. And it’s not always, of course, the super nerds that are able to take advantage of that because a lot of the features in WP Engine also make it easier for people to manage sites. For example, we have an auto-updater for plugins that will do automated visual regression testing.

David V.: So you’re able to kind of punch above your weight on the technology side, as well. And I guess the last thing would be support. We have an award-winning support group consistently scoring in the high 80s for what’s called the net promoter score. It’s the way you measure how successful a support group is and because our support is only focused on WordPress, that allows them to specialize and go above and beyond what you might normally experience if you’re with a platform that’s also doing email and Drupal and other kinds of CMS. So that’s what I think about when I think about what makes WP Engine special.

Chris Badgett: Well, I’m going to brag a little bit too, because what I love about WP Engine and especially for course creators is the website is the business, it’s not just a brochure. I mean that’s fine, but it’s really mission-critical and it needs more horsepower because it’s not like a simple static site. And the backup features, the restore features, the staging site features, the clone the website features. It’s incredible and I’ve done research into customer support into other companies, I talk to people, customers, but also just other users in the WordPress space, like, “Who do you love from a support perspective?” And WP Engine will often come up and a lot of times they reference, I just mentioned the technical stack stuff, but they will mention the chat support and that ability to really get to somebody quick and have high-quality support.

Chris Badgett: It’s amazing, I mean, I’ve had some WP Engine things where it’s usually stuff I messed up and I go to chat and I’m resolved in like five minutes. Which, you guys set the bar really high in terms of doing that in a chat, more like live situation, not just the traditional ticket situation, so my hats off to-

David V.: [crosstalk] we use our chat support quite often, [crosstalk] features there like staging, and I think for people with a low technology ability or knowledge, things like having a staging instance of your website can seem a bit like The Matrix, “I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to push data back and forth between staging and production.” So platforms like WP Engine will make that easy for you by giving you buttons to color on your site and staging and a button to push those changes live to your website. So instead of cowboy coding on your live website, you can leverage kind of advanced workflows without necessarily having to be advanced.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think that’s a great way to say it, and you protect the customer from themselves. So like if you’re running a bunch of updates or whatever and you mess something up, even if somebody doesn’t know. Well, first of all, there’s an alert like, “Do you want to run a restore point?” Or whatever you guys call it-

David V.: Yeah, backup. When you install a plugin or make major changes in WP, admin will pop something up to remind you, and then we also do daily backups. As a matter of fact, I messed up one of my sites earlier this week, I installed a plugin, it caused basically the whole site to go down. This was one of my personal sites, It wasn’t that important. But I just popped into the backups, restored it, and then I was back up and going in minutes.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, you protect us from ourselves, which is really amazing and part of the LifterLMS audience, we do have a crew of people who build membership sites, online course sites for clients. And just the ability to do the staging and the transferable install, I see people talking about it and using WP Engine as really a workhorse in their services stack. So it’s just awesome. Could you tell us just a little bit about just the benefits … Or I guess I would say the question is what is managed WordPress hosting? What does that mean to WP Engine?

David V.: Sure. Yeah, just for those listening, I have run an agency, I ran one for five years, a WordPress agency. We built a ton of course sites and for those doing that, I’ve done that many, many, many times. So, I was also a partner and customer of WP Engine during those days, and the way that I used it was as we built a site for the customer, depending on how your agency or freelance business works, you might want to show the customer the site on a staging instance that you control. A lot of people won’t want to transfer the code to the customer until the final bill is paid. And if you’ve ever gone through collections on an agency customer, that can be very hard, especially if you’ve already delivered the asset to them. So what our customers do is they’ll leverage a feature called transferable installs. Agencies and freelancers actually get a free account on WP Engine and they can use as many of these transferable installs as they want to stage their client work.

David V.: So you can build the site, stage it up on your own account, show the client, have them check off, say, “Yup, that’s what I wanted.” And then if you want to tie it in billing, that’s fine. But once you feel comfortable, they’ve paid that final bill or will, then you can transfer the site to them. For the novice customer who’s not super technical, this is actually very helpful because what they do is they get an email. If they are a WP Engine customer, it will essentially transfer that site to their account. And if they’re not a customer, they can sign up and then the first install on their account is the one that you transfer to them. So this is super helpful, I think from two ways, the staging side and then also being able to transfer the asset to the customer without having to necessarily go in and immediately get their SFTP settings or other types of things that a non-technical customer might be challenged to get you.

David V.: I remember we’d go weeks at a time trying to get the customer to get us the right access level to their account, either here or anywhere else, any other host. So this is one way that makes that a little bit easier. So those are some of the ways I think agencies, in particular, use our platform for that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, and just a couple more questions before we switch over to start talking about the Course Maker Pro theme. One of the things I learned from WP Engine and correct me if this has changed, but you guys don’t offer email hosting and that’s what I remember at the time. So when we recommend WP Engine we’re like, “You should use Google Apps for email.” And that’s really what I’ve found over time, about 10 years in this industry is, it’s kind of smart to decouple email from your web hosting and Gmail, Google knows how to do email pretty well and it’s only $5 a month per user. Is that still the case with you guys? [crosstalk 00:10:40].

David V.: Yeah, we don’t host email, G Suite is an excellent choice. What I’ve done also in the past is some people will register their domain and the domain registrar will also offer email services. WP Engine, our CEO, Heather Brunner, has the saying, “Where there’s focus, there’s progress.” So as we think about our engineering group, our support group, any element of our business, by staying focused on WordPress, it allows us to excel in that area. I remember when I joined the company as an employee back in 2015, my agency also serviced WP Engine as a vendor during that time. But when I officially joined in 2015 we have something called NEO, New Employee Orientation, and we had a bunch of people in there that had experienced doing support at hosting. But at hosts where they also did email and things like that, and when they learned in that new employee orientation that they didn’t have to do email, it was like, “Oh, thank goodness.”

David V.: But that’s just a whole set of mind share, not just from the supplier perspective, but the technology perspective. Those that support our customers with their accounts, all of those things and can be highly tuned. So I know if you’re used to having email and you come to a platform like WP Engine that doesn’t offer it and there’s a bunch that don’t offer email. That can be maybe a little shocking like you’re used to seeing it with your host, but the benefit to you is that you’re choosing a vendor that’s exclusively focused on WordPress and then you can leverage G Suite or perhaps your domain registrar’s email service to satisfy the email requirement. I think the other big benefit is that if your website were to go down on WP Engine or wherever you choose to host your website, if your email is separate from that, chances are your email may still be up. Or if your email goes down, your website will still be up. So by diversifying your services, you’re able to kind of hedge your bets should something bad happen to either your website or your email.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, and one more question just in watching WP Engine over the years, I love that quote you said, “Where there’s focus, there’s progress.” You all have a great way of innovating and maintaining focus and picking the next move. Could you talk a little bit, and also just to inspire the course creators out there, they often have a lot of options and sometimes it’s hard to focus on the roadmap of like, “Where do we go, what do we do next?” How does WP Engine do that, and maybe couch that in with the decision to get into acquiring StudioPress and helping them on the theme side a little bit? How do you guys innovate and roadmap and what’s up with the focus on themes, as well?

David V.: Sure. I think there’s two parts to that, the first is to be comfortable with ambiguity. Technology changes very quickly, opportunities present themselves very quickly and you have to be able to be flexible to be able to pursue those things. At the same time, having focus and having a direction at least in the short term, the next quarter or the next year, maybe even the next two years can help make sure that you’re not taking on too much for what you’re trying to tackle in your business or your technology. The opportunity with acquiring StudioPress and with that, the Genesis framework was a fantastic opportunity for us. I mentioned previously I ran a business, a marketing and development agency and we were actually a Genesis focused agency.

David V.: For those unfamiliar, Genesis is a way of building WordPress themes, fast performance WordPress themes and then people will use Genesis to make what are called premium themes. I’m sure you’ve all aware of that and of course, that’s what we’re talking about here today with Course Maker. But first again, be comfortable with ambiguity but also have your eye on the end goal and have the discipline to stay focused on that. The other thing, as you’re trying to think about, “Well, what should I do?” I think the common is to, “Go ask my customers.” And that’s exactly what we did after the acquisition of Genesis.

David V.: And one of the first pieces of feedback we got that came over and over again in these interviews was that “Setting up a WordPress site is hard. Setting up a premium theme is hard, There’s a list of instructions, it could take me hours, days, maybe even weeks to get that demo content loaded so I could start editing it.” So almost immediately after the acquisition, we added what’s called one-click theme setup into Genesis’ core and in the StudioPress side, we started adding those capabilities to our themes. And then partners like brandiD, of course, making Course Maker Pro have leveraged that in their themes. So the benefit to the end-user there is basically the demo content, complimentary necessary plugins like LifterLMS are loaded with that setup and you’re able to start editing beautiful block-based demo content in about 30 seconds. It’s insane how quickly you go from, “I installed this theme and it looks nothing like the demo.” To, “It looks exactly like the demo and it’s easy to edit.” And to have all of that happen in 30 seconds.

David V.: So we know this was a fundamental issue for people with WordPress and themes in general, I call this the most annoying problem on the internet, “I installed my theme, it looks nothing like the demo.” So it made sense that that was a direction to go. But hearing that feedback be repeated over and over again from customers made it very clear for us that that was a value we wanted to deliver. And since delivering that, watching folks like brandiD and others take advantage of that to make their customers and just people, in general, using WordPress have a more delightful experience. It’s really fun and special to watch.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, I really appreciate that, and I want to go over to you, Rachel with the theme that we’re talking about here is called Course Maker Pro, it’s a Genesis child theme. You can take a look at that at buildmybrandid.com, where did this theme start? Like why did you guys decide to build this theme?

Rachel Gogos: So in our work as a digital agency, we often help people really grow and expand their personal brands. And one of the common things we do is help them build courses around the substance, the content that they already have. So we just found that there was a need and kind of a hole in the marketplace for a Genesis theme that actually was designed to work ideally with a course creator. So that’s why we actually developed this a couple of years ago and we did a significant rebrand and then connected with Lifter and integrated the plugin right into the theme in the last couple of months.

Chris Badgett: And David kind of touched on it, but can you touch on it a little more just for people who aren’t familiar with Genesis like Course Maker Pro is a Genesis child theme, what does that kind of mean in the stack of the website?

Rachel Gogos: Yeah, so the way I always describe it to our clients who are often not technical is if you want to power your WordPress website with a Mercedes engine, then you want to use Genesis and the child themes are basically customizations of your Mercedes car. This is kind of like the most layman’s way to describe it and I find that that works pretty well with our customers. But it’s a theme, the child themes all support the Genesis framework, and they’re built on the StudioPress platform. Which is another brand, but also just part of the big umbrella that WP Engine owns.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome, and can you tell us more about just the market you serve? You were talking about people building their personal brand, making courses as an extension, what else are these people doing? Tell us more about if somebody is really stepping into that, “I want to build a personal brand.” What are all these people doing in addition to courses?

Rachel Gogos: Sure. So a lot of our clients tend to be innovators, thought leaders, experts in a particular area. Maybe they worked at a university as a professor, but they no longer wanted to work in academia or they may have been a professional athlete or just a variety of industries and backgrounds are people that we work with. But they want to leave what they’ve done in a more traditional setting. So maybe more of a brick and mortar where they get up and travel to a nine to five and really be able to scale their reach and amplify their brand. So aside from building courses, oftentimes people provide consulting services or speaking, they position themselves as a speaker or authors. And the nice thing with courses is … Excuse me, I have a cold. You can leverage your course content in a book, right? And declare yourself as an author, you can also take that same course content and repurpose it into a keynote speech or a workshop and all of a sudden start collecting fees and another revenue model is workshops or speaking. So it’s a great way to expand your intellectual property, grow your audience and serve lots more people.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I know we were wearing our technology hat here, but Rachel went into instructional design a little bit where if you focus not just on being an expert, there’s this issue called expertitis where we can’t read the label from inside the bottle. But if you focus on a process and a transformation that has a clear starting line and a finish line and a clear promise and a clear opportunity. That content or that method can be courseified, or put in a book or it becomes a structure that you present in a keynote and all those things can support each other. Which is more manageable than feeling like you’ve got to invent something new every time you go to a new media format. So that’s super cool. Tell us a little bit more about your relationship with WP Engine and how you guys work together?

Rachel Gogos: Okay, so we’ve been WP Engine clients for I think the last four years. We host our own websites, but we also host a lot of our client websites and also support them through additional maintenance. That’s one relationship we have with WP Engine. The other relationship is this partnership in providing premium themes built on the Genesis platform. And that’s been a whole lot of fun, especially since WP Engine acquired Genesis because they are really putting so much effort into the themes and really promoting them. Which for your audience, Chris is great because of this one-click install technology, it’s just making WordPress way more accessible to someone who is not typically as technical in nature, has a significant technical background.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I call that moving the starting line because if people can just start further along and everything’s already ready to go, it’s very different from a white screen and the default WordPress install or whatever. So that’s really amazing, for the people who listen to this show who do LMS sites for clients, you mentioned you provide hosting on WP Engine. How do you do that as an agency? How do you do that with your client? Do you just provide hosting so they can have a hands-off experience and you deal with all that part or do you just interface with WP Engine on their behalf or how does that work?

Rachel Gogos: So we basically have a large hosting account within WP Engine’s platform, and if we build a site for a client, we offer them the opportunity to host on WP Engine by basically purchasing a little piece of our real estate. So aside from the amazing services WP Engine provides, we also go into our client websites with one of our developers, a live human and they actually test all the forms, any opt-ins, any links, whenever software updates are done. And we also email our client through their contact form just to make sure that that’s working and just send them a message and kind of check-in on them and see if they need any other help. So we believe the combination of WP Engine’s amazing technology with our live human behind it is just a winning way to work. And it’s just one less headache for again, a more non-techy client to have to worry about their software updates and worry if things are working.

Rachel Gogos: And I’d say the biggest benefit of what we provide is if those software updates cause a website to look out of whack on the front end, so the more custom a site is, the more potential there is for that to happen, then we fix it to look exactly as it did pre-update at no additional cost.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome. One of the ways we solve the five hats problem is we don’t do it alone and by getting help from an agency like yourself, it can free people up to focus on the other hats.

Rachel Gogos: Exactly.

Chris Badgett: I want to talk about just with both of you, the ecosystem for a little bit. It seems as WordPress continues to mature, it feels like we’re entering into more of a collaborative era. Like here we are three companies on a podcast serving the same customer, trying to figure out how do we remove friction? So I just wanted to open up a discussion about that. Like, how do you all see collaboration in the technology space? Where are we coming from and where are we heading?

Rachel Gogos: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

David V.: I guess I’ll take a stab at that. I mean, WordPress certainly is kind of an open operating system if you would for the web. And what that means is that it’s open-source, of course, you can see the code, you can contribute or build your own code on top of that and others can as well. So I think anyone building a WordPress site experiences this. You might choose Yoast for SEO, you might choose Genesis for your theme, you might choose Beaver Builder even for your page builder or you might be leveraging the core block editor like Course Maker Pro does. But the point is that you get to choose what is best for your website and best for your business. Now as you stitch all of these things together, it’s often helpful that those technology providers work together to make sure that their products help you as the user achieve your objective.

David V.: So if they don’t play nice together and break, that’s not helping you achieve your objective. And one of the things I enjoyed about working with you all on this particular project is that our objective was to reduce friction. And in reducing friction, accelerate time to market, and hopefully for those using these products together, leads to a faster financial outcome and hopefully to help fuel the business. So that’s roughly how I think about the ecosystem and how technology providers play together within it. Rachel, how do you think about that?

Rachel Gogos: Yeah, no, that’s a great response. Back to the quote you mentioned from Heather about the importance of focusing on what we’re all really good at. I would say that’s another big piece of the collaboration is working on our theme is one of our amazing designers named Veronica who created first, a design in Photoshop that is very strategic, and really positioning a person as an authority. Not only visually, but also the way that design sort of unfold from the top of the homepage down to the bottom of the homepage. So there’s a highly trained designer behind that, then we have a copywriter, right? Which I often play the role. For this theme, again, there’s a lot of strategic thinking behind how do we unfold the words from the top of the homepage to the bottom of the homepage to get that conversion to happen right at the right points on the site?

Rachel Gogos: And then again from our team, Alex Mustin is the developer of this theme. The combination of our talents with WP Engine’s talents and Chris and his team’s and Lifter’s talents I think is what makes this a really unique collaboration. Because it would be difficult for each of us to have experts in all those areas on our team to produce something like this. And the other is, I think it’s way more fun to collaborate, right? Like whether you’re a big company like WP Engine or smaller companies like Chris’ and mine. I know that we all enjoy collaborating and creating that sense of community and figuring out how we can make our individual products even stronger by combining them.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome. I mean community is definitely the theme of WordPress and in Lifter, we wanted to solve some all-in-one issues of people used to get a membership plugin for that, a gamification or engagement plugin for this, a course thing for this, and e-commerce thing for this. So we wanted to build an all-in-one solution, but you never really can be all-in-one. I mean it’s pushing the boulder up the hill that keeps rolling back. You can solve problems and move the starting line, and reduce friction, but really it takes a team of teams these days.

Chris Badgett: It’s all about the network and stuff like that, and like you mentioned, Rachel, about Alex. I remember he came through our a developer Slack channel and was working with Thomas, my business partner to help do stuff that they want to do with the Course Maker Pro theme. And I just love seeing that collaboration and seeing what you guys do, David, with your solution center and you just clearly have a commitment to the customer and it’s not a winner take all mindset. It’s like a, “How do we win together?”

David V.: Yeah, it’s interesting, as we engage with various companies and agencies that have yet to adopt WordPress, it’s really interesting to see their transition into how an open platform works. And what I personally see when I’m involved there is they’ll have a list of things, “I want the CMS to do this, that or the other. Do you integrate with this technology partner or that technology partner?” And of course, in the WordPress world, especially when complementing with plugins, the answer’s yes to all of the things. And if it is no to any particular thing, then, of course, you can, if you have the resources, create a custom plugin to achieve X, Y, or Z. So when people come to us and they say, “Does WordPress do this or does WP Engine do that?” Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes there’s a plugin, sometimes the answer’s no. But the point is that they get to choose what’s important for their business.

David V.: So unlike closed platforms where you’re kind of bolted down to this way or the other of doing things, assuming what you want to do is even provided, it’s a shift in mindset to an open platform. And I think if you’re going to participate in an open community and an open technology stack, you have to be real with yourself and have pride in the things you make and do your best to deliver that value. But to recognize that sometimes people are going to choose a path that’s better for them that might use a different plugin, a different theme, even a different host. And I find this really exciting and inspiring to participate in a community like that where you’re not just trying to shove all of these square pegs into round holes. But rather to participate in a way that allows people to customize their content management system in a way that serves their business, not to customize your business in a way that serves your content management system.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, very well said, and when it comes to just a thing about WP Engine and like you were saying, people can start at different places. For some people, they want to start with the economical hosts, I say before you do that, think about some of the things you might need to add like a backup solution or a staging solution and all of a sudden they can end up close at the same price point. And the same with your theme, Rachel, Course Maker Pro. If it doesn’t have some features that can make the most out of the plugins you want to use, sometimes it can actually take you longer to get where you want to go. And I love how you guys are, you’re incorporating copywriting and helping remove friction there as well.

Chris Badgett: Because we’re helping people who aren’t necessarily strong technologists move forward with tech and maybe marketing isn’t the strong suit, helping them move forward with the tech and getting things converting and getting their business moving. Because really the education entrepreneur out there is going to have different levels of skill across the five hats. So on the technology side here, we’re all in the friction removal business. David, you a podcast, could you tell us about it real quick? Sure.

David V.: It’s called Press This, actually Joost de Valk was the original host of that podcast and then after he stepped back, it’s actually on webmaster radio, if you go to webmasterradio.fm, you’ll see it listed there on the left side. Just click on that link and you can see some of the episodes and basically every week I have someone on the show from WordPress community and I try to learn a little bit myself and then to do that in a context where others can learn, as well. If you’ve ever thought about podcasting to support, especially if you’re in the kind of learning management or course business, it can be a really neat way, of course, to create new content. But what I find most valuable about doing a podcast is all the people I meet and all the people I learn, I actually rarely obsess about subscriber accounts or listeners or anything like that. I find the most value in learning new things and getting to know new people.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, and Rachel is over at the Course Maker Pro theme. You can find that buildmybrandid.com. Anything else you want to tell us Rachel about brandiD and how they can best get in touch and connect?

Rachel Gogos: Sure. Well, one thing, I do want to share those copywriting guides. There’s actually a template that maps directly to the Course Maker Pro homepage, about page and work with me or services kind of page. We sell a copywriting bundle, but we want to provide a coupon code, Chris, to your audience. So I’ll get that together on the backend and share that with you. Maybe we can share it on the Facebook page so they can download those at a deep discount. And in terms of getting in touch with brandiD, the best email to use is info@thebrandid.com and buildmybrandiD is our personal brand hub. So for anyone who really wants to invest time in identifying and building their personal brand, there’s some other really cool resources on there that they can just kind of DIY, right?

Rachel Gogos: There’s a course, there’s a book and a couple other tools like that. So if they want to do kind of that deeper introspective work before launching their business or even after they have, it can only enhance their ability to get more revenue and reach more people.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. And also go check out WP Engine and they got a phone number, they got chat, they’re easy to get ahold of. I’m Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. I want to thank David Vogelpohl from WP Engine for coming today. Check out his podcast, Press This and Rachel Gogos from brandiD, the Course Maker Pro theme. You’re also going to see us do a webinar where we actually get into the theme and do some more looking at what it does and what it looks like. So keep an eye on your inbox for more information like that. I want to thank you all for coming on the show. Thank you, everybody, who came to attend live, and I hope everybody has a great rest of your day.

Rachel Gogos: Thanks, Chris, you too.

David V.: Thanks, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I hope you enjoyed the show. This show was brought to you by LifterLMS, the number one tool for creating, selling, and protecting engaging online courses to help you get more revenue, freedom, and impact in your life. Head on over to lifterlms.com and get the best gear for your course creator journey. Let’s build the most engaging results getting courses on the internet.