Building a WooCommerce Agency in the AI Era ft. Jonny Martin

Brian Coords (00:00)
Welcome to Webmasters FM. Today I have Jonny Martin from Built Mighty. Jonny, maybe introduce yourself and let people know what you do in the WordPress space.

Jonny Martin (00:09)
Awesome. Yeah, thanks, Brian. I’m Jonny Martin. I’m the founder of Built Mighty. We’re what I would call a WooCommerce development agency, is kind of what we focus on. We’ve done a lot in the WordPress space since about 2009, and with a kind of primary focus on e-commerce over the years. So, you know, we do a lot of you know non-e-commerce work as well, but I’d say, you know, 70 to 80 percent of our work has been in the e-commerce space.

Brian Coords (00:34)
Nice. And do you do just WooCommerce or do you have big commerce, Shopify?

Jonny Martin (00:38)
Yeah, yeah.

Jonny Martin (00:39)
So we were actually a Magento partner years and years ago before WooCommerce was even around. in fact I

Brian Coords (00:45)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (00:45)
started as a merchant myself. I ran several e-commerce stores on the Magento platform. and then, you know, realized I liked building stores more than I liked running them, really. And so

Brian Coords (00:55)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (00:56)
we kind of leaned into that. And so we focused on building stores.

Jonny Martin (01:02)
Magento, we had people reach out to us like, hey, I need a brochure website, I need a blog. And we’re like, Magento can’t do any of that. So we started doing WordPress, right? And so started

Brian Coords (01:12)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (01:13)
building WordPress. I think our first WooCommerce site was actually a baby diaper delivery service here in Seattle.

Brian Coords (01:20)
Okay, okay.

Jonny Martin (01:21)
And WooCommerce at the time was new, right? So there was, a lot of rough edges on it. And so we we waited for a couple of more years until it it really grew up and could handle larger catalogs and more traffic and and stuff like that. And then once it could, we really began to kind of lean into it. And in fact, we were the only company that was a partner with both Magento and WooCommerce for the longest time. We were the first

Jonny Martin (01:46)
Woo partner, I think they called us ninjas, or I don’t know what Woo Expert, whatever the name of the program was,

Brian Coords (01:50)
huh, yeah, yeah.

Jonny Martin (01:51)
back in the day. and and then in about what 20, was it 2017, 2018? my dev team kind of pulled me into the conference room and said, you know, we’d

Jonny Martin (02:02)
focus on WooCommerce than Magento, primarily because we could build the same feature with about a tenth of the code in WooCommerce

Brian Coords (02:09)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (02:10)
than we can in Magento. And I said, you know, our customers actually don’t care about the code. They want the feature.

Brian Coords (02:16)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (02:16)
So let’s do that. And so in about 2017, we dropped our Magento partnership and then really leaned into 100% WooCommerce. So we don’t do Shopify, we don’t do BigCommerce, we don’t do Magento.

Brian Coords (02:27)
Okay.

Jonny Martin (02:28)
It is, it is just WooCommerce.

Jonny Martin (02:30)
WordPress, and then we build some, other Laravel apps or some mobile apps, stuff like that,

Brian Coords (02:34)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (02:34)
right? But for e-commerce, it’s a hundred percent woo.

Brian Coords (02:37)
Nice. And so I would say you’re pretty involved in I would say like the Woo community and really like automatic, the larger parent company and some of their

Jonny Martin (02:46)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (02:47)
other products and Pressible and everything like that. And I would say like one of the things

Brian Coords (02:51)
That’s really changed over the last year. I I was at a meetup last night, a WordPress meetup, and all we talked about was AI. You know, that was like the topic everybody was talking about managing. They were asking, you know, they were showing me how they were managing their Woo stores, doing audits and stuff from, you know, Grokbot on their phone and all these. I mean, it was I was really surprised. I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting a like a AI

Brian Coords (03:13)
To be a very low level of the conversation, but I have to imagine that the last year to two years has changed in some ways the way that you approach your development work or the way you

Jonny Martin (03:22)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (03:22)
d approach really anything. has that been the case?

Jonny Martin (03:26)
Of c yeah, of course. I mean things changed in December, right, of twenty twenty

Brian Coords (03:29)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (03:30)
five, right? Like that was when I don’t even know remember which version it was of Opus that came out and it was just like, wait a minute,

Brian Coords (03:36)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (03:36)
Eric, like this can do stuff and and do it well. And so, you know, in like the you know, middle of January, I actually went to our development team and laid down a challenge that they were not allowed to write a line of code for thirty days.

Brian Coords (03:53)
Dang.

Jonny Martin (03:53)
Right?

Jonny Martin (03:53)
you it said if you want to write a line of code, you have to tell AI to write that line of code. and it was hard, right? Because at the time, Opus wasn’t very good actually at CSS then, right? it was actually really

Brian Coords (04:04)
Mm-hmm, yeah, definitely.

Jonny Martin (04:06)
good at functional code, but the visual side of things it wasn’t as good at. And so, you know, we really had to kind of learn like how do you do that well? It’s got of course it’s gotten a lot better since then. but but it was it was a challenge, right? Now, our devs still write code.

Jonny Martin (04:21)
Today, but 95% of what they write is probably coming from AI. Maybe you know, depends

Brian Coords (04:25)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (04:26)
on the developer. but to have that challenge to force them to use, I mean, was to the point where if you want to write a line of code, you write it in the chat and you tell AI where to put it. Like, we need to make this change because the world

Brian Coords (04:39)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (04:40)
is different now. And and it was like we had to force the team to do that.

Jonny Martin (04:44)
And we came out of that thirty day period and it was a it was a game changer for our organization.

Brian Coords (04:49)
Yeah, you were definitely ahead of it. And I feel like that’s been the big change I’ve seen with people where, in automatic and WooCommerce, we kinda had the same mandate, which is like, you know, learn this tool as like as much time as you need to take away from your day-to-day work to actually spend learning this tool, it’s gonna be worth it. It’s gonna be valuable. So freedom to do that. I know

Jonny Martin (05:08)
Yeah, you guys had that

Jonny Martin (05:09)
I forget what it was called, that month that build fast month or build whatever

Brian Coords (05:12)
yeah.

Jonny Martin (05:13)
you want month. I thought that was an awesome program because it was it was like what we did, right? 30 days, you have to use this

Brian Coords (05:19)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (05:20)
every single day no matter what. And I and I saw that same thing go on at automatic. I thought that was a pretty cool program.

Brian Coords (05:26)
Yeah. I and it it exposed, obviously it’s not all roses with AI. There’s some downside. You end up with a lot of code, you end up with a lot of things maybe you wouldn’t have built and probably shouldn’t have built, but it got built because you can. So

Jonny Martin (05:36)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brian Coords (05:38)
you end up with you know, still have to look at it, okay, well now

Brian Coords (05:41)
What are the bottlenecks? it’s code review is still something where you want some humans. It’s understanding what your customer actually wants to build and wants to use. And you’re not just

Jonny Martin (05:50)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (05:50)
building every idea that comes to you. So you it was a good thing. And I think probably the biggest thing we took away from it was smaller teams, more focused, a little more freedom to drive in that, the way you can build stuff. Just you can be faster, you can be more nimble. And that’s like the piece that’s carried over from that, from

Jonny Martin (06:07)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (06:07)
that experiment.

Jonny Martin (06:09)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (06:10)
For for us, one of the biggest learnings is it you know, you start by I need to control everything because you know when you write code, you control everything, right? Like you’re starting and every single

Brian Coords (06:20)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (06:20)
thing is very controlled. And so switching to AI, it’s really easy to think, hey, I have to control everything. And and you know, our our our team goes in a bunch of different directions there. We still have developers that spend, you know, they may spend an hour on the plan.

Brian Coords (06:39)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (06:39)
Right?

Jonny Martin (06:39)
really spend a lot of time in that plan document before any code gets written. Whereas, me, for example, I’m like, I don’t even read the plan. Right? I

Brian Coords (06:49)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (06:50)
have Claude generate the plan and then I’m like, build it.

Jonny Martin (06:54)
Right, because by the time it’s built, then I go back and instead of reading the plan, I see the prototype and I work with the prototype

Brian Coords (07:00)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (07:01)
and I’m like, wow, half of this sucks. Let’s get rid of it. Let’s make this better. Let’s do that. Right. And so it’s I think there’s two different approaches. And I I don’t think either one’s right or wrong, actually, right? I just think that you know, there are different ways to to go and I think everybody has their own workflow with that.

Brian Coords (07:18)
Yeah, and I I feel like there is a big difference. The one thing that I’ve noticed is if you’re writing code where no one’s gonna look at it, I think you can push a little faster on some things where you can make sure it’s good, you can make sure it’s secure and all that, but like then there’s s like being inside of WooCommerce or like the WordPress core project where it can’t just be good. Also, people have to extend it and they’re putting their agent like the code is so visible and it’s like.

Brian Coords (07:45)
You do have to go a little bit slower at the platform level.

Brian Coords (07:48)
But I think the benefit is that everybody who’s building like the agencies, the extension developers and stuff, I mean it’s just a huge influx of functionality out there nowadays because you like the foundation, the guardrail of WordPress and WooCommerce is solid. So you can actually go off and, you know, most of what we’re writing is probably repeatable boilerplate code anyway, register

Jonny Martin (08:09)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (08:10)
some filters and things like that. I mean, you can really just speed through a lot of that stuff. I I feel like it’s it’s such a big difference these days.

Jonny Martin (08:18)
Yeah, yeah, for sure, right? And then it’s also y you need to go back over the code. You need to right, like you can’t like

Jonny Martin (08:25)
The web dev studio team, they just launched a site, is it done or something like that. I forget what it was, right? Like 90%

Brian Coords (08:30)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (08:31)
there or something like that. It was a great example of of what you can build. You can build something that’s pretty with AI, but you know, in their example, like does it have the structured meta, does it have the site map, does it have all of the stuff that you actually need in order to really

Brian Coords (08:45)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (08:46)
have a functioning product and functioning site? And think the same is true for for anything we build with AI today. You have to spend the time to make sure it’s complete.

Brian Coords (08:54)
Yeah. And there’s not even just the code, there’s also the testing. One of the things I love is I’m working on a prototype because I want to propose some feature or something. I come up with a plan and everything, but then it’s not just make it for me, it’s make it for me and like find twenty ways to test it. And it can spin up a browser and it’s like

Brian Coords (09:11)
I’ll still get to the place where I’m gonna review it and test it, but you just probably saved me, you know, a few hours because you went and found

Jonny Martin (09:17)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (09:17)
the obvious kind of quick bugs by literally loading a browser or using a C Light to kind of click around and stuff like that. And so I’m seeing it bleed out into

Brian Coords (09:26)
most of what I do is at this point marketing, th

Jonny Martin (09:28)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (09:29)
that’s the department I work in. But it’s like there’s so many just little things where it’s like, just that little tedious thing of having to move this to here and spin up a demo store so I can take screenshots and test out this feature so I can talk about it. It’s like, get it all ready for me and I’ll I’ll show up when when it’s time, you know? It’s

Jonny Martin (09:46)
Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Coords (09:47)
such a different mindset.

Jonny Martin (09:49)
It it is it and it’s a little dangerous, right? ’cause I I think we’ve all built lots of stuff that we don’t remember building anymore, right? you you start to the w play with AI and you build something and then you realize like, wait, I I built that last month, but I haven’t used it. Right? Like I solved like there you know, Elon’s got that quote, you know, engineers spend time solving problems that don’t need to be solved, right? And like it’s fun to solve problems sometimes with it, but like

Jonny Martin (10:14)
Does that really fit into my daily workflow? Does it really actually

Brian Coords (10:17)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (10:17)
help something? and again, I don’t think that’s necessarily a negative thing because sometimes we have to explore to learn, but you know, you really gotta make sure you’re sticking on the roadmap, whatever that roadmap is.

Brian Coords (10:29)
And there’s definitely a concern. I like I said, I was at this meetup and these were mostly like agency, but s you know, smaller agency folks and they were there’s definitely a little bit of a concern that, well, what am I what is my job here? Like what do why does somebody need me if you can just prompt a WooCommerce store or something like that? And I’m curious where you think because you know, I think there’s like levels of the market and there’s always gonna be a segment of the market that would much rather

Brian Coords (10:57)
do it themselves than pay somebody else and probably not a place you anybody should be investing their their time. but I’m curious for your customers that have maybe higher stakes, e-commerce stores and stuff,

Jonny Martin (11:08)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (11:09)
do they come to you with AI or do they want to use AI in it? Or do they think they can vibe code a feature and like go around you? How’s that working out?

Jonny Martin (11:17)
Yeah, so it the the answer to that question is it depends, right? stores doing several million dollars a year in sales. If they take their store down, they’re losing real money. and

Brian Coords (11:27)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (11:28)
so if you know orders get deleted, right? Like you can’t you can’t just roll back a store. You’ve then lost orders, right? and so there’s there’s there’s a lot kind of more that goes on there. Like

Jonny Martin (11:39)
the systems and processes that we have to help protect that. Now, we definitely have clients that bring us prototypes and they bring us like, hey, I built this this thing, I don’t know how to get it into my website. Can you help me? like that kind of stuff.

Brian Coords (11:53)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (11:54)
And there are gonna be a lot of DIYers that are gonna build it themselves, but that’s what makes WordPress great and WooCommerce great and has always been what makes

Brian Coords (12:02)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (12:02)
it great is that people can do it themselves.

Jonny Martin (12:06)
But there’s a level where people, and and we’ve always been an agency that focuses on this. we’re the kind of agency that takes on projects because somebody has outgrown whoever got them to where they’re at, right? So when they

Brian Coords (12:17)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (12:18)
outgrow their internal developer, when they outgrow their nephew that is in college that learned how to code, when they outgrow their overseas team, when they

Brian Coords (12:25)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (12:25)
outgrow the local WordPress marketing agency on their e-commerce store, then they come to us, right? And so

Brian Coords (12:32)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (12:32)
it isn’t the DIYers that

Jonny Martin (12:35)
really are the the issue. It’s like, okay, great, once your business is big enough where, you know, you make a mistake and it costs you real money, then then you needed some an engineering team. And then on our side it’s it’s our responsibility as an agency and I think for anyone actually in the WordPress space, we need to deliver way more. Right? Like

Brian Coords (12:53)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (12:53)
our clients are not going to accept, you know, five thousand dollars for a simple brochure site. Right? Like they’re not

Brian Coords (13:00)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (13:01)
going to accept that anymore. They

Jonny Martin (13:03)
We charge the same amount for things, but we deliver way more, right? The same amount to the customers, right? So for five thousand

Brian Coords (13:09)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (13:10)
dollars, you need to get a brochure side, an SEO plan, you need to get everything in there, right? Not

Brian Coords (13:15)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (13:16)
just a template.

Jonny Martin (13:18)
Right. that that world is definitely over, I think. and so our focus is it is really like not how do we deliver less, it’s how do we deliver way more for what our clients’ budgets are, right? How do we make it

Brian Coords (13:31)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (13:31)
so they’re like, wow, I am impressed by by what you gave me. How do we focus on that week in and week out?

Brian Coords (13:38)
Yeah, that was an issue when I worked at an agency, which I did before I worked at WooCommerce. That was an issue already with things like Elementor, where a lot of our clients were marketing agencies that didn’t have

Jonny Martin (13:49)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (13:50)
developers. So we would just be like their development team. And we were already hitting that point where the designers were like, actually, this Elementor thing’s pretty easy. I don’t think we need a development team to set this up. And that was that was already a trend in that space. And I think, you know.

Brian Coords (14:06)
Now instead of Elementor, it might be, well, I have Claude and that sort of thing. And I do think that understanding the difference between we just write code versus we provide a full solution, we provide strategy, we actually understand what works. And also, like you said, focusing on those sort of sites that like downtime is unacceptable,

Jonny Martin (14:25)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (14:25)
fatal data loss is unacceptable versus a marketing site that maybe, you know, you can roll it back to a

Brian Coords (14:32)
to yesterday’s backup and and you’re gonna be okay. So it’s just definitely

Jonny Martin (14:35)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (14:36)
a it’s it’s it’s a trend that already existed. It just feels like it’s hitting us much faster these days.

Jonny Martin (14:41)
Yeah, it and and I but I also think right there used to be most problems were too small to solve.

Brian Coords (14:48)
Hm.

Jonny Martin (14:48)
Right? Like we we actually can’t solve all of the problems that people bring us because they don’t have a budget for it, right? Because it would cost

Brian Coords (14:55)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (14:55)
too much money. And and and so people would use like Salesforce.com. They use Salesforce.com as a great enterprise CRM, but it would never do everything people wanted.

Jonny Martin (15:07)
Right? And

Brian Coords (15:07)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (15:07)
it would do a whole bunch of stuff that people didn’t want. Right. And and

Brian Coords (15:10)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (15:11)
they couldn’t afford to build something that did a hundred percent of what they want and was light enough and didn’t do anything that they didn’t want. Today that is possible, right? today it’s possible for us to solve every problem.

Jonny Martin (15:23)
not just the most expensive ones with the biggest budgets. And and I think right

Brian Coords (15:27)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (15:27)
the focus needs to be what are the other problems that that business owners and publishers and marketers are facing. And then how do we solve that problem for them? You know, like the little stuff. How do we automate their reporting? How do we automate their analytics? How do we auto help them kind of automate the whole suite of things and really kind of

Brian Coords (15:46)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (15:46)
focus on saving them time along

Brian Coords (15:49)
Yeah and I want to ask you about I saw you at WordCamp US and you were showing me some pretty cool stuff that you were working on. And I’m wondering how much you can talk about what what you were working on and how that’s been going for you. Cause I thought this was I mean, it’s it’s a topic that is very big inside of automatic, which is how do we get people from other platforms onto

Jonny Martin (16:09)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (16:10)
WordPress? How do we kind of

Brian Coords (16:11)
They call it data liberation or migration. How do we get people that are so invested in a closed platform but want to, like you said, go somewhere where they can do everything. They can’t be limited by it. And so you guys have been working on that. I’m curious if you could give a an overview of what that that experience has been like.

Jonny Martin (16:28)
Yeah, so

Jonny Martin (16:29)
We kinda had the issue where we could design a site in Claude Design, Google Stitch, or whatever the platform was. but then how do we get that to be a WordPress site? And how do we get it to be a WordPress site that is pixel perfect, right? And and

Brian Coords (16:43)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (16:43)
actually is legitimate blocks where people can edit the content and move things around, right? Like you can say, hey, Claude, make this design a WordPress theme and it makes it and it crams HTML into blocks and it it just builds

Brian Coords (16:56)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (16:57)
it a little wonky or

Jonny Martin (16:58)
it it b builds a good block, but it doesn’t quite look what it’s supposed to look like. And you know, like it’s fine if you can accept those rough edges, but but how do we automate that? And so we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to build kind of a system and a harness that’s really focused on just that. How do we take a

Jonny Martin (17:18)
design a site and build a theme off of it. And so

Brian Coords (17:22)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (17:22)
we started with the need to create a a good theme from a design. Then we started, we had sites that were using a an old theme builder that was a little slow and clunky. How do we, you know, how do we turn that into a beautiful block based theme, right? Like how do we actually build that so you know it isn’t a five second page load. So we drop this down to sub one second. And so we built this, you know, it’s a it’s an orchestrator script

Jonny Martin (17:47)
Is really what it does, and it stands up agents. The agents write code. The agents don’t say when they’re done. The agents actually then turn their code in and it gets validated with a set of scripts, really, is what it does, right? And so it kind of runs through this looping process. And you know, it’s an automated process, but it might, you know, it might take 12 hours for a home page for a site, for example, and then the next page gets less and less and less. and so we started building that out for kind of CMS sites.

Jonny Martin (18:15)
And then we had some clients wanted to migrate from Shopify over to WordPress or WooCommerce. And we’re like, hey, I bet it can work on that even easier, right? a product page, that’s

Brian Coords (18:23)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (18:23)
a template, right? that, you shouldn’t have to do 5,000 different products. You could just do one.

Brian Coords (18:27)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (18:28)
And so we really started focusing on the Shopify side of things. and it worked really, really well, right? Like we can make a pixel perfect migrated Shopify store in three days. like, like I mean pixel perfect, whatever animations they have, what whatever their design.

Brian Coords (18:43)
Mm.

Jonny Martin (18:43)
Is

Jonny Martin (18:44)
whatever their flow like it’s it is just awesome, right? Brings over their products, brings over their orders and customers, all of that stuff. Now, of course, it doesn’t have their back-end ERP integrations and any of that. That still needs to be built. so

Brian Coords (18:56)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (18:57)
we really kind of leaned in and creating that. I started that I think in March, really kind of finished it up in July, and August is really when that really got wrapped up. And then we launched kind of a consumer-facing version of that, mightymigrate.com.

Brian Coords (19:10)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (19:12)
And so Mighty Migrate is focused on you can move anything to WordPress. we can move a Wix site, a Squarespace site, a big commerce site, a headless site, a design file, like whatever you want to do, we can move it to WordPress and build a fully functional block theme. and so we decided to try to productize it as a service, right? Have a service that’s productized. And so we launched Mighty Migrate. We use it internally, our dev team uses it to build stuff.

Brian Coords (19:39)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (19:39)
We use it for larger Shopify stuff.

Jonny Martin (19:41)
we just launched Mighty Migrate to really focus on how do we get the the person that somebody built a Squarespace site for their dentist office right and how do

Brian Coords (19:51)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (19:51)
we get that off Squarespace and onto WordPress somebody gets kicked off Shopify because they sell you know I don’t know like

Jonny Martin (19:59)
firearm related stuff or they sell vape stuff or I don’t know what it is,

Brian Coords (20:01)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jonny Martin (20:03)
right? how do we get them moved over? And so Mighty Migrate really kind of takes care of that for us and for them. And it and it’s been it’s been awesome to get that launched and up and running.

Brian Coords (20:13)
Yeah, and I think like you were saying earlier, it’s the difference between a s task that maybe wasn’t profitable to do at all. Like maybe there there wasn’t it just wasn’t going to happen before because it just wasn’t worth putting a development team on something like that and

Brian Coords (20:28)
I w like the foundational piece of what you’re talking about is that you’re moving them not just to WordPress but to block themes. And so I’m curious, because when I was at this meetup, I did the typical how many of you use the block editor, and like, you know, no hands go up and and then they’re telling

Jonny Martin (20:41)
Okay.

Brian Coords (20:42)
me they’re having performance issues, and it’s like, all right, well, what page builder are you using? Blah, blah, blah,

Jonny Martin (20:47)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (20:47)
you know? And I there’s still such a misconception, but like clearly it seems like you’re seeing that going all in on blocks is

Brian Coords (20:55)
giving the performance gains that are making it worth it to do it. Cause I know that blocks are a little bit harder. They’re they are a little bit trickier.

Jonny Martin (21:01)
They are. Yeah.

Jonny Martin (21:03)
They they they definitely are. And and and they’re

Jonny Martin (21:05)
They’re e they’re actually harder for AI too, right? Because the information

Brian Coords (21:08)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (21:09)
isn’t all in code. Some of the information is in the database, right? And then

Brian Coords (21:12)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (21:13)
and then it’s that AI doesn’t know where to look to get the information, and so it tries to write the information in the code, but that’s supposed to be in the database, not in the code, right? so there’s there’s

Brian Coords (21:22)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (21:22)
all kinds of challenges there, but block themes are so much more performant than any kind of page builder. and so you know, like actually for Mighty Migrate, like we guarantee on the site, right? Like if you run a page.

Jonny Martin (21:34)
Speed analysis, we guarantee right 93, 95, 100, 100, right? So 93 plus performance, 95 plus accessibility, 100 on best practices, and 100 on SEO for every site

Brian Coords (21:46)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (21:46)
that it makes. and you know, like I don’t care what your site is, we can get it to get that performance as a block theme. And you know, like there’s there’s people’s that no matter what they do, they can’t get their sites above 60 on performance,

Brian Coords (21:59)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (22:00)
right? And it’s just like no with a block theme, you really can.

Brian Coords (22:03)
Yeah, ’cause that was some of the issues where people were saying, well, then I have Elementor and it has a cache, and then I have this other caching plugin on top and they’re layering all these things. And

Jonny Martin (22:11)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (22:12)
I mean, I’m I’ve been out of the agency space for a while, so like the sites I manage are just personal stuff or, you know, things that aren’t at that level anymore. But it’s like

Brian Coords (22:20)
It’s been a while since I’ve said, you gotta get that optimization plugin and stuff like that, because it seems like a lot of that stuff you get for free with core, with good hosting, and then maybe some light touch plugins on top of it. But I’m just I’m curious if if there’s like other pieces in your stack that you still have to put on top of the block theme, or how much how much of like a vanilla WordPress and WooCommerce, you know, experience can you really provide?

Jonny Martin (22:47)
Yeah, so we we still use ACF, right? On on

Brian Coords (22:50)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (22:51)
just about every site. we love ACF. It’s a great plugin. you know,

Brian Coords (22:54)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (22:54)
we use Gravity Forms on almost every site we build that has a form on it, right? Like it’s just easy. And I know the w I I forget, was it you that posted? There’s a there’s a new forms block feature, I think, that’s either out or coming out.

Brian Coords (23:09)
Yeah, JetPex blocks are getting much better for forms. You c you’re they’re starting

Jonny Martin (23:13)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (23:14)
to put in that conditional logic, the webhook integration. It they’re catching up, but obviously gravity forms, that’s a Yeah.

Jonny Martin (23:19)
They’re catching up, right? But they they have a little while, right? and then

Jonny Martin (23:22)
and and we we still use the legacy menu, right?

Brian Coords (23:26)
Okay. Yeah.

Jonny Martin (23:26)
I just think that’s easier to to use and kind of

Brian Coords (23:29)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (23:30)
see and control your menu than than in the block, right? But other than that, we use we kind of build custom blocks for everything and use the existing blocks.

Brian Coords (23:38)
Do you use the blocks that come with WooCommerce, like products, product galleries, product carousels, product collections,

Jonny Martin (23:42)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brian Coords (23:45)
add to cart and some of that stuff? Okay, cool.

Jonny Martin (23:48)
We do, yeah. And we love the new checkout

Jonny Martin (23:49)
blocks too, right? I think the the block based checkout has been great as well. So we we definitely do

Brian Coords (23:54)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (23:54)
use all those.

Brian Coords (23:55)
Okay, yeah, and that’s a good one too, because a lot of people are afraid of the block checkout. it converts like we have data, we know that it converts better, but I know that stores are unique. They do kind of weird things with checkout. That’s just the nature of the WooCommerce user. They’re generally here ’cause they’re doing something goofy, to get, you know, a specific experience and stuff. So it’s good to hear that you’re actually using block checkout because I don’t think people

Brian Coords (24:18)
I understand it’s scary to move your checkout. It’s scary to change anything and stuff, but I just feel like a lot of the problems, even the problems we’re talking about today where blocks are a little bit hard and it’s mixed to database and stuff, even the last round of Frontier models kind of they kind of blow through that too. Like everything that seemed like it was kind of a hard problem for WordPress kind of feels like it’s getting blown away by these models. I mean, you

Jonny Martin (24:40)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (24:41)
you probably even saw improvements over the last few months, if you’re updating the models.

Jonny Martin (24:44)
yeah, Opus 55 and

Jonny Martin (24:46)
the even the latest Grok. We use Muse a lot too for kind of simpler

Brian Coords (24:49)
Okay.

Jonny Martin (24:50)
coding tasks, right? Like the Muse is it is super fast, right? Like, you know, it is not nearly as good as as an Opus or something like that, but it is so much faster, right? and

Brian Coords (25:01)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (25:01)
so I I mean think there are, you know, just like you have a Phillips head screwdriver and you have a standard screwdriver and you have a wrench, like there’s different tools for different things. I I do think, right, like

Jonny Martin (25:11)
People for the longest time had to they were stacking aftermarket products on top of WordPress. WordPress

Brian Coords (25:17)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (25:18)
has now moved and now they’re trying to make those aftermarket products fit on the new WordPress. When the new WordPress actually does most of the stuff.

Jonny Martin (25:26)
That they had

Brian Coords (25:27)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (25:27)
those aftermarket products for, right? the page builders and all that stuff. and and I get that, you know, a a a marketing team might be really used to Elementor, and there’s there’s still use cases for Elementor, right? Like Elementor

Brian Coords (25:38)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (25:38)
uses blocks and there, right? There still are use cases for that, but I think it is just way overused today. and things can be simplified. And we like to think like the less there is on a store, the simpler a store is.

Brian Coords (25:52)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (25:54)
the less there is to break. And so, there’s that old adage, you get a client and they have a hundred plugins or 180 plugins and they don’t even know what half of them works or any of

Brian Coords (26:03)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (26:03)
that kind of stuff, right? Like, but that is true. Like how do you really simplify the work or even offload it? Offload it to a third-party service, right? Like, hey, do

Brian Coords (26:12)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (26:12)
your reviews need to be managed on site, right? Like there’s review things. we have people that are migrating from Shopify and they’re like, yeah, we use Trustpilot for all our reviews. Right? We wanted that to be completely offloaded.

Jonny Martin (26:22)
I’m like, well, okay, great. that just they want WooCommerce to be just the e-commerce engine. and and

Brian Coords (26:28)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (26:28)
I think that’s a great plan for a lot of people.

Brian Coords (26:31)
Yeah, we were actually talking about that as well too, where you know, a lot of WooCommerce stores, it’s maybe they have a a storefront, but they also have a retail location and they’re,

Jonny Martin (26:39)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (26:39)
you know, they have inventory management and maybe they have a separate pin or whatever, you know, managing their inventory and there’s all these

Jonny Martin (26:45)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (26:46)
things syncing. And that was kind of one the topics was that WordPress and WooCommerce, WordPress really is great for publishing and marketing. And I think that’s

Brian Coords (26:55)
Honestly, the biggest value of a WooCommerce store is the visual storefront. But there’s a lot of people that want to cram their marketing email in there and they want to do all these other things. And you really don’t have to

Jonny Martin (27:04)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (27:04)
go that route. you you can let WooCommerce be really great at what it’s meant for as that sort of central hub that connects to Google and all these other

Jonny Martin (27:13)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (27:13)
things. But like there’s you can really just compose it the way you want. And there’s ways to kind of make it a better experience. It doesn’t all have to be inside of WooCommerce, I guess.

Jonny Martin (27:23)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (27:23)
Well, I think that comes from there was this period in the early 2010s when, for a lot of people, WordPress was their first framework, right?

Brian Coords (27:32)
Hmm.

Jonny Martin (27:33)
That they worked in. And so people would build everything with WordPress. They would build a social media platform and it was WordPress. They would build a chat

Brian Coords (27:38)
Yeah. Guilty, yeah. Yeah.

Jonny Martin (27:42)
bot and it was WordPress. every feature and functionality that they could think of, they would build in WordPress because WordPress was the

Jonny Martin (27:51)
Biggest framework that was out there at the time, right? And most developers, at least that I work with, that aren’t kind of C out of the CS engineering side of the world, most kind of self-taught developers, right? Like that was the first framework that they learned. That’s where they got comfortable. Well, in the last 10 years, and especially in the last three, like technology has caught up so much that you

Jonny Martin (28:12)
WordPress actually isn’t the best framework for a a chat bot, right? it isn’t actually

Brian Coords (28:15)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (28:16)
the best framework for a social media site, right? it is really good at content management. WooCommerce is really good at serving products, processing orders, right? get all

Brian Coords (28:24)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (28:24)
the rest of the stuff out of there and really just focus on on, best of breed stuff.

Brian Coords (28:30)
Yeah. So if you were I guess maybe like a

Brian Coords (28:33)
A closing question is if you were maybe a smaller agency, like I consider you more of an aspirational agency. You guys are very well established. You know, we in WooCommerce, we trust you all the time with big products. But for somebody who’s maybe like not at that level yet and they’re looking and they’re kind of seeing, all right, well, is AI making me irrelevant? Should I be learning how to code? Should I wear, you know, should I be learning this other stuff? What’s the kind of general advice you give to people that are still trying to grow and build their agency to get to that level of trust and and they’re just

Brian Coords (29:03)
a a little freaked out right now because of of all the changes.

Jonny Martin (29:07)
Yeah, yeah, there’s there’s nothing to be afraid of, right? if you’re able to learn, there’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of. I remember when I was in at UW in business school in the basic economics class, right? Like the definition of a consumer is something with unlimited wants and desires.

Brian Coords (29:23)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (29:24)
Right,

Jonny Martin (29:24)
that’s what a consumer is, right? They always want more. and and

Brian Coords (29:27)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (29:27)
our our and our customers are like that, right? Customers always want more. There’s always another bell, there’s always another whistle. So

Brian Coords (29:35)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (29:36)
figure out like whatever you know really well, right? And then f lean into that space and just become an expert, right? Like when people come to us.

Jonny Martin (29:46)
We have 80 clients at any given time, right? Like we know how to migrate subscriptions from one platform to another platform and not lose any order flow. The reason we know that is because we’ve done it a hundred times, right? Like they don’t

Brian Coords (30:02)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (30:02)
want to do that kind of work themselves internally. What if they lose their subscription? So when you can bring kind of repeatable experience to the table, right? That really becomes a value to a client.

Jonny Martin (30:15)
And so I would say for smaller companies, right? what have you done twice? What have you done three times? What have you done five times? Lean into

Brian Coords (30:22)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (30:22)
that. and you know, it’s kind of random at first. Like, you know, you, you know, start an agency, you kind of, you know, get business from your network, you get business from,

Brian Coords (30:29)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (30:30)
you know, friends and family, or you know, I mean, I knocked on doors, right? Like I we literally went and I knocked on every chiropractor, dentist, and autorepair shop and sold paid search, right? Like, you know, I mean, you you just build

Brian Coords (30:40)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (30:41)
whatever you can. And then once you figure out

Jonny Martin (30:43)
Like what you’ve done a few times, just lean even heavier into that, right? lean all the way in. and people want security, they want confidence, right? A business owner.

Jonny Martin (30:54)
Don’t want to do it themselves. That is not what where they make their money, right? Like they

Brian Coords (30:59)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (31:00)
make their money doing their thing, whether that’s auto repair, chiropractic, selling candles online, grinding coffee, right? Making lattes, whatever their thing is, that’s what they want to do. They want someone else to focus on that, right? I mean, don’t know how to work in a fancy espresso machine. I have no

Brian Coords (31:17)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (31:18)
idea how to pull a shot, right? Like I drink coffee every day though, right? Like, you know, and

Brian Coords (31:23)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (31:23)
so I can’t.

Jonny Martin (31:24)
do that but but I can take care of their subscription services where they sell coffee, right? And and so I for for smaller agencies, don’t be afraid, right? there is there is there’s more opportunity today than there was yesterday and I haven’t seen opportunity go down.

Jonny Martin (31:40)
There’s o there’s always more of it, right? Things change, they’re different. You can’t rest on your laurels. Like you have to like lean

Brian Coords (31:50)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (31:50)
in. You have to deliver more. And there there’s another thing that you learn in business school is that wherever there’s profit.

Jonny Martin (31:58)
Right? a large profit margin, competition swoops into that market and tries to drive that profit margin down to zero. Right. So a company, in order to survive, has to constantly change, change their markets, change what they’re doing, change what they’re offering, or competition is gonna come in and they’re gonna squeeze that to zero.

Brian Coords (32:16)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (32:16)
and so it’s about like leaning in and being adaptable, right? And and I don’t think there’s any reason for anyone to be afraid, right? Like

Jonny Martin (32:26)
There’s there’s so much opportunity out there.

Brian Coords (32:28)
Yeah, I I I really do think we’re just at the beginning of seeing a a big growth in e commerce. I think the f people wanna spend money and people wanna sell things online and I think it’s already a huge part of our industry, but I think it’s just gonna keep going. I think we’re just

Brian Coords (32:44)
opening the doors even more and there’s gonna be more people trying to make money online and there’s gonna be more need for experts to help them get ahead competitively and

Jonny Martin (32:53)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (32:53)
there’s only so much they’re gonna get from asking ChatGPT to build a business plan for them. there’s at some point you you just want a human to be able to point at and say, make sure this goes right. And I I don’t see that going away at all.

Jonny Martin (33:04)
Yeah. And they don’t

Jonny Martin (33:07)
want to type into ChatGPT. They to make their espresso or they want to grind the coffee or

Brian Coords (33:10)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (33:10)
turn the wrench or whatever whatever their whatever their expertise is, right? not everyone is a technologist. right?

Brian Coords (33:17)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (33:17)
Like and so let’s help the non-technologists succeed.

Brian Coords (33:22)
Yeah, and if they were gonna do that, they were gonna do that ten years ago and spin up their own WordPress site. Yeah, the they

Jonny Martin (33:24)
They were gonna do that anyways. Yeah.

Brian Coords (33:27)
were not your customer in the first place. So I I don’t think that’s a hu should be a big concern.

Jonny Martin (33:32)
Yeah, we should have customers

Jonny Martin (33:33)
that want us, not customers that have to have us, in my opinion,

Brian Coords (33:36)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (33:36)
right? it should be a win-win scenario with between you and your clients, right? if you’re a necessary evil, right? they

Brian Coords (33:43)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny Martin (33:44)
have to have you, but they don’t want you.

Jonny Martin (33:46)
I don’t

Brian Coords (33:46)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (33:47)
really that’s not a good relationship, right? I would much rather

Brian Coords (33:50)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (33:50)
have people that are like, wow, thank you so much for what you did for me, rather than, man, there’s that invoice I gotta send out, right? Like you

Brian Coords (33:58)
Yeah.

Jonny Martin (33:58)
you gotta you gotta figure out how to build those relationships with people.

Brian Coords (34:01)
Yeah, and provide the actual value where it’s it’s a no brainer for them for sure. Cool.

Jonny Martin (34:05)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Brian Coords (34:07)
Well So where can people go to learn either both about your agency and about Mighty Migrate and and if you’re active online, if there’s places you hang out, give give us all the links.

Jonny Martin (34:15)
Yeah, yeah. I I’m

Jonny Martin (34:17)
I’m lightly on X, right? at Built Jonny, but just lightly, really. and then you of course our agency is builtmighty.com. and then you can always check out mighty migrate dot com as well, right? That’s where we can help anyone migrate a site from anything to a a WordPress theme. and you know, we kind of have it’s pretty simple pricing for most simple sites. It’s like five hundred dollars. for e commerce stores it’s five thousand and above because there’s a lot more kind of

Jonny Martin (34:43)
Can’t mess upness in that as well with the orders and the customers. But yeah, we’d love to I’d love to talk to anyone that wants to reach out.

Brian Coords (34:52)
Awesome. Thanks for hanging out today.

Jonny Martin (34:54)
Sweet. Thanks, Brian.