Jonathan and Luke catch up with Lesley Sim to explore her experience creating products in the WordPress ecosystem, starting with Newsletter Glue, and now EventKoi. They discuss her and Ahmed’s approach to building EventKoi as an ecosystem plugin and their thinking about early decisions. Luke reflects on what he found inspiring about their approach to design and Jonathan asks questions about their plans for growing the EventKoi ecosystem. Ultimate Frisbee is also discussed.

Transcript#

Transcript generated via Riverside and hand-edited.

Jonathan:
Luke, was a couple of years ago that I got this idea to take up acting and I got into a musical as my opening foray. I auditioned and was cast into two roles in a musical called Into the Woods. It was quite the experience for me.

Luke:
This was before you took on your role as Satan in the church musical.

Jonathan:
Lucifer, thank you, but yes. And it was actually around the same time, but it was a proper production. It was like 14 showings. It was an intense thing. I loved it. It was an incredible experience. And I was delighted to find that our guest today is a fan of Into the Woods. Lesley, on your blog, you called it out as one of your favorite musicals. So that already puts you really good standing in my regard.

Lesley:
That’s crazy. No idea what I write on my blog. But yeah, that’s… When you started, I was like, that’s my favourite musical. That’s so cool. I wasn’t expecting you to link it to me.

Jonathan:
Yeah I took on and actually in your blog posts, you embedded the YouTube video of a performance that is the performance that I actually studied for the musical. It’s the the reference that the cast used.

Lesley:
I think the one that I embedded must have been the first one? Like the original? Yeah.

Jonathan:
It’s one of the older ones, yeah. I had so much fun doing that and was like I would be sitting working on WordPress stuff during rehearsals because it was like hours and hours every day.

Jonathan:
It was an incredible experience. That was a happy reference. Lesley, welcome to this episode of Crossword. We’re excited to have you. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of reading your blog or seeing what you’ve been doing in the space for some time, would you mind just giving us a bit of background on yourself? How did you come into this WordPress world?

Lesley:
I… Wait. Now I need to know what role you played in Into the Woods.

Jonathan:
I played two roles actually. I played the steward and the old man. So two fairly simple roles, which was a big deal for me. And it was also my first time - there’s a solo that the old man does at the end. So I didn’t have any formal musical training. I got really fortunate to be with a cast that was quite talented. I was by far the least experienced. I just really poured myself into it and it was an incredible experience. So back to you.

Lesley:
That’s so cool. Yeah, I started on WordPress, I want to say maybe 2016? Something like that. As most people start, I was looking for a cheap way to build a website. At the time, I think it must have been… So I was doing two things. I was helping a friend with the beer brewery business and I was also trying to start a video agency. So the beer brewery ended up on Shopify and my video agency website ended up on WordPress. So I kind of got a chance to play with the two. I guess, I mean, it’s almost 10 years now, but I still distinctly remember how my experience was using WordPress. And I think that has kind of shaped a lot of my approach to building stuff to this day. So I should say, my first introduction to WordPress was around 2016, building my video agency. And then that kind of turned into a marketing agency and a design agency. With small businesses, you kind of have to do it all. so I built websites for clients over time. And it kind of got to the point where I was sick of having clients and I always thought about building software products. And I’ve spoken to a lot of agency people and I think that’s kind of like a common thing they all dream about. The harsh way to say is I fired my clients.

Jonathan:
It’s a common refrain, yeah.

Luke:
They’re all sick of their clients.

Lesley:
in 2019, I just kind of got rid of most of them and started figuring out this plugin world, plugin business. And I think it took us to about mid to late 2020 to launch our first one, which was Newsletter Glue. And that has a whole story in and of itself. But yeah, now in 2025, we are on to our second plug-in business, which is EventKoi, which will be launching soon, fingers crossed.

Luke:
I’m really keen to dive into EventKoi and some of your product thinking, but I saw that Newsletter Glue, it was acquired. So congratulations. Would you tell us a little about that story? How did you land Newsletter Glue to that point?

Lesley:
Thanks. Yeah. How did it - as in how did we sell it?

Jonathan:
More of the journey because you were working hard on Newsletter Glue for for quite a few years, right? Like that’s even if you go to lesley.pizza today, it says “Working on Newsletter Glue” - it’s been your your main focus for a long time and was how I first came across your work. So yeah for those who don’t know maybe just a little bit of that that journey of creating the product, focusing on it for years and then ultimately selling it.

Lesley:
Yeah, so I guess the medium length story is that we started in 2020. That must have been like at the start of COVID as well. And so everyone was online and I think we benefited a lot from that. Newsletter Glue started as a pivot from a membership plugin that we were trying to build and that didn’t go so well because we were new players in an established niche, so it was hard to even get people to use the free version. So we pivoted to Newsletter Glue, which was kind of like a much smaller product, but because there weren’t many people using it, it became easier to convince the people who needed such a feature to try it because there weren’t many options around.

I think, as I said, it was kind of during the pandemic and that helped a lot with conversion because I’m over here in Singapore and my co-founder, Ahmed, is in Egypt. And we weren’t able to go to WordCamp US or WordCamp EU, which is happening right now. And I think having a lot of things online really benefited us. I managed to attend WordCamp US and give a talk there, but like, you know, I was doing it from Singapore, which is definitely not something I can do right now. Yeah, so that happened. One thing I also wanted to mention is, again, because of the pandemic, everyone was online a lot, and I think that allowed me to build a lot of relationships with people, with plugin owners, agency owners from the US and Europe, were our two main countries, areas, regions that people bought us.

I don’t think that I would have been able to do that now because everyone’s much more in, you know, meeting face to face. Yeah, so then we built up Newsletter Glue and that was a huge learning lesson for me as well.

Jonathan:
Lesley, want to just touch on that for a moment, because it’s an interesting contrast that’s just now clicking for me. Yeah, COVID gave us this opportunity where suddenly there was this all, we’re not able to meet face to face. And what’s occurring to me is with all this focus on AI now, I would argue that there is actually something like prickling up here around face to face becoming more valuable again, because of this, like, how do you know what’s real? It’s an interesting contrast in timing - here where we had this worldwide thing where we couldn’t spend time in person and, at least as I’ve been thinking about it, it feels like there’s a near term future where there’s a greater emphasis being placed on in person again, which has its benefits, but also trade offs for those of us who’ve benefited so much from things like being accessible and online.

Lesley:
Yeah, I mean, I couldn’t put it better myself. I do think that, yes, there’s like, people appreciate that in real life part more, but I think there’s also like a, you know, convenience thing that AI provides and also, know, Zoom and Riverside provides that once you have that, it’s also hard to go back.

Jonathan:
I’m curious to see, yeah.

Lesley:
Yeah, it’s like a Pandora’s Box thing, I think.

Jonathan:
Okay, so, and I’m curious for a bit more context in this going into Newsletter Glue, like what prompted you to say, hey, I’m going to make a product like you mentioned - you had that agency’s background where you’re like, you fired your clients, but did you go into it with your eyes wide open about like, it’s going to be difficult or like, I guess what was the the sentiment going into that early on? Was it just that you wanted something different than the agency work?

When I read some of your writings now, it feels like you what you’re doing, but you’re also honest about what you’re trying to figure things out. But when you started on that product journey with the membership and then into Newsletter Glue - did you have anything else that informed that? Had you had product experience prior or was it very much like learning from the ground up?

Lesley:
Yeah, I was very much learning from the ground up. Sheer hubris. Didn’t know anything about anything. I thought that I knew about marketing, but as it turns out - so my background before running my own agency business was I had worked at ad agencies for a number of years and that was always working on large global brands. So I thought that I knew how marketing is done. But it turns out that doing marketing for a large global brand is very different from doing marketing for a small startup when nobody knows you. And I’d argue that you actually learn a lot more about marketing when you’re doing a small startup because on the larger scale, like you’re just kind of keeping the ship moving in the right direction. But building the ship from the ground up is a whole other story.

And it requires you to make the strategic decisions. The strategic decisions weren’t made for you by some CMO 10 years ago that you’re just kind of like running the playbook for. Yeah, so, you know, even the thing that I thought I knew turned out to not really even be that helpful.

And so we started in 2020. I didn’t know anything about marketing. I didn’t know anything about design, didn’t know anything about product management and those are all kind of skills that I’ve had to learn and teach myself over the years. And I think in particular product management, my lack of product management skills were frustrating for a bit when we first started working together because I, you know, I’d be kind of doing the most annoying random - “hey, let’s build this. Hey, let’s build that.”" And like, with no kind of reason other than that I think people will like it. So I like to say that I’ve come a long way since then and am now a less annoying product person.

Luke:
So you launched this product and you built it up. You learned how to market it. You got more and more downloads, more and more sales. And then at some point you made a decision to pass it on to some new owners. What was the thinking that led you towards, hey, I think it’s time to move on.

Lesley:
So we’ve been building EventKoi for about just under six months now, or around six months. And it was getting harder and harder to manage the two because we’d be dealing with support requests, building new features, and then at the same time trying to build an entirely new product. And we’re a small team.

It’s always kind of been me and Ahmed and then we have an additional developer who works on a contract basis part-time with us and then also a support person and that’s kind of always been about it. So juggling the two got more and more difficult. And yeah, so I think it kind of reached a tipping point early this year where I was like, I can’t do it anymore. It wasn’t even like number of hours that we were working. It was just like the mental load and the context switching. Yeah. So I decided to pull the trigger this year and set it off.

Jonathan:
Yeah. Okay, so I want to ask about EventKoi. When I first saw that you were working on it, I had a mix of different feelings and thoughts that sort of went through my head. I’m like, first off, an event plugin? Don’t we have enough of these? I think I’d feel similar if someone was like, I’m going to make a forms plugin. Why are you doing that? But then I was like, if Lesley’s working on it, she’s going to do a good job. It’s going to be something proper, so it made me intrigued. And then when I actually started playing with the demo of it, I was like, oh wow. this is, there’s some things about this. It’s still early, but even in just some of the early experiments with the UI, I was feeling this like, ooh, there’s some real thought and care and experience and skill that’s already showing up to me as someone experimenting with it. But I’d love to hear a bit more about the, like why events, of all the things that you could do, like what prompted you to say, “okay, you know what, we’ve had a couple of years of experience, we’ve learned some new skills”, I guess I’m interested in two parts: What motivated you to say, we’re going to do something else in the WordPress space, like we’re going to make another product and then why events?

Lesley:
So one of the reasons is actually motivated by something we’ve talked about or a concept and I’m going to attribute it to you, Jonathan. And that is the concept of platform plugins versus tool plugins. And I think this was something that we kind of always found ourselves.

We kind of painted ourselves into a corner with Newsletter Glue, which was kind of like a tool plugin, masquerading as a platform plugin. We were higher priced and we inevitably became one of the more important plugins for the publishers that used us. Just because by the time we…

Jonathan:
Yep. You did carve out a niche for it.

Lesley:
By the time a publisher wanted to use us, they would have a large newsletter function in their company. And so we’d be kind of like a core piece of that puzzle. So it kind of felt like we were a platform plugin, but we weren’t because there wasn’t really any way to integrate with us. We tried for a number of years because we have so many friends and partners in the WordPress world. just the nature of how it works. So Newsletter Glue connects email platforms like Mailchimp into WordPress and lets you use the block editor as the newsletter writer. So inevitably when people wanted to connect to us, it actually makes more sense to connect directly to Mailchimp because there’s no piece that made sense for them to connect, plug into us rather than plug into Mailchimp. And so when we were looking for a new plugin to build, we knew that we would definitely want to be a platform plugin because it just allowed so many more… marketing opportunities, partnership opportunities, ways to do things. Well, I mean, you could argue that tool plugins can be well monetized as well, right? I would call Yoast a tool plugin, and they’re famously one of the larger well monetized plugins out there.

Luke:
Monetization opportunities.

Jonathan:
Yeah. When I first started talking about this, I described it as an ecosystem plugin. And one of the key hallmarks is this idea that you also have indirect monetization available. In order to meet the test, it has to provide introduce a suite of functionality. So events is a good example, like it adds events to WordPress, right? It needs to have an integration layer, like a method for others to extend it.

Lesley:
Yep.

Jonathan:
Someone else should be able to go into it and create another business within what you’re building - something that takes it further as new functionality. And the third piece, which is where I think a lot of folks don’t put much energy is what I described is this intentional shaping of an ecosystem where you’re like, you want to make sure that people who are building with you.

Gravity Forms, for instance, unintentionally became an ecosystem plugin and has a bunch of folks who’ve built up around it. And whereas the idea is to intentionally say, “Okay, how do we make sure that people are building successful businesses within this ecosystem that we’re curating and shaping and influencing over time?”, which can then lead to indirect monetization, right? Like you could make money in different ways than just selling a piece of software.

Lesley:
Yeah. Yes. Copy and paste. Exactly that.

Luke:
All right, so let me talk about an idea that I’ve been banging on about for a little while, which is WordPress plugins that feel like they belong in WordPress, that don’t completely reinvent the UI. And that’s one of the things I always look for when I’m trying out a new plugin. And something interesting happened when I looked at EventKoi. And what I noticed was that EventKoi does kind of reinvent the WordPress UI, at least sort of there’s a bit of a redesign, but it’s still fundamentally the same thing, right? It still uses common things like list tables. I’d say it’s like a fresh splash of paint on top of WordPress that looks fantastic and feels like fundamentally somehow native, even though it’s not. And so my question is: how did you arrive here? How did you arrive at this design point? And do you think that there’s a design system here that could then actually be implemented by other plugins?

Lesley:
Let me answer the second question first. we actually thought about building kind of like a design system for plugins and trying to sell that. Kind of like Tailwind UI and how they sell their design system. But I think we figured that you couldn’t monetize it that much because the audience is quite niche and I’m not sure how much they would be willing to pay if they’re selling plugins for you know $49 a year or $99 a year how much are they going to be willing to pay for for a design system that allows them to do that?

So we dropped that idea but I still think it’s a fantastic idea and if someone wants to do that they should totally do that.

So the first question I think that’s just like people build the things that are in their heads. And I think what you’re seeing is the manifestation of what is how Ahmed and I about WordPress and plugins. So I think you’re right. And people have pointed that out, that EventKoi has a completely different UI to WordPress. And frankly for me, I did that because I feel like WordPress feels, it itself could use a fresh coat of paint. And I felt that, like, it my first experience using WordPress in 2016? I still remember all my impressions of WordPress from then.

Luke:
Bit stale.

Lesley:
And I remember thinking in 2016 that it looked kind of old and it some work then. And that’s 10 years ago. yeah, so I just wanted to build something clean and fast. And we’ve already been experimenting with React with Newsletter Glue. And once you kind of get used to that snappiness of everything, it’s hard to go back to loading every single page. Yeah, and then I think the other thing is also just there were things, there were design things that we wanted to do, which WordPress didn’t really allow you to do, like certain things, right.

Luke:
Mm-hmm.

Lesley:
You see it sometimes with some plugins where they’re like 90% WordPress and then 10% random UI element because WordPress doesn’t have it. I find like, I don’t, just, I want it all to look kind of comprehensive. And so for me, it’s like, because of that, I’d rather do like a whole new thing.

Luke:
Yeah.

Lesley:
And then, so that’s the design part, but I think for me and Ahmed, like both of us, like… in our heads, the architecture is still the WordPress architecture, because that’s how we view WordPress, how we view how the plugin should work inside of WordPress. And so that’s kind of how you get that thing that you were talking about, Luke, where it looks not from WordPress, but then it feels, and the flows, the processes, the workflows, the step-by-step all feels like WordPress, because the underlying architecture is still built like a WordPress plugin, like a WordPress thing.

Luke:
Yeah. I wish that the entire WordPress admin looked a lot more like EventKoi. It looks fantastic. And I understand what you’re saying about not wanting to redesign individual or design your own individual components. I love that too, that what you said earlier about how you sort of design what’s in your head. And I think we must see this a lot in WordPress where people come from different space, right? Like they’re doing some sort of SaaS and then they think, I’ll pop my SaaS in WordPress. And all they do is they create a new admin page and that admin page then just looks exactly like their SaaS. It doesn’t look like it belongs in WordPress.

And so because you and Ahmed are fundamentally WordPress people, you think in terms of WordPress, I think that that really comes across. It’s really nicely done. I wanted to ask you also about marketing. You said you had some marketing background that may or may not apply. I always find it really hard when it comes to marketing my plugins. There’s the whole like, do you put it for free on the repo or not? And then try to do this sort of upsell thing. There’s like, and it feels like for software, it’s either like Facebook, Google ads or social media marketing. And I’m not on Facebook, I’m not on social media. don’t even have a Google account. so like, how do you do it? How can you like stay, is it possible to live a life free from social media and also somehow market your software?

Jonathan:
And by the way, before you answer that Lesley, I think this is all just a plot for Luke to get out of having to promote the Crossword episodes because he’s like, “sorry, I don’t have any followers. I don’t have anything.” I guess that counts for something. Please, Lesley - go on.

Lesley:
Ha ha ha.

Luke:
I shared it on LinkedIn. Yeah, I put it on LinkedIn.

Lesley:
And did you hate yourself, Luke, when you did that?

Luke:
No, no, I don’t mind. I don’t mind because everybody’s promoting everything on LinkedIn. That’s all it’s for.

Lesley:
Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. I don’t know. So I think with what I found with Newsletter Glue, when we started out, the idea was to build a Twitter following and somehow get customers from there. And I very quickly found out that that’s not really how it works. So the people that are on Twitter are like fellow… WordPress community people, fellow WordPress plugin business owners, developers, designers. And so what I kind of stumbled into was realizing that social media, or least Twitter, was a way to build relationships with the WordPress community who would then in turn share it with potential customers. via their blogs or their newsletters and so on and so forth. So that’s kind of the playbook that I’m hoping to run this time around as well with EventKoi. Build up b2b relationships basically and hope that that kind of trickles down to the people who eventually buy.

Luke:
Right. It’s like an indirect word of mouth sort of thing. I guess WordCamp must play a big part of that too. I know that we met at a WordCamp, and subsequently I began telling people about Newsletter Glue.

Lesley:
Hey, there you go. Thanks. yeah, I guess that’s, that is kind of, the way that it works. I should be better at WordCamps, but honestly, after the pandemic and being at home for so long, it’s like being at a conference feels really overwhelming and I don’t love the setting. I don’t love planning and like planning a conference, like meetings for conferences, like not my favorite thing and and so I tend to just go and drift around and regret not spending my time more efficiently. But yeah.

Jonathan:
Conferences aren’t for efficient time. There’s different methodologies, but I’m also the I don’t like to plan things out I don’t know. I don’t like a schedule telling me what to do.

So Lesley, I’m curious like you where you’re working on EventKoi now someone anyone who’s interested they can go check out the demo they can play with it up top on InstaWP - what can you tell us about the the current plans and intentions? You’ve been fairly public up on on Twitter about it. But from this point in time, how are you feeling about the the next couple of months? Do have any targets or milestones in mind for when it’s going to be released? How are you currently thinking about pricing? And drawing from one of your recent blog posts, you’ve given some pretty helpful guidance on how to think about pricing, which is don’t overthink it. So what are you currently thinking?

Lesley:
I think with building something new and launching something new, it’s hard to have a super rigid timeline because you never know. what’s going to change. And as you talk to people, new information comes up and then that causes you to change direction, so on and so forth. So right now, we’re hoping to launch in the first week of July. But again, things could change from there. But hopefully in July. That’s kind of what we’re hoping for.

As an example of something that changed a lot, when we first started talking about EventKoi, and I got a handful of people using it, I want to say like half the people immediately looked for tickets, like you know, how do I buy tickets to an event? And like, oh, that doesn’t exist yet. And those people did it via screen recordings. which was really helpful for me to kind of see people wandering around the plugin and talking through and talking out loud I mean. that was like, you know, like seeing them wander around and being like, where’s tickets? Where’s tickets? You know, is it me? Is it the plugin? Do you not have it yet? Or am I just not looking for it in the right places? I was like, okay, we obviously have to build tickets now. And then that let us down a ticket rabbit hole for three months. not having done any ecommerce stuff before. And you know, three months in, I was like, okay, if we continue down this path, we will not launch until the end of the year. And so we had to put tickets aside.

We built like, I want to say half of it, also knowing that the last probably 20% would take as long as the first 80%. So we’d already built half of it. And I was like, OK, we got to stop. And instead, we chose to build out our event settings. So our event settings now, think, are great, probably just as robust as the more established event plugins out there. So we’ve got like standard events, recurring events, a whole bunch of there. And so we’ve chosen to do that instead and fill that out and launch based on that first. And then hopefully maybe like end of the year, start tackling tickets again.

Luke:
And then you also have options for integrating with other ticketing platforms.

Lesley:
Yeah, that’s a separate plugin.

Jonathan:
So how are you thinking about pricing and connected to that, I’d love to hear your current thoughts on if you’re building this as an ecosystem, how are you thinking from the outset about the role that opening it for others would play? Where does that fit into some of the initial efforts and conversations that I can imagine you could already be having with folks?

Lesley:
Yeah, so pricing, like you’ve mentioned, I haven’t really… I’m not overthinking it and I haven’t really thought about it. I think it would be like a day or two worth of like Googling to see what other event plugins are charging and then you’re just being like, hmm, somewhere in middle of that. And trying to make it worthwhile for people who are purchasing. a new plugin to the scene. So we obviously can’t charge the same price as an established plugin because we don’t have as many features. It’s probably not going to be as stable. You just kind of, know, here’s the starting price. That makes sense.

Jonathan:
You could tap into that hubris that you had at the beginning and just double the price of what was out there. It’s a funny thing, right? You never know how it can work, but it sounds like you’re taking a sensible approach.

Lesley:
Yeah, I mean, I’m taking the approach that you can change your plugin pricing every other day when you’re new because you don’t have that much traffic, nobody knows you and everyone understands that you’re just starting. honestly, I don’t think the pricing on day one matters that much. I could change it on day two, could change it on day three. So it’s more like putting it out there and getting feedback. think that’s always the most important thing. So I see, I see like, sorry, this is a slight sidetrack, but I think worth talking about. I see launching as like a series of like taking your thing to market. And in my case, it’s just posting on Twitter and posting in Slack channels.

And what you really want is just other people other than yourself to look at the plugin and give you their feedback with fresh eyes. And the same goes for pricing, right? So like I probably just post it and you know if someone comments and says it’s too expensive or too cheap or I was willing to pay twice the price then that kind of gives me more information to then change the pricing. Yeah, so I think that’s the most important part.

Luke:
What about the model? What about the business model when you’re going into it? How do you think about it? Cause you know, there are plenty of freemium plugins and premium plugins and there’s plugins that monetize through third party add on marketplaces and through payment gateways. What are you thinking for EventKoi and why?

Lesley:
Again, like, haven’t super thought about it. We’re still really early days and I think kind of the business model will show itself over time. With tickets, we’re hoping to do some kind of, I think what’s common is a 2% cut. So we’re hoping to do that. I know some people. Some potential customers really don’t like that, but it seems like that’s kind of the norm now in the plugin world. So we’ll probably do that. And then we’ll do some partnerships with people, affiliates, nothing, not try and reinvent the wheel here.

Jonathan:
what I’m gonna be curious about because it’s not standing out to me clearly yet - like I would have taken ticketing as an example of something that might have been a go-to for a third party to be building, or to have multiple ticketing solutions like within the context of you building out an ecosystem, right? So that’s an interesting one to me, if I were to just take a guess I have thought that there’d be a couple of different ticketing options that had specialization and different, like sub areas of usage. And yes, you could build a native solution, but maybe there’s someone who’s better suited to be working on that in parallel. I’m curious about the first couple of things that you’d anticipate a third party developer coming in and say, “Hey, you know what, I want to build in the EventKoi ecosystem” that I think that’s an interesting opportunity that you have to shape and seed some of those initial forays

Luke:
I’ve already got ideas, Jonathan. But yeah, let’s hear them, Lesley.

Lesley:
I don’t know. It’s all fine and well for me to say what I think people should build, but at end of the day, it’s also, you know, who… who wants to build and like, you know, the person that might build on EventKoi might, you know, be, might have an ecommerce background and might want to build this ticketing thing, but they might not. Maybe they have an email background and they want to build, you know, an email add-on or maybe they have, you know, some other thing. So it’s kind of hard for me to, say what I think other people should build, just because I think people kind of come into things with their own biases and their own preferences, which is totally cool and what I’d love to see. I’m also like, I don’t know if this is sabotaging myself, but I imagine… It will take a while for the plugin to be big enough and stable enough that people feel like they can earn money on top of it. Because, you know, why build something? Why spend, you know… weeks or months building add-on to a new plugin where they can just go build and add on to Gravity Forms. If I were trying to make that decision, I would build on us. I would build on something more established.

Luke:
Really? No, the answer is because it was built by Lesley and Ahmed. Like that’s that’s a good answer. No, for real. I think you back people in the space. That’s what you do. But another big answer could be because you have put a lot of thought into promotion and cross promotion and marketplace opportunities and that sort of thing. I don’t know, is that something you’ve been thinking about at all?

Lesley:
Yeah, for sure. I think a huge part of our success is going to come down to integrations and partnerships, working with existing plugin owners and having really, really nice, tight integrations that really make sense and feel really seamless. think, I’m hoping that’s kind of how we grow actually. Yeah.

Jonathan:
What I think is gonna be interesting is - I like your thought process of yeah, you don’t know what people are going to do. You want to you don’t want to presume and you don’t want to fix constraints. I think at least in my experience, though, sometimes people struggle with a lack of imagination. And there’s something that I’m interested in seeing of like, what does it look like for someone creating an ecosystem plugin to put the ideas out there and make an explicit invitation, where it’s like, “hey, this is a friendly space that we want to work with you. Here’s the ideas that we have so far that we haven’t gotten to yet. If any of these trigger something for you, and if you’ve got other ideas, reach out like we to sort of put a shingle out there that says we are consciously wanting to create an environment where others can succeed in and we can share in that success together and help support it.”

That’s something I haven’t seen done much of. I think people get there eventually and I think that there’s something to be said about starting with that intentionality of saying, is the direction we want to go. Here’s what we have to offer so far, our thoughts and ideas, and just make that more direct invitation, which I think it sounds like you’re already doing implicitly, and it’d be interesting to see it just be done more explicit.

Luke:
Lesley, should have known better than to get Jonathan started on ecosystem thinking.

*Lesley:
I love talking to him about it.

Jonathan:
Well, we’re excited to see what you actually do with this and maybe Luke will be one of the early contributors to building things within EventKoi.

Lesley:
You know even even though we don’t necessarily have a laundry list of… features we’d love people to build on top of our plugin yet. I think we’ve gone into it on day one with that’s kind of the intention. One of the key things about WordPress is its extensibility. And so when we built EventKoi with a thousand and one different hooks, with everything like code that’s easy to extend, easy to read, easy to understand. So we’re hoping when we do get to the point where we’re like, yes, come, please build on us. We are super excited to have you. It’s not going to be, oh, crap, now we have to go back and make sure our code makes sense. We have to build all this stuff in. We already have an API, for example. So yeah, even if right now my lack of… Confidence is saying, you I’m not sure that we’re big enough yet to make it make sense for someone who wants to be on top of us. The code is already there. So if you wanted to do it, you know, talk to me and like, we’re super ready.

Luke:
Yeah, that’s another big reason why a developer might choose to build on top of EventKoi as opposed to a different events plugin that maybe is more established. It’s just a beautiful code base. You want to have fun writing the product that you’re building. And I guess the other thing also would be a commitment to backwards compatibility.

Jonathan:
Yep. Lesley, we’re as we’re about to..

Luke:
Hold on, hold on, I want to hear what Lesley has to say about that. That’s tough, isn’t it? It’s tough when you’re launching a brand new plugin and on the one hand you want to encourage people to build on top of it, but on the other hand, you know you’re going to be making mistakes and you know that some things will need to be completely refactored. You’ve probably already rebuilt the plugin twice. If you build anything like me, how are you thinking about that sort of thing?

Lesley:
Yes, it is. yeah, I mean, it’s just going to be like, sorry. Which again is, yeah, which again comes back to why it’s hard for me to at this point, encourage people to start voting on us. Also because we ourselves don’t know what’s gonna be something that we want to keep in our core plugin versus something that we encourage other people to build because we don’t want to build. Because I think even, mean, Shopify is famous for that. They have big apps that are really successful. And then Shopify says, we’re building that exact feature. And then it kills the app overnight.

And I think a bunch of plugins, I think Gravity is one of them and I’m forgetting the course plugin, LearnDash is another of them. I don’t think it was that there’s been any dramas around it, but I think it’s something that’s kind of talked about occasionally within the Facebook groups, within their respective Facebook groups. Like, should I build this at all? I’m not sure if Gravity or LearnDash is going to build it in the future. And kind of always juggling that. So I think on our side, I’d love to kind of have a better grip on these other key features that we can’t afford to outsource too much versus yeah, versus like, we’re never going to build 500 patterns for event design templates. So like, please feel free to do that.

Jonathan:
This is the core. Yeah. Yeah, and I would argue it’s gonna be interesting to see, and this will take some time to evolve, but the clearer you are in the core business and how monetization works, I think it’s gonna make some of those decisions easier.

Lesley:
Yeah, exactly.

Jonathan:
What’s the core, what are our core principles here and what are the things that are adjacent?

Lesley, you’ve been involved in ultimate frisbee professionally for quite some time. I think several decades at this point. How, so you have this, and for those who don’t know, I think I’d leave it you to describe better, but it’s a professional sport and you’re involved at high levels. How, if at all, has that affected that background affected your work building products in the WordPress space.

Lesley:
Sadly, I don’t think Frisbee is super professional. I think there might be some leagues in the US that are trying to make a go of it. But even… Yeah.

Jonathan:
There are, that’s how I’ve heard of it. I heard of that before I knew that you had any involvement in it.

Lesley:
Yeah, but so I think my involvement is very much unprofessional, just enthusiastic amateur. I think I’m not sure how much it’s affected how I run my business, but maybe it’s probably given me confidence in, you know, certain things. training hard at Frisbee, learning how to learn, I would say, has been a huge thing that I got from playing Frisbee. When I started, there weren’t, so for example, when I started, there weren’t much in the way of coaches. If you are on a team with a coach, you are quite lucky. Usually it’s player coaches. And so you kind of have to spend a lot of time. learning for yourself, there isn’t someone that’s dedicated to giving you feedback. And we spend a lot of time, for example, also doing all the admin to travel to a tournament. So we don’t have team managers or if the team manager exists, it’s going to be a player team manager. And so we have to figure all of that out. so learning how to do admin and like get a whole bunch of, you know, 20 something players off into a tournament, get jerseys. get hotels, get cars, all that stuff. Learning how to get all of that off the ground is, I think, very helpful for learning how to do anything in the world. And it gives you confidence. Once you’re able to do that, it gives you confidence that you’re able to do more things, or you’re confident in yourself. And I think that has helped me quite a bit. And also, Yeah, I mean, I think that I was a bratty kid and when I stepped up into leadership roles in Frisbee, it forced me to be less bratty because I realized, I can’t influence people and I can’t inspire people and I can’t teach people and coach people and do all these things because I’m too busy being selfish and wanting things to go my way and that’s not how things work. Yeah, so I learned a lot of life lessons and had a lot of personal growth through VSV and I’m sure a lot of that has influenced the way I now operate my business.

Luke:
I’m sure that a lot of the very best product owners and business builders were brats as kids. Lesley, thank you so much for coming on Crossword. Could you tell people where to find you and where to find out more about Eventcoi?

Lesley:
yeah, I am on Twitter at lesley_pizza. And you can try out the latest version of EventKoi at eventkoi.com.