{"id":512,"date":"2026-02-18T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xn--mnchen-3ya.xyz\/index.php\/2026\/02\/18\/205-matt-cromwell-on-redefining-wordpress-product-growth-in-a-crowded-ecosystem\/"},"modified":"2026-02-18T15:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T15:00:00","slug":"205-matt-cromwell-on-redefining-wordpress-product-growth-in-a-crowded-ecosystem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xn--mnchen-3ya.xyz\/index.php\/2026\/02\/18\/205-matt-cromwell-on-redefining-wordpress-product-growth-in-a-crowded-ecosystem\/","title":{"rendered":"#205 \u2013 Matt Cromwell on Redefining WordPress Product Growth in a Crowded Ecosystem"},"content":{"rendered":"
\nTranscript<\/summary>\n
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[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.<\/p>\n

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, redefining WordPress product growth in a crowded ecosystem.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com\/feed\/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.<\/p>\n

If you have a topic that you\u2019d like us to feature on the podcast, I\u2019m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com\/contact\/jukebox, and use the form there.<\/p>\n

So on the podcast today we have Matt Cromwell. Matt has been an influential figure in the WordPress ecosystem for many years. He co-founded GiveWP, led its growth, and continued his journey as part of the StellarWP leadership after it was acquired.<\/p>\n

Recently, Matt has shifted gears, launching something new. It\u2019s called Roots and Fruit, and is an agency dedicated to helping WordPress product businesses thrive. In recent years, WordPress has gone through a period of flux. There\u2019s been shifting stats about WordPress\u2019s market share, tightening budgets, and increasing competition from both within and outside the.org plugin repo. Despite these changes, Matt remains optimistic about the opportunities for product makers, especially as WordPress evolves alongside emerging technologies like AI.<\/p>\n

Matt starts off by sharing his background, his experience with GiveWP, and the unique perspective he gained navigating growth, crisis, and the challenges facing plugin developers. We then talk about how the WordPress product space has matured. Why building a plugin, or theme, and hoping users will simply discover it is no longer enough, and how focusing on the customer journey, branding, and marketing is more crucial than ever.<\/p>\n

Matt is now positioning himself as a mentor and guide for solo founders and product teams, helping them prioritize growth efforts, refine their product experience, and avoid the scattered approach that many developers fall into. He brings practical insights from years of hand-on experience, and explains why a successful WordPress product business relies on process, diligence, and wise prioritization, not just code and hope.<\/p>\n

If you are building digital products in WordPress, and want to learn how to make them stand out in a crowded, competitive ecosystem, this episode is for you.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com\/podcast, where you\u2019ll find all the other episodes as well.<\/p>\n

And so without further delay, I bring you Matt Cromwell.<\/p>\n

I am joined on the podcast by Matt Cromwell. Hello, Matt.<\/p>\n

[00:03:22] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> Hi. Happy to be here.<\/p>\n

[00:03:24] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Matt and I have chatted many times. In fact, we were having a nice chat just before we realised that the time was going to get away from us. So we\u2019ve diverted and pressed record. We were getting into AI, but we\u2019re going to park that because that\u2019s a whole different episode. Well, maybe not. Maybe there\u2019ll be bits of that leaking into this episode.<\/p>\n

[00:03:39] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> It\u2019ll come up.<\/p>\n

[00:03:39] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> I\u2019m sure it will. But as I say, Matt\u2019s been on the podcast before. He has had a significant sort of reshaping of his career in the recent past. And so we\u2019re going to talk a little bit about what the new direction is, and where he\u2019s going to be focusing his efforts in the near to long term.<\/p>\n

But Matt, just before we begin, do you want to tell us a little bit about you and what you\u2019ve been doing in the WordPress space these many years?<\/p>\n

[00:04:01] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> Absolutely. Thanks so much. I\u2019m Matt Cromwell. I am was, it\u2019s hard to figure out how to introduce myself anymore. I was co-founder of GiveWP and sold that product in 2021 to Liquid Web and stayed on and came on the leadership team of what became StellarWP, and took all the things I learned from Give and got to apply them across lots of products, in an excellent learning journey.<\/p>\n

Recently exited back this last fall, 2025, and went on a journey of discovering in what I want to do, and found that I could not prime myself away from the keyboard enough and decided that now\u2019s the time I get to invest my time and efforts and energy in the WordPress product ecosystem like I always have. So I built a new agency called Roots & Fruit, which I have basically said is your fractional chief growth officer agency. I just launched a couple weeks ago and it\u2019s going well. So that\u2019s what I\u2019m doing. That\u2019s how I say it.<\/p>\n

[00:05:02] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Yeah, I love the domain, by the way. The minute I saw that, I think I got where you were going without even having read a word. Roots & Fruit sort of says it all, doesn\u2019t it? It\u2019s the growth to the actual harvesting at the end. And so we will get into that.<\/p>\n

Can I just ask you though, we\u2019ll begin this way because we\u2019ve had several years now of flux in the WordPress ecosystem. You have charted the growth of many products in the WordPress space. You\u2019ve been involved in them personally, and you\u2019ve seen the journeys of other founders and what have you.<\/p>\n

Do you have the same level of optimism that the Matt Cromwell, let\u2019s say from the year 2020, when everything was going gangbusters, that 35% went to 38%, went to 40%, and on it went. Do you have the same level of optimism? Do you think there still is fruit to be harvested in the WordPress space in 2026?<\/p>\n

[00:05:59] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> Absolutely I do. There\u2019s a lot of caveats in there, I have to say. Being at GiveWP, we had a unique perspective when it came to things like a pandemic. It was like an internal thing where we were afraid of becoming ambulance chasers, okay? Because, especially in the US, when a crisis would come, suddenly our sales would go through the roof. And it\u2019s because when bad things happen, people need to do fundraising. And the worst thing we wanted to do was start capitalising on trauma or things like that.<\/p>\n

And so when COVID came along, we were like, woah, this is going to be significant. And it was. It was a very significant thing. But we had been through the motions, so we knew that it was going to have a downside on the tail end of it, sales-wise. And I think a lot of folks understood that conceptually as well. But we had experienced it a lot.<\/p>\n

But what a lot of folks found out on the tail side of COVID was that the downside was worse than it was pre COVID. A lot of folks felt that, even GiveWP to some extent and several of the Stellar products were like, oh, we\u2019ve leveled out, we\u2019ve come down off of the COVID high, and actually it feels a little bit worse than it was before. Budgets got tight in terms of businesses and agencies, nonprofits, things like that. There\u2019s lots of circumstances to those things. But over the last year or so, a lot of product companies have started to see things start to slowly climb again.<\/p>\n

But in the WordPress space, I think it\u2019s important that everybody also look at our ecosystem in the bigger ecosystem of just the web. On the web there are small to medium to large companies launching all the time with huge amounts of success. Just a couple years ago, nobody knew what Lovable was. Now it\u2019s a billion dollar company. Things like that do happen and they happen regularly. That to me means there is still lots of appetite for the kinds of solutions that we are trying to bring to the world through the web. And we can be part of that solution.<\/p>\n

Now, the conversation you and I had a little bit before was more about like, what about WordPress and the threat or the opportunity of AI? I do think the way in which WordPress Core has been tackling AI and trying to bring tooling into WordPress Core is making sure that WordPress itself as a platform has not only a future, but it has a lucrative future. I think the way that they\u2019re going about it is really smart and really intelligent, and it is going to actually build the platform in a way that makes AI understand how to build with WordPress better than anything else out there.<\/p>\n

WordPress is the most, one of the most documented, open source projects in the world, and it\u2019s been open source this whole time, and AI loves that kind of stuff. So it just has been able to scrape the WordPress database, the WordPress code, all the WordPress documentation over years and years and years. AI now knows WordPress really, really, really well. So I think there\u2019s lots of opportunity.<\/p>\n

[00:09:07] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Yeah, no, it\u2019s really great because you covered a lot of ground there. I should say, dear listener, at this point, maybe go and have a look at Matt\u2019s domain. I mentioned it, but I\u2019ll just read it into the record. So it\u2019s Roots with an S. Roots and fruit singular, .com, rootsandfruit.com. So go and check that out. Maybe pause the podcast if you\u2019re at a screen and.<\/p>\n

[00:09:28] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> Singular and plural.<\/p>\n

[00:09:29] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Both. Yeah, you\u2019ve managed to get all the goodness in there. Go and pause the podcast and have a little poke around and you\u2019ll get some intuition as to what Matt is doing over there.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to sort of sidestep a little bit though, because I want to frame this question slightly differently, and that is to, I\u2019ll frame it like this. I, as a consumer of WordPress things, I\u2019ve spent the last 15 or so years pottering around, having a problem, then going to Google and discovering that there\u2019s typically a WordPress plugin or theme or what have you, for that. And then I go to their website and perhaps there\u2019s two or three websites that I might be juggling and thinking which one is superior for the needs that I have. And then I purchase something, you know, I go and I buy a premium version of something or maybe download the free version to give it a test.<\/p>\n

But the point is, I have this really abstracted concept of what it is. I\u2019m buying a commodity. So I buy the finished thing and it comes as a zip file, and I typically don\u2019t interact with a human being. And that\u2019s the interesting bit that I want to get into to begin with, is the human behind all of this, which was you for many years.<\/p>\n

And so can we just explore that a little bit? What is the stuff that somebody like you, when you were with GiveWP, but maybe now the clients that you are going to be servicing, what is their day involved with? What do these people do? What are the anxieties they have? What is the stuff that makes up a plugin or theme developer\u2019s life and business?<\/p>\n

[00:10:55] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> Generally speaking, product folks are nerds, love to be behind the screen. And they like this kind of industry, specifically because they don\u2019t have to be the person dealing with the customer as much. That distance that goes between the screen basically, is something that gives them a sense of safety, where they get to focus on the work that they love and they enjoy, without having to deal with the noise of the people.<\/p>\n

The exception to that are all the folks that are highly motivated to help with technical support. And I love those people. Those are my people. My focus as a founder was more on the customer support and marketing side of things, so I enjoyed being more of the face of things for our brands over the years.<\/p>\n

But the allure there is both being able to have that separation from the noise of the public, but also having a little bit of the security of what might be called mildly passive income. And that\u2019s the big difference between folks who are running an agency and folks who love to run product. Agencies are service oriented folks. They have to be with the customer and the client all the time. You are paying for hours. You\u2019re being paid for the time that you put in, in many ways. With agency service work, there\u2019s ways to get away from just purely time-based charging, but by and large.<\/p>\n

In the product space, you\u2019re not being paid for the time you put in. You\u2019re being paid for the product, and for the outcomes that the customer experiences. And that\u2019s what you bought Nathan, when you went and bought a utility or a tool or whatnot. You weren\u2019t looking to hire a person, you were looking for a specific outcome on your website, and you felt that that one product could provide you that outcome. And once you had that outcome, you\u2019re happy.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s exactly why product shops are, in my mind, have to be customer oriented first because all of the success, all of the success of the product, of the marketing, of the business, all starts with whether or not the customer is happy.<\/p>\n

[00:13:05] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Yeah. We have this expression in the English language which is, a rising tide carries all boats. And essentially what it means is, when there\u2019s this sort of groundswell of growth, everything touching it grows. And I think we had that in all sorts of ways recently, over the last decade or so.<\/p>\n

The mobile phone app ecosystem, that just was taking off and all the developers over there were doing incredibly well. Same with the WordPress space. Just year on year growth. And so there was this notion, which you reference on your website quite a lot, of build it and they will come. And that phrase essentially is, okay, I am one of those people. You said, nerds.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to build a product, and I have a complete expectation that I am part of that rising tide. I\u2019m one of the boats. I\u2019ll build this thing, I\u2019ll mention it a few times on social media, and this thing that I\u2019ve spent hours and hours doing will take off and I will be able to have some kind of passive income from it.<\/p>\n

Now, I don\u2019t know when you started saying that those days were gone, but you are definitely saying those days are gone. Why are those days gone? What happened? What changed to make it so that the rising tide carries all boats analogy, possibly no longer fits?<\/p>\n

[00:14:17] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> It depends on the context. I mean, it fits in several different ways. But when it comes to product in the WordPress space nowadays, we used to depend so much on the wordpress.org plugin, or theme, directory as a primary outlet for discoverability. I want people to find that I exist and that I am a solution for their problems, and this is where you find me.<\/p>\n

The plugin directory in particular, when we launched GiveWP, I think there were 30,000 plugins at the time, or approaching 30,000. And now there\u2019s over 60, and they are growing every day more or less. They grow and they shrink. They get rid of plugins too, actually. But that does increase the amount of surface area where you have to break through in order to be found. If you try to be an AI alt text generator right now, good luck. There are three dozen of those that got shipped yesterday. It\u2019s crazy.<\/p>\n

But even more so than just the noise and the volume on the plugin directory, it\u2019s also that the consumers that are building their websites, they are not thinking about WordPress as much anymore. They\u2019re building with WordPress, but they kind of don\u2019t care that it\u2019s WordPress. They\u2019re just building a website. They have specific outcomes and they know that there are lots of products out there that can serve their needs, and they don\u2019t care if it\u2019s a SaaS, or a platform, or a plugin, or a theme. They don\u2019t care. They\u2019re just going to look for that outcome and they\u2019re going to plug it into their website in one form or another, if that solution is pluggable.<\/p>\n

And that space, the SaaS space in particular, has gotten a lot more crowded and a lot more competitive for being applied directly to the WordPress customer. So we\u2019re not just competing WordPress to WordPress, we\u2019re competing WordPress to the rest of the whole world.<\/p>\n

[00:16:18] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Yeah, that\u2019s interesting. So my analogy, when I said a rising tide carries all boats, what I\u2019m imagining 10 years ago is that there was a really nice looking harbor with a few little boats. And the tide came up and these little boats just bobbed along and they all rose up. Whereas now it feels like the harbor is just chockablock. There\u2019s boats cheek by jowl with other boats. They\u2019re slamming into each other. And instead of it being a gentle rise, it\u2019s stormy, clouds. The sea is choppy all over the place, and everything is sort of bumping into each other.<\/p>\n

In other words, it\u2019s saturated. If you are going to be doing the alt text plugin for AI, well, there were six that came out this morning. There\u2019s going to be nine more by the time we close the doors this evening. Whatever it is that you are doing in the WordPress space, chances are somebody\u2019s already done it. They may already have an existing audience. They may already have paid subscribers.<\/p>\n

So this all sounds very bleak. It sounds like we\u2019ve got no way out of this. But your endeavor, what you want to turn your attention to in the years to come, is to persuade people that\u2019s not the case. So what is the rainbow? What is the shining light on the horizon? How would a plugin developer, a theme developer, somebody in the WordPress space, how do they cut through all of this and get noticed?<\/p>\n

[00:17:28] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> Yeah. A lot of things have changed over the years, but I would say the majority of things, when it comes to digital products, have not changed. And that\u2019s really the brass tacks of what it takes to be a winning product on the web in general. SaaS companies have known this for a really long time because they didn\u2019t have the obvious distribution channel of wordpress.org that we have.<\/p>\n

So they knew if they were going to ship a product, they\u2019re going to have to market it a ton. In the SaaS space, there\u2019s very, very, very few just handy developers who are like, hey, I just built this cool thing, I\u2019ll just put it out there. And then all of a sudden it just goes off like crazy. It doesn\u2019t work that way, and they know it. And so they partner up with marketers.<\/p>\n

And in the WordPress space, for way too long, we got lazy because we had the .org distribution channel. And we assumed that we could build it and people would come. And that\u2019s not like one hundred percent wrong. The directory is still a good tool, and it\u2019s still helpful, and I love the freemium model for products in general. But the thing that WordPress product folks in particular have to learn is to learn how to be a product business, not a code business.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s even more significant now that everyone is learning that code was never the product, because now nobody is building with code anymore. The humans do not build the code anymore. The machines build the code. And you\u2019ll find lots of marketers or CX folks who are building their own apps now as well because they\u2019re savvy enough to use the tools to be able to generate the code that they need and that they want.<\/p>\n

[00:19:11] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Can I just pause for a second there Matt, is that all right? Just because there\u2019s a couple of things that you said, and clearly for you it\u2019s common knowledge. You know, you\u2019ve been in and out of this all the whole time. You painted a strong definition there between a product and code. What\u2019s the boundary between those two things? I mean, I think I can encapsulate, I just want to be clear that the audience know. What\u2019s the difference between product and code businesses, if you know what I mean?<\/p>\n

[00:19:33] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> Let\u2019s go back to when you said, I\u2019m building my website and I have a problem that needs to be solved, and I see this plugin and it solves my problem. And I installed it, or I bought it and I installed it and it worked. That process that you went through, all of those things that you said, you never once said, I inspected the code to figure out if it was good enough or not. You never once said that. All of the things that convinced you to use that product had nothing to do with the code at all.<\/p>\n

You went to the website and there was marketing involved that told you that we know what your problem is, and we know how to solve it. And there was a checkout experience that was calm and soothing enough and giving you enough confidence that they\u2019re not just stealing your money. Then you installed the product and there was a user experience involved that made you feel like it\u2019s actually going to solve your problem, and then it did actually solve your problem. All of those things cannot happen without code, but that is what a product does. And that\u2019s a product experience, is the whole entire customer journey that happens from discovery, to purchase, to adoption is what a product is actually made of.<\/p>\n

[00:20:43] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> So I\u2019m going to infer from that then that from the year 2026 and onwards, what you are saying is that the focus now needs to be on the product. More than ever, the product and the way that you market the product and the way that you pitch the product, and all of the things that wrap around the sales process and the discovery process of the product. That\u2019s where a significant amount of the effort needs to go once the code is in place. Have I parsed that correctly?<\/p>\n

[00:21:11] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> Yeah, I might even go at it from the perspective of the customer because you only understand the product when you look at that whole thing through the lens of the customer. If you think about everything from, oh, I can build that, I just need to pipe these APIs and do this kind of thing, and then you get the outcome, it\u2019s like, well that\u2019s not really what the customer\u2019s ever going to experience.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re going to experience a website first. They\u2019re going to try to have trust first. Look at the whole thing through the customer lens and then you\u2019ll start to understand your product. I mean, you\u2019ll understand your brand in the first place. A lot of WordPress folks don\u2019t think about brand particularly well either. They just name it like Advanced Custom Fields. Now, I love that product. It\u2019s a great, but it\u2019s one of those things where like, let\u2019s just name it what it is. Okay, I guess.<\/p>\n

[00:22:04] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> So this is really interesting. So presumably then, if product is the way forward, it feels like you have now kind of invented a new career angle for yourself where you are going to hopefully kind of helicopter yourself in, or be helicoptered in, to businesses who maybe have got this product bit missing. You know, there are bits of that they, I don\u2019t know, maybe they feel that they\u2019re weak on that, or that past endeavors haven\u2019t really worked out. Or maybe they\u2019re at the first step of that journey and they just want to try and figure out what direction they should point themselves in to have some success.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s kind of interesting. That\u2019s the role that you are going to be taking on in the future. And I can see you nodding. Dear listener, he\u2019s nodding away, so that\u2019s good. But, do you have like a one size fits all template here, or is the endeavor very much to be, okay, I\u2019m going to go in, have a long listen, figure out how you differ from the other people that are on my roster? There\u2019s not really a question in there, but I\u2019m kind of asking you how you are going to position yourself for the different clients that you\u2019re no doubt going to be taking on.<\/p>\n

[00:23:06] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> Yeah, yeah, Well, one thing I\u2019ll caveat a little bit is I\u2019m trying to position myself towards two related audiences. The primary one, for the fractional CGO, is the teams. Product shops that are a team of people. A small team, medium sized team. They\u2019ve built something, it\u2019s successful, they are paying employees, but they\u2019re looking for that next level up, in order to start growing into what they hope to be, more sustainable growth in the long term.<\/p>\n

The other one is what I call the solo lab, where I am trying to position more towards solo individual founders who are by themselves and maybe just got their product out the door and are trying to grow from the ground up. That\u2019s more of like a coaching environment and it\u2019s a group environment and things like that. But both of them are, it\u2019s not that there\u2019s a, I don\u2019t believe really in playbooks. I don\u2019t believe in silver bullets. I believe in process and diligence.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s what I am trying to bring in both of those circumstances is I help the solo folks understand the type of activities that they have to force themselves to do. The solo folks typically are very dev oriented. They know how to build more things. And if you ask them to write a blog post, they\u2019re like, okay, I\u2019ll do that tomorrow and tomorrow never comes. You know, helping them to focus on the work that they have to do to grow their product.<\/p>\n

While the teams, it\u2019s more generally about, they have founders who have done all the things. They have been the dev, they have been the HR lead, they have been the marketer, they have been the support guru. They\u2019ve done all of it, and they\u2019re just tired. And they need the growth but there\u2019s just a missing gap. They need somebody to kind of put on the hat of, you are going to be responsible for finding growth in this team, so that that founder can focus more on other parts, the things that energise them more.<\/p>\n

[00:24:59] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> I\u2019m curious as to whether or not, when you were doing the busy work of being at GiveWP and then StellarWP, whether you drew the intuitions that you are now going to be helping people with. Whether you were aware of this in your head, or it was just the busy work that you were doing. You know, day in, day out, you do this task and over the decade or more that you were doing it, you just kind of perfected it. And, okay, when this thing arises, I do this thing. And when this thing arises, I do this thing.<\/p>\n

Now I expect you\u2019re in that curious position where you are having to lift yourself away from the whole process, stare back at it, and sort of examine how you would do it with a third party. Again, there\u2019s no real question there, but I\u2019m curious as to how different that is for you being the outsider, but relying on the insider knowledge that you must have acquired over time.<\/p>\n

[00:25:49] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> Yeah. I think that\u2019s one of the reasons why I felt a certain amount of confidence in moving in this direction is because I\u2019m helping people that are in the position I was in years ago. I\u2019ve been there and I have done that, and I have absolutely failed. And I don\u2019t have a perfect record or a perfect playbook, but I know what it\u2019s like, and I have done the hard work to see successes.<\/p>\n

I think what also makes my experience a little bit unique is that I had the experience of GiveWP and I honestly, going into being acquired and working at Liquid Web, I had that whole feeling of like, what if I\u2019m a one hit wonder? What if I like did a great job with Give, but I try to apply this anywhere else and it just is like, well you got lucky with Give, that doesn\u2019t work anywhere else? And it turns out that most of the things that I learned can be applied to other products with success as well. It does give me a fair amount of confidence that I do believe I can be helpful with these other shops.<\/p>\n

[00:26:50] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> You\u2019re not sort of saying there\u2019s a formula, you know, that kind of snake oil mentality. But there are wise things to do and less wise things to do. Let\u2019s just put it that way. And by repeating the wise things over and over again, you give yourself kind of a fighting.<\/p>\n

[00:27:05] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> Yeah, and there\u2019s a process and there\u2019s also the ability to form smart priorities. That\u2019s, I think, a lot of what I\u2019m trying to help provide is being able to help founders learn how to say no to a lot of things. Because sometimes, especially when it comes to anything that\u2019s growth oriented or marketing oriented, we see a million opportunities. And so then we start dabbling in all the things because we don\u2019t know what else to do.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re like, oh, there\u2019s like, I can go and jump into Reddit and find a whole bunch of leads, or I can like spend a bunch of time on LinkedIn, or I could write a whole bunch of really good emails, or I can maybe do a paid ad campaign. And then we start doing just like a million small things. But that doesn\u2019t lead to growth, you know? So the ability to prioritise around growing rather than noise and activity.<\/p>\n

[00:27:57] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> I think it\u2019s just really nice to be able to put down the scatter gun. You know, that thing that you\u2019re firing tiny pellets in a million different directions. But you put the scatter gun down because somebody says, put the gun down because that\u2019s not effective, and here\u2019s why it\u2019s not effective, and here\u2019s some things that you could do to try which might be more effective.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s just something nice in listening to the words of wisdom coming out of somebody else\u2019s mouth who\u2019s obviously been there, done that. It\u2019s kind of hard to put that into words, but just knowing that somebody\u2019s got your back, and that somebody\u2019s been through that before. And the million, gazillion little things that you are trying without a great deal of success are things that you can put away and listen to your advice.<\/p>\n

I feel that you\u2019ve hit a real vein of, well, let\u2019s go fruit. You\u2019ve got that in the title of your business. And the reason I say that, and I\u2019ve said this in this podcast a few times before, it really does feel like there are an awful lot of people who have done the code side of things in our ecosystem. They are, as you\u2019ve described, you know, you used the word nerd or something like that. They have built this thing with very little thought for the business side of it because WordPress, for many people, has been like this sort of hobby thing, this passive income thing, this side gig kind of thing. But they don\u2019t know how to do it. And I get email, no doubt you get email, and certainly will be getting email, about this kind of thing. And so I feel that there is a real undercurrent of people who hopefully will tap into your service. Let\u2019s hope so anyway.<\/p>\n

[00:29:29] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> Yeah, let\u2019s hope so. So far, so good. I\u2019ve already secured a couple folks.<\/p>\n

[00:29:33] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> In which case, we\u2019re sort of around the half an hour mark, which is exactly perfect. So I will just point the people to the domain once more. It is rootsandfruit.com. Go check that out. Where would we find you, apart from the contact us form, which no doubt exists on that website? Where might we find you elsewhere online, Matt?<\/p>\n

[00:29:52] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> I have been on LinkedIn a lot. So look for Matt Cromwell on LinkedIn. You can also look for Roots & Fruit on LinkedIn. That\u2019s kind of where I prefer, but I\u2019m also on the nefarious x.com as learnwithmattc.<\/p>\n

[00:30:06] Nathan Wrigley:<\/strong> Well, good luck with the new adventure, Matt. I really hope it works out well and, yeah, speak to you soon.<\/p>\n

[00:30:12] Matt Cromwell:<\/strong> Thanks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/details>\n

On the podcast today we have Matt Cromwell<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Matt has been an influential figure in the WordPress ecosystem for many years. He co-founded GiveWP, led its growth, and continued his journey as part of the StellarWP leadership after it was acquired. Recently, Matt has shifted gears, launching something new. It\u2019s called Roots and Fruit, and is an agency dedicated to helping WordPress product businesses thrive.<\/p>\n

In recent years, WordPress has gone through a period of flux. There\u2019s been shifting stats about WordPress\u2019 market share, tightening budgets, and increasing competition from both within and outside the .org plugin repo. Despite these changes, Matt remains optimistic about the opportunities for product makers, especially as WordPress evolves alongside emerging technologies like AI.<\/p>\n

Matt starts off by sharing his background, his experience with GiveWP, and the unique perspective he gained navigating growth, crisis, and the challenges facing plugin developers. We then talk about how the WordPress product space has matured, why building a plugin or theme and hoping users will simply discover it is no longer enough, and how focusing on the customer journey, branding, and marketing is more crucial than ever.<\/p>\n

Matt is now positioning himself as a mentor and guide for solo founders and product teams, helping them prioritise growth efforts, refine their product experience, and avoid the scattered approach that many developers fall into. He brings practical insights from years of hands-on experience, and explains why a successful WordPress product business relies on process, diligence, and wise prioritisation, not just code and hope.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re building digital products in WordPress and want to learn how to make them stand out in a crowded, competitive ecosystem, this episode is for you.<\/p>\n

Useful links<\/h2>\n

GiveWP<\/a><\/p>\n

LiquidWeb<\/a><\/p>\n

StellarWP<\/a><\/p>\n

Roots and Fruit<\/a><\/p>\n

Matt on LinkedIn<\/a><\/p>\n

Matt on X<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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