Welcome to Community & Code, the podcast about the humans behind the commits. I'm here today with Patrick Rowland. He is the host of Plugin.fm and does other things in the space. Patrick, why don't you tell us about yourself and who you are and what you do? Sure. Hi, everyone. My name is Patrick Rolland. So yes, so I do run a podcast called Plugin.fm. So if you want to learn about marketing software, that's what we talk about there. I also do, I'm also really big in the e-commerce world. So I've done a lot of stuff with WooCommerce in the past. And I currently work at sort of an enterprise e-commerce scale for a company called Zero Shoes, building their e-commerce website and enterprise. And then I also do some cool stuff for LinkedIn Learning. And then outside of WordPress, I have a board game I designed behind me. I made a Star Wars helmet last fall. So I do all sorts of weird, fun, nerdy, cool things in addition to coding. If you're only getting the audio version of this podcast, I would recommend jumping over to YouTube real quick just to see, just for a second, because people always tell me that my background looks like I'm in a spaceship, but Patrick actually is in a spaceship, I think. I think that literally we've got the Enterprise behind you. The Death Star, but yes, yes, I'll take it. Okay, okay, yeah. I stand corrected. So tell me about your, I guess you're sort of in the WordPress space. What is your WordPress origin story? Oh man. Um, origin story. So I, okay. So first job, okay. So first job out of college, I knew I wanted to go into web. So I worked at this, at this website, at this, uh, custom web shop. We just built, everything was custom. So it was like, you took build a login page by hand. You had to build a, you know, a beer page by hand. If they were a brewery selling different types of beers, like everything had to be its own CMS. And I just, you know, I just got tired of building login pages. That was like, why do we, why do I need to keep, I like building custom stuff because then there isn't like a million menu options that people can get lost in. That's what I like about the custom side. But the thing I really dislike about the custom side is you're always rebuilding plugin or login pages. And, And it's a ton of work to upload images and different MIME types and all sorts of stuff. And you can reuse code, but not every site is the same. Anyways, I started basically saying our low-end sites need to be WordPress. And so that's how we got started with a couple test WordPress sites. I changed jobs, and then I kept doing WordPress at the new space, at the new place I worked. And then I just kept getting deeper and deeper. That's when I, you know, I always followed open source and stuff like that. But that's when I, at the second job, a couple of years after WordPress, I finally got into like finding GitHub repos and making fixes there. And that was another deeper dive into WordPress. Did you ever try other open source CMSs besides WordPress? I know back in the day I was playing around with Joomla for a little bit, and I did a couple Magento sites, and I did a bunch of Zen Cart sites. There's a thing that I found where it was... Sort of like a quasi CMS where like you uploaded this PHP script or something that basically gave you an admin page. The pages are all written in HTML, but it gave you like an admin interface to edit the HTML of those pages. Do you ever like play with with other things like that? There were a couple. So I started as a student web developer at university and we used, sorry, oh God, was it Dreamweaver? Dreamweaver like page templates, which is so like, yeah, yeah. So page templates, like it's not a CMS, right? But it's just a program that manually updates all of your like HTML, like everything outside of the content area. Oh man, there are some nightmares there of updating things going wrong. Um, I did try Joomla. Sorry, I guess I shouldn't say I had a friend who also did web stuff and he showed me some of the stuff his shop was doing with Joomla. I thought it was okay. I wasn't, it didn't blow my socks off. So I, I didn't, I didn't dive deep into it. And I should say, I actually started WordPress one or two years earlier. I think this was WordPress two something. And it was, there's something about WordPress before version two where it just didn't quite catch me. I'm like, okay, it seems fine. And then by the time WordPress three came out and that's when I was looking for, again, just login pages and uploading media and a couple of basic things that I just want, didn't want to recode every time where everything, everything I wanted to do was in WordPress. And I, I looked at expression engine and play five. There's, there's a couple other CMSs later. And there were some local people who did Magento and I saw how they did stuff at a, at a web meetup and, They just never called to me. Nothing ever looked that good compared to WordPress. I always felt like everything was just really overly complex. I would get lost in the Joomla menus. I would get lost in the Magento menus. I never knew what I was doing. I was building these sites and I was like, I hope you know what you're doing because I don't. I know how to make it look pretty, but I don't know how to use any of this shit. Yeah, super complicated. Yes. Like, yeah, again, the thing with the custom CMS is that I like those are the things that are it was like there's, you know, you log in and it's like, do you want to add a new blog post or do you want to add a new announcement bar? Like those are your two options. There's no one. There's no settings. There's no profile. I like minimal aesthetics and most CMS are just exploding with options. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, back in the olden days, I also worked at the university, at my university as a web, I think my title was webmaster. Yeah. And webmaster was a title you could have. Yeah. And I don't even remember what department. It might have been like the HR department or something. And I was literally writing everything in just like plain HTML. I was probably like using Notepad or something. Yeah. And just like, SFTP actually no FTP is before SFTP. It's just like straight FTP up to the server. uh which was like some server like a physical box somewhere on campus like uh very very and like that's like before that like I I the reason why I even wanted to do that in the first place is because obviously I got my start on geocities like that's what you do if you have a certain age um so uh so yeah you you do a lot of e-commerce stuff tell me about uh how you transitioned into to doing uh to focusing on like woocommerce specifically and e-commerce generally Timeline-wise, I was doing WordPress stuff for a couple of years. So doing custom CMSs, doing some WordPress stuff. And then I got my first WooCommerce site. And actually it was WooCommerce on easy mode. It was just like the catalog, not actually checkout, shipping options and taxes and payments. And that was a really nice introduction to WooCommerce because we were still dealing with a couple thousand products Um, but it, but it wasn't all the complicated e-commerce stuff. I loved it. So again, from my very first, just building an online catalog, I'm like, oh, this is cool. Right. It has most of the options you want. You can add a million extensions to do whatever, whatever custom stuff you want to do after that. I loved it. What I think, what I think really helped is I started immediately contributing to WooCommerce, uh, I can't remember if it was, it might've actually been some of their like extensions. Like I think at the time WooThemes had a plugin called testimonials or something just to add like testimonials to your website in a, in a CMS controlled fashion. And I think I, you know, there was a filter that was there, but like in the wrong place. And so, you know, it just, I got to know their dev team by like submitting pull requests and be like, Hey, this does ninety five percent of what we want. But I think this filter needs to be here. Just just some sort of simple things like that. And it really I think that really got the ball rolling. And then when I so I saw a job at WooThemes, I'm like, why not try? I applied and it was really easy in your cover letter. You're like, I've already written code that you guys use that you know, you've that's a really easy cover letter to write. And then I, so then I got on the WooThemes team. So this is, I'll fast forward, but it was, it actually wasn't that long. It was maybe like nine months, six months, nine months. It's hard to remember the exact timeline. As a support engineer, I worked with WooCommerce subscriptions almost exclusively for the first couple months. Then I went on to the dev team. That was pretty short, maybe six months. And then I moved into product management and I was their first basically dedicated product manager for any of their products. So there was a head of product, but no individual products had a product manager. And then I was the product manager for Woo. And I did that all the way up until Automatic acquired the plugin. and then stayed for about six months after that. So I was with the Woo team and I did, you know, everything from writing code for them, support, dev, product management, all the way through the acquisition with Automatic. So, and that sort of ties into, you said your podcast is primarily about like e-commerce product marketing type stuff. Yes, I would. I think a lot of e-commerce, I would say, is, you know, you're selling T-shirts or clothes and there's thousands of SKUs on the websites. Plugin.fm is more for software makers. So generally you have, you know, a software bundle that maybe has a couple of different tiers. That's definitely e-commerce, but like a flavor of e-commerce. But yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me about how that got started and like how long you've been doing that. Um, boy, how did that get started? I forget how but I met Vova from freemius. I'm trying to remember how we met. But I think I think he saw one of my other online videos. And I think he just likes my online persona. You know, like I can be energetic, I can be positive and uplifting and Chatty. So I think he liked that and he wanted someone who could just regularly produce sort of video content for them. And I think a podcast is a way to do that. So anyways, Vove and I talked, I actually think it took us, this is one of those, like a lot of, a lot of my best projects took years to happen. I, we should talk about Woosash a little bit later if you want, but Woosash just like this, this plugin.fm took, I think like, Plugin.fm took maybe close to two years to actually like we made a pilot episode and what do we want it to be? What type of guests do we want to bring on the show? How long? What's the format? It just took us a while to sort of get through those details and the guys at Freemius are busy doing their own, a lot of their own stuff. And I should say they also have other people who make other video content and other blog posts and all sorts of other content for them. So I was a very, I'm sure I'm a very small piece of their, of the, the marketing puzzle for them, but I love it. Um, so we get to bring on, so this last season we focused on marketing and we get to bring on all sorts of cool people. I like to bring on people who've done like case studies, like really like a specific unique thing they've done at least one time, as opposed to talking about abstract stuff. Um, My big thing is, so working for Woo, I've interviewed hundreds, probably not thousands, probably hundreds of store owners and almost all of them are struggling to get started. The first gate to business is how do you get those first... ten sales a hundred sales that aren't your family like you can't you can't include family in that number like it's really hard you have to like you know because your mom will always say that your marketing looks good right um so it's really hard to get that that if I can get people their first hundred sales with something that I teach them on plugin.fm I'm really really happy um because then then there's something in the business and it can be viable and it can grow into a at least a side project it's not a full-time job Yeah, that's sort of like, I don't know, I don't want to say like the myth of building an online business or even just a business in general, but that was definitely something that I had to learn sort of the hard way when I was freelancing and then tried to start my own theme development business. And I didn't want to do Envato because I didn't want to like sell out or whatever. But I mean, the benefit of a platform like ThemeForest is that it's got a built-in audience, right? It's the same reason, like I've since learned and like now, like we chose to make an Etsy shop as opposed to like trying to do it ourselves. And because like there's this idea, this sort of like naive idea, if you haven't been doing websites for a while on your own, that if you build it, they will come like you just you just put a website out there and then it's on the Internet and then people can just go there. Like, yeah, but you need to find a way to get them to go there. and I don't do marketing like I don't know what that is like I can kind of maybe figure out my way through search engine optimization a little bit there's tools for that that make that that that make that helpful but like I'm not you know tweeting something every hour on the hour or whatever like I'm not like creating a funnel to get people into my site um what's sort of uh the biggest tip that you that you give people that you find uh that that helps people get over that first hurdle oh man um so there yes a bit build it you will come is a hundred percent true that is definitely a belief that we have online and I I think maybe I do think it's shifting. I think there's been enough discussion over the last decade plus of how hard it is to get real people to your website. I think it's starting to shift, but man, I wish that topic shifted. I mean, I still know people that have that kind of idea. Yeah, you're a hundred percent correct. That is still out there. let me go high level. I think it's a lot less, you know, like, um, so, and I'm in some private e-commerce forums where there are people who have incredible success on Tik TOK or have incredible success on LinkedIn and incredible success with postcards. Like there there's, there's a wild number of channels, especially when you start talking about like postcard, like physical mail. Um, I think what's, what's even more important than that is a process. You just, for me, it's all, you have to, you have to test each channel for two to three months. You see if you get results and then you move on to the next channel. Like there's just no telling you, you just don't know what you're good at. Like, sure. So it took me, um, even getting into blogging, I did a month long blogging challenge with some friends. Again, this is at WooThemes. So probably a decade ago, God, it might be longer than that. Um, but we did a month long blogging challenge and the first blog post took me like six hours to write. And you know, it's like four or five hundred words. It's like, oh God, it took me a minute a word. Like, how does that happen? It took forever to write. It was painful. And then by blog post two, it took half that. By blog post three, it took half that. By blog post four. And it starts getting down to like, oh, this is only like an hour and a half, two hours. But I had to like, I had to go through this thirty day blogging challenge to get good enough to know if I should keep doing blogging. Does that make sense? I think you should do the same thing with, you know, Obviously, short form video like TikTok or Reels or YouTube Shorts. You should definitely try those, but just give it a month. And then if it doesn't work, great. You can wash your hands. You can try a new thing. Again, there's LinkedIn ads. There's postcard. There's a million things to try, but you just have to try everything. And you can't do everything. That's the other thing. There's the myth of build it, they will come. There's also the, you have to be everywhere your customer is. That is a losing game. Right. That is a losing myth. If you believe you have to be everywhere, you will, you will burn yourself out. So I don't be everywhere, two or three channels. And as a channel, you know, and try it for two to three months, if it's not working, you drop that channel, you try a new one. That for me is the most important thing for, and that's, you know, software creators, but also e-commerce vendors. Yeah. Yeah, that's a really interesting point, too, the limiting yourself and also figuring out what you're good at. And also, like, what I heard in that was a little bit of you're going to suck before you get good. Yes. Yes. That's really hard. It's really hard to suck, right? Yeah. Yeah. if your first video like okay so a blog again my first blog post for this challenge took me like six hours took forever just just to get out of the idea phase took forever um and I think if you're doing a video I can see that taking you ten hours twenty hours I can see your first Tick Tock being like and your first Tick Tock's gonna be bad you know what I mean like yeah for sure you're gonna spend twenty hours on ten hours on it twenty hours and it's still gonna be bad yeah that's very it's very frustrating to be to have to be bad at something before you get good at it yeah Yeah, I think about, so I had a podcast with a couple friends for, we ran for six years and then we just stopped hitting the record button. And now we just hang out. But the very first episode, so the premise was my friend Gary and I worked together at Web Dev Studios. We really overlapped for like maybe two or three months. But I onboarded him. And then we kept in touch afterwards, and he would, like, come across, like, bits of my code or, like, comments I made and stuff, and then he would send me the Fry mooning the, like, rubbing his butt on the window emoji or GIF on Twitter randomly. Whenever he came across my code so I would just get these mooning gifts on Twitter every once in a while and then we get in these like weird debates about nothing at all and and so another another person that we had worked with that we both overlapped with Allison just would sit back and like popcorn like like sort of feed the the argument and and and she's and we she would say that like we kind of argued like like an old married couple and And that she would, you know, we were like, oh, we should make a podcast and just argue like old married couple. And she's like, I would listen. I'm like, well, you came up with the idea. So you should be on the podcast with us. And then it just turned into an actual podcast. I love that. where she would like for the original premise was she would come up with like a random topic and we would just try to figure out and debate what that topic was without knowing anything about the topic and without knowing what the topic was. So there's like You know, very few episodes where we knew going like we didn't know going into the episode what it was. But there's a few times, only a few times when we knew what the thing was at all. And so we would just like make up a random shit to let sounded like plausible. But the very first episode of that podcast sucked. It sucked partially because she couldn't make it. She just gave us a topic and walked away. And then it also sucked because we didn't know when to stop. We didn't know what we were doing. We didn't know how to have a good... So if you go back to the very first episode of Binary Jazz, I think the topic is barefoot running. It's not a very good show. but from there like we we leaned into the fact that uh zoom kicks you out after forty minutes and and rather than trying to like make that make that pretty we just leaned into it just cutting us off mid-sentence um because because it was funny and so it was just like a running joke like um and yeah and we did that for six freaking years and that's like Like, yeah, I think I stand by that. Like, you know, I enjoy hanging out with people and I enjoy, like, just having conversations. And it was it was a lot of fun. And like, if you think about, like, the lifespan of a lot of podcasts, like six years is a long freaking time. How long have you been doing your podcast? we're on season three and I also had a separate board game podcast that I made for maybe like two years so that was that one got up to like a hundred twenty episodes it's interesting because it's like three seasons at Plugin.fm but they're much more like I don't know like fifteen episodes a season twelve episodes a season but they're much more curated so I only have like thirty six forty episodes of Plugin.fm going on three years my board game podcast I have again a hundred twenty or something like that and that was only like two years anyways just interesting Yeah. Yeah. I honestly cannot say that I know the number of episodes that we did because we called it Binary Jazz. And the reason why it's called Binary Jazz is because my handle is Jazz Sequence and my friend Gary's is Binary Gary. So Binary Jazz is – yeah. So because we called it Binary Jazz, we counted episode numbers in binary. Oh my god. Yeah. So that was fine. That was fine for a while. And it's easy enough to tick up one, right? Like I can count by one in binary, but like looking at an episode number now, like to see like what episode we were, I have no idea. Like I stopped, I stopped trying. But what attracted to you about getting into podcasting in the first place? Like, why is that a thing that you wanted to pursue? Love it. Okay, I would love to talk about podcasting. Let me put a pin in something, and we may come back to it. Barefoot running, because I work for a company, Zero Shoes. We make barefoot footwear. So we might want to loop back to that. I'm curious on your episode one takes. But podcasting. Okay, so I'm just a huge fan, consumer of that media. I'm a big fan. I think one thing that's going on in maybe like TV media is like, I want to hear the best version of someone's arguments. Like I, whatever this is, it's politics or I love personal finance. I love some software. I love IT stuff. I love board game stuff. There's a million different types of podcasts I listen to, but I always want to hear like the best, most interesting version. And basically a podcast, you can listen to like an hour long uninterrupted ad free podcast on whatever topic I want to. But podcast is the medium, right? And it's very personal. And you're usually outside. I have a dog, so I'm walking my dog around the neighborhood. It's very personal. It's very intimate. And it's also like instead of like if I want to be a master in a topic, let's say personal finance, you just need to download three personal finance podcasts, stick with one or two of them, and then listen to them for a couple of years. And in one or two years, you're like, cool, I've got like, I've got like, I've got like, I've got like, I've got like, find all the right books and the right experts. You can just kind of start with a couple, whittle down to your favorite one, listen to it for a year or two. And then I do actually find podcasts trail off for me after two years. And I just, I sort of got most of what I want to get out of the podcast. But yeah, But I love the medium. It's like me time. If I need to do cleaning around the house, I'm usually listening to a podcast. So in addition to walking outside, it's also cleaning the house and doing errands and mowing the lawn and stuff like that. So anyways, it's just my favorite medium. I love uninterruptedness. I love people getting their point across without being interrupted. Yeah. I think that's what I think. I think I said there, I don't think there's anything magic, you know, like now there's podcasts on YouTube there. I don't think there's anything magic about the audio miss of podcasts, just that that's the main thing we're listening to. And then the video is like an extra, but anyways, yeah, it's, um, it's a bunch of cool stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I find I also have something in my ears when I'm doing dishes or making dinner or whatever, just kind of in the background. I got into actual role-playing games, like watching many years ago, and sort of like speed ran through critical roles. first couple campaigns and then like got caught up. And so like and those are like, you know, four or five hours sometimes. And it's like you're obviously not a thing that you're going to be consuming in one sitting. And part of the reason why I did that talking about board games is I wanted so my I wanted my kids to kind of get into D&D. I mean, I they wanted to get into the D&D and role playing also. Um, and they tried a couple, uh, things at like the library, but the library program D and D stuff wasn't very good. Um, and so we just decided that if they, if we wanted them to have a good D and D experience, um, then we sort of needed to curate that for them with their friends and whatever, and kind of do that. So I just like, I, I bit the bullet, uh, became a DM. The first session was ridiculous. It was chaotic. It was a bunch of like early teens and like tweens, and it was like eleven people playing. It was a stupid number of people. And so I started listening to Critical Role, and then I got into a couple other actual plays, partially because I just wanted to just be more fluent in, like you said, the rules. And it sort of filters in through osmosis. It does. You listen to a thing long enough that you stop thinking about the thing. It kind of just becomes natural. Agreed. Go ahead. Agreed. I don't feel like I'm learning. When I listen to a podcast, there's very active learning, and then there's passive listening, for lack of a better word. And you still need to pay attention, but you're not like... Again, I'm walking my dog. I need to cross the street. I need to pick up the dog poop. You're doing other stuff. And you are... how romantic picking up the dog poop. You are still like, you are still learning in the background. Like it is, it is learning through osmosis. And you know, um, I'm listening to, um, an Ed Helms podcast, uh, snafu right now. And now I have like random facts about the citizens commission to investigate the FBI in my brain. Like I've like, I didn't try to learn this, but just like, that's part of this. One of the topics of this season of that podcast. And now I have some like really cool facts to pull out at a party or chatting with my friend last night. Like you just, you do pick it up via osmosis. It is magic. Yeah. Yeah. It's magic. There was an Audible podcast I listened to a while ago, probably a couple years ago now, but it was about an almond heist. It was about basically people who hire truckers to deliver their truckload of specifically California almonds to a particular location, pick up the truckload, and then drive it to a different destination. and sell black market almonds and then so it went into like the the like why would somebody do that and like how does that go and like where the almonds come from and like all of the stuff so now I've got random almond facts in my brain yeah yeah I love that yes you just pick them up yeah yeah so that's what makes it such a good medium it's incredible yeah yeah so good So tell me about your barefoot shoes. So the takeaway from barefoot running was Gary had done some amount of running and I hate running. And so we both were kind of like, and it was funny because like just left to our own devices and rambling on for way too long. It was like, this sounds like a bad thing. I understand the theory of barefoot shoes and that your feet are supposed to be not contained in small boxes. Shoes are awful. I wouldn't do it, but I get the theory. But running barefoot seemed bad, and that was basically the takeaway of the episode. I love that. Um, so I have experienced this before. So I, do you remember those five finger toes, the five fingers? I tried those. I was, I was, I tried them. I was into the fat. I just got into running right around. I'm guessing right around this time. I got some V brums. I got, uh, I ran a couple of half marathon. This is like ten getting close to fifteen years ago. half marathons and eventually a whole marathon in Vibram. So I was very big into those. So I, man, I was not prepared. I'm actually really excited because I'm not a shoe person. And now that I've worked at a shoe company for a year, I like, I know things about shoes that I just, I'm excited to talk to people about. So like, so barefoot running is, I'm sorry, we need a visual for people. There's a, this is our beach shoe. It's called the Kona anyways. So most running is heel striking. So you hit the heel and you roll down. And actually that to me is like, Regardless of protection, like you would just... If you start going on long... If you start going on... For me, it was half marathons, thirteen miles. Once I got beyond that distance, my heels would always, always hurt. Like there's just something about you're just slamming your heel into the floor over and over and over and over and over again for thirteen plus miles. And it just does some... like damage. Um, so barefoot, right. Is you're generally, you're hitting on the ball of your foot and you're rolling back. So you're stepping and hitting and rolling that for me, just, it just intuitively feels better. So I know it, it sounds wild, but like, there's just a big difference between heel striking and rolling forward and landing on the ball of your foot and rolling backward. And I, I love that about barefoot shoes. Okay. This is just for running, right? Like the other thing. So we make the barefoot shoes market. Now is Matt. I, If you talked to me a year ago, I wouldn't have had any of these facts. So now casual shoes can be barefoot. And then it's not about the heel strike anymore. It's about you want to have the wide toe box so your toes can sort of fit in your shoes. And then the other big thing is just there's no heel, obviously, on barefoot shoes. It's called zero drop. It's as flat as it can be. Anyways, I, I, I now work the shoe company. I love, I get, uh, I get a ton of three pairs of shoes and I, I'm finally getting to like shoe fashion. I, I, I never used to care what shoes I wore, but now that I have, I have, I have a dozen pair of shoes. I've never in my life had a dozen pair of shoes. I've had like four shoes max at any point in my life. So it's, um, it's a weird thing to get like into a thing that you didn't, you had no idea you might be into. Yeah. Yeah. I worked when I was freelancing, I worked part time at Whole Foods and I eventually moved into specialty, specialty department, which if you're not in the grocery business, specialty is usually like cheese and coffee and chocolate and and like specialty foods is like the the the high end, you know, stuff. And so I got really, really into uh cheeses and chocolates because that was what I was selling all day um and also like you know the local like coffee roasters like we did a tour of one of the local coffee roasters I learned how they roast coffee and the difference between different roasts and we did a coffee tasting and I learned about how what how how coffee tastings happen, like how you how you're supposed to consume coffee tasting specifically is a different it's not it's very similar to like wine tasting. Yes. I met people. I met the the the founder of like a local chocolate company that makes amazing single origin chocolates. I learned why. So I'm in Salt Lake City, Utah, and I learned the dry environment is really, really good for roasting beans. So coffee roasters do well, chocolate roasters do well, as opposed to other places. And so, yeah, there's a lot of random... I love sort of picking up these sort of random... And now I'm fully vegan, so I know a lot of stuff about cheese that I'm never going to use again. uh-huh uh-huh I okay let me let me ask you a question um do you okay so are we weirdos who just pick up fun interesting facts everywhere we go or is there or is that a human thing like the fact that you and I listen to podcasts or or we both had jobs where we got interested in the subject of the job having not been interested before we started like is that just a you and me thing or are other humans like this as well I mean, I hope it's not just a uni thing, right? I would like to think that most people, if they're doing something that they find enjoyment in, end up learning about that thing. I feel like there's a lot of people that kind of... I don't know. I don't want to say it's like they're one dimensional, but they don't have as many outside interests, you know? And like, I feel sad because like, what are you doing with your life that you don't have other things, you know, like there should be things that like occupy your brain more than like the thing that you do at a desk or, you know, at a job for for eight hours a day, right? Like. so my my go-to my go-to whenever I meet a new person is what do you do for fun that's my go-to question and it works it works ninety eight percent of the time I have run into a few humans who I've I I I've said what do you do for fun and they can't think of a thing and I'm like I don't want to say a red flag but like this is probably not going to be a great conversation right this is right if you can't think of anything you do for fun outside of work Well, I remember having a conversation in like the lunch line at a conference once and they asked me like, what am I reading? And I'm like, oh, I read like, you know, and everything that I could think of was like fiction. And they're like, oh. You read you read fiction like like that was some wild like an amazing concept because like the only thing they ever read Business you have like business books and like self-help sort of thing I'm like, I'm like, how do you read that? like I don't like that's the only thing that you read you read from enjoyment like I read to like enrich my life like You know like I want to learn about other places and ideas and like things that I don't experience in the real world Like that's what I read for That's pretty funny. I get, I, you know, what's funny is I, I get where that person's coming from of, I was so big into business books for five, six years. And I just, and there's something about the pandemic where I had to get my sleep schedule sort of dialed in and I finally got back into fiction, but I, I never, I never didn't understand why someone would want to read fiction. You know what I mean? So that is, it is weird to not understand why someone would want to read that at all. So I'll ask your question back to you. What do you do for fun? My, you know what? Working online all day, I feel the need to disconnect from my screen. Obviously, I still watch TV and stuff like that, but I do really feel the need to disconnect from the online world. My favorite thing, you can't really see it in my background, but I have these little tiny miniatures. My personal belief is every human likes to do something with their hands, whether it's pottery or cooking or even turning a page on a book. Humans like to do things with their hands, and for me, It is painting miniatures. It's very therapeutic. It's very relaxing and And then at the end, you get a cool miniature, and there's lots of games. I have a Marvel game and a Star Wars game, and I go to tournaments on the weekends, and I play my little games for nine hours. That's not a little game. If it's nine hours, it's not little. You're correct. So they're two-hour games with breaks in between and a lunch break. So it's about nine hours of three games in a row is about nine hours. Yeah. But yes, I guess a two-hour game for most people is not... That's still a pretty big game. You're right, you're right, you're right. I'm in my miniature world. The flagship miniature game... Man, I'm guessing you haven't talked about miniatures. The flagship miniature game, and other nerds will recognize this term, Warhammer, that game takes like three to four hours. And if you haven't played in a while, probably like five hours just to remember all the rules. So a two-hour miniature game is relatively short. I never got into miniature gaming. Well, I say that. The only time that I got into anything resembling that is in college, I had a friend who was just interested in game design. It wasn't even a thing he was studying. It was just a thing that he just liked doing and thinking about. And so he would create what he called low dice games, which are low dice is basically like really it was no dice. It was like a handful of pennies that we would flip the flip and like the number of like heads is like successes or whatever. And so he made a low dice game with a handful of pennies and little green army men. Oh, cool. So the only time I ever did any sort of like actual miniature gaming was a low dice game with little green army men on like a pool table. That's great. I love that. What a great start. But yeah, I never got into Warhammer. That seemed way too much of a commitment of time and money. But you had a board game podcast. Tell me about your board game podcast. It was called Indie Board Game Designers. It's still around. So you can still find it online. It's called Indie Board Game Designers. And the whole goal was to interview... I'm not interested in talking with... Asmodee is a big board game company. If you're in the board game world, you may have heard of them. I'm not interested in talking with people at Asmodee too much, a little bit. There might be the occasional designer there that I want to talk with. But it's really about talking with the one-man shops about what game they think is interesting and they want to bring to market. And again, before the kind of world's craziness, we're living in with tariffs and all this craziness. Before that happened, it was very easy to design a game And then you pay, you know, maybe a thousand bucks for an illustrator to illustrate the cards for your game. And then you can have it manufactured in China for, you know, relatively speaking pennies. I ran, I ended up running. So, oh man, it's not behind me. I made a game called Fry Thief. Very cute little take. It's called a take that game where you're messing with your opponent's resources. And you're just stealing fries back and forth. It's very silly. And I think I raised like ten thousand dollars. And with ten thousand dollars, it's like I was able to pay for everything and order like three thousand games. Right. It's like it's crazy how cheap manufacturing is in China. And you see you see why everyone does it. But anyway, but yeah, so, so I veered off topic from, from the podcast, but I got really into, I, but I like knowing like, and some designers sell their games. So my second game is called, that's the one that you can see broken and beautiful. That one I did sell to a publisher and I get a much smaller cut, but I don't have to deal with any of the manufacturing storage, yada, yada. But I just love talking with game designers about that. For me, I, one of the biggest things is the most challenging thing about games is how do you teach someone the game when you're not in the room? That is the, and I, once or twice, I let people, I don't want to say push past the question. They just say, oh, it's easy. You play it once and you get it. But I really wanted it because like, because people might not play it once correctly the first time and you play it wrong. Almost certainly they will play it wrong the first time, given the personal experience. Yeah. It's it's really hard. And I know like so my spouse is one of those people who can't listen to board game rules. She just has to play it. So you also have to like I OK, so I learn best by like I'm I want to be prepared. And if I bring a new game to game night, I will watch a twenty minute YouTube video of how to play the game just to concisely explain everything to everyone else tonight. that night that's what I will do my partner can't do that um so like you just have to like how do you with like a simple rule instruction book I guess you have a qr code links to a youtube video but like how do you manage all that for all these different types of learners because if they can't learn the game they can't play the game um so anyways that's That's why I liked when it was around the web series Tabletop with Wil Wheaton and now on Dropout there's a series called Parlor Room because it's just people playing the games and then as they're playing the games it sort of explains the rules of the games. I learned so much from watching and learned about games that I might want to play on tabletop that really sort of shaped my interest in board gaming. Because, yeah, my partner also can't listen to rules. And I lose interest if the rules are not presented in the book in a way I don't know, concise enough way. Then I lose interest halfway through. It's like a twenty page book. Like, I'm not going to read that before. And I would like to watch the twenty minute YouTube video, but I don't always have time to do that either. So then we're like making it like that. Like I said, almost certainly the first playthrough, like we'll get three quarters through the game and realize something we were doing. We were doing wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then like, okay, well, we need to play this again next time. You know, that's already like an hour and a half into the game and we're close to the end game. Like, well, we'll, you know, we'll fix it now. And I guess we'll try to remember next time. And the next time is like maybe a month from now or something. And then we'll probably forget then too. So yeah, that's definitely a very true, a valid thing. What games do you play? What types of games do you go in for? So let me first say, if you like Wil Wheaton, I was lucky. A friend of mine got his. So I joined a board game designers club a couple of years before the pandemic. And basically me and two buddies that I met there all got our games published, which is really cool. My buddy who had his game published called The Alpha. It's a really cool area control game. If there's board game nerds listening to this, it's an area control game. where you're wolves hunting for food. Anyways, they got Wil Wheaton to do something like tabletop and I got to play in that as well. So me and we're all online. Cause I think again, this was maybe in the pandemic, but we were all playing online. So anyways, I got to play an actual game with Wil Wheaton, which was magic. Sorry. So what type of games do I like to play? I love personally. I love. Okay. So I love short games, like games that are less than an hour because look, I have a kid now. I don't know. I don't know how anyone has free time for anything anymore. Yeah. I'm, I'm still, I'm still reconciling having a child and having no free time. So like short games are magic. That that's really important. And then I, I also, I like, I hate take that games because it just, but you wrote one. yes okay so there's caveats so I did make a take that game um the nice thing about fry thief is it's not I play I play card I steal fry you play card you steal a fry it's I'm the salad player I have special rules and my cards work this way you're the fry player you have special rules your cards work this way that's like uh it's asymmetric or yes thank you yep And that to me, like changes the dynamic a little bit. Yes. But I think for me, it's mostly the feels bad. And when unintentionally, like if you're playing a game with a married couple and they both pick on you, like, it's just kind of like, do you guys realize that you might be teaming up on someone else? Like, cause they, they're a married couple. They don't want to pick on each other. Like it's just weird dynamics and take that game. So I try to avoid that. So broken and beautiful. is a game where you can only indirectly harm other people. So by the last card you take off the table, there's a card left, and that affects everyone. So you don't choose which card to leave on the table, but you do choose which is the last card you draw into your hand. That affects everyone at the table. So it's a very indirect method of like... harming other players so it doesn't feel nearly as bad so anyways I I try to get around those issues by um yeah but with with interesting mechanics where you're not directly player one you lose a point that to me is yeah yeah not very interesting so yeah So what's your current favorite game? I'm sure you have at least one. And I'll add the caveat that it doesn't have to be one that you've played recently because you have a kid. Because I understand how that goes. And, like, there's definitely several years where we just, like, weren't playing adult games or playing, like, games that were designed, like, cooperative games that were designed for kids and, like... simplified rules there's there's actually a gaming company or was a gaming company I don't know if they exist anymore that that made really good like uh games for kids but with interesting enough mechanics that adults can play without getting bored it wasn't just a bunch of go fish it was like actually like you know like mini versions of like area control type stuff and like other things like so like you know uh so it was more interesting but yeah so uh what's what's your current favorite Well, I'm sorry. So I'm looking forward to those because that's that's a very near near point in my life. I'll be able to play play games with my kid, which I'm excited about. Yeah. Is it Haba? Haba is, I think, the publisher that makes more kid games. Anyways, I'll have to look into that. Okay, let me, I have a couple games upstairs that I just love all the time. So one of them is, so one of them is the most board gamey is Tiny Epic Dinosaurs. Yeah. Oh, Tiny Epic Dinosaurs. Okay. Tiny Epic is a series. Yeah. So if you see Tiny Epic blank, that's a series that they make. And all their games are in this sort of, you know, seven by five inch box or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Easy to stick into your carry-on luggage. Yes. And I like, again, so small games. Small and short games are what I love. The thing I like about Tiny Epic is they do really feel like there's a full game in there. Yes. That's what I've always observed from Tiny Epic Games. It's right there in the name, right? It's tiny. It's small enough to fit in a backpack. But it does feel like a much... physically larger game it doesn't feel like you're playing a tiny game or just a card game or whatever there's like some of them even have miniatures that you can move around like it feels like a game that could have been in a standard size like shelf size box yes and this is if you're again so for the board game nerd nerds this is a worker placement game so that would be things like if any agricola or I'm trying to think of other classic word you know worker placement games but it's a worker placement game. And basically the goal of the game is you're trying to raise the best dinosaur ranch. So you're raising dinosaurs to sell them, but of course it's dinosaurs. So if you don't build enough fences or you don't have enough resources, like you don't have enough money to feed them, then they break out of their cages. So, and then if a carnivore escapes, it also eats another animal. And if like a herbivore escapes, it like breaks another fence. So like multiple, multiple animals are just going to be like, rampaging all around your dinosaur island if you mess it up. It's very fun. And again, there isn't really a take that element. It's just, did someone take the space on the board that you wanted to get the two leaf tokens before you did? That's the most you can do. But I really like it. And I think it's good because... I, my, my partner is not a board game person and I can get her to play that game. So I really love that one. Okay. Very quickly. Uh, slap. Forty-five is, um, a certain cart cards come flipping up on the table. And when a certain cards come up, you have to slap the middle and point to someone and shoot them like a Western, or you have to slap your home base. And I think then you're safe in your home base. So it's just a very quick reflexes, super light game. Like not, you know, that's like a ten minute filler game. I also love a bunch of those ten minute filler games I also love liar's dice peruto um where you're you know which you've seen in pirates of the caribbean too yep but you're you know you're looking at how many dice you're guessing how many fives are on the table you only see your dice that's a really fun bluffing game yeah um those are some of my favorites I'm sure I have more that I'm I'm not thinking of yeah What about you? My current favorite, I just got into Dune Imperium last year. I just got a copy of that, and so I really, really like that. It hits a lot of the right sort of sweet spots for, like, It's not just a worker place where there's other things. It's sort of asynchronous or asymmetrical. Asymmetrical. Thank you. Yeah, it's just a lot of good things. We're playing... I really like Wingspan. Oh, yeah. And we just got Wormspan recently, so we've been playing that a little bit. Uh-huh. I like... I do like the... There's a couple games that I have that we don't play enough. I've got a game called Guildmaster that I really like, which is basically your... It's sort of like... into the, you know, leaning into like the D&D sort of role-playing theme. It's as if you had your own guild, your own thieves guild, your own merchants guilds, whatever. And so you hire heroes and then you send them out on adventures to go out and make money for you. And then the team that has, the player that makes the most money or does the most things or builds up their guild house the best ends up being the winner. So, yeah, I, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of things like, I also kind of lean into like, you know, I really like Lords of Waterdeep. I've been told there's other games that do, that do the same thing way better, but I still just love the flavor of Lords of Waterdeep because yeah. Um, so yeah, I, I, I, we've got so many stupid games. I built a plugin. a plugin to track. It's called Games Collector. And it's basically just, it's a WordPress plugin. It's on GitHub. And it's so that you can just track your game collection. And it has integration with the Board Game Geek. BGG? Yeah, with the Board Game Geek XML API. So that you can add, you can do a, when you're adding a game, you don't have to just add it all manually. You can do a search. Oh. for that game on the BoardGameGeek API, and it'll fill in all the details for you and pull everything in. And I partially wrote this because my father-in-law was like, I don't know what games you already have. And I was like, I'm going to write a plugin, and I'll have a page on my website, and you will know what games we already have. But I also built it with the idea that, like, You know, you could set like number of players, how long it takes to play the game, what the difficulty level of the game is. And then you can have these filters where if you're looking for a game, like I've got five people at this party, we're going to look for a game that's five people and up. They're beginners, so we're going to look for something that's not super complicated. And then it'll filter down the list to see these are the things I have in my collection that fit that criteria. I love that. I love that. I, um, man, BGG, I kind of, I, so, so as a website person, I've hated that website for so long. It's so ancient looking. And, but then eventually I just, I realized that every, like talking to all these other board game designers, like I needed a presence there, uh, speaking. Yeah. And I, I had to like add all my games on BGG and I wish there was an easier to use plugin to add all of your games to BGG. Cause it's an old school interface for sure. yeah yeah for sure um well I feel like we've we've coming up on time and and like wow it's it's kind of flew by flown by uh where can people uh find you online are you going to any uh events where people might see you in person um yeah you have any any links to share I would love to say I'm going to WordCamp US. I cannot confirm that. I would say it's a coin toss, but I'll explore going to WordCamp US. But the main place to find me online is Speaking in Bytes. That's B-Y-T-E-S.com. That's my programming blog. I talk about all sorts of WooCommerce things there. Check me out on Plugin.fm. So the podcast is great. Talk about interesting marketing for software. And those are the two best places. I'm on Twitter, but that's a weird place now. And then LinkedIn, but I don't check that. So yes, my website or the podcast website are the two best places. I'd love to connect with you there. Awesome. Well, thanks again for coming on, Patrick. And thanks for everyone sticking out or geeking out on board games. And yeah, I'll see you online. Bye.