Hi, welcome back to community and code.
I'm Chris jazz sequence on the internet.
And today we've got a guest I've been
wanting to get on the show for a
while.
Miriam Schwab has been in the WordPress
world for two decades.
I first met her several years ago at
WordCamp US in San Diego,
which was the one that was the first
one after COVID when we were all still
trying to figure out how to stand next
to each other.
her company Stratik had just gotten
acquired by Elementor,
and she was sent to represent a company
she had only just barely joined.
Mariam started as a freelance content
writer who noticed that the websites she
was building were actually more
interesting than the writing itself.
So she taught herself how to build them
and then built a thirteen year agency
serving tech companies and non-profits in
Israel.
Then she went full startup mode,
co-founded Stratik,
raised venture capital,
got into accelerators,
the whole nine yards.
Stratik ended up with Fortune five hundred
companies and governments on it,
and then Elementor acquired it,
which is how she ended up as head
of WordPress at Elementor,
a title that basically means she does
everything that keeps the most installed
WordPress plugin in the world connected to
the community that made it successful.
We talked about what it's actually like to
build a community presence inside a twenty
one million install company.
Yes, you got that number right.
Why she thinks contributing to open source
is a brand investment and how the
connection she made with the Elementor
founders at a tiny WordCamp in Israel many
years ago eventually led to all of this.
Let's get to it.
Welcome to Community & Code,
the podcast where we talk to the human
beings behind the commits.
And I'm here today with Miriam Schwab.
Miriam is a head of WordPress at
Elementor, a longtime WordPress developer,
contributor,
been in a lot of WordPress-y things for
a very long time, speaker, mentor,
all sorts of things.
Miriam,
welcome to the show and tell us about
yourself.
Well, thank you for having me.
About myself.
Well,
I got into WordPress when I was actually
providing freelance services for content
writing.
That's what I was doing first.
My degree is in English literature and
that seemed like a pretty natural
progression from that.
But the truth is that when I started
studying in university,
I started out studying computer science,
actually.
But I had just moved to Israel.
And while I knew Hebrew quite well,
there's a difference between knowing
Hebrew for like standard conversation and
studying computer science in Hebrew is a
whole other level.
And I found that I really just didn't
know what they were talking about.
I didn't know what was going on.
I didn't know what the words meant.
And so I decided to switch into basically
the only thing that was taught in English
at the time in Israel, which was computer,
which was English literature.
I've always had a dual love for technology
and literature, actually.
avid reader um I do also enjoy writing
but also have loved technology since I was
a kid um my dad bought us our
first like pc I don't know how old
I was like maybe eight but he was
he bought two actually first he had one
and I think we were driving him crazier
like especially that we were always we
always wanted to use it it was so
cool that he actually got a second one
for us in his office space in our
house like he would be on one and
we'd
I would be on the other.
And he would buy me these coding books
where they would just have the code on
like printed pages,
like this was my old school, right?
And I would type it in and then
it would turn into like a snake game
or something.
And I was like amazed.
And he would also buy me these magazines.
I think it was called three, two,
one contact.
It was like a science magazine.
And, you know,
it was about like nature science and tech
science.
And I always loved the things about space
and all that.
Anyway, so I always had like,
very strong interest uh and love for where
technology was going um but it just the
the way things worked out was that i
studied english literature which i
actually really loved um but then after i
finished it i figured okay i'm gonna work
with that kind of space which i did
but then what was happening was the
content that i was writing
was going into websites and the websites
were way more interesting to me.
I was like, and I like,
I was enamored with the internet and what
it offered made so many things accessible
to all of us, you know,
any question now, you know, with AI,
it's like a whole other level,
but then already just the idea that I
could search for information and get it.
And, um,
and that websites gave people a way to,
um,
be in front of many other people so
i started to teach myself to build
websites um that was the other wonderful
amazing thing about the internet that um
it was very embedded in an open source
philosophy and approach and that's what
made it what it is so people also
share a lot of information online
So I could learn from others.
Like basically I would just search for,
okay, how do I do this?
How do I do that?
You know, Stack Overflow,
all that kind of stuff.
And then, yeah,
so I taught myself to build websites and
started to offer that as a service.
And then things went from there.
I remember the very first time I
experienced the internet,
I was probably at a library on one
of their computers.
They just barely got like computers hooked
up to the internet or something.
It was probably dial-up.
I don't know.
It had to have been dial-up.
um and like like that was like when
yahoo was like what you used and um
Like, I mean,
there was a couple other like directories,
but like Yahoo is the thing.
And like, there was just like,
just like lists of links and you didn't
know what any of the links were and
you would click on a link at random
and it would take you to some weird
site and like, okay, this is interesting.
And then at the bottom of that weird
site, there'd be like, uh, find the next,
uh, site in this web ring.
And then you would click on that and
you'd get set to some other random site
that was tangentially related to the last
site you had on.
And then you would just get into these,
like you deep rabbit holes of like,
weird inter like interlinked pieces like
parts because the only way that you would
know how like the only way that you
would find another site was from some
other site that might have linked to it
through like a web ring or a guest
book or like something like because there
wasn't there wasn't there wasn't ranking
in certain like google search engine
ranking wasn't a thing like it would like
there was no google like it was just
like a bunch of just random text pages
that had
a hyperlink that took you someplace.
Like you had no idea where you were
going.
Right.
Totally.
It was a weird and wonderful thing.
It was like,
we all could get access to other people's
weird, random, cool, fascinating, strange,
like ideas and representations of
themselves.
And it was so interesting.
Like that was the other thing that I
really loved about the internet
specifically,
like beyond computers and technology was
that like,
you could just, you know, talk to someone,
regardless of where they were,
and hear their thoughts and communicate
with them.
Whereas in the past,
it was a phone call was doable,
but okay,
that wasn't gonna happen with like
strangers.
And, you know, maybe email at some point,
but like,
that was a whole other level of connection
with people removing the constraint of
Geographic proximity,
which was always a type of constraint.
And that also was so cool to me.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
Like every one of these,
these web pages on the internet,
on the very early internet,
like represented a single human being
somewhere else in the world that was
completely different and separate from you
that you would never have been exposed to
previously.
And I I've told this story before,
but I paid for.
access to a bbs before i paid for
access to the internet so like i was
like even even while i was going to
the library and like like browsing online
the thing that i found most interesting
was hanging out with people in chat rooms
um and like there that that was also
like a weird weird wild wonderful space of
like
like, the dial-up and then, like,
hyperterm and, like, logging into this,
like, text-based thing and, like,
navigating through, like,
an interconnected web of these, like,
there's, like,
a network that I subscribe to.
Like,
there is a network of these BBS servers.
And so you would pick what server in
which city you would want to hang out
in.
yeah uh so so you got you got
started writing uh on websites and then
you started getting interested in websites
when when we met i think the first
time we met it was uh work camp
san diego or no one camp us in
san diego
And at the time,
it was the tail end, I think,
of Stratik, because I think, like,
you were just, like,
it had not yet been announced that
Elementor had acquired Stratik,
which was your agency.
So where is the intervening years between,
like,
making your first website to running your
own agency that gets acquired by
Elementor?
Like, what happens in the in-between time?
So actually,
I went agency tech company startup.
That was Stratik.
Stratik was a platform for publishing
WordPress websites.
And then acquisition by Elementor.
So basically, it went like this.
Discovered that I love websites.
Start building websites.
Start to add that as an offering in
addition to content.
Start to push that more as an offering
because it was much more fun for me.
And then...
that like positioned me to be one of
the first people to offer WordPress as a
professional solution,
not just as a blogging platform for
amateurs in Israel, actually.
So I was well positioned when people
started to turn around around version
three of WordPress and were like, oh,
actually,
this is a great option for our company
or organization websites who can do that
for us.
Oh, Miriam, because I was already
I was already doing it and people like
kind of start, you know,
it's like word of mouth or whatever.
So I started to do that and building
custom WordPress websites for companies,
a lot of tech companies and large
nonprofits that, you know,
needed specific attention for their
activity.
It was just me at first and then
grew it out to be an agency.
So I did that for thirteen years.
All along the way,
I did have ideas for products.
especially as the years went on,
I had like,
I had more and more of like a
push to move into the product space,
but I gave it a few goes,
but at the time, so like I had,
I was having kids and I was,
you know,
they were little and the agency and I
had to force myself to realize that like,
you really have to learn to say no,
even to yourself.
Like when I bit off more than I
could chew, too many things paid a price.
So I left that and kept building sites
and really enjoyed it.
Like that was like for thirteen years of
offering services.
It was always interesting because the
companies were interesting or the
organizations like that made the work also
meaningful and also
Each one had their own, you know,
unique take or need.
And so we had to learn to do
things that we hadn't done before.
So it was a constant learning curve.
But at a certain point,
it did start to feel like, okay,
I've done this for like quite a while.
Also, my kids were getting bigger.
And I wanted like a next challenge.
And I had really wanted to move into
the product space.
And then that timing was around the start
of the Jamstack trend.
And I read a blog post by Matt
Billman,
one of the co-founders of Netlify,
where he did a case study where he
generated a static version of a WordPress
site.
And of course,
performance was better and all that,
the scalability.
I was like, oh my goodness,
that's really cool.
I could see that Jamstack had issues
because it led people to having to do,
I don't know how else to describe it,
too many somersaults in the air to achieve
the same thing that WordPress was doing.
You know,
like you're reinventing the wheel the
whole time.
But I thought,
what if we combine these two worlds,
give people WordPress as their like a
source of truth where they work and they
know how to work and marketing teams feel
comfortable, but that's like hidden.
It's a, it's almost like a staging site.
And then they deploy a static version of
the site to the internet.
And then that site is super fast,
resilient, scalable.
Like it solves all their issues.
A lot of the companies that came on
board with Stratix,
it was driven by their CISOs or someone
who was like a CTO type person who
couldn't stand the company was running a
WordPress site.
They were not sleeping at night because of
it.
These were people who were like,
let's say they were tech companies.
A lot of them, you know,
the tech stack is super high end,
you know,
with an eye towards the future,
but then their marketing team is using
what they saw as like a legacy platform.
But the marketing team wanted it because
it was their power tool.
So Stratik bridged those two groups within
the company,
gave the marketing company's team what
they wanted.
And then the tech team or the tech
leaders could sleep at night.
So that was like the vision of it.
And it ended up coming to fruition with
a fortune,
five hundred companies using it,
governments, the UN, you know, all sorts.
So built it up,
raised venture capital funding for that
and did that for like six years.
I was in some startup accelerators at the
beginning, which was a great experience.
The whole thing was a great experience,
like wild.
fun great learning experience met amazing
people lots of sleepless nights for me and
my co-founder and our team a lot of
pain and suffering also building a startup
is you just have to go into it
a lot of uh emotional strength or
something but um but yeah and then uh
I knew the founders.
I met them first when I was organizing
WordCamps in Israel.
So one of the first ones that I
did, they sponsored.
At the time,
they were like three guys with like a
folding table.
They were so small.
And I think the first time they sponsored,
it was like pre-Elementor.
They had...
a product before that they called POJO.
It was like a theme that was more
customizable,
but then they took that to the next
level with Elementor.
But they would sponsor.
And so we always stayed in touch and
were friends.
And then they were watching Stratik and
had an eye on it.
And that's where we ended up.
But when I saw you in San Diego,
First of all, that was a weird WordCamp.
Remember that?
Yeah.
Like COVID.
It was the first thing post-COVID,
I think.
Yeah,
it was the first big event post-COVID.
And people were freaking out about it,
too.
Freaking out.
Yeah.
Don't stand too close to me.
Wear many masks.
Yeah.
It was really limited.
It was like a hundred people.
It was more than a hundred people.
Yeah.
It was like some really small amount.
It was definitely small for,
for a WordCamp for sure.
Yeah.
It was,
I really think it wasn't more than two
hundred people.
I remember the number being like super
small, but it was right, like,
like right after,
like maybe the week after Estradic had
joined Elementor,
like we were super new there.
I was trying to figure out.
I felt a little bit like,
what am I doing here?
And it was the first time I went
to an event with Elementor.
and I was just,
I was just like trying to figure out
my place in the, in the company,
like from that perspective.
So yeah, that's it.
Yeah.
No, I remember that.
I remember you like talking about how like
your,
your company was just acquired and you
really didn't know what your title was or
what you would be doing anymore.
But like, here you are.
Yeah.
They're like,
obviously you should go to word camp
because like,
You know, they know me.
They knew me and, like,
and my involvement in the WordPress
community.
So if anyone's going to go to WordCamp
with Elementor, it should be me.
But, like, I didn't yet feel, like,
part of the team.
And, yeah, it was very... It was, like,
a bit awkward for me.
So...
Yeah, that's kind of a journey,
more or less,
from agency to Stratix to Elementor.
I want to take a step back and
I want to ask,
was there ever something else that you
looked at besides WordPress?
Or have you been deep into WordPress from
day one?
You know,
sometimes when I've been interviewed in
the past, they're like,
what are your other interests in hobbies?
You know, that kind of thing.
I'm like, I, I, I have not,
I have always been all in on WordPress.
Like, you know, I think one of the,
there's like a few reasons for that.
Uh,
I always found it really fun and
interesting.
There was always something new to learn,
which is, which matters to me.
So it wasn't, it was not boring.
Um, and really the people, like,
I really just loved meeting the community.
When I started going to like more global
WordCamps, I,
you know,
I met people that I had been following
or connected with online and then you meet
them in person.
It's a whole other story.
And I just, you know,
I really loved meeting people and seeing
what they're working on.
And it just continuously stayed
interesting and fun and nice,
like just a really nice, pleasant,
good hearted, I would say, like,
I don't know, community.
So, so I've, I've always been in it,
you know, obviously throughout the years,
as things develop and evolve,
like on the web and in tech,
I've looked at other solutions to see if,
you know,
I don't want to be left behind and
I don't, you know,
I want to make sure that,
also let's say in my agency days,
to make sure that we're offering the right
solution for them.
But every time I tested something out,
I got frustrated by it.
It was always limited.
It just, it was never as good.
And it was,
I never felt as good working with it.
So, you know, I dabble,
but like in the end, just,
just stuck with it.
And yeah, I'm like a one trick pony.
I mean, you know,
like I sort of had a similar experience
when I was freelancing is like when I
first started freelancing,
I was working for a company and I
was like a contract freelancer and they
sort of had their own way of doing
things which involved
like doing your whole design in Photoshop
and then using the slicing tool to like
make a HTML like table based website out
of that.
That was like the very early days.
So that was all like just straight up
HTML,
but we also used Zen Cart whenever there
was an e-commerce platform.
So I got pretty good at styling that.
But when I broke away and started
freelancing on my own,
Zen Cart was still a thing that I
was doing for a little bit just because
I was familiar with it.
But I played a little bit in Joomla.
I played a little bit in Magento.
But WordPress was the thing.
When I started using it for myself,
that was just so much easier,
especially because at the time,
I think what I was doing was I
had found a script
that would essentially like it'd be you'd
make an HTML page and then there's like
a little JavaScript thing that you would
put in there.
And then so like this area of the
page is editable from some kind of like
a back end kind of thing through this
JavaScript thing,
and it would actually write
changes to the HTML, right?
And that was like the thing that I
would do if somebody needed to update
their site on their own,
was write that in.
And I was like, when I found WordPress,
it's like, okay, so that's easier.
There's so much more stuff here.
Like,
why am I ever doing anything else like
that?
And I think there was a period of
time where I'm like, okay,
let's make sure I'm doing the right thing.
And I tried all the other CMSs and
installed them and gave them a go.
And I think Expression Engine was a thing
that was big at the time.
You know what I even tried for some
reason?
ColdFusion.
I don't know if you remember that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't think I ever tried cold fusion.
That seems a little bit too daunting.
Giant book.
And I was like, that seems cool.
There was something cool about it,
but everything was just like more
complicated.
Yeah.
And I mean, you know,
when I think about like, you know,
I work at Pantheon and obviously we do,
um,
Drupal and WordPress.
And even now,
I talk to Drupal developers and I've gone
to a couple of Drupal events and it's
like, okay,
I get what Drupal is good at.
It's also not the thing that I would
use because it is...
There's a learning curve.
There's a very steep learning curve.
Or there's a whole category of
professionals that exist in the Drupal
ecosystem that WordPress has never had
because it's never needed it.
Because it's just the people that manage
the website.
Not the people that put the content into
the website,
But the people that manage the
configuration and structure of the
website, that's the category of people.
We talk about in WordPress,
there's sort of site builders and maybe
they're not writing the content or
whatever, but you don't really need that.
It's generally speaking accessible enough
for anyone.
So I totally relate to what you're saying,
obviously, we're both here.
But, yeah,
I'm always interested in the
decision-making process that leads people
to like kind of stick with a thing
for as long as, I mean,
you and I both have.
I think it's like WordPress made the
decisions for me.
What I mean is...
every time I tried to get something to
happen in WordPress, it happened.
Like I was able to make it happen
more or less.
Whereas in other platforms,
I wasn't able to.
So I kept choosing the one that enabled
me to do what I wanted to do.
I am what I call a fake developer.
And what I mean is I sat at
some point in writing code and I hated
it.
I hated it.
I don't want to do that.
I want to get things together.
I love tech and I understand it.
So that makes me really annoying because
like back on things from I've managed
development teams.
And so I've learned about that, but, um,
I'll never be the one sitting in writing
code.
So I want to work with a platform
that allows me this like weird fake
developer type person to achieve what I
want to achieve.
And, and that,
and it was always WordPress.
yeah the thing that that kept me around
was uh especially at the beginning was
anytime i had a question about how to
do x there was always an answer whether
it was whether it was in the codex
or a blog post or something like i
there was always an answer somewhere
whereas whenever i use something else
maybe there is an answer or maybe there
wasn't or maybe there was a forum but
maybe that forum hasn't been posted to in
three months like right like it was never
it was never consistent but wordpress was
always consistent for sure and now you're
the head of wordpress what does that mean
so it's a nice segue right speaking of
which it is the nice segue so what
does it mean well i
I was at like Elementor for like six
months and then the founders said,
would you like to take on this position?
We don't know what to call it.
And we don't exactly have a job
description.
We know we need someone like you doing
something like this.
And what do you think?
So,
How was the position pitched?
What were the things that they knew that
they needed?
So I could see after joining.
Actually,
I could even see before joining from the
outside.
Elementor, their flagship product,
the page builder, editor,
whatever you want to call it,
is obviously very popular.
It's the most popular plugin.
It powers over twenty million sites.
Um, from the beginning it caught on and,
uh, grew quite quickly,
but as the company grew and hired talent
and the people at the company are very
talented,
they didn't come from within WordPress.
So you had the founders who are WordPressy
people, but you know, they're founders,
so they can only be so involved in
community related, you know,
ecosystem stuff.
Um, and, and the,
the rest of the team,
they came from other tech companies,
you know, um,
and not necessarily even from open source.
And when you're working in open source,
there's definitely like a culture to that,
you know?
Um, and
There were a few things that were lacking.
It's not just community.
It's like,
how do we communicate with all the levels
of the ecosystem and how are our
relationships with all of the companies
essentially that are contributing to
WordPress by creating other products where
we have shared users?
How do we make sure?
Always that the way that we're deploying
our products to the repo is one thousand
percent aligned with the guidelines.
There were some missteps before I took on
this position and it wasn't out of.
It wasn't because they were trying they
trying to not meet the guidelines.
It was because there wasn't really someone
who could fully be on top of it
and or something that I do on an
ongoing basis.
Check with the plugin team.
whenever we want to implement something in
the plugin that we think should be
reviewed and to make sure that it really
aligns with the guidelines.
And only if they say, yes, that's okay,
do we go ahead with it.
You don't want to ever be doing something
that's not okay.
So we're super careful and that's
something.
Also setting up our Five for the Future
program.
That was an interesting process for me.
I had to research all of that and
figure out where we can even do that.
First, we had to figure out internally,
are we going to align or just contribute
internal resources like people time?
But we couldn't.
Everyone was too tight.
So then the decision was to sponsor
contributors.
Okay, but how do we do that?
How do we sponsor contributors in a
meaningful way?
Which teams need
So I had like I spoke to a
ton of people in the community, you know,
from the contribution related teams on
WordPress.org to contributors themselves
to figure out how we could start.
I think the first sponsor contributor was
on the performance team because at that
time that was a big pain point.
Oh,
and Google was working on it and they
asked us if we want to like work
on it with them and like make,
you know, help with that team.
So that's where we started.
It seemed like a good opportunity.
Good place to fill in the blanks.
And then grew it from there.
At this point,
we have contributors to performance,
plug-in review, theme review, hosting, AI,
and I think something else,
but I can't remember.
And I manage that and stay in touch
with them on an ongoing basis,
get reports on what's being done to try
to make sure that
Our contribution is valuable.
So that was another thing.
And it's generally anything related to
Elementor within WordPress.
It's a very broad position.
It involves also partnership type of
activity,
whether it's with a dollar sign attached
or not.
I've kind of become the face of Elementor
within the community.
So that's helpful for people who are
trying to reach out to Elementor and
having a hard time.
That was very much the case before I
took on the position.
Like,
if you want to talk to someone at
Elementor, like, good luck.
It wasn't, again,
that they didn't want to be talked to.
It was that there wasn't someone to do
that.
So people reach out to me directly.
They find me wherever or they know me.
And it's different kinds of questions.
They want to...
you know,
increased compatibility with Elementor and
they like need some dev input or they
created something for Elementor and they
want to show a test and like whatever,
or like there's hosting companies,
they're like,
they're encountering some issue.
In the past,
that kind of communication was full of
friction.
Now we have a lot of shared Slack
channels with a lot of partner companies
in the space and it's great.
We can really like make sure that all
of our shared users have good experiences.
Um, yeah, I don't know.
It's like, it's so many things.
I,
at some point I started documenting what I
do because I was like,
what am I doing?
But, um, but it's,
it's always interesting because things are
always changing.
Um, and I'm always learning.
So yeah, it's,
it's an interesting position.
I know that for me,
as a developer advocate,
I went from being on an engineering team
where what I do in a day or
in a week is very specific.
It's like we have these sprint goals,
we have these specific tickets,
we have a cadence.
This stuff needs to get done by this
date,
and that's just what you're working on.
And in developer relations, that's...
kind of a lot more wibbly wobbly timey
wimey like you kind of have to like
it really demands that you are
self-motivated because otherwise you're
just going to be twiddling your thumbs and
like who knows what what oh totally how
are you going to prioritize this thing
over that thing or whatever or you'll just
get pulled in a million different
directions and never be able to focus on
anything and context switching is already
like you know huge like i imagine that
is pretty similar for you as well so
how do you sort of like
Yeah,
prioritize what it is that you're thinking
about in any given day.
My gosh, totally.
So first of all,
you have to be a self-starter.
At least I have to be also.
It's sort of like in many ways,
it's sort of entrepreneurial, isn't it?
Oh, totally.
Which is amazing.
And I I've said that internally, actually,
that I actually didn't know how I was
going to last at Elementor,
not because of them,
but because I had never been an employee
before.
And I was afraid of like that what
would happen is why I had never been
an employee,
which is that people would start telling
me what to do.
Not that I don't.
I love getting feedback and input and
direction.
I love it.
But when someone's like, you must do this,
you must do that.
And like, I don't know,
that kind of thing,
which is what I figured it's like to
be an employee.
I was just like, it's not for me.
But this position is very entrepreneurial.
And a lot of what I do feels
like what I did when I was the
CEO of Stratik.
Um,
because a lot of work of leading a
company and just, um,
just to put that just a disclaimer,
I'm not saying that I'm leading Elementor
at all.
I am not.
But when I was leading a company, I,
a lot of it was very relationship driven
and also very,
a lot of like staying current on
developments, competitive, you know, um,
developments.
tech, all that kind of stuff.
It was like a combination of both.
And I do a lot of that now.
I actually create an internal weekly
newsletter about AI and WordPress now,
for example,
to keep everyone up to date on where
it's going,
what other companies are developing,
to bring that all together.
I think that the more information anyone
has,
the better the decisions they can make.
And that's how I was a CEO.
And that's kind of what I'm doing now.
So a lot of what I do is
self-starter type stuff where I just see a
need and I work to fill that gap.
In the beginning,
there was a lot of stuff that I
was trying to fix, like, you know,
our Fly for the Future program,
even how we sponsored WordCamps.
I...
It wasn't my vibe.
Let's just say that.
I didn't like it.
I wanted us to be more involved.
I was the first person to speak on
behalf of Elementor.
They had never had speakers.
But then I created a program encouraging
other people to apply to speak.
And now I'm not the only speaker,
which is amazing.
So there's like a lot of things that
I, oh,
also I wanted us to sponsor other
WordCamps around the world,
even if we're not going there just to
support them.
So set up like a process and like
a way to do that.
I'm very fortunate that the company and
the leadership basically like just support
and believe in me and trust me.
So the message to me more or less
is you do you.
now go forth.
So and I report to the CEO.
And, you know,
I love when I get direction and feedback
and ideas from him,
but mostly I'm just doing what I think
I should do.
So there's like stuff that I maintain.
And then there's stuff that comes up that
needs attention.
So obviously,
and especially if it's like critical,
that will get priority.
And then there's just new challenges or
relationships or things or whatever that
come my way that I pick up.
Attending events on behalf of Elementor,
that also is something that wasn't really
happening before.
I think it's important for us to have
like an actual person at these events.
Elementor is such a significant player
that, for example, at CloudFest,
which I'm not at because I couldn't get
there in the end.
But we should be at CloudFest.
We're a leading web company.
How can we not be there?
So I started going on behalf of Elementor.
Yeah, it's a great position.
I'm very fortunate that I have the backing
and belief of the company's leadership and
that it allows me to bring to fruition
my entrepreneurial spirit,
which I think would be hard if I
couldn't.
You mentioned five for the future and and
sponsoring word camps and things and.
wearing my wp Community collective
President hat for a minute.
Like obviously you know sponsored
contribution or contribution with with
compensation.
And sponsorships in general like this is
like it shouldn't be a controversial
topic, but yet,
like a lot of companies that are using
wordpress aren't necessarily giving back
to the ecosystem or going back to the
open source project itself like.
talk through that conversation within
Elementor of like building up this
program, which like,
how do you see contribution in how it
works at Elementor and how does like
leadership or your CEO that you report to,
like how does that sort of internal like
financial math align with like the
ideological goal of like, yeah,
we need to actually contribute back to
this thing that we're like essentially
profiting off of?
so they knew that they wanted to set
up a fight for the future program like
when they it wasn't like i had even
brought it up or someone i don't know
what the internal conversation was i had
been there not that long i was still
trying to figure out who i am and
what i am and all that kind of
stuff um i don't remember that we had
actually discussed fighting for the future
i think it was probably something that i
felt like they should set up but i
also didn't think it was necessarily my
place to bring it up like i didn't
know how much i could you know flag
things sure yeah
It turns out that Elementor is very much
a company where you can express your
opinion.
But I had to learn that.
Yeah, it's great.
So that was actually the first thing that
they tasked me with.
Get us set up, please,
with a Five for the Future program.
They didn't say how, except for,
like I mentioned,
when they said we're going to sponsor
financially rather than internally.
Go forth and do it.
Why?
Because it's the right thing to do.
That's it.
So
When you have an open, and also,
I think it's very much to the credit
of Elementor's leadership that that's
their perspective.
They knew they needed to do this thing.
They knew it was the right thing to
do.
They needed someone to just set it up
properly, who is a WordPress-y person.
That's what our CEO often says about me.
I'm WordPress-y.
And I think you understand what that
means.
I think others may think that sounds
weird,
but I live and breathe the ecosystem and
I understand its nuances and you need
someone like that, I think,
especially in a large organization like
Elementor.
That's all about WordPress.
So they knew it was the right thing
to do.
So when you have an open source product,
I think a company ends up making some
decisions based on,
what is the right thing to do for
that community at some point.
It's not feasible for smaller
organizations.
It really often is not,
no matter what anyone says.
I know what it's like.
When I was running my agency,
we were just running from after projects.
You just finish one, you're like,
where's the next project going to come
from?
There's not much breathing room at all.
So I think people need to be realistic
about their expectations about who's
contributing.
Like, yes,
that agency is profiting off of WordPress,
but what does that mean?
It means that maybe they can pay their
other contractors or employees and maybe
give themselves a living wage.
You know what I mean?
Like, often that's the case.
So have a little sympathy.
But once you have like a thriving open
source product, then it becomes necessary.
So there's like the,
it's the right thing to do.
But then I think if we're gonna look
at it from like a dry financial
perspective,
companies invest a lot of money in things
that don't have a direct ROI.
For example, brand.
Brand is critical.
I have learned the importance of brands
since joining Elementor.
I was very cynical about it.
And now I see how much it matters,
how a brand, you know,
you have to have a real product standing
behind it that gives people value,
but when you do that and you have
a brand wrapping it up,
it gives people a certain sentiment or
they have a certain sentiment towards you
and maintaining that, growing it,
And investing is super important.
So a company like Elementor invests a lot
in brands also.
And I think that you can say that
investing in contributing back to open
source is a brand investment to the
ecosystem.
It's like our brand is that we are
collaborative, cooperative, contributing.
We are doing the right thing and we
are good citizens of the ecosystem.
So that's,
I think the business side argument that
can be made for it.
Yeah.
I mean,
obviously I'm involved in a lot of these
conversations as well.
Developer relations is very much in the
sort of brand and less direct ROI sort
of side of things,
because like I've said this before,
like internally,
like the
The stuff that DevRel produces,
the content and the outputs that we
produce,
very often is maybe on a very long
tail.
I'm not going to write a blog post
that's going to lead to five hundred
incoming leads.
I'm going to write a blog post that
someone's going to read in two weeks,
and then in six months they're going to
remember that blog post that I wrote
something smart about Pantheon doing
something cool.
and they're gonna be like oh well we're
looking for something for this project
that we're that we're coming to and maybe
they'll be part of the conversation right
like yeah i i always get like whenever
when roi comes into the conversation about
like sponsorships or about like open
source uh good samaritism good
samaritanism or like whatever uh like
Yeah,
it's already like I just like I just
smirk like whenever I hear ROI in those
conversations,
because like you're not going to get ROI
from any of that stuff.
But what you're going to get is something
intangible.
And John Hawkins was on a few episodes
ago and he he said that.
So John Hawkins used to lead a or
co-lead a an agency, and they spent,
I think,
two years just going to every word camp
that they possibly could.
And
It was wild.
It was kind of insane.
But what he said that he learned out
of that is not ROI,
it's return on connection.
Because it's those connections that you
get from those events,
from meeting people and having the
conversation in person leads to other
opportunities.
Maybe not today,
but like he was saying that like he,
they got leads and he has gotten leads
that are like somebody he's never met
before that someone he did meet talked to
their friend and said, oh,
you should talk to this person because
they're doing something that's really
similar to what you're looking for.
And like,
that doesn't exist if you're not like,
having the conversation in the first
place?
Oh, totally.
There's no question that when I started
going to WordCamps around the world and
speaking,
that it had a huge impact on the
future of my career.
At the time, I would speak,
I don't know how many people would be
in the hall,
and I would get zero feedback.
You know, like often it's just like,
thanks, bye.
But then six months later,
someone would get in touch for a web
project or, you know,
and I would always say,
just took one person in the audience that
that talk meant something to them,
that it was worth it.
But it's stuff that,
that kind of activity,
it's time consuming, it's expensive.
It's, you know, it's very easy to say,
nevermind, we live in a digital age.
I'm going to sit here behind my screen
and that will be enough.
But you can't compare to the power of
a real connection.
And it's the kind of thing that builds
up over time.
And you don't, you can't predict how,
like what is going to mean.
And so you can't also be doing it
because you think at some point you're
going to get something out of it.
I started going, um,
because I wanted to connect more with the
WordPress community and I could see how
impactful it was for me to speak.
I didn't know what it was going to
do, but I knew that it was like,
it mattered and it meant something for,
for my work.
So, but how to play out,
I had no idea.
but it turned out to play out like
in many ways, um, very well,
but I just loved meeting the people.
So like, you know,
you have to be in it because you
love the people and if good stuff comes
your way, great.
And by the way,
it goes the other way.
Also,
I've been very fortunate to help many
people along the way who know me,
like it goes both ways.
Like I sometimes I think, wow, so good.
That person knows me because I can help
them out with something.
And, um,
Yeah, it's definitely,
it's been a journey, but it's worth it.
I want to talk a little bit,
this will probably be the last bit,
but I think that you mentioned a number,
and you mentioned it too when we were
doing the livestream for Angie,
the number of Elementor installs is some
ridiculously high number that I can't even
fathom a product being used that much.
Yeah.
Was it always like that?
Was it like that when you joined first
of all,
and then what do you credit Elementor's,
I mean, objective success to?
So Elementor has been growing at a fast
pace basically since it was launched.
I can't remember the exact numbers,
but like within
I don't know,
six months or a year of them launching
Elementor,
they had reached like a million installs.
It was like a very short amount of
time.
The growth hockey stick was like crazy.
And then since then, it's been growing.
When I joined,
it wasn't yet the most popular plugin in
the repo.
It was like number three.
And we would pay attention.
And then at one point, we're like,
oh my gosh, it bypassed Yoast.
Yoast was like number two.
And we went to number two.
And then one morning we woke up and
we're like, we're number one.
It was crazy.
So why is it growing?
First of all, I think from the beginning,
like in the start,
it was just really the right product at
the right time.
It was that combination,
which is like winning the lottery.
And I'm not saying it was luck because
they built a product that people really
wanted,
but like they built that product that
people really wanted at the exact right
time.
There were some other products already out
there,
but the Elementor approach gave people
more capabilities.
And then people just loved it and they
were just talking about it and then they
were sharing it.
And also, I think at that time,
at least, I don't know how long,
but it was only the free version.
It took them a while until they started
offering the pro version.
But I think that that,
like going all in on open source like
that,
was also a key to their success.
They've been good at listening to customer
feedback.
There's a lot of complaints, you know,
why don't you do this?
Why don't you do that?
But like, if you think about the scale,
so the number is now like twenty one
million active installs, which is crazy.
So just imagine how many opinions there
are there.
Sure, twenty one million.
So obviously Elementor can't do
everything,
but there's a lot of
One of the things that I couldn't believe
when I joined because they're so big that
like how much they cared about like one
person saying something negative.
I'm like, you're so big,
you're growing at like,
I don't know how many sites a day
and you care that Joe over there,
but they cared and they were always
listening.
So I think that probably plays a role
as well.
And then, you know,
just really talented people working
together.
I have also learned, so at Elementor,
HR is super important in terms of hiring
the right talent.
They'll spend as long as it takes to
fill a position until they feel like more
than a hundred percent that the fit is
right.
And then, you know,
there's a lot of appreciation for that.
And the people who work at Elementor are
really,
really very brilliant and it's really fun
working with them.
Everyone, you know,
has their like area of expertise and they
really are an expert in that area.
So whatever it is,
even like what I'm doing,
whenever I'm doing anything.
So on the one hand,
I'm kind of like a lone island.
I don't have a team.
I report to the CEO.
He's super busy.
I'm like doing my own thing.
But I work horizontally.
So like, you know,
if we're sponsoring a WordCamp,
I have to pull in finance, legal, design,
if we're going to have a booth, right?
And
everyone's just so smart and like brings
such value to the project that the output
will be really good.
So, so I think that as well.
And of course our, the co-founders,
Ariel and Yoni,
their vision is very focused and strategic
and they're always thinking and
rethinking.
And they're also, they hear this,
they're like, they have humility,
meaning they don't think they know
everything.
as all we're all like,
everyone is always discussing things and
yes, they'll make a decision in the end,
but, um,
they don't think they know everything.
And, um, yeah, I don't know.
It's like,
I guess it's a combination of factors,
but yeah, it's wild.
The reach that the company has.
Yeah.
Well, thank you very much, uh,
Miriam for being on the show.
Uh,
I'm hopefully we'll get to meet someplace,
uh, in the next year.
Uh,
I'm sure we tend to like rotate in
similar circles, uh, as it were.
Um, uh,
where can people find you on the internet?
So actually I just built myself a website.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Miriam Schwab.me.
Someone took miriamschwab.com.
They're not doing anything with it.
So I took miriamschwab.me.
Um,
it's a WordPress site that I built with
AI.
I was super excited about it.
So you can,
I have a contact form there and I
have links,
but you can obviously find me on LinkedIn,
uh, Twitter slash X, um,
and all the usual places I'm there.
Oh, make WordPress slack,
post status slack.
All the slacks.
Yeah.
All the slacks.
Uh, well, yeah.
Thanks again.
Uh, thanks for, for being on the show.
Thank you everyone who might be watching
or listening to this in the future and
we'll see you on the internet.