“In 2022 at Post Status… we will be together and make the most of our online experiences.” —Cory Miller
In this episode of Post Status Excerpt, David and Cory chat about the key events for Post Status in 2021, including Cory’s acquisition of Post Status from Brian in May, StellarWP‘s sponsorship of Post Status Slack to go pro, and the acquisition tracker. Cory also explains how his understanding of Post Status has changed since acquiring it.
Also: David and Cory also discuss what they hope Post Status can become in early 2022.
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- Post Status Acquisition Tracker
- Post Status Open Web Manifesto
- David Bisset (Twitter)
- Post Status (Twitter)
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Transcript
David Bisset: It may seem like [00:01:00] yesterday, but you know, we started 2021 with Brian’s still at the helm of Post Status. You were a partner, but that changed in the middle of the year, around may or June and where you are fully acquired Post Status. So you remember that still.
Cory Miller: Oh yeah.
Vividly. We were just kind of prepared for this. It was just pulling me back and going. It’s really good to reflect, you know, and review what’s going on. And I don’t take enough time for this instead of member huddle, but, you know, we didn’t really talk about this linking back for posts specifically on, remember how that on some, I’m glad to do it because.
I think if I look back, it was me taking over full-time with Post Status going from what was kind of a part-time gig and a really fun gig to a very busy gig. And because we’re growing the vision and it just I think there was, you know, if I can look back on the year related to Post Status for me, it was.
This light bulb moment of like, I can do anything. I want, not that I couldn’t with Brian, it was just like, okay, I’ve got [00:02:00] full control of this. I don’t know if a lot of people realize David, but at I themes, I actually wasn’t the majority owner. And I start when I started in 2008, I met two, my, my two partners and they gave me some initial funding.
To to get started with iThemes. And so, I had partners all along and there’s many pluses to that, by the way. But this magical moment that happened to me was over that summer and just realizing one day. This is all mine. Not to sound very selfish about it. You know, Dave, because I’ve tried to be very collaborative and share everything we’re doing, but I go, I can do anything I want, what do I want to do?
Oh, wow. Like, yeah. And again, not that brian was holding me back at all. It was just, it was this moment of going, this is mine. And then another day, wake it up and go on everything I want to do I can do here. So those are huge light bulb moments for me looking back in this year.
And I hope everybody can see that my energy, like we’re we were a [00:03:00] bunch of part-timers David you’re part time Dan’s part-time more or less. I was part time. Brian was part-time like, when we all we said, and I gather, we probably have a couple of full-time people here. But this was just different fitting for me this next adventure spirit Post Status.
And I’m, really pumped about it.
David Bisset: So obviously you saw potential in Post Status when you first joined Brian, I’m going to say sometime in 2020.
Cory Miller: Yes, January 2020, right before the pandemic. And he came out and we had a lot of cool plans that we’re now gonna start doing, starting in February. Some of our in-person things, very small groups now with omicron going on and we’ll see how everything goes, but we’re going, we’re pushing forward with our first in-person meetup.
Our partner summit in February in Oklahoma city. But yeah, that was pre printed. January, 2020. It’s crazy to think our fastest.
David Bisset: So you cruise through and then May 2021 you acquired. [00:04:00] So what is the difference between how you’re looking at Post Status and your goals when you acquired it from Brian then versus now, like what’s changed in your mind?
What goals have changed? What potential are you realizing?
Cory Miller: You know, being very honest and reflective about all of this David it’s just going we’ll maintain cool stuff. That process was already doing. That was the previous mindset. The mindset today is now we’re going to grow. We’re going to do 10 times what we’ve done in the past.
We’re going to take community to a whole new level. We’re going to really blow out what we’re doing at post-test and truly become and be, and showcase. We are the professional community of the open web. That WordPress leads in that we, as WordPress leaders are a part of that bigger ecosystem, but the whole point of we are Post Status.
It’s an energizing, shared vision that rallies all of us together. And that’s why I’m so energized about all of this, because it’s, what I [00:05:00] love to do is help bring people together. And it’s just funny, the artificial boundaries and barriers we’ve put on ourselves, but that’s what I had. Previously, when I took over, I thought I will maintain this awesome community.
That was my, that was pretty much my vision. I’ll do cool stuff. Get to work with cool people, get the, hang out with all of my friends. You know, now it’s even a bigger vision and I’ve had a lot of. With that Jonathan Wald, yourself, Dan, or editor-in-chief Michelle Frechette. My wife Lindsay is always my number one partner in anything I do.
She’s always there to help and support me. Now we have Felicia on full-time to take over operations here. Our first full-time employee. I don’t know, I guess technically second, because you can count Brian in the past. So, Yeah. It’s spark. You just got me all excited, just thinking about that, but that was on this truth.
That was, as far as I could see at that point, you know, was let’s make them this cool thing. Let’s don’t do anything to break it, [00:06:00]
David Bisset: right? Yeah. When you inherit something precious, the first thing I do is like, don’t break anything. Don’t don’t mess up. And then eventually you’re like, okay, how can I expand this without breaking it?
Now I wrote down, you know, Your better journalist and I am, but what I did was I wrote down, I tried to write down the top three Post Status moments of the past year. And frankly, I think palpably, since you took over, I think has before, you know, with everything going on, I can barely remember the last six minutes, let alone six months.
So we’re starting from you, acquiring from may have going forward. So one of those was actually something you touched on before, and I think it caught a few people, maybe not delight, surprise, but something that, what is this. You, you mentioned an open source manifesto, or you talk to, you mentioned about seeing Matt and talking about open source, the open source manifestos on our site right now at poststatus.com/open-web-manifesto.
And it says Post Status seeks to grow WordPress economy in three [00:07:00] ways, guide, connect, and elevate. Was this an idea that you and the in the team had, you know, when you acquire Post Status or when did this come into real clear picture? They feel like, oh, I know I’m going to talk to Matt about it.
Oh, I’m going to, we’re going to put this together, put on our website and what, you know, what was the, what was, what were you trying to get out of this by posting this Manifesto?
Cory Miller: Yeah, that was you know, everything I do it’s just a collaboration and I try never to take credit for things to that.
I don’t do I work so much better in a band or an orchestra or whatever, like with other people. And this was a vision that Jonathan Walton. You know, crystallized in my head he shared the vision of the open web, what she’s talked about and blogged about prolifically on his own site. And then he shared that with me and I asked him questions and clarify, like, okay, what do we mean when we say that?
How does WordPress fit into all of that? And super got energized by that vision shared vision [00:08:00] that, that really is it connects all of us here at Post Status in the bigger ecosystem of WordPress. And so, And I just like, I love building community, a little blood pulling people together. And I know that one way to do that is to have a shared vision that energizes us just like WordPress is the shared vision of democratizing publishing for postage.
The open web, we are builders and makers of the Oakland web, you know, crux guard did a shirt like that back in the day. And I thought it was the coolest thing. I’d seen a, I make the internet or something like that was the shirt that we’re going to bring back by the way. So this has been, this is not a new vision necessarily.
It’s a clarification of one, but so much of what we’re doing today is what was built with the bedrock of what Brian did. And then you David and Dan. And now me and now Michelle, now Jonathan NA AIG. Now all these different people that we’ve got on our contributing team to build something cool. But the open web manifest is sometimes just want to keep [00:09:00] ringing the bell.
When they think of Post Status. I want them to think open web. We are the makers of the open web.
David Bisset: Yeah. Cause it says here we offer guidance on how to think and where to focus. Businesses, we help our members get connected with each other and we grow businesses or growing businesses need support. And we’re committed to doing what needs to be done to help our members grow.
So that actually fits into something that you mentioned. You’ve been one message you have been repeating in some form more or less, I’d say you fully took over in may or June is that Post Status is not a news site. So if somebody came up to you and said, is Post Status a new site, how would you respond to.
Cory Miller: We’re not there’s variations of that. We happen to break news. We happen to commentate on these, but I’m a purist as a journalist and I go, true news is, should be balanced. It should be fair. It should be. Objective as possible within our humans feces about we can be, and that’s just not what we do here.
We serve and support WordPress professionals and WordPress businesses. [00:10:00] That’s what we do. So we’re not a journalistic outlet. We are ho what can we do that serves and supports our members and makes our life better? How do we help think ahead for them? How do we think, like one of the stalwarts of post as for you.
With Brian and you and Dan later on, was that too long? Didn’t read email. I got every week and I would sit and read that and go, okay. I can’t keep up with drama press sometime. I can just scroll through my email and go “here’s the interesting things. I should probably pay attention,”. And so that’s the guide part as part of our mission guide connected elevate.
And so the we’ve been doing that for years. That’s a legacy that Brian has a huge fingerprint on going forward from forever here at Post Statuses. We should give he, I loved his thought analysis pieces his commentary and his insights. And I pushed our team and brought in more contributors to say, don’t just say this.
It doesn’t, that’s a headline they can get anywhere. That [00:11:00] doesn’t help people. It just shoves a headline in your face. But if it says, how does this, what does this mean for me in a couple of lines succinctly, which is hardware, by the way, that’s what we want to be doing at Post Status is saying the too long didn’t read. Here we can help you say brain processing power and keep up with all the stuff going on that you can’t within this amazing ecosystem called WordPress and the open web. So that’s the way I see our content. What we publish here is everything that just helps our members think about, get ahead, stay ahead of what’s going on in their world.
David Bisset: Yeah, good. Cause you know, I can’t stop giving my 2 cents on anything. So that kind of fits well with the analysis part of it. All of it. One of the things we did do that seemed, I mean, I think may have, seemed like news in the beginning, but we kept one of the top three, I think highlights of my personal highlights of post status over the past year is we started the acquisition tracker. You [00:12:00] know, you can look at that as news. I kind of look at it as more of a guide for all of WordPress to look at because now I think whenever there is an acquisition. Either me or Dan get pinged on Twitter or in post that a stock that somebody else randomly reset the calories at the counter or some other podcasts goes, this is where, and you can see now it’s a very useful tool for now, for me personally, even though we’re the ones who put it together, that wow, you can look, I was reading article about Matt Mullenweg the other day about his role in trying to push the open web. And in order to do that, he needs he through automatic. For the most part, we’re making these certain acquisitions in certain categories and you’re reading the article and you go, well, I, you know, you look at, and then look at the acquisition page and you see all the acquisitions, automatic is put together.
You begin to see, wow, this is starting to make sense. It’s like, you know, the over not to get into a story about Matt and the acquisitions, but you begin to see. Wow. This particular journalism app has been acquired this particular photo, you know, the creative comments thing has been acquired or [00:13:00] absorbed into the project and you begin to see a grander picture and, you know, embarrassed.
I am to probably have read I think it was David Pearce’s article or something on this, but you can go back and look at a nice orderly list, like the acquisition tracker and we’ll have more stuff next year, probably to go along with that. So I thought that was a real. Good thing for us post status people to put up because everybody seems to use it.
And, you know, I like putting up stuff. That’s actually useful to people.
Cory Miller: Again, we should be giving those type of tools for people it’s not about, it’s not about breaking news. It’s about which we happen to do with the Pagely announcement. But like, that was a member longstanding member of our community who wanted it of the two that news to be broken through post status, which he in.
Lovely wife has, co-founders have supported for years here. And that’s why we broke that news. But yes, it comes down to those tools. Like how can we help our members? You know, keep up. We have a set of members that are founders here. We want to help them [00:14:00] move up, take the next level and things like that.
And yeah, that all just kind of gets me excited. Cause that’s what I want to be doing more and more of here at post status and to
David Bisset: be clear our own community is adding. List as well. They’re not waiting for us to read stuff and update their they’re just sending us stuff to update. So to me now it’s more of like a.
Borderline Wiki page at this point.
Cory Miller: But this is why I love the word collaboration, because there is no way I can do it by myself, no way. And it’s so obvious that I love it because then we can say like, I don’t know whose idea was the tracker, but it wasn’t mine. And when that, then I was like, yes, we, but when I heard that deal, I was like, absolutely this fits perfectly. We should do that. And then we got it out and it has been a community collaboration because I know we miss things. We’re not in a news, you know, watch Doug and financial.
David Bisset: We’re not a news site as you’re saying well, so, so here’s the last thing on my list. And I wanted, I want to talk to you about stellar WP [00:15:00] provided us a sponsorship that allowed our post status slack to be fully upgraded to I guessing the pro version, which means you get access to all of the past conversations and a lots of other bells and whistles as well.
Weeks before that announcement was made publicly. You were talking about that internally with us as a possibility, and you were very excited about that possibility. Can you tell me why it was so important for you to, with stellar WP to pursue this particular upgrade and what it means for the post status community?
Cory Miller: I had heard from a number of people, you know, this is the hallway track. This is the in between times where we see each other, you know, team. Meet all the time, see each other all the time, but we have so many amazing community members that are on different teams. And hosts has, is the glue is the hub.
And I had heard from so many members over the two years of being a part of post status now. And that issue would be [00:16:00] nice. Well, when I asked, I was like, okay, a pressing increase right now is not going to is probably not going to work or fund us, you know, for the foreseeable future. So I valued the preservation of memories and conversations and things like, particularly in the DMS, our stats say it every single week.
It’s just conversations don’t happen in public, on Prestos. They haven’t happened in the DMS and then you lose track of the conversation. You and I might have had five years ago, Dave, and you know, and now we get it back and we can kind of retrace that. I think that’s valuable because there’s so many best practices, tips, cool stuff that we share with each other, and it just needed a better way to be preserved.
And this is my short term solution. I think, you know, you and I’ve talked and our team has talked about how. Going forward. When I talked to Matt Mullenweg in San Francisco, a couple in back in where was it? December? Earlier this month when I mentioned we’re going to paid slack he mentioned an open source project [00:17:00] that I don’t think is ready for the prime time just yet, but that they were looking to use for the.org project.
And I was like, okay, that’s interesting. But really the premise is just maintaining that hub. To connect with each other. That’s the essence of why we did, why I sought out a sponsorship, but then out into the universe. And then our friends at seller WP said, we’ll take it. We’d love to be that sponsor.
And I’m so thankful for Hazel and her team and core course, Michelle Frechette and her new role over at seller WP and being a huge part of our culture contributing team here at Post Status is pretty awesome. So synergy, can I use that?
David Bisset: You can use whatever word you want. As long as it’s family friendly.
That’s my only thing for this show. Cause my kids listened to this. Believe it or not. Yeah. They really need to get them a Disney plus subscription they’re going into from now. well, Olivia, my 17 year old daughter It’s getting to be more of a [00:18:00] production type oriented type of person, probably a lot more professional than me.
So she actually listens and tells me when I mispronounced things and when I could have done better. So what do you, so we’ve kind of covered what was the quickly the big, exciting moments of post status last year. And I don’t want to put you too much on the spot, cause I think we can probably.
Do a whole other episode about what’s coming in 2022, but what are you most excited about maybe generally speaking, whether involves post status or not, as we kind of get into the first quarter of 2022 what Scott what’s on your radar in terms of things that are interesting you the most in this.
Cory Miller: For process specifically it’s small group cohort type meetings that we’re going to be starting posters. So like we’ll be starting January 12th. I think it is on the Wednesday, our first 2022 member huddle each week. We’ll do that on slack. There’s a channel there for that. So I like more than. We went, you know, finishing the year, getting to be with Matt Mullenweg and [00:19:00] awesome members like Aaron Campbell, and Jordan, Michelle Frechette and a different people in person for state of the word was freaking awesome.
We, we missed the human. We have so much miss that human component in a recognize that in lieu of being able to do that. And we’re going to try to do that in 2022 is be together, is if we can’t, you know, in person we’ll make the most of our online experiences. And so that’s what I’m most excited for the first quarter at Post Status.
David Bisset: Oh, great. I, again, I go back to the manifesto that was published and beyond the open web, again, there, there is a, the post status credo. Is embedded in, into growing the WordPress economy. And then by and by that, we mean growing the businesses that need the support, the individuals too, that also need that support a rising tide lifts all the boats.
So in order for WordPress [00:20:00] to like eventually market share is not going to matter anymore. It’s either, we’re going to be able to lose the ability for the reporting of it or something else will take its place or the market share. From a certain metric is going to stop. I’ve always said that’s not really a good measure of how WordPress is doing. That’s just an easy number to pluck off you know, in, in sticking in a sticker or stick it in a headline, stick it in a tweet, but the best way for, to judge the growth of WordPress in my opinion has always been the community, the strength of the community, because you can have software. Without the community.
But you can’t, there’s not really much, you’re going to be able to do with it. You’re not going to enjoy using it. You’re not going to look forward to using it with other people. And I think what you’re discussing here is more than just centering around WordPress, the software. Once you have this community and slack and Post Status slack, you’re talking to people about running your business.
You’re talking to these, all these great people and it’s just, WordPress becomes just a thinner line that connects everybody into one. Great, huge. Community. And I’m really looking forward, like you to see [00:21:00] how this expanded slack goes, how this more interactive ability, like some people will use, we use Post Status and just like they’ll drop into slack, have a few conversation, reads things and leave.
But I think now, especially going to 2022 is whether or not we’re trying to judge carefully how to step back into the public, you know, however way that is and wherever we live. We need to be able to take advantage of having this collective community bonding together and meeting together regularly.
Because sometimes even though you may not feel like it, sometimes you really need to have to talk to someone or be coached by someone or be enlightened, be refreshed, be relaxed by someone. And sometimes being people around that digitally even is better than nothing you don’t want to be alone. I don’t think for very long in this space emotionally or.
Financially or business-wise either. So I think that’s one of the best things of appreciating. Our direction at Post Status. It’s not just like you said, we’re not a new site. We’re offering commentary, but what I’m most excited, [00:22:00] what I saw you especially talk about is we’re trying to get people to have conversations together.
And, you know, on my end too, I’m putting out a stage on Twitter spaces. For example, people communicating together their ideas because our community isn’t going to be strong unless we’re continuing the exchange of idea. And thoughts and advice. So that’s awesome. Corey, that your vision, it kind of goes along that same path to.
You know, I don’t want to, I mean, it’s not the, it’s not the alcohol talking right now because it’s still too early for that, but I do appreciate what you’re doing. And so, yeah, so we’ll, I’m going to wish you a good year because there’s only two more days left of it. So I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
We’ll talk next year. Yep. And I’ll see you then and best to the family.
Cory Miller: You bet. Thanks so much for what you do, David. Your commitment to the WordPress community and also post status
David Bisset: and our team and our team. You know, our team deserves our team. The team itself deserves [00:23:00] all the praise we can get, especially in these in these times confusing times.
So yes, we thank them as well.
Cory Miller: Yep.