The future of WordPress, B2B identity case study, and agency relationships

I spent most of the weekend:

• recovering from a new COVID variant

• past the Amazon Prime Day portfolio scale

• and amidst a thunderstorm of conversations with former and existing WordPress partners (plugin and theme shop owners, engineers, governance advocates, agency owners, hosting peers).

What’s up with WordPress?

Look, it’s been an absolutely insane month and as a veteran in the space, I’ve been around the block enough to know everyone personally and collaborated with different parties on multiple occasions over the years.

I’ve also met Matt several times at WordCamps, community summits, afterparties, and whatnot:

Not going to delve into the politics of the current state of affairs between cease and desist letters and a lawsuit or two going on, but the facts of the matter are:

• WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg waged war on Silver Lake and their portfolio company, WP Engine, over trademark issues, royalty fees, and possibly a handful of other conflicts

• WP Engine’s access to WordPress update servers and plugin repository has been restricted - the same is valid for sister companies or products including Advanced Custom Fields and NitroPack

• Advanced Custom Fields had been forked into Secure Custom Fields - the state of both plugins being in flux at best

• Community backlash has taken victims in the face of contributors being banned from community servers, withdrawing contributions, certain events eventually not happening, new WordPress forks popping up, other open source community leaders interfering, and so on

Bottom line, not a great month for the ecosystem. But reading into the current events, for the CMS powering 43% of the global web, there’s a lot of fear, uncertainty, and confusion going on.

Plugins may go down, hosts may go under, Automattic may lose the trademark, leadership may or may not change, some hosts may decide to fork WordPress or run with a blended installation, others may start to promote and invest heavily in a different CMS. We’re yet to see.

What’s the state of the web, then?

But the truth is - most enterprise projects require custom development besides injecting 40 different SaaS apps into a Webflow build and running hundreds of parallel JS requests.

And in the CMS realm, WordPress still powers 10X+ more websites than Shopify or 30X more than open source systems like Joomla or Drupal. So bringing over a different mass-adoption platform would take years at the very least.

What the future direction is going to be is still in the stars. Hosting companies may decide to fork and run their flavors. Or invest heavily back into core development to work out a unanimous front. The underlying infrastructure systems may differ.

In any case, our agency WordPress retainers would keep enterprise accounts safe and sound, running the right stack the right way on the right infrastructure. So all is safe and sound.

And where is B2B headed?

The billion-dollar question is still unravelling, too, but visitor-level identity data is the biggest invention in the space over the last year.

Mani Iyer, CEO of Kwanzoo, joined me on the Growth Hacking Playbook podcast to discuss some epic applications of his tool:

We also touched on the future of B2B in 2025, other progressive opportunities in the market, how GTM leaders adapt in the new year, and the massively growing Indian-American and Indian tech communities. It’s worth listening as always!

B2B SaaS, mid-market, publishers, wholesale e-commerce, manufacturing, sustainability are all turning to visitor identity as the holy grail. And we’ve been integrating a handful of GTM solutions for the ecosystem, augmenting with AI for maximum results.

Keeping ourselves busy for the new normal.

Wait, and B2B agencies?

I know that agencies are frequently reading this newsletter, drawing inspirations for their own service lines or utilizing new tools.

So ones that have been struck on the tech or SEO front are leveling up and partnering up - which is only natural!

I’m leading a workshop for US and global agencies on the 6th, and I’m getting more and more requests for transformation, operational efficiency, productizing, and building new departments for agency teams. I know it’s packed and I can’t help everyone, but I’ll keep catching up with the backlog slowly but steadily.

I see some promising transformations from agencies in my community on automating more processes and refining their product offerings better than usual. This pilot is shaping out to be pretty transformative - and I’ll keep working with established leaders to help level up to the best of my abilities.

And agencies seeking exit opportunities? Make sure you check out my podcast episodes with Dom from Onfolio and Blake from Flippa on selling and acquiring agencies.

Back to the trenches here on the agency and consulting side, and chasing guests for new episodes. Stay tuned!

Yours,

Mario

✍️ Growth Blueprint Podcast #8 - How Visitor Identity is Transforming B2B Marketing - As organic and social channels have been drying up for many and paid ads performing far less efficiently, maximizing conversion rates and data collection are more important than ever. So while being able to capture company-level account data has been possible for years (albeit not too affordable), progressive products like SiteStop now provide visibility for individual-level data - names, email addresses, LinkedIn profiles, and even phone numbers.

✍️ 10 Marketing Approaches Every Executive Should Know In 2025 - As organic and social channels have been drying up for many and paid ads performing far less efficiently, maximizing conversion rates and data collection are more important than ever. So while being able to capture company-level account data has been possible for years (albeit not too affordable), progressive products like SiteStop now provide visibility for individual-level data - names, email addresses, LinkedIn profiles, and even phone numbers.

📧 Entrepreneur - They’ll be in your inbox every morning Monday-Saturday with all the day’s top business news, inspiring stories, best advice, and exclusive reporting from Entrepreneur.

📧 Statista - Within just a few years, Statista managed to establish itself as a leading provider of market and consumer data. Over 1,100 visionaries, experts and doers continuously reinvent Statista, thereby constantly developing successful new products and business models. Subscribe by logging in.

📃 Apple exposes AI weakness. Apple has used a new benchmark test to establish that major AI models are not capable of genuine logical reasoning. The common benchmark test GSM8K, which most firms run their large language models (LLMs) through to establish how capable they are of solving real-world problems with logical reasoning, is fundamentally flawed. 

📃 Meta’s new AI generation in ads. You can opt-in to join a test of the new AI generation features. The enhancements available within these tests will be a moving target. When new enhancements become available, they’ll likely be sent to testing first. As of the time of this post, there are four enhancements that are part of this test, and this has grown quickly during the past few weeks.

📃 Adobe’s AI video model. Adobe is making the jump into generative AI video. The company’s Firefly Video Model, which has been teased since earlier this year, is launching today across a handful of new tools, including some right inside Premiere Pro that will allow creatives to extend footage and generate video from still images and text prompts.

📃 Boeing stops all 737 production amidst workers’ strike. The aerospace company confirmed to Fortune that work on the aircraft is at a “complete halt” because 33,000 workers with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) union have been on strike since Sept. 13.

📃Google’s move and Merchant Center Next. All merchants have now been migrated to Merchant Center Next. Accordingly, Google has updated the Merchant Center Help Center to primarily show Merchant Center Next content instead of classic Merchant Center Next content.

📈 Nearly a quarter of S&P 500 companies have lower credit-default swaps than the U.S. government.

Marketwatch reports former President Donald Trump — when he’s not authoring a 39-minute deejay set — has proposed a “yuge” list of tax cuts, from exempting tips from income tax to lowering the corporate tax rate to 15% for domestic manufacturing, that the Tax Foundation estimates would cost as much as $6 trillion over a decade.

Not to be outdone, Vice President Kamala Harris has a basket of tax-and-spending policies that could cost $3.5 trillion over a decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

• S&P 500: $5,815(-0.77%)

📈 National mortgage rates increased for all loan terms compared to a week ago, according to Bankrate data. Rates for 30-year fixed, 15-year fixed, 5/1 ARMs and jumbo loans moved higher.

• 30-year mortgage rate: 6.60%(+0.20)

• 15-year mortgage rate: 5.92%(+0.20)

📈 Citing recent data showing an uptick in inflation and a U.S. economy and labor market that are stronger than previously thought, Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller on Monday called for "more caution" on interest-rate cuts ahead.

"Whatever happens in the near term, my baseline still calls for reducing the policy rate gradually over the next year," Waller said in remarks prepared for delivery to a Shadow Open Market Committee conference at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. The Fed's policy rate is restrictive, the labor market remains healthy even as labor demand is moderating, and inflation is "in the vicinity" of the Fed's 2% target.

📰 Here are some of the most prominent headlines this week:

• The U.S. is sending a high-altitude anti-missile system to Israel along with a U.S. military crew to operate it.

• Social Security recipients can expect a 2.5% cost-of-living adjustment increase in their payments starting in 2025.

• Hurricane Milton makes landfall near Siesta Key, off the coast of Sarasota, Florida, as a Category 3 storm, the National Hurricane Center says.

📈 September 2024’s Portfolio Success stories from SeedBlink - We’ve featured many of these companies throughout these months. If any of them have caught your eye, you can have a look at how they’re doing in SeedBlink’s latest article.

• InstaSun - redefines the beach experience with a revolutionary 360° solar protection device.

• I Love Failure - raising €300,000 to expand its platform dedicated to personal and professional growth.

• Brainactive - Access +300 million consumers globally, gain key insights and optimise your decisions with a user-friendly AI-enhanced survey builder.

Note: Got a round going that you want to feature - your own business or a portfolio company? Get in touch.

There’s an exciting Flippa update I want to share with you. They’ve now created a category for digital agencies.

The global market for them was estimated in 2021 at about $4.2B and is expected to double by 2027. As part of the digital agency community for about 15 years, exciting times are up ahead!

Thriving Mobile App Development Agency - This end-to-end enterprise app development agency specializing in product strategy, design, development, and QA/support has generated a staggering $1.6M TTM profit.

• Monthly profit: $133,236

• Client LTV: $200K-$2M

• Business age: 16 years

Auto Detailers Booking SaaS - This SaaS business provides simple web building and booking services for automotive detailing professionals.

• Monthly revenue: $935

• CLTV: $7,792

• Business age: 2 years

Business News Blog - This well-established business content site comes with a long history of performance and with a DR of 41, draws in 1M+ page views per month.

• Monthly profit: $3,075

• Monthly page views: 684,401

• Business age: 24 years

Need My Help?

I'm involved with a number of initiatives - here's what I can do to help you:

🌐 Scalable and secure WordPress? DevriX provides WordPress retainers to SMEs, publishers, eCommerce, SaaS, and more. Our plans start from $1,200/mo to $40K/mo for anything from support through engineering, CRO, performance, security, to fractional CXO services and managing the data stacks of large corps.

🚀  Want to scale and optimize your business? Growth Shuttle offers personalized advisory plans starting at $600/hr. Tap into my personal pool of business know-how and my data warehouse of industry data.

👥 Want access to my blueprints/books and a weekly Slack planning session? Join my Community and grab my Entrepreneurship book. 

📈 Looking to start a US company? Check out doola and their “Business in a Box” model. Suitable for both foreigners and US citizens and both for residents and non-residents.

📊 Have you tried buying and selling digital property? Have a look at Flippa’s marketplace. They offer a vast variety of online businesses for any buyer’s interest. Or if you’re ready for an exit, Flippa provides you with the necessary tools to list your business and close the deal.

💼 Looking for investment opportunities? Check out SeedBlink and use Nimity to manage it.

💡 Eager to incorporate my recommended solutions? Track my angel investments. Sharing, applying for open roles, or writing reviews helps a ton.  And anything else I try to publish on my blog and my courses here!