0:00:04 All right. Today’s episode is special. We’ve got Matt Mullenweg. Matt founded a company called
0:00:09 WordPress, which is used by something like 45% of all websites on the internet. So it’s just
0:00:13 huge thing. And we talked to Matt about a bunch of interesting things. Sean, what have we talked
0:00:17 to him about? He had an offer to sell his company for $200 million when he was 24 years old. He
0:00:21 turned it down. We asked him what that was like. We talked to him about some of the recent drama
0:00:25 that they’ve had. We talked about how they’ve been acquiring companies. They bought the small
0:00:29 company in South Africa and how it turned out to be a huge thing for their business. Like, you know,
0:00:34 a billion dollar plus win. And he’s just a student of the game. He’s been doing it for like 20 years.
0:00:38 This guy started this company when he was 19 years old and is still doing it. And it’s become
0:00:44 this absolute juggernaut. So enjoy this episode with Matt Mullenweg. Tell me if this is right,
0:00:48 because this sounded like almost too good to be true. But I’d read that in 2008, you had an
0:00:52 acquisition offer. I think you were only 24 years old for $200 million. At that point,
0:00:55 I think you’d only raised a million dollars. And I think you raised a million dollars at
0:01:00 $3 million in valuation, something like relatively, you’re 24, you’re going to be worth nine figures,
0:01:04 something crazy like that. You turn it down. But then you talked about how you didn’t have
0:01:09 control of the company because you were young and maybe just like made some mistakes with funding,
0:01:14 something like that. What’s the conversation like with yourself when you’re like, I’m turning down
0:01:18 something that might make me worth over $100 million at the age of 24.
0:01:23 You talked about your name, the first million. It’s kind of funny. Like, I guess technically on
0:01:28 paper, my first million was that first funding round, right? In theory, I owned like half the
0:01:32 company that was now worth $4 million. But as you know, like that’s paper money. I was still
0:01:39 you know, eating ramen and, and Mountain Dew and Pizza, like living, you know, a very broke San
0:01:45 Francisco college kid life. But it was in 2008 that we had this acquisition offer. And you’re
0:01:50 right, it was about two and a half years in this company. Someone tried to buy us for $200 million.
0:01:56 And the investors at the time did something which now is quite common, but at the time was pretty
0:02:02 forward looking, which is a secondary. So they said, they said, wow, you know, we’re 20 people,
0:02:06 we’ve been doing this for two and a half years, a $200 million exit would be pretty amazing.
0:02:10 And like I said, I would walk away personally with a lot of money. But we think this could be
0:02:18 actually way bigger. So let’s, let’s build that. And so we took that acquisition, made an evaluation,
0:02:23 you know, turn that into a funding round where we put a lot more capital into the company. So we
0:02:28 could, you know, really build things out. And I sold some stock myself. So I, that was my first,
0:02:34 that was my first million liquid was kind of in 2008, I think I was 24. And that was a step
0:02:39 change, you know, was able to like pay off my credit cards and buy my mom a house. Like, you know,
0:02:43 all that sort of stuff that you want to do, that you dream of. And it sort of removed some of those
0:02:48 sort of early economic things. And I was really able to focus on just the business and swinging
0:02:55 for the fences, which is what they want me to do. All right. So when I ran my company, The Hustle,
0:02:59 I think we had something like 2 million subscribers. And we made money through advertising. We didn’t
0:03:04 actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter, because advertising in general is
0:03:09 kind of a crappy business model. And so I remember sitting down and I’m like, what are all the different
0:03:14 ways that I can make money off the hustle that aren’t advertising? And so to make sure that you
0:03:19 don’t make this mistake, Sean, me and the husband team, we went and looked at a bunch of different
0:03:25 ways to monetize your business. And we put it all together in a really cool document where we lay
0:03:30 it all out along with our research. And we call it very appropriately, we call it the business
0:03:34 monetization playbook. Go to the description of this episode and you’re going to see a link to
0:03:39 that business monetization playbook. It’s completely free. You just click the link and you can see it
0:03:46 back to the episode. You know, I hear these stories. Like, Zuck turns down a billion dollars
0:03:52 from Yahoo or whatever. This story about you at such a young age, turning down the opportunity to
0:03:58 exit and have this huge payday. I think you’re a better man than me. I don’t think I would have
0:04:03 been able to resist that. Was that an easy decision for you? Was that a hard decision? Like, what,
0:04:06 and like, you’re like, I think this could be bigger. Let’s go for it. Is that just like,
0:04:10 not blind faith, but just like an extreme amount of self-confidence and faith? Like, how do you even?
0:04:13 Or did you even want to do it? And the investors were like, nah, it’s too bad.
0:04:18 No, it wasn’t an easy decision at all, of course. You have to really seriously consider these things.
0:04:22 Also, as a fiduciary, you know, like you have a responsibility to shareholders.
0:04:27 Consider every acquisition. And we’ve had other acquisition offers and people trying to buy automatic.
0:04:32 Yeah, as recently as this year, I think you have to ask yourself with any acquisition,
0:04:39 like, will the mission that we’re doing be accelerated by this transaction? Or will it be
0:04:42 hampered? It’s like, we acquire a lot of companies like WooCommerce, I think, did a lot better
0:04:48 because we acquired it than they would have on their own. But there’s probably other things
0:04:53 that we try to buy that we didn’t buy that did really well on their own. Reddit was one actually.
0:04:58 We looked at Reddit at one point. Did you look at them in their
0:05:03 Condé Nes, $10 million valuation days? I actually really wanted to buy Reddit. I couldn’t convince
0:05:09 my board. They thought it was like two outside of our early stuff. So we never got that far on
0:05:12 the discussions or anything. But yeah, there was a point when they were like for employees and for
0:05:17 sale, kind of in the wired offices on Third Street and San Francisco. I just thought it was really
0:05:23 cool. So obviously they did so very well. But when you created WordPress, it seemed like it took
0:05:27 off like within a year. I forget which year you started it. But like I said earlier, I think I
0:05:33 was using it starting in like 10 or 11, 2010 to like pretty early on. And I at the time was like
0:05:36 a Tennessee college kid. So if I had heard about it, then a lot of people had heard about it.
0:05:42 What was the first version of WordPress like? 2003. Oh, wow. Okay. I wrote a blog post on this
0:05:47 called like meaningful overnight success. Because basically, like what people see is overnight
0:05:55 success is often a thousand days of relevance or people haven’t heard of you. At one point,
0:06:01 there was a joke that WordPress had more developers than users. The first few blogs,
0:06:06 which was ones I set up for my friends in high school, because no one was using software. So I
0:06:11 just kind of like would manually set it up for people. Early, we used to do these upgrade parties
0:06:15 where just I’d say like a new version of WordPress would come out, I just open up my apartment,
0:06:20 go to Costco, bought some booze or it’s a pizza and said, Hey, just come to my apartment and
0:06:26 I’ll upgrade your site for you. So you really, you know, the early days were very much bootstrap,
0:06:30 you know, just doing everything. It looks like overnight success later. We had some breakout
0:06:35 points, you know, when move will type change our license and other things, I think fortune
0:06:40 favors to prepare. It was because we had put in a lot of grind, a lot of work, a lot of community
0:06:45 building, a lot of contributions, a lot of code, a lot of everything in the many, many days before
0:06:51 that. But what’s crazy to me is I remember like four, six years ago, it said that WordPress was
0:06:56 used by something like 30 or 20% of all the websites on the internet. Then recently, I went
0:07:00 and looked at it. Now it’s like 40%. And like the thing that struck me, I was like, are you the
0:07:06 most under monetized business on earth? How are you not like the biggest company on earth? Because
0:07:12 I used WordPress and I used WooCommerce, which you also own at my old company. My WooCommerce
0:07:19 license, Sean, I think it was a $300 lifetime or $300 a year. And the product that I was using it
0:07:23 was making many millions of dollars. And I’ve got a friend, Sean, you and I both have a friend
0:07:29 who made $100 million off of the $300 a year license or whatever it was. It was like nothing.
0:07:35 You guys have to be like the least monetized company there is. I think the way I put it is
0:07:40 WordPress is almost like kind of the dark matter of the web. You know, when you build like a list
0:07:45 of like what’s the top website, you know, we’re not going to show up. I mean, WordPress.com will be
0:07:50 in the top 100 or whatever. The beauty of it is that the ecosystem of WordPress is probably like
0:07:57 $10 billion a year, at least revenue. Now my company automatic is, you know, 5% of that.
0:08:02 But if you add up all the companies and all the people, I’m not even counting like all the stuff
0:08:05 that you talked about, like people selling things on WooCommerce, which we know is like,
0:08:10 I think last year was over 30 billion of goods and services sold through WooCommerce.
0:08:14 But actually more than half of automatic revenue comes from things that aren’t just WordPress.
0:08:19 So we have a variety of different businesses, some really cool mobile apps like Day One or
0:08:24 Pocketcast, a new one called Beeper. Well, we’re like the top two acquisitions, right? Like even
0:08:29 Buffett, for example, if you study Buffett’s portfolio, it’s like a huge amount of the gains
0:08:33 came from like a couple of like really key acquisitions at key time, right? SeizeCandy at a
0:08:38 specific time has given them over a billion dollars, I think, of free cash flow over the years.
0:08:40 What’s the revenue number that you can say the whole company does?
0:08:43 We’ve publicly saved for over half a billion in revenue now.
0:08:46 Okay, got it. All right. So yeah, to answer the challenge question, what’s been the surprising
0:08:49 thing? What are like the crown jewel, like best acquisitions that you feel proud of?
0:08:56 Our most successful is probably WooCommerce. And so this came a lot from, you know, WordPress is a
0:09:02 platform. And so I did a lot of study of platforms. And so that led me to do a lot of deep reading on
0:09:07 Microsoft, actually. And it was funny, like if you look at some of the press around Windows 95
0:09:13 coming out, they talked about how for every dollar that Microsoft made from Windows,
0:09:20 there was $20 made by the word Windows ecosystem. By the way, that ratio is similar to what I
0:09:24 talked about earlier, where Automata makes about 5% of the money that works for its ecosystem.
0:09:29 I sort of found that platforms often do this. They create a lot more value, a true platform.
0:09:33 Have you heard that story of Bill Gates of talking about the when he meets Mark Zuckerberg,
0:09:36 he talks about the Facebook platform. Have you heard this? There’s like a quote I remember reading,
0:09:42 which was like, Gates was like, this is not a platform. He goes, a platform is when the
0:09:47 companies built on top of it generate far more value than the host platform. Whereas the Facebook
0:09:52 platform at the time was like Facebook was this gargantuan thing, all the small things on top,
0:09:56 and Facebook was just sucking a lot of the value back in. And he kind of famously was like, that’s
0:10:01 not what a platform is. I would agree with that assessment. And also that’s not a platform which
0:10:04 now a lot of businesses are built on. And there were some that sort of came up in the early days
0:10:10 like Zengar or whatever, or Spotify even, but it’s now not something that like every business
0:10:14 is built on because you can get work pulled. Like a not true platform, they might give you
0:10:17 some distribution early on when you align with their interests, but then they can easily pull
0:10:21 the rug on you, which I think Facebook ended up doing to a number of companies. So yeah,
0:10:25 I wanted to build a true platform. But of course, Microsoft famously had Microsoft’s office.
0:10:31 So they had an application built on top of Windows, which ended up being very lucrative. So
0:10:35 it was like, what’s going to be, you know, I have this platform WordPress, which is now becoming
0:10:39 like an operating system for the web. We were obsessed about backwards compatibility and auto
0:10:43 updates and things like that, learning a lot from successful operating systems in the past.
0:10:48 What’s our Microsoft office? And that ended up being WooCommerce, which was a sort of small
0:10:53 company, like I think 40 people based out of South Africa, a plugin for WordPress. It actually
0:10:59 started as a theme company. It’s called WooThemes. They developed this, actually a fork of another
0:11:04 open source e-commerce thing. And they started doing it just to sell more themes because themes
0:11:09 were kind of the big business for WordPress at the time. And this e-commerce plugin took off a
0:11:14 bit. Actually, we looked at buying it years prior. You know, can’t delete the code was really crappy.
0:11:19 And so we were like, oh, this is like really crappy code. We’re, you know, automax very much
0:11:24 like engineering led like technology R&D companies or like, oh, this is, but it just kept taking off
0:11:29 because they did such a good job like building something people want. So even though the code
0:11:33 wasn’t scalable, well organized, you know, they built something that they were really great at
0:11:38 that product market fit. So WooCommerce was taken off. So we, that was an early acquisition that we
0:11:42 did. Funnily enough, the competitor there was there were, there’s a private equity that was
0:11:47 trying to buy this plugin. So we kind of won over the private equity because they wanted to join
0:11:53 like our culture and everything like that. And Woo, you know, like I said at the time, it was 40
0:11:57 people, pretty small. They only had like four engineers, by the way. So a lot of those people
0:12:01 were like customer support or other things. We were able to take what we were really great at,
0:12:06 which is like engineering and scalability, all that sort of stuff and apply it to what they had
0:12:12 done really brilliantly, which is like great. This thing that people love to use. And that’s,
0:12:17 like I said, I think last year, I did over 30 billion of goods and services sold. So that’s,
0:12:21 that’s definitely one of our best acquisitions that we’ve done. But I also that e-commerce is
0:12:26 an incredibly competitive space. And you know, we’re blessed to have an incredible competitor
0:12:31 Shopify, which is a company I have a ton of respect for, you know, the founders and entrepreneurs
0:12:35 and the whole thing. They’re actually a really, really great company. You know, Toby and I think
0:12:38 have a lot of mutual respect for each other. You know, drive each other to be better.
0:12:44 So do you look at that? This is again, like, we’re kind of giving you a compliment and an
0:12:48 insult at the same time. So the backhand of compliment is in full effect here. So on one hand,
0:12:54 we’re saying, Oh my God, there’s 43% of the internet uses WordPress, or you know, y’all’s
0:12:59 products, there’s 500 million websites using WordPress. Like that is just such a mind boggling
0:13:05 number. And so on one hand, that’s in absolutely incredible. And on the other hand, Sam was saying,
0:13:09 are you the most like under monetized? Given that, are you the most under monetized? Because you
0:13:15 look at like a Shopify, Shopify alone right now, market cap is 150 billion. The ruthless
0:13:20 capitalists could say, Matt, you’re doing all this work. Your whole company, including WooCommerce
0:13:26 and all this stuff is going to be worth several billion dollars. But the closed source Shopify
0:13:33 variant of the e-commerce side is worth 150 billion. What should I take away from that?
0:13:36 And what do you take away from that? What meaning do you put on that?
0:13:43 There’s definitely some things that are easier in a proprietary sort of closed ecosystem
0:13:48 software model. You know, it’s easier to, you know, Shopify is really great at forcing people to use
0:13:53 their payments, for example. And WooCommerce, you know, you can use ours, but you can also use a
0:13:58 lot of other stuff. I think there’s sort of average revenue per subscribers is like 10x,
0:14:04 what WooCommerce is this. How I think about it is very much sort of short term versus long term.
0:14:10 So one, we have this philosophy of open source. I want all of the work I do, all of my creative
0:14:15 output to increase the amount of freedom and liberty in the world. I just something I believe
0:14:20 very morally. So that’s why I’ve dedicated my life to open source because open source software,
0:14:23 you sort of have bill of rights attached to it, right? The freedom to use this software for any
0:14:27 purpose, to see how it works, to modify it, to redistribute its modifications, the four reasons
0:14:34 of the GPL. To me, that’s a moral decision. The software I create, I want not to have a proprietary
0:14:43 license. Shopify is amazing. If Shopify changed their policies tomorrow, their customers are stuck
0:14:49 with it. They have no recourse on their proprietary license. We’re with open source. We could change
0:14:54 our policies tomorrow. I could become evil or whatever. And automatic could be a sell or be a
0:14:59 terrible company. You would still own all the code. WordPress, WooCommerce, etc. belong just as
0:15:04 much to you as they do to me. And that sort of freedom and liberty is, I think, better in the
0:15:11 long term. So I’d say open source has a slow burn. So it often is kind of slower to start up. But
0:15:18 then over time, it builds sort of this compounding momentum that is a bit unstoppable. And there’s
0:15:22 two things. One, it could be very successful in a zone, right? As WordPress has, you know, it’s 10x
0:15:27 the number two in the market. But two, one great thing it does is it forces the proprietary folks
0:15:31 to be a bit more open. So I use proprietary stuff myself and a lot of Apple things that
0:15:37 are proprietary. And I really love their products. I think Apple is probably a bit more open than
0:15:42 they would be otherwise because Android exists. There’s an open competitor, which is, by the way,
0:15:48 open source. And that kind of influences the market. So even if we don’t have make as much money as
0:15:53 Shopify or don’t have the market share Shopify in the e-commerce space yet, although, you know,
0:15:58 check in in 10, 20 years, let’s see where we are. We force the proprietary folks to be a bit more
0:16:03 open without they do things. The short answer there is basically, I do it because that’s what
0:16:08 I believe. I believe in open source. I just believe that the moral decision comes first.
0:16:15 And secondly, in the long run, let’s see. In the long run, we’ll see. Is that a good summary?
0:16:18 Proprietary. It’s just as easy to have a failure of a proprietary company as it is an open source
0:16:23 one. So I think, you know, being proprietary open source is a little bit orthogonal or not
0:16:28 causal to like whether you’re a successful product or not. People get really attached to it. But I
0:16:33 would say in the short term, it’s definitely usually a bit easier to monetize purely proprietary
0:16:38 stack. But over the long term, you can create a much, much bigger thing if you have this kind of like
0:16:45 flywheel of an open source, a community adoption, etc. Innovation, you know, a ton of innovation
0:16:51 happens with open source. All right, let’s take a quick break because I got to tell you about a
0:16:55 friend of the pod who’s got their own podcast. If you know Steph Smith, she is a legend. She’s been
0:17:01 on MFM many times and she’s got her own podcast called the A16C podcast. And it’s all about
0:17:06 technology. If you think about it, technology has evolved like crazy. I mean, I grew up in the 90s.
0:17:11 I had CDs, phones had cords. You couldn’t use the internet if your mom was on the phone. And now
0:17:17 there’s like 3D printers and there’s rockets that could go up into space. AI, there’s so much crazy
0:17:21 stuff going on. And you got to have a place that helps you stay ahead of the curve. And that’s what
0:17:26 the A16C podcast is trying to do. It’s a podcast from the VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz. And it’s
0:17:29 trying to give you an inside look at the trends that are shaping our future. They’ve had guests
0:17:34 like Mark Cuban and Neil Stevenson on and they talk about topics like deep fakes or the science
0:17:39 behind GLP ones or autonomous drones. No small boy stuff at all. Steph is the host. She’s awesome.
0:17:44 I think you’ll enjoy the podcast. So check it out. It is the A16C podcast. And I like this tag
0:17:48 line to say it’s like eavesdropping on the future. That’s pretty cool. That’s a good tag line.
0:17:51 So check it out. The A16C podcast wherever you get your podcast.
0:17:59 By the way, Sam, isn’t it nuts that Matt is clearly like this thoughtful, almost like soulful
0:18:05 entrepreneur who has been building this thing since he was literally like a kid, 19, 19 years old.
0:18:10 Like a guy you’d call wise when he was 21. Yeah, exactly. Like, oh, he’s an old soul type of thing.
0:18:17 Works on open source software. Like you said, it’s widely used. It’s almost free. It’s only good.
0:18:22 All I hear is like only good. And then you had this like random villain arc that people tried
0:18:26 to paint on you in the last, you know, year with this like drama that’s going on. I couldn’t believe
0:18:32 it. I was like, if I was going to put money on who’s like the least drama attracting founder,
0:18:36 it might have been you. So I thought that was nuts. Sam, quick, your reaction to that real quick.
0:18:41 And then I want to hear Matt’s thoughts on it. So I didn’t follow it too much. I’m a WordPress user,
0:18:47 but I just, and I’m friends with Jason Cohen of WP Engine. You guys had a fight, but I was
0:18:50 actually shocked, Matt. I thought that some of the stuff that you said, I was shot. You like,
0:18:55 people were insulting you and you felt like I insulted them back. I was like, I’ve read a lot
0:18:59 about Matt’s work. I don’t know Matt and I’ve listened to him. He doesn’t seem like someone who
0:19:05 would ever like insult someone. And I was actually surprised that you were going as hard as you were.
0:19:09 And I guess your perspective is like they’re coming after everything I made or they don’t
0:19:14 contribute, whatever. But I was actually surprised that you were pissed off. And I didn’t think that
0:19:17 you would be the type of guy that would come off pissed off.
0:19:21 You know, a failure mode, and I think that can kill many open source projects,
0:19:27 is when they get taken advantage of. And so just like a schoolyard bully,
0:19:31 like you kind of have to stand up for yourself. It’s kind of funny because you say you don’t think
0:19:35 of me as doing this, but actually, if you look at the history of WordPress, there has been
0:19:40 maybe four or five times in the history where I had this kind of villain arc.
0:19:46 People were like, we had a fight to protect like our principles and like the sustainability
0:19:48 and like the future of WordPress.
0:19:51 Can you give a one minute summary of what happened? Because I even half followed it. And
0:19:54 I’m sure there’s a bunch of people listening that don’t even know what we’re talking about.
0:19:56 Can you give like the one minute and try to be objective with this like,
0:20:01 like not just the your side of the story, but what happened? Can you explain?
0:20:05 You know, it’s an ongoing legal battle. So I can only say so much.
0:20:11 Basically, there’s a company called WB Engine started off like very positive in the community,
0:20:16 Jason Cohen, I think is awesome, by the way. But in 2019, they were bought by a private equity firm
0:20:23 called Silver Lake and sort of in the subsequent five years started becoming, I would say, more
0:20:28 parasitic of WordPress, also creating with how they were marketing themselves and branding
0:20:32 themselves a lot of confusion in the marketplace in a way that was threatening our trademark,
0:20:36 you know, the WordPress trademark. So people would sort of say, Oh, it’s WordPress engine,
0:20:39 and they wouldn’t correct them. And they think it was official. I even had very close friends
0:20:46 who were WB Engine customers who thought that was my company. And I would frequently get support
0:20:52 requests for WB Engine, like my sites down and things like that. You know, for a long period
0:20:56 of time, and two years prior to this fight started, I was doing our best to partner with them and
0:21:01 resolve all these things and resolve the trademark stuff. They just weren’t responding.
0:21:06 And basically, WB Engine is a web hosting service, maybe only for WordPress sites.
0:21:12 And the accusation, I believe, was that you felt they weren’t contributing to the project as much
0:21:16 as they should have been given that they make like a lot of money and also people confused
0:21:20 the two companies. On the contribution thing, is that like, I guess, like, what’s your leg to
0:21:25 stand on that? You know, for example, you know, does somebody have to contribute? Is that like a
0:21:29 rule? Or is that a suggestion, right? Is this like, you’re at church, you should put something in
0:21:34 the tray, but you don’t have to, technically, but it’s frowned upon? Like, what is the take there?
0:21:38 So WordPress, we do have this program we call five for the future. By the way, this is all
0:21:42 voluntary. It’s an open source license. You don’t have to do anything. You do whatever you want.
0:21:48 But we say that if you’re building a business on WordPress, you can allocate somewhere between
0:21:54 zero, one and five percent. Profit or revenue? It doesn’t matter. However you want to define it,
0:21:59 it could be time, it could be hours, it could be whatever. But and put that back into what we
0:22:04 call core, core WordPress, which is something that belongs in the open source project. So it’s
0:22:08 accessible to everyone. It doesn’t just benefit your company. That’s part of what’s made us so
0:22:14 sustainable and allowed us to be a open source project, which has really thrived more than,
0:22:19 you know, some of, you know, other great CMSs that were open source that came up at the same time,
0:22:24 like Joomla or Drupal or something like that, which haven’t has as much assesses us. By the way,
0:22:29 I think this is great self-interest as well. WP Engine is fairly unique in that pretty much every
0:22:34 other company in the WordPress ecosystem does this quite a bit. And in fact, if you look at old
0:22:40 versions of WP Engine’s website, they were, you know, very supportive of this. And actually even
0:22:46 say on their website, they would dedicate, you know, two or four full-time people and everything
0:22:51 like that. You know, fast forward to 2024, they had less than that on core. So I think that’s,
0:22:58 that’s a whole like sustainability health of the ecosystem, health of the product issue.
0:23:03 That’s not a legal issue at all. The trademark abuse of not just the WordPress, but also the
0:23:09 WooCommerce trademark. So you could argue that WordPress, WP, whatever, but like they’re also
0:23:13 using the WooCommerce trademark, which is fully owned by automatic. You have to protect that if
0:23:17 you don’t protect your trademarks, you lose them. And so we’re having discussions around that. We
0:23:21 have trademark licenses with other web posts, great relations with every other, and they’re,
0:23:24 they’re just a web post. They’re not a tech company. They don’t really create a lot of IP
0:23:30 and they’re a web post, which people think is the largest, but they’re actually, you know, probably
0:23:35 the sixth or seventh largest WordPress web post. There’s a lot of bigger ones. They’re a single
0:23:39 digit percentage of all the WordPresses in the world. You know, they probably have like 700,000,
0:23:44 800,000 or something. So people have made this into a bigger deal. It is, you know, some of these
0:23:49 previous controversies that got mainstream media coverages, you know, CNN, that I had this hot
0:23:53 nacho scandal in the first couple of years of WordPress, or a thesis fight, or the Easter
0:23:56 massacre of themes, like all these things I’m mentioning, you probably haven’t heard of.
0:24:02 It used to be like half my Wikipedia page. Now it’s not. Today, if you go to my Wikipedia page,
0:24:07 your other PR firm has the whole paragraph about this. I think in five years, maybe it’ll be a
0:24:11 sentence or not even out there at all. So it’s not my first rodeo. Sometimes you have to fight to
0:24:16 protect your open source ideals and the community and your trademark, by the way. I expect this to
0:24:21 resolve in the next few months. Although it’s easy to find, like if you go on Reddit or Twitter,
0:24:26 I get a lot of heat. A lot of people were pissed at you. I tweeted out that you were coming on
0:24:30 to the pod yesterday. There was a lot of angry people and I was a little surprised by that,
0:24:36 to be honest. Yeah. And, you know, some of the people are uncomfortable with, you know,
0:24:41 us having to fight protect ourselves. You know, WP Engine took some very aggressive legal action.
0:24:45 So it turned out when we thought we were sort of good-faced negotiating,
0:24:50 they were preparing a legal case to attack us because, you know, three days after I gave this
0:24:54 presentation, they launched this huge lawsuit with Quinn Emmanuel. It’s kind of like one of the
0:25:00 biggest nastiest law firms. And, you know, private equity is so famously like goes in, hollows out
0:25:04 businesses, extracts all the value, kind of kills it. There’s this crazy story. I don’t know if you
0:25:09 saw it recently where like one of the reason there was like shortages of fire trucks in LA
0:25:13 was like the fire truck manufacturers have been like rolled up by private equity
0:25:17 and they’ve been like jacking the prices. And that was like huge waiting list for like fire,
0:25:22 new fire trucks and fire truck repairs. And there’s lots of examples and not all private
0:25:25 equity is bad. There’s good investors and bad investors in every asset class.
0:25:31 Look, I didn’t follow the story in depth. I didn’t need to. I’m not a lawyer. Don’t need to be.
0:25:37 It’s common sense to me. Whose side am I going to be on? The private equity backed company that
0:25:43 sounds almost like it’s made by the by you guys, but it’s not. Or the founder who’s been working on
0:25:49 this for like, you know, 20 plus years of his life, open sourced it is, you know, used by everybody.
0:25:54 It’s kind of like a staple of the internet and, you know, captures like a tiny bit of the value
0:25:58 along the way. It’s pretty obvious to me, you know, which side I was going to come down on. So I
0:26:02 think it was, it was actually a common sense test, I think for most people. And I can’t believe how
0:26:07 many people are like, you know, on the PE side, it actually reminds me a little bit of like the
0:26:11 AI stuff right now. Wait, Sean, we did a whole podcast about the founder of this PE firm, though,
0:26:16 and how like fascinating we were with them. We do profiles on ruthless killers. And then we’re at
0:26:20 the end, we’re like, isn’t that awesome? And we’re like, yeah, do you want to be that way? Hell no.
0:26:24 Like that’s not me. But like, I’m glad that these people exist. Like you need all these people in
0:26:30 an ecosystem. Like it’s not, they’re not all bad. And there’s impressive things about how I think
0:26:34 is what Egan Durbin or whatever they like, I think that’s the guy that we talked about. You know,
0:26:38 it’s impressive in the same way that David Goggins is impressive, but I’m not going to go out there
0:26:42 and run until my toenails bleed. Like I like that he exists. That doesn’t mean I want to be like him
0:26:48 or even that I think that’s the right thing for most people to do. I think it was on, on your blog,
0:26:53 it could have been on the Tim Ferriss podcast, you wrote about how I think WordPress or automatic
0:26:58 has like roughly 2000 people. And I think you wrote about how you tried a bunch of different
0:27:02 ways to hire people. You’re like, did all these tests like Google does, like these like brain
0:27:06 teasers, and you tried a bunch of other stuff. And you said two interesting things that stood out.
0:27:12 You said what I found is that the people who are the best writers oftentimes are the best people
0:27:17 who we hire, not PhDs, not master degrees. It was a correlation between your ability to write and
0:27:21 communicate via the written word. And then the second thing you said that was pretty wild.
0:27:28 You used to hire people just by like emailing or texting, like it was like just through chat,
0:27:32 not ever face to face, not phone calls, things like that. Do you still hire people strictly
0:27:37 through text communication? You know, for some roles, we might do a Zoom if it’s a sales role or
0:27:42 something like that. You know, obviously it’s important to see how someone interacts. But
0:27:47 basically, you know, for a lot of our roles, you know, written communication is going to be the
0:27:51 primary thing. But also like people want to talk to someone like we’re not going to be like, no,
0:27:55 you can’t. Yeah, a lot of our hiring process can be completely asynchronous and completely text
0:28:00 based. And for the first thousand or so hires, I did a final chat for every single person.
0:28:05 Is your chat like slacking or g chatting or something? Yeah, it ended up being on Slack when
0:28:09 one Slack was invented. You know, before that I think it was on like Skype or aim or something,
0:28:15 you know, in the early days or IRC. I think the way you said it was we do auditions, not interviews.
0:28:19 So what does that mean? How do you how do you do auditions? Well, we do a trial project. So we
0:28:27 actually hire people on a standard sort of 25 an hour contract. And so we pay them to do and we
0:28:30 have screens with, you know, resumes and a little interview and stuff. But then we say like, let’s
0:28:36 actually do some work together. And there’s various versions of this for different roles. We’ve done
0:28:39 sandbox versions. We’ve also done it where they were actually talking to real customers, you know,
0:28:45 like a support person was actually like answering real tickets. But we’ve always been smaller than
0:28:49 a lot of the big tech, but we compete with them. And so we need to have like the same caliber or
0:28:56 better of talent. So part of I think automatic advantage is we’ve created an environment and
0:29:04 also sort of a way of hiring that finds people who might be overlooked by sort of a meta or
0:29:08 Google or something like that. And we give them an opportunity not just to be hired, but also to
0:29:12 participate in a company in a way that they can still be just as influential and have as much
0:29:17 impact. Because even like, you know, there’s other companies that might have remote workers.
0:29:20 But if you’re not at headquarters, you’re not going to be, you know, close to the sign,
0:29:24 not going to be next to the CEO, you’re not going to be able to grow or have an impact. But
0:29:27 we’ve tried to create it where our center of gravity or headquarters is really on the internet.
0:29:33 And, you know, I have colleagues in 90 countries, 90, even though we’re only, you know, 750 people.
0:29:38 And another sort of innovative thing we do, we didn’t do this in the beginning, but we moved
0:29:43 to it probably like 2012, 2013, is that we pay people the same salaries regardless of location.
0:29:48 So it’s kind of funny because we’re all like the quality DEI stuff, whatever. So much of
0:29:52 I feel like it’s virtue signaling. Because if you ask these companies and say like, hey, you know,
0:29:57 I’m not going to call anyone out by name, let’s say a big tech company, do you pay someone in
0:30:03 Pakistan the same that you pay them in California? Usually the answer is no. If they’re doing the same
0:30:09 job, you know, the same like code wrangler engineer or whatever like that. And they usually say no,
0:30:13 and they usually have some reason like cost of living or local markets or whatever.
0:30:18 But we sort of move to where we say, hey, same work, same pay. You know, it’s kind of a something that
0:30:23 you know, the past 100 years, that wasn’t always true for men and women even, you know,
0:30:28 or racial things or something like that. So I think the same more reasons why you say like
0:30:32 same work for same pay of people of different skin colors or something like that.
0:30:37 Within a country, I think you should do that globally. And I think that’s the future of work
0:30:43 actually, because to sense that you can be equally as valuable and generate as much value for a
0:30:48 customer wherever you are, you should receive the equal pay for equal work.
0:30:55 So I’m obsessed with being transparent about money, particularly with ultra high net worth
0:31:00 people. The reason being is that there’s not a lot of information on this demographic. And so
0:31:05 because I own Hampton, which is a community for founders, I have access to thousands of young
0:31:08 and incredibly high net worth people. We have people worth hundreds of millions and sometimes
0:31:12 billions of dollars inside of Hampton. And so every year we do this thing called the Hampton
0:31:17 wealth report, where we survey over a thousand entrepreneurs, and we ask them all types of
0:31:21 information about their personal finances. We ask them about how they’re investing their money,
0:31:25 what their portfolio looks like. We ask them about their monthly spend habits. We ask them
0:31:29 how they’ve set up their estate, how much money they’re going to lead to charity, how much money
0:31:33 they keep in cash, how much money they’re paying themselves from their businesses. Basically,
0:31:39 every question that you want to ask a rich person, we went and we do it for you and we do it with
0:31:43 hundreds and hundreds of people. So if you want to check out the report, it’s called the Hampton
0:31:47 wealth report. Just go to joinhampton.com, click our menu and you’re going to see a section called
0:31:50 reports and you’re going to see it all right there. It’s very easy. So again, it’s called the
0:31:55 Hampton wealth report. Go to joinhampton.com, click the menu and then click the report button.
0:32:01 And let me know what you think. Have you guys read American Kingpin, the story of
0:32:05 Ross Albright, The Silk Road? Have you read that, Matt? I think I’ve read some of the
0:32:09 long-form articles, but I’ve never read the whole book. Yeah. Oh, you’ve got to read this book,
0:32:13 man. I’m rereading it now because you just got released and it’s like the best book I’ve ever
0:32:17 read. It’s like a total page turner. The story of it for listeners, basically, Ross Albright was
0:32:21 accused and I think he did it, where he started Silk Road, which was eBay for drugs. In two years,
0:32:26 it did two billion in sales, gross sales, something like that. But what’s crazy is
0:32:31 it kind of sucks because this whole business was documented because he chatted with everyone.
0:32:37 Like he had 12 coworkers and he did two things that were interesting that I actually think
0:32:41 are going to be common. The first thing is that he obviously, because it was an illegal enterprise,
0:32:46 he never, they didn’t know the identity of the workers. It was just their username. Like one
0:32:50 guy’s name was like chronic pain. That was his username. So we just, he didn’t know this guy’s
0:32:54 real name. He just knew chronic pain as like the guy. Ross knew everybody’s name. They didn’t know
0:33:00 each other’s names or his. He made them send a license so that he could basically have that like,
0:33:05 you know, always have that in his back pocket, have leverage. But chronic pain didn’t know Ross’s,
0:33:08 sorry, I forgot that was actually important detail. That’s actually very similar to like
0:33:12 early agriculture. You know, everyone was sort of known by their username. There’s like interesting
0:33:18 merits to that. And then the other thing was that they only communicated via messaging. I was
0:33:21 reading this book, I’m rereading it now. And I was like, those two attributes are kind of
0:33:26 interesting for a company, which is like anonymous workers and, but you’re still oddly friends.
0:33:31 Like he developed relationships with his coworkers. This is a great LinkedIn post for you, Sam,
0:33:34 like 13 management lessons I learned from the Silk Road. Here you go.
0:33:41 I believe that he did murder for hire four times. He did a lot of bad shit, but he was actually an
0:33:47 inspiring leader. Like when you read like some of his like, like stuff. Well, he was very idealistic,
0:33:51 right? Like he had certain beliefs that drove him right. He didn’t intend, like he didn’t
0:33:56 necessarily intend, like for example, he wasn’t super interested in selling guns on the platform,
0:34:00 but he believed that people should be able to sell what they want. And his team was like, no,
0:34:03 no, you shouldn’t do this. This is going to increase the target on our back. Like you’re cool
0:34:07 with the drug side, but you don’t care about this. So let’s just ban it. It’s going to cause problems.
0:34:12 And he was like, well, no, that’s not the ethos of what we’re doing. Like we wrote a creed of what
0:34:16 we stand for and why we’re doing this. And therefore we got to stand by it. And they called
0:34:20 them captain. You know, it was very much just like, we are revolutionizing thing. And that’s
0:34:24 like a really interesting thing. Matt has a, you don’t get called captain, but what is your
0:34:30 like benevolent dictator for life, right? BDFL? It’s a term and open source that’s applied to like
0:34:35 Linus, Lennox, or Guido, Python or something like that. David Hammer, Hanson and Rails.
0:34:40 It’s sort of a joking thing. And one that I think none of us like really attach ourselves to,
0:34:44 just kind of like an internet lower thing. Well, you do a couple of other interesting things,
0:34:48 right? Cause you’ve got this like multi-billion dollar company used by most of the internet,
0:34:52 but you run your company in these interesting ways where remote work, I think is you’re famously,
0:34:57 we’re early and heavy into remote work. And you’ve talked a lot about that, but you do a couple
0:35:01 other interesting things. So we talked about auditions instead of interviews, but you also do
0:35:06 everybody in the company, including yourself works customer support, I think one or two weeks out
0:35:10 of the year. Can you talk about that one? Yeah, part of our hiring process is your first two weeks
0:35:15 of doing customer support for every single hire, whether you’re like our new CFO or chief legal
0:35:20 officer or, or whatever role it is. And then once a week a year, you rotate back and doing customer
0:35:25 support. By the way, lots of companies have versions of this. So it’s definitely not anymore.
0:35:29 The first to do this or anything like that. Why should a company do that? If you look at every
0:35:33 successful business, the closer they are to customers, generally the more successful they are.
0:35:38 And so it’s very easy, especially when you’re running something on the internet and distributed
0:35:44 for people to become numbers or stats or something on your look or dashboard or something like that.
0:35:49 And so, you know, getting back to like every individual, every number of your signups,
0:35:54 you might have 5,000 signups in a day, but each one of those people is like, has a story.
0:35:59 You’ve just learned a lot about your product. And it’s, I think the best way to sort of do
0:36:03 iterative customer developments. I think Eric Reeves talked about this or Steve Blank, you know,
0:36:07 the kind of like get out of the office and go meet the customers. And I’m very inspired by like
0:36:11 leaders at Salesforce. Talk to Mark Beanieoff or someone like that. They’ll typically spend a quarter
0:36:18 to a third of their time with customers, even at that scale. Is there a story or any epiphany you
0:36:23 had from doing this? You’ve probably done this now, you know, for decades. So is there like an
0:36:29 insight that came from this? Just the other day, a few days ago, I spent like 30, 45 minutes with
0:36:35 a gentleman who kind of checks expenses at the company. You know, because anyway, we have like
0:36:40 these ramp cards and people who expense things and stuff like that. You know, sometimes we like
0:36:44 say, you need a receipt for this or a question at expense. I just want to understand more about
0:36:48 this and also make sure that the way we were doing this was the most hated man at the company,
0:36:54 by the way, like, well, I had gotten some feedback from folks, they felt, you know,
0:36:59 some of the questions they were getting felt a little aggressive. And so, you know, we want to
0:37:04 talk about one, I just can’t want to see like the tools he used and how the work did and stuff
0:37:08 like that. So some of that was just shadowing. So I was like, okay, because I want to understand
0:37:13 the interfaces. This was also really helpful, like going through support. I realized that some of
0:37:18 our internal tools like don’t represent, you know, best practices and design or usability, you know,
0:37:23 sometimes, you know, so that internal stuff doesn’t get the love that your external stuff does. But
0:37:27 then also, you know, we just sort of talked about like the culture of automatic bedside manner,
0:37:32 if you will, like how can we like, you know, hold these principles, like we need to really
0:37:37 enforce our policies and make sure we do, you know, we get audited and everything. So like,
0:37:41 we need to have these things from like a good accounting principles point of view,
0:37:44 but also doing it a way that like when we have these conversations, we’re talking
0:37:50 about the principles of it. And the reason why. So it’s not just like I’m giving you Sean a hard
0:37:54 time because you didn’t have a receipt, but like, hey, if we don’t have this receipts,
0:37:58 you know, it’s sort of art of firm might question this. And then, you know, that might
0:38:03 create an issue for XYZ or something like that. When I first moved to Silicon Valley, I came
0:38:07 to work with this guy, Michael Birch, and he was he represented everything I wanted. He had already
0:38:14 built like successful tech companies, and he had made it. And I was a 23 year old kid who wanted to
0:38:18 make it. And so I’m super excited to go into the work the first day. And I’m like, I’m gonna learn
0:38:21 so much from this guy because he’s not just done it one time, he’s built like four successful
0:38:25 companies. I’m ready for him to teach me to kind of like the dark arts. I’m like, what’s the strategies
0:38:32 to growth hacks? What this like super like high level strategic thinking. And the very first week,
0:38:37 he puts me on not the new shit. Like the oldest company that he had started something he started
0:38:42 back in 2001. It’s like birthday calendar or something. Yeah, birthday alarm. Is that still
0:38:48 going? Birthday alarm? Still going. And so I as like 25 year old company now. So I at the time,
0:38:53 I was like, Oh man, like, I got to do this like whatever. And he tells me the story. So I actually
0:38:58 learned this really valuable lesson in it. I go, so what’s the I got curious, because instead of
0:39:03 just like being bored at doing like birthday alarm, which seemed like this old outdated product at
0:39:06 the time, a little curious. So I started asking him, like, where did this come from? Like, how did
0:39:11 you even come up with this idea? Why did you build this product? And what he told me was he goes,
0:39:16 my very first startup, I quit my job. I wanted to like, build a successful tech company, like do
0:39:21 an internet company. Internet was like the new thing back in 99 2000. And he quit a high paying
0:39:26 insurance job while his wife was pregnant and was like, I’m going to make it. So he tried to create
0:39:30 something really fancy. So he’s like, Oh, with the internet, he credit or create something that many
0:39:33 people have tried like Sean Parker, try to create this a self updating address book, which is like,
0:39:38 you know, I have your information, I have your name, your address, but you move Matt. Now I don’t
0:39:42 know that you moved. So wouldn’t be cool if you could just update your info in one place and it
0:39:46 updated in all your friends address books. So we now have your latest and greatest address. So that’s
0:39:51 what he wanted to build. And he’s spending like nine months heads down, like doesn’t leave the
0:39:56 bedroom coding this thing. And it’s not really going anywhere. But because he was a one man
0:40:00 show, he was also doing, you know, he was the designer, he was the developer, he was the ops
0:40:05 guy, he was the customer service guy, like he did all of it. And he was like, it’s the customer
0:40:09 service that was actually the key because he was answering support tickets. And he’s like over and
0:40:12 over again. He’s like, I spent like, you know, seven hours a day banging my head against the wall
0:40:16 trying to figure out why nobody wants to use our product. I think it’s so cool, but nobody wants
0:40:21 it. And then the hour I was doing customer support, he’s like, I noticed that a bunch of people kept
0:40:25 thanking me for the birthday reminder feature I had built in, like just the one feature, which was
0:40:29 like a throwaway idea, which was just say, if you know, forget the address, if it was someone’s
0:40:33 birthday, I would just tell you, you know, Hey, it’s our birthday today. Remember that this is
0:40:37 before Facebook existed, right? So you didn’t have Facebook or a bunch of other ways that people could
0:40:42 do this. So he just threw away the whole product and renamed the company birthday alarm.com. And
0:40:48 he’s like, I expected to go nowhere. And that was the thing that took off. And you know, at that
0:40:53 time, birthday alarm had generated for him and his wife personally, like probably $20 million
0:40:58 of pure profit by that time, because it was just every year was just generating a few million
0:41:03 dollars of profit. And it’s still to this day generating a few million dollars a year of profit.
0:41:07 Like, it’s this incredible business. That’s just the gift that keeps on giving that only came
0:41:11 because he was answering the support tickets. And he got curious, like, huh, like,
0:41:14 why are they keep talking about this birthday reminder thing? Like, is that, is that actually,
0:41:18 maybe I should do that. And he did it on a whim. And then in two days,
0:41:22 had built the product that actually people wanted, you know, that’s awesome.
0:41:26 I have one last question for you. It’s on AI. So there’s a lot of stuff you could talk about
0:41:31 with AI, but I just, I’m curious on your quick take about deep seek, because it’s also, you know,
0:41:35 they came out with this open source thing that there’s a lot of people on either side of,
0:41:40 how much they believe about the story, but like, what’s your quick reaction to what you saw with
0:41:45 deep seek deep seeks a really cool model. So, you know, every model has like kind of a vibe
0:41:50 with the way it’s tuned and everything like that. And so it’s a really fun one to play with. And I
0:41:55 would say, you know, the thing I tell people with all this AI stuff, just like use it, play with it,
0:42:01 you know, because it’s such early days. And there’s kind of a, you know, the way to prompt it,
0:42:07 the way to interact with it, there’s a skill there that you’ll learn. And the vibes of the
0:42:13 deep seek model are very cool. I think what’s I’m most excited about as an open source guy is that
0:42:18 they actually open source the model were really amazing papers about how they built it and it
0:42:27 opened weights. Like for example, at my company, I would say, don’t use like deep seek.com,
0:42:32 you know, for various reasons, that’s hosted in China and stuff like that. But like, we can run
0:42:38 the model ourselves, you know, locally. And that’s pretty cool. Or you can get it through
0:42:42 perplexity, which hosted in the US. So like, there’s, there’s lots of ways to access it.
0:42:46 It’s a, it’s a really fun model. So all these models have are like good at different things.
0:42:51 They have a coding version, they just released a cool image thing. And so think of these as like
0:42:56 little entities that you can interact with and run and spin up a boot. And you should just learn
0:43:01 the nuances and kind of flavors of each one. Matt, do you guys actually believe that they’ve
0:43:04 only taken the amount of funding that they’ve said? Didn’t they say something like
0:43:08 five or $10 million? They said that’s what it cost to run the final training.
0:43:16 That might be true for like some something, but obviously, like, I’m sure they’ve spent
0:43:22 invested a ton in other things. So, and I know there’s kind of this theory that maybe that’s
0:43:28 like a PR or PSI op or whatever like that. When I started reading about them, I got fearful.
0:43:33 It was pretty insane, right? That the market reacted the way it did. That, you know, it wiped
0:43:40 out a trillion dollars of value in 24 hours. It was pretty wild how big that announcement was. I
0:43:44 didn’t think that was going to happen. And I think you called it, Matt. Didn’t you like tweet
0:43:49 about this during Christmas time? Well, Andre Capati, you know, so full credit, like tweeted
0:43:53 about this like the day after Christmas and I saw his tweet and retweeted it. So that’s when I first
0:43:59 learned about Deepseek, started playing with it. Yeah, I think that with all these things, there’s
0:44:05 you can verify all the things. They made some amazing advancements and like how they train
0:44:09 things and how they run things and how they did memory interconnects and working with the constraints
0:44:14 that are some really cool engineering breakthroughs and they shared it. And this is stuff that I think
0:44:19 OpenAI had also figured out, but they hadn’t like shared it publicly. And so what I love about the
0:44:24 Deepseek guys is they they’re open sourcing it all. So and it’s all available under like a true
0:44:29 open source license. It’s not like the llama license where it’s free and so you have 700 million
0:44:34 users or something or I think Quinn Alibaba one, which is also a really great model that people
0:44:37 are sleeping on. So check out Quinn and some of these other models coming out of China. They’re
0:44:43 really, really good. But it’s a true open source license. So that’s awesome. Matt, thanks for coming
0:44:47 on, Matt. It’s good to see you again. And thanks for sharing everything you did about WordPress.
0:44:50 It’s been a pleasure. Yeah, we appreciate you, man. All right, that’s the pod.
0:44:58 I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days
0:45:01 off on the road. Let’s travel never looking back.
0:45:09 Hey, everyone, a quick break. My favorite podcast guest on my first million is Darmesh.
0:45:14 Darmesh founded HubSpot. He’s a billionaire. He’s one of my favorite entrepreneurs on earth.
0:45:19 And on one of our podcasts recently, he said the most valuable skill that anyone could have
0:45:23 when it comes to making money in business is copywriting. And when I say copywriting,
0:45:28 what I mean is writing words that get people to take action. And I agree, by the way,
0:45:32 I learned how to be a copywriter in my twenties. It completely changed my life. I ended up starting
0:45:36 and selling a company for tens of millions of dollars. And copywriting was the skill that made
0:45:41 all of that happen. And the way that I learned how to copyright is by using a technique called
0:45:46 copywork, which is basically taking the best sales letters, and I would write it word for
0:45:51 word, and I would make notes as to why each phrase was impactful and effective. And a lot of people
0:45:55 have been asking me about copywork. So I decided to make a whole program for it. It’s called Copythat.
0:46:01 Copythat.com. It’s only like 120 bucks. And it’s a simple, fast, easy way to improve your
0:46:05 copyrighting. And so if you’re interested, you need to check it out. It’s called Copythat.
0:46:09 You can check it out at Copythat.com.