Episode 504 Progress Planner With Taco Verdo


Show Summary

This podcast episode features an interview with Taco, who recently joined the Progress Planner team. Progress Planner is a WordPress plugin designed to gamify website maintenance tasks, helping users stay on top of updates and content review. The interview discusses the plugin’s features, including a free version and a forthcoming pro version with additional challenges and expert consultations. Taco highlights the importance of regular website maintenance and how Progress Planner helps address this often-overlooked aspect of website ownership.

Show Transcript

Hey everybody, Rob Cairns here and today I’ve got a good friend and colleague Taco with me and I’m not even going to try and pronounce your last name because I butcher it every wise decision. I I’m sorry my friend, how are you? I’m good. Thank you for having me.

Oh, my my pleasure. So, this is a big week. We’re going to talk about progress planner and your involvement in that and uh what the product is for WordPress uh admins and how it can be used. Um how did you get involved? Tell us a little bit about progress planner and how did you get involved first of all?

Yeah. So, let me start with the easy part. How do I get invol did I get involved? Um uh some of uh you might know that I used to work at Yoast for a while.

Yep.

Um and the founder of Yoast sold the company uh a couple of years ago. Uh left and started something new. Uh and well late last year he made me an offer to rejoin him. Uh so that’s when I left Yoast the company to rejoin Yoast the person uh and Ma and the amazing team here. at Amelia. Um, yeah, to work on on progress planner.

Yeah. And, uh,

yeah,

plugin companies are a tough game, aren’t they? Just a little bit. Like I One of my good friends is Mark Wescart over at WS forms. And many people in the community know Mark and he’ll tell you it’s a tough game. It’s not an easy haul, is it?

Uh, not at all. So, the interesting thing is that back in the day when I joined Yoast, the plug-in already had a million installs. So, I sort of came in running and we could just go from there. Um, now that I joined the team at Progress Planner, we had 100 installs when I joined.

And so, we it it starts at the absolute basics getting the word out that there is a thing called progress planner and that it will help you um make your website better. So, Yeah, we’re we’re completely at the start and I can’t wait to see that counter on WordPress.org go up to a thousand plus, which is the next level.

Yeah, I’m sure. Um, what is progress planner and why do you need a free website?

Yeah. So, um, you manage a couple of websites. So, you know that

425 of them, Taco,

see, so you know that the the dayto-day maintenance uh keeping content updated, keeping your plugins updated, all the all those tasks that you should be doing regularly, that’s not the fun stuff of building websites. It’s tedious. It’s boring. Um but it’s important because it keeps your site healthy. And so that’s why we decided to build something that brings back the fun into those small maintenance tasks. So that’s progress planner. Um What it does is keeping a score of how well you take care of your website and it shows that in nice colorful graphs. It gives you um challenges to get badges. For example, if you work on your website week after week and you do that for 10 weeks in a row, then you get a next level badge.

You do that for 30 weeks in a row, you do that for a full year. Um so it will it will sort of reward you for doing those tasks. tasks. Um, but not just rewarding, it also helps you on what’s the next thing that I should be working on. So, for example, if you have a ton of posts on your website, um, what you should be doing is reviewing them after what is it like six months to see is this content still up to date? Are the images still up to date? Are the links still uh working in this in this post or page? Um, And so what progress planner will do is it will pick one of your older posts and say this week it’s time to work on this post and if you haven’t written new content in a while, it will tell you, hey, it’s about time to write some new content.

If you have pending updates, it will tell you, go ahead, it’s time to update your plugins. And all of those will get you points as well. Uh, and those add up to getting a monthly badge so that you can show when you meet us at a word camp. Look, I’ve been getting all my monthly badges and we’ll turn them into physical badges for you.

Yeah. So, it’s a bit of a gamification tool, if you want to call it.

Absolutely.

You know what this reminds me of is I wear a Google watch. I don’t have it on right now. It’s beside me charging. And it’s got Fitbit technology in it. And we all know in the Fitbit 10,000 steps is the magical gi gamification. And then it sends you by email little badges to say this is where you’re at, this is where you’re going and so on. This sounds exactly that that except for

I will say that uh Fitbit and Dolingo are definitely inspiration because both of these have mastered gamification. Um so yeah, definitely that it’s not a coincidence that it looks uh like Fitbit.

Yeah. Um for progress planner. Is there a free version in the repo and the repository? So, we’re talking WordPress.org for those who aren’t familiar with language. And is there a paid version? And what’s the differences between the two?

Yeah. So, um we’re about to launch the pro version. We’re currently in uh in pre-launch sale.

Y

um but on the uh 23rd of January 25

uh we will launch the uh the pro version of progress planner

and the pro version brings you a little bit extra. So it will give you sort of mini courses in your WordPress admin for example on uh how to make a good about page because there’s science to it and

there is

you know if we can help you make that a little bit better do that. Well, it will help your website and it will help the overall health of your website by having good content. So, there’s quite a few of those sort of special pages um where we have a little mini course in the pro version, but the real deal for pro is the challenges that we do. So, about six times a year, we’ll host a challenge which is a spans a couple of weeks each and it will be about a specific topic that’s slightly larger on your site maintenance. So, uh the first challenge will start fairly quickly after launching uh our pro version um and is all about broken links and not breaking them but fixing broken links.

So, what we saw is that especially websites that have been around for a little bit longer have a lot of them without people knowing So in that challenge, we’ll help you how to find them. Um we’ll help you how to fix them and uh we’ll have a workshop for all the pro customers where uh we individually help them. So our own experts in in this challenge that will be Yost Falcon, myself um will be in a in a meeting looking at your website helping you fix those broken links. Uh, and that’s what we’re going to do with every challenge. We’re going to find experts in that specific field to give you personal advice on, hey, this is what you should do on your website, which basically is sort of the cheapest form of consultancy you can find.

Yeah. And that is so cool because, you know, you talk about broken links. I don’t know how many people on mature websites go back, especially WordPress blogs, and look at post two and three and four years ago. And I did that it’s got to be two and a half years ago. I went through I did a a migrate of my site to cadence uh from a traditional page builder. And when I did the migrate, I also did a cleanup and I did a mass cleanup. And we’re not talking let’s get rid of one post. It was like I’ve got at the time I had about 700 blog posts if you can believe that. And I think I tossed

except for the podcast and a few things. I tossed like 70% of it. I just said, “This isn’t relevant. This isn’t relevant. This isn’t re relevant.” And most people never get into that. And that’s where broken links become a problem because

Yeah.

You know, you know what? Things change. Especially if those links are external links, they change even more. Right.

Exactly. Yes. And and one of the areas that we found, and this is a little bit of a spoiler already, um, but is in the comments on your website. If you have comments enabled,

that’s where a lot of broken links um exist because it’s pages you never link to yourself. So, they might have been broken right off the bat because someone made a typo or what have you.

Um and no one ever looks at them,

but they do drag down your site. So, that’s one of the areas that we’ll be focusing on in uh in the upcoming challenge.

Have you um in person you mentioned uh progress planners kind of is to help you with maintenance. Have you looked into talking to any of the maintenance companies like MainWP or any of those to try and get some integration going or has that not on the radar yet?

You don’t want to say

yeah.

No, it’s it’s too early. So, we’re um right now we’re building uh the product on our own. Uh and definitely in the future we’ll look at integrations because there’s so many awesome plugins that we could integrate with and do fantastic stuff together.

Um So that definitely in the future but right now uh our own strength.

Yeah, I agree. You got to build the foundation before you can build the uh 20th floor. Right. It’s just

Exactly. Yes.

Yeah.

Um costwise, what is a an individual site looking at or an agency looking at if he’s got multiple sites and he wants to implement?

So at this moment um we have the prolicens for 149 uh USD per site per year. Um we might look into agency licensing when that becomes a problem. Um right now I’d be happy to have a lot of single licenses. Uh first

I’m sure I’m sure from a user acceptability and a revenue generator that makes sense. Like let’s be honest, right? The the

Well, yeah. But even if agencies buy it once to try it out, that’s already a big win. So,

yeah.

Yeah. Because I think where you’re going to make progress with a product like this probably is in the agency game sooner or later. I mean, that’s where your adoption’s going to be. That’s where people are going to want it. Um, versus an individual site owner cuz I got to tell you, individual site owners don’t care. They they do stupid stuff because they a don’t know or b don’t want to spend the money and they’re at the point of view where it’s like whatever.

Yeah. So, the interesting thing is that Um, and I can safely say this because I know she won’t be listening, but my wife is one of my guinea pigs on what we should be building. Uh, she has her own company. She has her own website. Uh, she’s managing the site herself

except for plug-in updates. That’s my responsibility. Um, and so looking at what she needs is one of the ways that we currently get information. And we’re talking to a few other people to see, hey, What is it that as sort of the end user as I like to call it, what do you need? What do you need to get out of this? And my wife’s really honest and she will tell you that she doesn’t want to spend time on her website.

So, we have to tell her what’s the most efficient use of her time working on her website knowing that she won’t do everything. Um, and that’s what we try to do with progress planner is to find the things that have the biggest impact. and recommend to do those first.

Yeah, I I would tell you most business owners that are not in the web agency game, uh the website is the last thing they want to spend time on. I mean, trying to get them even half the time to change a phone number or change an hour that they’re open is like a task on upon itself, right? So, they don’t So, let alone do anything else, they’re just they’re not going to do it because let’s be fair, that’s not what’s generating them revenue. It’s their core business, not working on a website, right?

Yeah, exactly. It’s uh so I I am curious. I mean, if you hear all of this, um you manage over 400 websites you said earlier.

Yeah.

What would you need as an agency owner for in this plug-in to make it worth recommending it to your uh end users or even installing it just for your end users?

Um for me, probably something to remind me to do test. Um I have a pretty regimented schedule that I do on a weekly basis. But I mean, now I’m at the point where sometimes reminders don’t help. Reminders help. Things like going back and looking at old posts or looking at old pages because that’s stuff we all forget to do. I mean, and my site owners

definitely forget to do. So, like stuff like that’s really important, I think. Um, we got to make sure websites don’t get stale. So, I always tell my customers Websites are never finished. They’re work in progress every day. And they don’t want to hear that because they think, “Oh, we just paid a dev or a designer 3,000 bucks. We should be done.” You’re just started. And and that’s an education thing. So, if this product can help educate people, I’m all for it. Like, it’s that’s kind of where I sit.

Yeah. So, so there’s definitely the education part. Um, but there’s also the nudging part because what we do for every site. Um, every Monday morning we generate a report to see, hey, this is the activity on your website last week and these are the tasks that you need to do in the upcoming week to keep your website healthy and alive and prevent it from going still. So, there’s definitely that uh that nudge in there to get them to be hopefully slightly more active on their side.

And what what I think it would do too is if a small business business owner if if they will install the product, they’re going to realize that they don’t have time to do this stuff and they’re probably going to go get an agency or freelancer to do it for them anyway, which is a win-winwin for the industry. It’s a win for them because their site is done. And you and I both know how many times a website gets out of date or even worse, you look at a website version and it’s five versions before and they wonder why that little piece of malware got in there. errors, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I’ve seen um back in the day at at Yost customers email say, “Hey, my my plug-in stopped working. What’s going wrong?”

And we were at version 20 and they were still running 1.0.

So, yeah, it’s stuff like that that happens all the time.

And the problem is, and you know this, by the time you get somebody like myself involved, you’re not talking like easy. money at that point. If I have to go digging, I got to go digging. And and they always say, “Well, why does it cost so much?” Well, maybe if you had gotten yourself on a maintenance plan, you would have saved some hassle in the long run. But

I have to I have to tell you, the hard part about the maintenance business is a lot of customers don’t jump until they’ve been bit. And then sometimes I’ve got one former customer that’s been bit five times and still won’t pay for a maintenance plan. They’ll just throw money at fix ing it.

Yeah.

But they don’t see they’re a nonprofit and their board doesn’t see value in a maintenance plan. Well,

every time they come back to me, I just double the price every time and it gets higher and higher and they still don’t see value in a maintenance plan. So,

that’s Yeah, but that’s the thing. I mean, you you just said it. People get their website, spend some real money on it because that’s oftentimes the case.

Uh, and then don’t do any maintenance. Yet, they will buy a house that is, you know, 100 times more expensive or or even more. Um, and everyone knows that a house is never finished.

Yeah.

Car is the other one.

Yeah. Cars, they’re worse. They’re even worse.

But,

and you’ve got, you know, I like to I’m going to use the car model to talk about program. You go into a car and they have maintenance lights that go on. It’s time to take the car in. Especially with all these new electronics in them, they It’s not like a car 30 years ago. They beep at you. They tell you it’s time.

Yeah, exactly.

It’s That’s absolutely time. And And they will remind you until you get that in there. So that’s in essence what your product is doing. You can almost draw a parallel. It’s saying it’s time.

Yep. Yeah. Uh so it will show you when you’re in there, but it will all also knock on your door to tell you, “Hey, there There’s lights on in your car

every week. So,

I hear you. Um, if somebody wants Progress Planner, wants to check it out, where’s the best place to go?

progressplanner.com is uh the website. Uh, that’s where you can get pro after the 23rd of January 2025. So,

yeah. Y

and uh if they have any other question, I assume if I recall right, there’s a contact form on the website they can reach out.

Yes, there’s a there’s a contact form. If people are in the WordPress Slack, they can always uh send me a message. Um, if they’re active on the WordPress support forums, the free plug-in obviously has uh the support forums builtin on.org. Um, so that’s where you can ask your questions on the free version. Um, yeah, plenty of options. Come by in Vika in the Netherlands. We have a lovely office. So,

yeah, nice wonderful office. And, uh, Taco, thanks for joining me and talking about Progress Planner and good luck with the product.

Thank you very much for having me.

My pleasure. Have a great day, my friend. Bye-bye.

And you too.

Similar Posts