Bold Life – Episode 3 – Nathan Ingram

BoldLife

March 1, 2018 by Nicole P

Episode Notes / Transcription: MikeDemo: Hello and welcome to the third episode of the BoldGrid Facebook Life Show Bold Life. I’m Mike Demo and I’m happy to be joined by our guest today Nathan Ingram. Hey Nathan. Nathan Ingram: Hey Mike How are you? MikeDemo: Good. How are you doing today? Nathan Ingram: Man I’m great. MikeDemo: Awesome. The last time we saw each other was WordCamp Phoenix, right? Nathan Ingram: WordCamp Phoenix, yeah a few weeks ago. MikeDemo: Yeah, it was a great event. Nathan Ingram: It really was. MikeDemo: I’m surprised and impressed how they could take a great event that they had just a couple months ago and elevate it even higher in that close of a turnaround. They did a really great job. Nathan Ingram: It really was a tremendous turnaround for those guys. They had their last event at the end of 2017 in the late fall. Then just a few months later flipped it around. Yeah, it was as a WordCamp organizer, I’m not quite sure how you pull that off, but they did it and did it very well. MikeDemo: Awesome. Well, before we get too busy talking about our wonderful memories of the WordCamps in the past. Introduce yourself, what do you do? Nathan Ingram: My name is Nathan Ingram. I’m the host at iThemes Training where we do … It’s kind of like being at WordCamp all year round really. We do talks on WordPress and business and life throughout the week, most of those events are free webinars. I also have a coaching service and I work with WordPress freelancers to help them overcome the typical problems that most freelancers experience in business. I personally have been running a web design business since 1995. I still do a good bit of client work here in the Birmingham Alabama area. MikeDemo: Excellent. I think we met for the first time at one of the WordCamps. I don’t remember which one, but I think it was two years ago. Something like that. Nathan Ingram: Probably so. I do a lot of WordCamps speaking with iThemes. Mike, I can’t remember which one it was. It was probably a couple years ago though. MikeDemo: Yeah, it had to be 2016 some time because that’s when they started adding WordCamps to my Open Source circuit. With that being said, a lot of change. How did you start in getting into the industry? When did you get involved with WordPress? How did that happen? Nathan Ingram: Yeah, wow. Like I mentioned a minute ago, I started building websites for clients back in 1995. That’s when I built and sold my first website along with a partner of mine back in those days. We were living in Louisiana and we built a website for the economic development offices for one of the parishes there in Louisiana and fell in love with web design. The internet was just taking off, the web was just taking off. The tools were pretty poor to build anything. There were no WYSIWYG editors at that time. We just cobbled it together and made it work, but it was a lot of fun to build something on your computer and be able to push it out at a place where everybody in the world could see it.it’s a phenomenal feeling to be able to do that. I had been working with clients throughout those years and probably it was right around 2008 I became aware of WordPress. I was looking for a blogging platform for a clients and found WordPress. Nathan Ingram: It was okay, at that point WordPress hadn’t really evolved into the content management system that it is today. I tinkered with it for a couple years but really got into WordPress I would say in late 2009, early 2010. By 2010 we were all WordPress. I tell you what, to be honest in those early years I perceived WordPress as a threat because it allowed someone without any special training or software to be able to go in and edit their own website for themselves. My business at that point was based on, I have the software and a clients would have to pay me fairly big bucks to keep their website managed. If they needed it changed they had to email it to me and I had to completely change my business to pivot for this new content management system revolution that was coming. Like I said, I perceived it as a threat for a while, but then I realized, “Wow, this is a fantastic thing not only for me, but for clients to put the power to publish for their own business in their own hands.” MikeDemo: That’s very interesting that you say the threat thing, because I’ve been in this web space for a very long time. I started very similar to you. I built my first website in 94. For those of you doing that math, yes I was five. But I coded my middle school term papers in HTML. I just love that technology. Then I fell into PHP, so PHP Nuke and things like that and that evolved into other CMSs. The threat thing is so interesting because every year it’s a new thing that’s going to kill all the WordPress developer jobs. All the developer jobs, everyone that makes money for making websites for other people, they’re going to go out of business. MikeDemo: I’ve heard this every single year. First it was content management systems and then it was CMS easy to use drag and drop page builders that were doing it. Then it was the customizer, now it’s Gutenberg and now it’s Wix, Weebly and Squarespace. They’re taking our jobs. No one will ever be able to work and eat again. To some extent that’s kind of true, things like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and CMS systems allow people to make content on their own, but there’s always a need for professionals in this space. I laugh and chuckle whenever people keep talking about it’s the end of days for this industry. I’ve heard it and I’m sure you have too, way too much. I just find that so funny. Nathan Ingram: It is and I’ll tell you, the way I approach that whole question with people who ask is, I’ve been in this business a long time. No matter what tool you’re using, if you’re a web professional, and you’re working with clients and you’re trying to build websites. The service you’re providing is not really about building a website with a particular tool, it’s about solving a problem for a client. If you have a great tool like BoldGrid or whatever system you’re using with WordPress. If when you can take whatever tool you choose to use at that moment and use that tool to solve a problem for the client, that’s really the value proposition. I like to describe it as you can walk into Home Depot over here or whatever store is around and you can buy tile to do your bathroom if you want to. Nathan Ingram: Now if I did that, I might could pull it off, but it’s going to look terrible. It’s that way hiring a professional to do a website as well. If I hire a professional tile guy to do my bathroom, it’s going to look great when he’s finished. It’s the same for a website, you can build a website yourself, but the chances of it being what you need and be able to convert business properly and have the right SEO and have graphics looking great, the chances of you being able to do that as a novice are pretty low. There’s always going to be space for a web professional. MikeDemo: Yeah, I completely agree. It also takes the skill of that web professional to sell their services. I get to go to a lot of Open Source events. I hear even WordCamps, “Oh well, I lost this job to Drupal or Magenta or Joomla or whatever the case is.” I’m like, “You can’t lose your job to an Open Source CMS.” You didn’t do a good job positioning your pitch to say, “Hey, this is why I think as a professional WordPress might be a good fit and these are the add-ons and here’s what I want to do. Could you achieve that same site in Drupal or Joomla?” Sure, tools are tools. It’s up to you as the professional to find the best solution for that need. I find a lot of people just like to make excuses, they don’t like to take that responsibility on themselves. Nathan Ingram: The selling part of the website business is a challenge for just about everybody unless you’re naturally wired to be a salesman, which most web professionals are not. Learning how to articulate the value you bring to a project is … It’s a real challenge. It’s one of the things that I work with freelancers to do in my coaching service. MikeDemo: Yeah, let’s talk about that a little bit. How did you get into the coaching service? What does it specialize in? What do you talk to your freelancers about? What are some of those pain points and things that you try to help them avoid that maybe you had to learn the hard way. Nathan Ingram: Yeah, I had to learn a lot the hard way. I have a PhD in the hard way. The way the coaching service started, was actually one of the members of the iThemes Training community hit me up one day by email and said, “Hey, have you ever thought about doing one-on-one consulting because I could really use your help talking through some problems.” I thought, “Hmm that sounds like something I could do.” We started having a series of conversations and I realized I really enjoy not only teaching online to a mass group of people, but also working with freelancers one-on-one and helping them avoid, like you mentioned the problems that I experienced. Nathan Ingram: Just the basic things like, “How did I get my pricing straight? How do I know how to price a project? How do I build recurring revenue in my business? How do I decide what tools to use and what to spend my learning time on? How do I work with problem clients? What do I do when the client has delayed for four months getting me the content for the website?” These are problems that every freelance web developer experiences. I put a course together that deals with some of these things at NathanIngram.com, but then I also work with people, both individually and in groups to try to solve these problem together. For me the group coaching model is really, really powerful. Nathan Ingram: The way I do it, I combine a one-on-one coaching session along with a group of people I’m working with one-on-one as well. All the people in the group bring an issue to the group call and we try to solve those problems together. That deals with some things like one of the big problems that freelancers face … I’m working from home here, most freelancers are. I’m here looking at my screen all day. I don’t have a good network of people necessarily that I talk with, so isolation can be a huge problem in the freelance world. It causes you to become sometimes narrow minded and nearsighted on the way you’re trying to solve problems. Instead of having a group that you can be involved in to help you process through some of these things that we’re all struggling with. MikeDemo: For sure. When I was dealing with … In the agency work, it all happens the same way. You get all these different issues that pop up time and time again. For example, content like you said. You wade in all this content, stuff is piecemealed. Most of it’s coming from Microsoft Word and the images are inside your Word file. Nathan Ingram: Exactly. MikeDemo: You have to do all that, so we created onboarding systems that the client couldn’t send us client piecemeal. They would have to send us this form matrix with customer fields. It would say, “Nope, your character is too high or not long enough or whatever the case is.” It would yell at them to find the missing holes. It’s cool that you’re trying top take these best practice ideas and home brew solutions and helping a group out. Nathan Ingram: Exactly. You hit the nail on the head there because it’s all about developing a system. When I’m working with freelancers what I most often find is that most freelancers do what I call “Seat of the pants freelancing.” What I mean by that is every job is a one off. We just make it happen. Everything is completely custom, not only from the design, which is a good thing but also the way you’re dealing with the client. Most freelancers don’t have a process that they use for every client, every project, every time. That’s one of the things I try to help people do is to put that process together because that not only makes you more efficient and therefore more profitable. It also helps to protect you from problem clients because once you get a really great system together, when somebody tries to kick out the walls of that system. You realize, “This is a red flag and this person is going to be pretty difficult to work with.” MikeDemo: Yeah, and you start to learn from the first conversation, will this client be a good client? Or is it going to cause issues? Nathan Ingram: Exactly. MikeDemo: I can identify when people talk to me, “Oh we just got this little job or do this work, it’s going to be great. We’ll pay you when it hits big and then it’s champagne and yachts for everybody. It’s funny that the same things happen to everybody. Nathan Ingram: Oh listen, there are very few unique issues to freelancers. By the way, of any profession. Freelancers struggle with the same issues, particularly web freelancers. When I’m talking at WordCamps, I’m usually doing some sort of a business development talk. I try to speak on an issue that resonated with everybody. You look around and everybody has this issue, it’s funny how that works. It’s the same in agencies by the way as well. The common factor is we’re dealing with people. Clients are people and we’re people and all the problems that people have working together seem to be exacerbated by a project like a website and it brings those things out. Figure out a system of how to deal with that yourself and how to keep your customers sliding down the process and through the system to get the project done in a very good professional way, that’s the trick. That can if you’re flying solo, that can be a pretty difficult thing to do on your own. MikeDemo: Yeah, I give my talk, which is all about AB testing and using split testing to help you with your reoccurring revenue model, and to make the site that you spent all this time on and optimize it over time. It’s better for your clients, it’s better for your users and it’s better for your wallet. Nathan Ingram: Definitely. MikeDemo: You are under a lot of different hats. What do you do on the iThemes team? What are you helping them out with? Nathan Ingram: I started teaching on iThemes Training back in 2012. I actually learned WordPress on iThemes Training. In those days it was called WebDesign.com. We met and we co-branded with iThemes Training several years later. Back in 2012 I did my first webinar, it was incredibly difficult. I enjoy teaching, I enjoy speaking, I’ve done that for years. But talking to your screen and not having anybody feeding back to you is a really tough thing to do. I did it and You know what? I liked it and they asked me to do some more, so gradually through the years I became a weekly presenter with them. Then early last year, I took over as host. Nathan Ingram: What I try to do as the host at iThemes Training is find fantastic speakers on great topics. I said earlier I like to describe iThemes Training as having WordCamp all year around online at no cost. Because we have talks on content, we have talks on plug-ins, we have talks on SEO, we have a commerce series that we’re involved in right now. We bring the best presenters in and it’s a live webinar where you can interact with the presenter live, ask your questions. I do a lot of talks myself as well on business development topics and other plug-ins and WordPress issues. It’s a lot of fun. I love what we’re doing on iThemes Training. MikeDemo: Excellent. Looking back at the last couple years of WordCamps, do you have any specific WordCamp memories that stick out for you? Nathan Ingram: Yeah, there was this one guy who snuck up behind me in Raleigh and stuck a dragon on my shoulder. I’m not sure what that was all about. Yeah, that was Mike Demo and if you guys haven’t seen his blue dragon, it’s pretty awesome. MikeDemo: The blue is my personal one. The one that’s behind me on the screen, that’s the personal one. But the red and orange one we breeded another one. We have a whole rookery. That’s Boldy, that’s the road warrior. Nathan Ingram: Got you. MikeDemo: If you ever have to share a hotel room with him, he’s a huge mess. I lose the cleaning fee. It’s just … I get yelled at because I bring a pet in. I’m like, “No, he’s not a pet.” I might be his pet, but we’ll see. Nathan Ingram: Oh man. A few memories from WordCamp, a few stick out to me. Last year I tweeted out about this and had some conversations with folks later, but back in Wilmington North Carolina, I think it was their first WordCamp. It was a great event, a smaller WordCamp, but a really great event. I always try to go to at least one beginner talk whenever I’m at a WordCamp. This one really stuck out to me because the presenter was just simply talking about short codes. You can see the eyes glazing over. People were not understanding what this was all about. She dropped a short code for for contact form seven, just the basic WordPress form plug-in, dropped it into a page and previewed the page and this form magically appeared on this page out of this short code. Nathan Ingram: The oohs and ahs from these WordPress beginners on seeing this short code render a form. I tweeted out, “Hey, I think every WordPress professional ought to sit in a beginner WordPress talk so that they remember what it’s like to discover these things in WordPress, these magical things that just happened. When you put in the URL of a YouTube video and, boom it just appears, it’s an amazing thing. I think those of us that have been in the WordPress world for a while forget how cool that is. That really stuck out to me as a memory of something cool at a WordCamp. MikeDemo: Just last weekend I was giving a beginning workshop where people made a full website in 90 minutes and I only used Core, nothing else. It was interesting because I had two helpers, Adam Warner was one of those helpers, we’re good friends. I point out things in Core that her was like, “Oh, that’s there? You don’t need a plug-in for that?” Even we forget because we get so used to our workflows that the Core extends and expands. Sometimes we still use the same workflows and methods that we have for the last two or three years. I think it’s important to look back and say, “Core can do a lot more than I think we give it credit for sometimes.” Nathan Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. Do you want another experience? MikeDemo: Sure. Nathan Ingram: One of the things we did last year at WordCamp Birmingham, that’s WPAL. We had the best hashtag ever when it comes to a WordCamp. We’re WPAL.com as well. Last year. MikeDemo: Sounds like fun. Nathan Ingram: Oh yeah Mike. We want you there. We want you to be there. We’re [crosstalk 00:21:24]. MikeDemo: I’ll be there. Nathan Ingram: Yeah, the first weekend of August this year in Birmingham. One of the things we did, this is something I try to do personally at every WordCamp where I’m speaking. I’ll try to tweet out and get a table full of freelancers together and just lets talk about challenges in business and all that sort of stuff. I love to do that, get seven or eight, 10 people around the table and lets just get to know each other and share because like I said earlier all the challenges are the same. I took an idea and I said, “Let’s do a table talk for our lunch at WPAL this year.” We tried that, that was WordCamp Birmingham 2017. We had all our speakers pick a topic. We put our speakers around different tables around when we were eating. Nathan Ingram: You could just come in and “I want to talk about digital marketing. I want to talk about digital marketing. Oh there’s a sign with digital marketing, let me go sit down over there. Or here’s one with SEO and here’s one with blogging and here’s one with security for WordPress or whatever.” That went so well, we actually had to cut the lunch time short. A lot of WordCamp people were mulling around waiting for the next session to start after lunch. We actually had to cut it off because people were enjoying that so much. Really that’s what WordCamp is all about, connecting with other people who are trying to do what you’re trying to do and learn from each other. Build that incredible community that WordPress is known for. I really love that. That whole thing we did last year in Birmingham. MikeDemo: Yeah, I’ve been to a few conferences that have done round tables and they’ve done it that way where you can come and go or it’s 10 minutes per table and you rotate to the next one. All that stuff is really great along with un-conference options. Which I’ve never been to a WordPress event that has been un-conference styled. It would be very interesting to pull one together because I think you could get some very interesting topics out of that. Nathan Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I’ve got one more if you want to hear it. MikeDemo: Yeah. Nathan Ingram: In WordCamp Orlando last year they had one of the most unique key notes I think I’ve ever heard. It was from a guy named Sam Smith. Sam, had been a WordPress user for a year. Most of the key notes at these WordCamps are by some industry professional, very well known. This one was completely different, Sam had been a WordPress user for a year. He had come to WordCamp Orlando the first time the year before in 2016. In 2017 they asked him to key not because over the course of that year, Sam was on the journey of learning WordPress, learning some programming languages, getting away from his full time job and going into WordPress full time. Nathan Ingram: He just told a story, it was one of the most unique key notes I’d ever heard. He talked about how the WordPress community had rallied around him, given him, given him great connections, here’s how to learn this. Here’s how to do that. The community just wrapped their arms around this guy and helped him make the change into being WordPress full time, which he is now. He’s now one of the support representatives for GIB-WP. MikeDemo: Yeah, Sam’s story is a great story. That Orlando WordCamp was one of my favorite WordCamps last year and it being close to Disney didn’t hurt. Nathan Ingram: That’s true. MikeDemo: I’m definitely looking forward to WordCamp Orlando next year as well. Nathan Ingram: For sure. MikeDemo: We only have a couple minutes, but looking forward for the rest of 2018, what do you think the future of WordPress is with Gutenberg coming down the pike, some of the new changes that are happening. What do you predict? Nathan Ingram: Man, like it or hate it Gutenberg is a game changer. It’s really hard to know what that’s going to do to the landscape of WordPress. It is certainly going to cause some major changes. As a matter of fact just was it yesterday? I believe it was yesterday, we had Joe Casabona on iThemes Training to do a getting ready for Gutenberg webinar. That’s on Training@iThemes.com by the way. You can watch that replay. It’s a really good overview of Gutenberg, where things are, a lot of good Q and A. It’s going to be a game changer. Especially for those of us who use page builders. The whole … This continental shift that is coming to WordPress and the way that we handle content ultimately is going to be a really good thing because the content editor of WordPress has not been changed in many, many years. I’m not sure how long it’s been. It’s been a long time since Tiny MCE was dropped [crosstalk 00:26:27]. MikeDemo: It’s just Tiny MCE, yeah. Nathan Ingram: It’s going to cause all of us a little bit of tension, a little bit of change pain. Those of us working with clients will have to figure out how to navigate that course. Ultimately, it is a fantastic move because it’s going to position WordPress to be even more usable for the average person. It’s going to help everybody ultimately. Change is painful sometimes, we have to go through that. MikeDemo: Yeah, the same thing happened when the customizer came out and all that stuff. Nathan Ingram: Exactly. MikeDemo: We at BoldGrid are currently looking to see how we’re going to support Gutenberg because just currently we want to extend WordPress. We want to make the WordPress Core experience better, but not take people out of the WordPress ecosystem. We’re testing and working on some things right now, like Zach’s course at Gutenberg.courses BoldGrid is one of the main sponsors there. Whatever can bring more people into the WordPress family, we’re excited about. Nathan Ingram: Exactly. WordPress is such a powerful tool for anybody that wants to get their message out, whatever it may be, a small business, a political cause, just your personal blog. The mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing and they’ve done just that. It is a incredible tool and Gutenberg is going to be a game changer in allowing people to more easily craft their content. My mom was a fifth grade school teacher for many years, just retired. She started a blog and in her retirement that her dog writes. Well, “writes”, but anyway. It’s the world from the perspective of her rescue dog. You know what? WordPress is a great tool to talk about whatever you want to talk about. It’s going to be interesting to see as this year goes on and Gutenberg evolves and the WordPress platform evolves how that’s going to affect everything that we’re doing so far. MikeDemo: Yeah, definitely. What’s the next even you’re going to be at? Nathan Ingram: I will be in WordCamp Miami in a couple weeks. MikeDemo: Excellent. We will have two people working at Miami. Mike Reed and Nicole, they’ll be there and Nicole is speaking. Mike Reed I believe is an alternate speaker. Nicole is also helping with Kids Camp. If you are going to be at WordCamp Miami for their tenth year, please stop by the BoldGrid booth and say hi to them. Pick up your BoldGrid [inaudible 00:29:09] pen. I will be in Germany for Cloudfest, so unfortunately I’ll be missing Miami. Nathan Ingram: Oh, that’s a shame. MikeDemo: But I hope you have a great time. Nathan Ingram: It should be great. I’m looking forward to it. MikeDemo: Excellent. Where can people find you online? Nathan Ingram: You can find me if you’re a freelancer and you’re interested in courses or coaching you can find me at NathanIngram.com. You can find us online at iThemes Training at Training.iThemes.com, lots of free webinars going on every week there. MikeDemo: Excellent. Just a reminder to check out BoldGrid.com and follow us at BoldGrid on Twitter. We’ve got a lot new cool things coming. Some new products and plug-ins coming up. Please join us next time for the next episode of BoldLife. Thanks Nathan, I really appreciate your time. Nathan Ingram: Okay, thanks Mike. I really appreciate it.