[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news from the worth rest community. Now welcome your hosts. David Walmsley, a nap Wrigley.
Hello there. And welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast, you have reached episode number 284 entitled Strattic nd Elementor talk about the recent acquisition. It was published on Thursday, the 23rd of June, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley and just a few bits of housekeeping before we begin the main content.
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Okay. What have we got on the show for you today? Something a little bit different. Normally we record the episodes several days, possibly weeks, sometimes even months in advance because the nature of the episode won't really change.
However, this is what you might call a scoop. It's a burning hot topic this week. It was announced that element or had purchased Strattic Strattic is. Headless hosting company. Elementor I'm sure I don't need to tell you is a page builder. And so we've got two people who are intimately connected with this deal.
We've got Miriam Schwab from Strattic and Amita GAT from Elementor. They're here to talk about how the whole thing went down. When was it decided that this would be a good idea? How long did it all take what's happening in the future? And what's the play for Elementor buying a host, given that they've already got a cloud hosting environment set up.
It's an excellent episode with all sorts of interesting bits and pieces, and you get a bit of a behind the curtain view of what went. I hope that you enjoy it. I am joined on the podcast today by Miriam Schwab and Amita. Get hello, both of you. Hello. Hey, Ethan, it's gonna be one of those things because we're doing audio and we've got no visual cues.
It's gonna be like, who's gonna speak first. So don't worry about cross talking. I can edit out the mistakes later, but we're on the podcast today to speak about it's like some hot news because not normally on the podcast are we have things which are. Critical this week or last week or what have you, but this news item came across my email inbox and I thought it'd be really nice to get both somebody from Elementor, which is Amai and somebody from Strattic, which is Miriam to talk about the acquisition of Strattic, which is a web posting company by Elementor just a couple of things first.
Just to paint some context, I'm gonna go to Miriam first. Just tell us a little bit about yourself. And obviously, don't tell us about something that I might ask you about later in terms of what you're gonna be doing now.
[00:04:46] Miriam Schwab: okay. I won't spill the beans. So hello. I'm here IM Schwab. I am the co-founder and former CEO of Strattic.
And the reason I say former is because now that Strattic has been acquired by Elementor, my new title is head of Strattic, which is on the one hand, it's a funny title because it doesn't describe a function, but on the other hand, it's actually very. Apt to what I'm going to continue to be doing.
I founded co-founder Strattic about four years ago after I founded and managed a WordPress development agency for over a decade, building custom WordPress solutions for a lot of large organizations, tech companies, and nonprofits, and really wanting to solve some of the pain points around managing word.
and came across this emerging trend of static site generators and headless became very excited about it. Thought maybe we can bring these two worlds together. And that was where I came up with a concept for Strattic Strattic has we've been servicing many customers over the last years also including very large organizations publicly traded companies, tech companies, governments, and nonprofits, like the UN.
And now we're excited to be taking Strattic to the next stage as part of Elementor.
[00:06:01] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. That's such a great story, by the way. Did you say your new role is head of Strattic? Yes. Can I just say that you missed a trick there? Did you, should it not be the headless of Strattic? Wouldn't
[00:06:14] Miriam Schwab: that be? I think we need to write like head and then in brackets less.
[00:06:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. You've gotta do it. You've gotta, I know we're an opportunity there. Yeah. Thank you for the thanks for the update and wow. What an amazing journey you've had an equally amazing. Journey has been had by Elementor on the other side, but Amai just dwelling on you personally, just give us a bit of background to you and WordPress and whatnot.
[00:06:39] Amitai Gat: Okay. Yeah, so I started with again, work was around almost 12 years ago. So building website was working as a as a freelancer built all websites using WordPress and then kinda slowly got into engineering. Did that for a while, got into product product leadership.
And then when I came across a mentor just the combination of doing product and engineering and, in a, in the WordPress ecosystem is just just a. I had to go for that. And then I now I'm here and I'm leading the product
organization
[00:07:22] Nathan Wrigley: here at the company. Okay. Thank you very much again.
Nice story. So Miriam, just before we get stuck into the weeds of it all. You talk about headless and the fact that you came across this emergent technology a little while ago, whilst many of the people listening to this podcast will, will have an understanding of what headless means. I've got a feeling that there'll be a proportion, a significant percentage who may have heard the word may not, but don't actually understand what the difference is between a traditional host and a headless based host like Strattic is, could you just do a quick job of explaining how it differs?
[00:07:57] Miriam Schwab: Yeah, for sure. Okay. When you have a regular WordPress website what is happening there is that you've got the front end of the site, which is what everyone visits and use when they reach your website. And then you have the admin area or back end of the site, which is where you manage your content.
And those two parts of the site are tightly intertwined in WordPress and often referred to as a monolithic arch. And that architecture brings a lot of power to users in that you can make updates in the admin and then just press publish and immediately see the results on the front end. And that gives you a lot of control over the appearance of your site, and also enables a lot of different types of plugins and integrations that bring a lot of power to the user.
So that type of monolithic architecture which is generally running on what's called the lamp stack Linux, Apache myco PHP is hosted on standard. Lamp stack supporting servers. And that's how it's been done for the last, I don't know, 20 years, WordPress is 19 years old now, but let's say even before that, there were already PHP driven sites and so running on standard lamp based stacks.
And that's how your WordPress site generally, or until today has been run. So on the one hand you have all of the power of WordPress. Like I mentioned, on the other hand, when you're running the site in that format you're exposing it to a lot of different issues that repeat themselves and many WordPress users may be familiar with them.
So for example, your site may feel sluggish or particularly gets slow under load. And that's because of this monolith monolithic architecture, because your front end is so tightly intertwined with the back end. When the back end is struggling to serve up the pages that impacts the front end. So you'll have, you might have issues around performance around scaling the site for load, and then also security issues because you have so many moving parts and components.
and they're also directly connected the front end of your site. If there's a security issue that will become apparent on the front end of your site, and it will impact it. And security issues are painful because it can damage your reputation. It can take a lot of time and resources to repair. It can damage your site's organic rankings, et cetera.
So that's the challenge with running WordPress in the standard way. And as it's been done until today, Strattic comes to rethink that whole thing and our approach. The front end is really all that users need to see when they're visiting your site. There isn't really any reason most of the time we can get that for the back end to be there too.
It's the back end is there, let's say you have a regular website and you wrote a blog post. So you wrote the blog post, you published it now. You don't need that backend there anymore until the next time you want to update your site, but it's always there. And that always means that the site is relatively like sensitive to different factors on the web.
So we're saying. The front end is really all that users need. Let's just slice that right off of that back end and only deliver that to users. And the back end, the WordPress admin area is still accessible to users, but only to the users who need it, like team members or whatever, or content creators, or managers though, they can access it.
But the rest of the internet only visits the front end and that's where the term headless comes into play. So headless means. That the head, which is the front end of the site or the visual side of the site is actually completely disconnected from the back end. And that is what is referred to when you're talking about headless architecture.
So that's Strattic approach. We allow users to use WordPress as usual, use the plugins. They like use Elementor. For example, we have great support for it, and we've made sure we had support for it from the. Click our static publish button. All your changes are deployed to the static replica of the site, the headless like it's headless it's decoupled.
And that's what the internet views. The site looks the same act. The same feels the same, except for it's faster. Scalable. You never have to worry about load security issues become relevant and you get the best of all worlds.
[00:12:05] Nathan Wrigley: It's a really, yeah. That's so well done, by the way, it's a difficult subject to grapple to the ground.
But I think we did that really brilliantly. So let me just clear up a few things on my end, just so that the listeners are. Sure. So basically you've got a, you've got a WordPress website, which behaves on the admin side, but it's totally separate from what the users see. You. You log into WordPress, but you have to wait a few seconds whilst that version of WordPress, if you like is spun up on some kind of VPs or something like that, you make your modifications, save it.
And then some voodoo happens. Some magical static magic that saves what the pages will, the output, HTML, JavaScript, CSS. It saves that somewhere. Stores it somewhere else. Only those bits are used when a visitor comes to the site and the WordPress install is taken offline. So it's unavailable. It can't be attacked and so on.
And that
[00:13:01] Miriam Schwab: is, you did a very good job of explaining it. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. The WordPress site is in a containerized. That's the technical term. It's the containerized environment. Yep. And that isolates it as needed. And also it can shut down when not use, which has another layer of security. And by the way, also has environmental benefits because why should that just keep running?
I don't know if metrics around environmental impact of running servers, but Shutt it down and not using those results. Yeah. It's not good. It's not pretty. Yeah. So there's that and yes. And when our users spin up, the container make their changes. That WordPress site is a monolithic architecture.
So they do get to, make changes and immediately see it on the front end. But at that point only they see it in that WordPress site, they click the button. The voodoo, as you said, happens, generates the static replica. That's just Chan LCSS and Javas. So you get the front end is just completely disconnected from the back.
Solving a lot of those like issues that that we
[00:14:02] Nathan Wrigley: discussed. Yeah. My recommendation would be if you are, if you're curious to know more, this podcast is not about the technicalities of Strattic, but if you're curious to know more than go and Google Strattic, which by the way is S T R a T TTUs. I see.
And then you can discover all of the benefits and the reasons why the podcast today though, is gonna focus on the acquisition of that. And so you two companies at some point in the past met, I think we're going back quite a long way. It might be as much as a decade or more. I dunno if Amai or Miriam, wanna just paint the story quickly of how it all began.
And when things turned from a, oh, you are an Israeli WordPress company. Hello. So are we into more I wonder if we could start thinking. Talking about working more closely. When did the story begin and how long ago was it that you started chattering about acquisitions and mergers and so on?
[00:14:57] Miriam Schwab: So I when I was managing my agency, I also organized the local word camps, conferences in Israel. I did five of them. And one, I think it was the first one that I organized or the second one, I can't remember. Arielle and Yi, who are the co-founders development. They attended. And at the time they were either still working they also had an agency.
And that agency eventually transitioned into a company or a product that they called POJO it was a theme kind of marketplace or whatever, like a theme offering. Actually I, at the time thought that their themes were really good. And I wasn't the fan of commercial themes as an agency owner because as I'm sure, they often come with a thousand options.
Yeah. And you end up using two and then you have all this just. Garbage city, senior themes, but their themes were actually really well coded and really clean. We met back then and then the next work camp I organized, they were already working on POJO for sure. And they sponsored and I was so excited.
They were sponsoring also, I really enjoyed supporting the local WordPress community. So whenever I saw success happening, I was really happy. We connected around that. And then over the years, We'd just meet up at conferences either here in Israel, or like when we were flying, let's say toward camp Europe, we'd end up on the same flights or we'd stay in hotels near each other.
And also Yian Ariel and I, we only eat kosher food, which means that a lot of the time when we're overseas, we're very hungry. So we would bond over going in search of kosher food together. Oh yeah. That was pretty hilarious. Yeah. And yeah we became very. Friends over the years. And then when I founded Strattic pretty quickly we realized that we needed to support Elementor because more and more people were coming to us users and they were using Elementor and they wanted to keep using Elementor.
Yeah. Cause it brought them so much value. So we invested in supporting it including supporting elementary forms, which if you understand, like the static architecture that we're generating. A form, isn't a natural fit, but we made sure that we support their forms and every time we'd run into each other, I would tell them about the support that we were increasingly rolling out.
And we started having a shared slack channel with their dev team to work on the plugin, get help from them around certain things we needed answers to. And then we started working on a partnership which made a lot of sense. Partnerships can be win-win where each company's like promoting the other and working together on co-marketing or like different, product related initiatives.
And that was exciting. And then at some point they surprised me and Josh Lawrence, my co-founder and said, You know what we should acquire you
[00:18:05] Nathan Wrigley: ah, and you spat out your food at that point. basically,
[00:18:12] Miriam Schwab: if I had food in my mouth, it would've spat across the room. I was like, what really. Okay. Okay.
So let's explore that and I don't know if but like these types of things, they take a really long time, so it wasn't like that conversation happened. And then the deal was closed. Just consideration, done discussion conversation. What does this mean? Should we shouldn't we, what does it mean for them?
All this kind of stuff. But eventually we all came to the place where it just made a lot of sense for everyone. They really value what we're doing and bringing to the market and the industry. And believe in our vision and want to really work, to support our vision. And they're a great company.
The more I got to know them, the more excited I got about working with them, the people on their team were so nice and helpful and friendly, which was really important to, to me and Josh and also for the rest of our team. Including Amita who's been really nice and great to work with since we met.
It just seemed started to make a lot of sense and. And we move forward and here we are.
[00:19:20] Nathan Wrigley: It's such a nice story. The piece that I like about that story is the friendship. The fact that it's born out of a real world meeting the fact that you were both teams. If you like, the elemental founders and you both into WordPress attending events, they sponsored, you helped out.
And you obviously, like you said you bonded, you became friendly. You don't normally see that piece in an acquisition. Story, basically, it always seems to be about, we've acquired something to bolster our offering or what have you very rarely have. I heard it been explained in such compelling terms.
I just think that's really cool. Yeah, that's lovely. How long did it actually take though? Just to give us some idea, anybody who's never been involved in a merger or an acquisition, roughly speaking how far back was that first moment where you spa your food down?
[00:20:12] Miriam Schwab: that is a really good question.
I. I think I, you know what, I don't know. It was like, let's say within the last six months. And then once we, I think I, the last few months are blur are like blurred in my mind because, you mentioned that us being friends and that's a unique angle to this acquisition story. And I have to say, I don't know how anyone works on an M and a deal when they're not friendly.
Seriously. People don't know what it's like exactly behind the scenes. And I know this is not only the case for us. I've heard it from everyone. Who's gone through an M and a, when we started the M and a process, a friend of mine, like who knew about it, he came to me, he said, listen, Miriam, you're about to go through one of the hardest and most stressful periods of your life.
And I was like, why? But everyone's so nice. It's gonna be fine. But like lawyers and this and that it's really painful and stressful. But I think one of the reasons we could get through it is because, we have a strong level of. and, we have this history and so you can get through a lot of the hard parts of it when you've got that.
I seriously, I don't know how people do it when they're like strangers. Yeah. So yeah, so I think, I don't remember exactly when the first conversation happened and there was like stopping and starting. I think the whole thing came together over the course of a few months. It moved pretty quickly once we.
Once we decided to move ahead with it.
[00:21:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. We'll drill down into the details of what all that looks like our first sort of real question for you, is the, do you have an understanding I'm assuming that you do of what the reasoning was that instead of carrying on being partners, what was the reasoning behind the sentence we would like to acquire you?
What exactly is was going on the elemental side? Why. Acquire a hosting company, curiously the acquisitions that I've seen over the last, I don't know, couple of years, and there's been many it's always the other way around. It's always the hosting company acquiring the thing whereas this one it's the thing acquiring the hosting company.
So that's really curious, but tell us the reasoning behind buying a static headless WordPress hosting.
[00:22:20] Amitai Gat: Yeah, of course. So first of all like Miriam said, we've been friends for a long time and and Miriam is here a lot. And we talk a lot about that and we've been elementary, we've been kinda looking at what's going on in the, in a jams stack and, the headless kinda.
Kinda seen with a lot of interest, and we think that there's a lot of potential there. And in, in the WordPress ecosystem, which our ecosystem Strattic is the gem sack, right? This is headless. Obviously whenever, Miriam was here she and I had a lot of conversations about that.
We really believe in the value that it provides and kinda. Intro was very technical but the bottom line is that, there's a lot of value that, that that's Strattic and that technology can deliver to users, especially in WordPress. And it's amazing.
So we've been looking at it with a lot of interest and and again, we've been talking and at some point we, we just said that I think that right now and that question probably will come up later, but you. Even though we want to keep it as separate offerings. We can imagine a lot of a lot of synergies that that can be very interesting.
And and again, we just we just believe that this is perfectly aligns with the mission of elementary to, to empower web creators. And we just at some point realized that it's better, that this is just part of the company and we can do this together and we can work more closely and.
Just find those synergies.
[00:24:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So typically when I hear about an acquisition the story goes, something like this big company buys smaller company and then keeps smaller company maybe takes on the staff of the smaller company, but keeps it as a thing. Not typically does it roll it up into their, into their bigger product.
And I'm just wondering. It felt to me as if the chatter over the last week has been around. Okay. What's Elementor gonna do with this now that they've got their hands on it, what are they actually gonna do? Is this gonna be part of a cloud platform that you can, I don't know, go to the elemental website and choose a cloud offering, which you already have, but also here's a variance of the cloud offering.
If you'd like to go headless, you can do all of that. In other words, are you gonna consume it? As to be part of element or something that works with Elementor or is it just gonna stay a completely separate entity and everybody will go to the Strattic website and do the thing over there and then come back and marry it with their element or based website.
[00:25:11] Amitai Gat: Yeah. So like I said, for now, the intention is to keep it as as two separate offerings. We. Miriam said, like we've been working together even before. There's a lot of we had a slack channel. There were things that we did in elementary to make sure that it can work with Strattic better.
But right now we just intend to keep it a separate offerings. And yeah it's going to help us to, expand our offering. And I think that Strattic has different type of of customer. . And, but yeah, right now we, there's no plan to gobble anything up.
We're just we're just gonna keep it in separate offerings and and search for those synergies wherever we can.
[00:25:55] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So things basically from the point of view of a customer of Stratix at the moment, nothing changes. There's no plans in that direction. Miriam in terms of the things that you had to think about during the merger and acquisition did, obviously the you've got employees and staff and a team.
And what have you were there things that that you fought for in the deal as it were, or things that you wanted to happen in the deal? What I'm basically asking is what's happening to your staff.
[00:26:28] Miriam Schwab: There were a few things that were really important to us in the deal and. One was continued excellent service for our customers.
Our customers really love our product and really love our customer success team and rightfully it's led by Rebecca Markowitz and she's amazing. And so we wanted to make sure that we could continue to service them as we were, and that our team would find all, would find a new home at Elementor and we could continue working together lucky for.
That's exactly what elementary wanted. It was not, it was, they were, they wanted, they were like, you are unit. We want you to stay together. You work great together. Like why mess with success essentially. And so we were very fortunate that that our team found a very nice new home in Elementor. So we get the benefits of being part of an or large organization that has more resources.
And, let's say teams set up. Specific things that we at the moment don't have set up. We're not set up for. But at the same time, we, as a team, we really love working together and we really, we really like each other. We get to retain that and that's really fun and really great for all of us.
[00:27:46] Nathan Wrigley: So everybody's being kept on and it's transferring over. This is a total aside and forgive me, geography may play nothing to do with it, but I'm just wondering if you are actually close to each other. Physical terms like, is the, is where you live Miriam close to where the elemental offices are and things like that.
That's
[00:28:05] Miriam Schwab: a good question. So we are a company that our roots are in Jerusalem and Elementor is in a city called Ram gun, which is close to Tel Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are not like actually that far from each other. But if you add in traffic and whatever. It's a big deal. And also they're very different cities.
So we had our office in Jerusalem. It was a great office, but COVID happened. And we saw our team members were not interested in coming to hang out together and give each other COVID we shut down the office and we transitioned into being a fully remote company. We already were semi remote before that.
And we have team members overseas who are very important members of our team. So we already had some of that culture in place, but then we like fully implemented that and we went remote. We actually, it's not like we were going to one office and now we're going to another. But because we're a Jerusalem centric company unlike most Israeli tech companies, most Israeli tech companies, it all is happening in the Tel Avi area.
So we were different. Most of us are coming from outside of that area. Luckily there's train. My drive is not the best , but but elementary is also flexible. Also I think because of Corona. Our goal is that the Israeli team will meet up once a week at the elementary office, which is actually really nice for us, even though we all have to travel, let's say farther than maybe is ideal, but we miss each other.
So finally we can sit together and work together and have lunch together. Nice things like. , I'll plan on going in a few more times a week and others can come in when they want, but we can also work from home. So it's a great kind of hybrid situation, which really works.
[00:29:51] Nathan Wrigley: Soon after the elemental, excuse me.
Soon after the elemental team moved into their office, Amai was on our Monday show and he gave us a guided tour it was really nice. Yeah. He got his camera out, he went onto his phone and he, oh, no, you took the laptop around the office. That was, it was absolutely brilliant. Yeah, it was lovely.
So yeah. What a nice environment to be in Miriam, I've gotta ask. You, I know that you are going along for the rider. I'm just wondering what the what's in this for you, is it that you were feeling the pressure of it? It was obviously a total surprise when they offered to, to purchase it from you and your co-founder, but what were you hoping to get out of this deal and how will it change your life?
Is it about managing stress, more, having a bit more time available to.
[00:30:43] Miriam Schwab: That's a very good question. And the answer is complicated. So I'll try to, I'll try to do my best this this new situation on the one hand allows me to continue pursuing my vision of bringing headless static jams stack philosophy to, to the WordPress industry.
Which I don't feel like I've fulfilled or completed. I feel like there's so much more we can and should do. And in many ways we were only just getting started. For me, it's really important that I get to keep doing that. And as the head of Strattic I can continue leading that initiative and that's on the one hand.
For me work has always been about what I have to be excited and interested in what I'm doing and always learning. And I know that at elementary, I'm gonna have the opportunity to. Heck of a lot more even than I've learned until now. And wow. Over the last four years, it's been the most intense, like boot camp training of my life.
But I know I, I'm going to be able to learn much more expand my, the skills in different ways. And I'm excited about that. And then on the other hand founding a startup and managing it, it's very demand. I would've done this for many more years to come. Like I didn't even think about another option, so I would've kept doing that.
But now that we are in this situation, what I can say, like in retrospect is that I am excited that also in my new position, I can fully focus on Strattic and not do a lot of the stuff that you have to do when you're running a, like any kind company. There's so many things, accounting, legal, HR I don't know.
I don't even know. I mentioned before that they have teams set up with specific skill sets. Like we, I had, we all have to wear so many hats. So I was like, I became an expert in hub spot and I also was like trying to do our paid ads. And I was also doing our social media and I'm also working on the product and and I was also, with, we had investors.
So that also demands time, there's a lot of stuff that takes up time and then it doesn't allow you to focus on what you really, what I really got into this to do, which is to build this product, make it amazing, make people, help people use something that helps them and that they love. And I think in this new situation, I can actually fully.
Fully or mostly fully do that. And I'm really excited
[00:33:18] Nathan Wrigley: about that. Yeah. I'm not being ridiculous here at Miriam. I genuinely had concern for the amount of sleep you were getting because , you were literally everywhere and always around weren't you? That is meant as a compliment. I hope you take it as such, but no, I totally, but I did feel running that thing.
Trying to bootstrap it's, it's no mean fee, is it? And just being able to take the foot, not entirely off the pedal, but slow that side of things down and also be able to say, do you know what now there's somebody else in my bigger team now that can take the responsibility for the social media and for the legal, all the bits that whilst you, you did them and they were a necessary thing to do.
They probably weren't what you really wanted to be doing at the time. That's not what I really wanted to do.
[00:34:06] Miriam Schwab: And. I'm not like great at those things. Those people who do it on a full time basis. They're great at it. That's their area of expertise. Let people do these things who are better than me.
It's great. And I'll try to do what, hopefully I am. I'm bested and yeah. And take the foot off the pedal a bit. I'm also, a mom, so my kids are like, wait, so you're not gonna have calls till 10, 11:00 PM with California anymore. And I'm like, yeah. I don't know, but definitely not at the same
[00:34:35] Nathan Wrigley: rate.
Yeah. so there'll be less of them. Yeah. Just shifting gears to the elemental side of things. Firstly, avatar, it's been probably a while since we spoke. And so probably a lot has changed. Just fill us in on the last year or so of elemental. Tell us what's been happening. What new things, new initiatives have come down the pipe with elemental.
[00:34:59] Amitai Gat: Yeah, for sure. Wow. In a year can barely keep up
[00:35:04] Nathan Wrigley: with, yeah, I think that's about, I think that's probably when, whenever you moved into your office, that's the last time I think we we spoke well apart from the briefer side that we had at word camp Europe, just the other day where I won a rubber ball and then the guy came after me won an iPad.
I was gutted. Absolutely. Got it. yeah.
[00:35:24] Amitai Gat: So we've actually moved the. Two years ago. Ah, it could be it's two years ago. Be a long time now. Yeah. But yeah, we just rolling with with our builder we're, investing a lot in the existing product, also looking at the future You've heard about the containers feature that we're working on right now.
I think it's it's it's really exciting changing changing a lot of how we're going to do things. So is kinda like the basis for a lot of things that we're planning to do up ahead and just, keeping our focus on, on, on the builder. And obviously, one of the most exciting things that, that, that happened is that we launched our our cloud website offering.
Yes. Which which again, this is the way I look at it is just, we're continuing to investing in in, help our users, build the websites. Whereas hosting is is is something that you need to have. So this allows us to again, expand our offering and help everything more streamlined.
And. Help our users with their challenge. And again, this is, I think that we're again, starting, this is this is very interesting. It is again, aligns with the line with with again, helping our users with their challenges, the inspiring to
[00:36:56] Nathan Wrigley: create websites better. yeah, I think that was one of the curious things that kept coming up in the sort of social commentary that I was seeing after the announcement just a week or so ago was the sort of trying to understand where the cloud, the current cloud.
Fits with the new static thing. And obviously you've cleared that up. We now know that for the foreseeable, at least. Anyway, the two things are gonna, the element or cloud offering is. Be there. The Strattic headless offering will be over there and they're gonna be separate.
So I think that's, yeah, that's cleared that up really well. Just on the growth of element or it was curious a couple of maybe it was more like three or four weeks ago. Yo, as in the man, yo Deval, he produced a a piece where he was bringing into question whether or. The growth or the market share of WordPress for the first time had taken a bit of a dip.
We were up to 30, sorry, 43 point something percent. And since statistics have been gathered, that number has always gone up, it's never, ever taken a south turn, but it did. And what was curious, digging into that a little bit more is that it would appear that for the longest period of time, years, and years elementals growth.
Is WordPress' growth, which sounds like a really strange thing to say. But if you took elemental out of the WordPress ecosystem, I'm not sure what the growth for WordPress would've looked like. In other words, elemental has been driving the adoption of WordPress by new users and that's totally remarkable.
[00:38:39] Amitai Gat: Yeah. It's not that doesn't change since we've last spoken that the growth here has been has been very. Very intense MIRI and I had just had a conversation about that yesterday about about, about WordPress and the growth. I think that, yeah I think for sure we allow users that maybe otherwise wouldn't have been able to do what they can do now with elementary to to participate.
And I definitely believe that it drives growth. And I think, but. Again, counting specifically on, on those on those numbers. I think that, the entire world is kinda shaking right now, post COVID, everything is everything is strange, but but yeah we are in terms of elementary, we are growing and we, we planning on, on, on keep on growing.
And again, this is just by, by making sure that we deliver real value. To, to those users, to our users that wherever we can, whether it's via builder, whether it's using the cloud and, helping with the challenge of hosting your website and with the and with starting now, where Larger companies, that deal with mission, critical websites that, require, intense security and, intense performance and stability to to be able to use that.
[00:40:18] Nathan Wrigley: It's quite amazing, really. And Miriam, you could probably speak to this as well. Is that the, in, in a sense the success of elemental within WordPress has enabled this whole thing to happen. If Elementor had been modestly successful and had several million users less than it already does, then they wouldn't be able to go out.
Be the company that's going out and looking at possible purchases in this case Strattic. So yeah, Bravo, all round a fabulous achievement from the elemental side, just interested. And you may not have any insight on this, or you may wish to decline to answer the question Amai you.
Does this represent a sort of like a watershed, because I don't know of anything else that Elementor has purchased on this size, but I was wondering if this is going to be a bit of a sea change. In other words has element or the company now got to the point where it can start to bolster its offering by buying up different things or the hosting companies, other plugins, other various other bits of bits and pieces in the WordPress ecosystem.
And dare I say it, maybe some things which are not in the WordPress E.
[00:41:28] Amitai Gat: Yeah. I think that, like Miriam said, this is Strattic is a very unique story. So right now we're focusing on the builder and I don't think there's a lot of companies like Strattic or persons like Miriam
And and I think we, we've had a a wonderful opportunity here, working with people that we know and trust. On a product that we believe in with, great vision. This this was the right one for us. But other than that, like we're, we will keep focusing on what we do.
[00:42:07] Nathan Wrigley: thank you very much. I've asked all the questions I want to ask. I was wondering from both of you, if there was anything that you wished to get off your chest, or are you happy with everything that we've mentioned?
[00:42:21] Miriam Schwab: I'd like to say something about Elementor please do. So one when when we were working on our go to market at Strattic, like when we were independent one of the strategies that we really wanted to be able to pursue was what's known as product led growth.
I don't know how familiar we are with it. It was pretty hot in the tech world for some time. It still is. And the idea there is that company grows. By virtue of how amazing the product is and how much value it brings to its users. And then it creates the cycle of word of mouth and community.
And we succeeded with that to a certain extent from the perspective of thought leadership. And community interaction and things like that which is also an aspect of product like growth. And also the fact is that our customers do love Strattic and they share that with other people, they become enthusiastic ambassadors within their circles.
But if you look at elementary scale and impact on the market and the web in general it's basically because they've created a product that brings so much value to users that they. They want to use it and then they want to tell other people about it. So a lot of people might not appreciate that about Elementor, but the fact is that it's, that they grew so much, and they have so many users because their product brings so much value to users.
So it's exciting for me that we're joining a company that really helps their users and really brings so much value to them and has succeeded in grow. Through this product led gross type of approach and because of the value of this product I'm excited to learn from them about that.
That's just, I wanna say about their scale. Yeah,
[00:44:11] Nathan Wrigley: that's really nice. You are you're right from somebody observing all the things in WordPresses I'd like to do. There is no story like this the growth of element, or it really is. Off the scale successful. It's been remarkable seeing it.
In fact, that's a great product. Yeah. I remember picking up on it. Yeah. Really early on and thinking, oh, it's another thing. Let's see how this goes. Yeah. And then within sort of six months, it was pretty obvious that there was. Something special being created. And I think decisions made early on to jam in a ton of functionality into the free version was a really clever idea, which, boots strapped it into the lower atmosphere.
And, yeah that's really two to single that out to demonstrate the the mission statement of Elementor. That's lovely. Amai anything to add before we knock it on the.
[00:45:07] Amitai Gat: No. I'm good. Thank you.
[00:45:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Good. Okay. Thank you very much. In that case, I will round off by saying Miriam Schwab Amita, cat.
Thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today and explaining about why Strattic was purchased by elemental. That's brilliant. Thanks a lot.
[00:45:24] Miriam Schwab: Thank you. Nice being here.
[00:45:27] Nathan Wrigley: I hope that you enjoyed that really interesting to chat to Miriam, and Amai all about the acquisition of Strattic by Elementor.
If you've got any thoughts on that, please head over to WP Builds.com. Search for episode number 284. And leave a comment there. Alternatively, you can go to our Facebook group that's WP build.com/facebook, and you could leave a comment in the thread there as.
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Okie dokey. We will be back next week. We'll have a podcast on Thursday, but we'll also have our, this week in WordPress show, live 2:00 PM UK time, head over to WP Builds.com/live. And we'd love to have you there joining in the comments with all of the other people. Okay. I hope that you stay safe this week.
Byebye for now.
