[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once more to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 384 entitled surveying the WordPress industry revenue trends and challenges with Kyle van Deusen. It was published on Thursday, the 8th of August, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley and a few bits of housekeeping before we get into the main event with Kyle.
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Okay, what have I got for you today while I'm joined today by Kyle van Deusen. Kyle, as you may or may not know is the proprietor, let's call it that, of The Admin Bar, which is a gigantic and growing online community.
And each year for the past few years, Kyle has carried out a survey where he surveyed the freelancer landscape in the WordPress space and come up with some conclusions. So this year at 1,100 participants talked to Kyle all about their trials and tribulations, what works, what doesn't work, what they're earning, what their niches are, and so much more. And Kyle and I delve into that today. And I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast today by Kyle Van Deusen. Hello, Kyle.
[00:04:04] Kyle Van Deusen: It is so awesome to be here. Thank you so much, Nathan.
[00:04:07] Nathan Wrigley: you are more than welcome the Kyle. I don't know if you've been following Kyle's progress, but Kyle has a really strong WordPress community.
I'm gonna say it's 10,000 people or something. Is that about right?
[00:04:20] Kyle Van Deusen: We will hit 10,000 in May of 2024, I believe. So we're about a month
[00:04:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it's called the admin bar. It is a Facebook group, but also as you're about to hear, the purpose of this podcast is to talk about something that Carl did recently. It's also a website, a community. They produce content. There's various products surrounding it as well. Let's get to know Carl A.
Little bit first. Just rewind the clock for us. Give us your, WordPress bio. You can go back further if you like. Tell us about your childhood, your education, whatever it is that you wanna say.
[00:04:51] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah. We'll start with my childhood trauma
[00:04:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Tell me about your father.
[00:04:57] Kyle Van Deusen: Exactly. So I, worked, for about 15 years as a graphic designer, burnt out on working for somebody else and making them rich and started looking at ways to start my own business and, didn't really have any web experience at that point, but found WordPress and started figuring things out and, naively sold things I shouldn't have like most of us did to get into this business.
And, about a year later, I, was a proud business owner and so that was back in 2017. So it's been a few years now and have grown that business since. So the agency still exists and is still growing. And a couple years into that journey, I actually met somebody, online who did similar work. And we realized that as we started talking more about our business, 'cause we were both doing this on an island, as we started talking more about our business with each other, we realized how much our businesses were growing and we were learning from each other.
I'm like, there's gotta be, if. Two people can do this and multiply, there's probably thousands of people out there like us. Can, we build a community with this ethos? So we started the admin bar, in 2018, I believe. and just tried to get like-minded people in there, agency owners, freelancers, people in the WordPress space, to join in.
And we just share all kinds of things about the struggles of dealing with clients and growing our agency and technical WordPress bits and all those kinds of things. So my time is split between those two things. outta the admin bar, like you said, is, come products and some private communities, some mastermind type groups.
So I spend about 70% of my time running that community and the various things that go along with it, and about 30% of my time, dealing with the agency stuff. So that's it in a nutshell.
[00:06:32] Nathan Wrigley: there's a lot going on in there. Would you say that design is your, big love in this indu, strip out the community bit and the admin bar? If you were to be building a website, do you find yourself drawn more to the kind of like the, laying things out and the color palettes and getting in figma and things like that, rather than the playing with plugins and all of that?
[00:06:49] Kyle Van Deusen: I do enjoy that quite a bit, but because I spent so many years doing that, not that I'm any good at it, but it feels second nature. So I don't have to spend a lot of time on design stuff 'cause I can rinse and repeat a lot of that. So I actually get more into I don't know, maybe two years ago I really, this was far into starting my agency, but we had Elementor and all those kinds of things.
We didn't have to touch code. So a little over two years ago I started diving into like really learning CSS. So now I spend most of my time like trying to come up with cool ideas inside of CSS and code and stuff like that. So that's actually what interests me most now. But that's 'cause I'm further behind on the learning curve of that side of.
[00:07:27] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have a set of tools? You mentioned that you'd been through a bunch of tools and you mentioned dementor and things like that. Do you have a bunch of tools that as of April 2024 when we're recording this, do you have a bunch of tools that are like your go-to your arsenal?
[00:07:42] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah, so I got burnt out on some of the things with Elementor a few years back and I switched over to Oxygen and that kind of blew my mind and I didn't know how it all worked and had to learn a lot. That's about coincidentally the time I started really diving into CSS, that didn't last too long and generate blocks came out with their product generate blocks.
I use generate press theme for many, years and I really wanted to go towards the block side of things and stick a little bit more native to WordPress. so I got very much into generate press and generate blocks, and on the admin bars, YouTube channel, I create a bunch of content around that.
So that's pretty much the only thing I build with these days, and enjoy that quite a bit.
[00:08:20] Nathan Wrigley: There's quite a few, tools which are getting a lot of attention at the moment, aren't there, page builders like bricks and things like that. But I'm a bit like you, I've ended up with generate blocks as my weapon of choice. Just this tiny pallet of five or six blocks that more or less do anything if you're prepared to spend a few minutes figuring out what all the options are, they can really get you 90% of, I almost a pixel perfect design, I would say from Photoshop into, into the block editor.
Yeah, really nice. okay, so 70% of the time over on the admin bar, growing that community and 30% back in the world of web design and dealing with clients, if I was to come to you in a year's time, are you predicting that 30% will still be 30%? Are you focusing more in the future on creating content and all of that?
Or is it building up the agency more? what are you doing at trying to do.
[00:09:11] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah, I definitely, I prefer my time in the admin bar more I would say, than I do dealing with putting out client fires. But for several reasons, I really don't want to give out the agency One is I have a, 80 clients on care plans that bring in a lot of recurring revenue that would seem silly to get rid of.
So I'm not in any hurry to do that. and I also feel like, there's been lots of content creators and community builders and things like that before, and you do, I, do see ones that completely leave the agency world. they're not keeping up with what's going on in agencies today. So part of me wants to just keep my foot in the door of of that world, I feel like it makes me better prepared to help shepherd the community when I'm actually in the trenches doing the same work all the time. So I don't imagine that ratio will change a bunch. Maybe 80 20, I might be 80 20 now. I hadn't done a scientific study on that, but the 80 20 thing is probably good enough for me.
[00:10:05] Nathan Wrigley: and in terms of the admin bar, it began as a Facebook group, and I would, imagine largely the interactions with your community there, this 10,000 strong community is done through the, platform of Facebook. How do you find that? I, personally, have gone through a bit of a journey trying to really remove Facebook from my life because I'm just not the sort of person that is able to resist the algorithm.
You put Facebook in front of me and I'm losing six hours on meaningless scrolling and, there's no way that I could resist it. So I had to step away from my own sanity, really. I we have a Facebook group, if you're in there, you'll realize there's not a lot going on. how do you cope with that?
and also the question of what's your thoughts about relying on Facebook as the platform, which now is generating 70% of your income? Because we've all heard horror stories about waking up one day to realize your Facebook counts been deleted, or something like that.
[00:11:01] Kyle Van Deusen: I appreciate you reminding me to take my anxiety medicine today. yeah. had I get to do this all over again, that's probably not the route I would go, but here we are and getting people to switch at this point is very, difficult. People come to Facebook because it's convenient for them and they're there anyways.
the people who are on Facebook, one way to Help. My reliance on that has been building up an email list. So a few years back we started a newsletter and I try to keep some parody between the group members and the people on the list. So the list is only maybe 8,200 people and there's closing in on 10,000 people in the group.
So a good number of them are on the email list too. So if Facebook died tomorrow at least, I would have a way to contact all those people. And then we have a Patreon ish type thing, that I set up where we have a Slack group, so there's, 150 or so people inside there. much smaller community, but it's, it's behind a paywall.
try to do a little bit of those things. But yeah, I wouldn't advise somebody to build everything on Facebook, but the truth is, we get a lot of people that join the group and find us through Facebook's algorithm. So there's good and bad with it. But,
[00:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: Oh
[00:12:19] Kyle Van Deusen: while everybody's wishing bad things on Mark Zuckerberg, I'm quietly rooting him on and hoping he does
[00:12:24] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's right. I mean it.
[00:12:26] Kyle Van Deusen: my business relies on it.
[00:12:27] Nathan Wrigley: Totally amazing what they give you for, for no money down. Obviously, there's the whole advertising model that they've got and everything, but, you set up a group, you click a few buttons, type in a one field, what's the name of this group gonna be?
And you're off to the races. You've got all the tools there that you need and yeah, absolutely amazing. And obviously if your audience are there and are happy to be there, that's brilliant. okay. Anxiety levels, down. That's good. One of the things that we're gonna talk about, in fact, let's just get stuck into it, is the third, I believe the third survey, that you've done, of WordPress professionals, 1,144 people, took your survey.
Do you wanna just give us the skinny on what the point of the survey is? What, I mean we'll go into all of the individual questions and the answers, but what are you roughly trying to figure out with this?
[00:13:21] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah, so this started back in March of 2022. So as you said, this is the third time we've done this annually. The idea was, we share a lot of stuff inside the group, with each other, but there's some things that, people aren't as open and honest about sharing when their names attached to it.
And everybody will know, like, how much money do you make? so there's kind of some black boxes in our industry, and as you come into this industry, you might not know, I, if you've been working at it for 10 years and you're barely making $25,000 a year, do you know if that's normal or are you way behind or There's no benchmarks there for, so our idea was to create some kind of survey to just take the temperature of the community and find where everybody's at, pricing and revenue and those types of things are part of it.
but we really, WordPress has a survey as well where it's more focused on the platform. Ours was really to focus more on like the freelancer agency side of it and see how people's businesses are really set up, how they're growing, what's changing about them. And the idea was if we did this year over year, we could see some trends and changes, in the industry.
But really it started just out of my own curiosity of okay, I know what I made this year. And I know what my expenses were, but how does that compare to everybody else? Not that it's a competition, but if I'm not doing something I should be, or I'm doing something that maybe is getting me further ahead, that I could be sharing with people, I would really like to know those things.
So it, it really just started out of my own curiosity and it's been interesting to do it year over year and see how these things
[00:14:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the trend bit is the most interesting bit for me at least anyway. the idea of doing one of them and then just shelving that you get some interesting data, but how it rises, how it falls, what the income was two years ago is not the same as what the income is now.
And, so all, of that really fascinating. I, we don't really have a way. Carl, and I were chatting just before we hit record, and we haven't really got a, technique for going through this, but we're just gonna take it piece by piece, talk about some of the interesting data, which is coming out of there.
So should we just crack off? Oh, firstly, I should say, the URL for this. is the admin bar.com all as one word, no hyphens or anything. The admin bar.com/and then the numbers 2024 dash survey, 2024 dash survey. So maybe honestly press pause, go and spend 25 minutes, half an hour digging around and seeing what's there.
And then, come back. Yeah, don't, press pause and don't come back. Don't do that. Don't, be silly. Come back. and when you've come back we'll have things to talk about. should we go right from the top? Let's go through the numbers. How many people, and does your, has your survey grown over the years?
You getting more people doing it?
[00:16:08] Kyle Van Deusen: So yeah, I do wanna give a bit of a disclaimer, but I'll answer your questions first. so the first year we had 321 people fill it. In. The second year we had 667, so it just about doubled. And then this year we had 1,144. So it about doubled again, which is great news. 'cause the more data we get, the better, however.
1,144 people is not everybody, right? This isn't representative of a true scientific study. We have a small sample size here. We also have people from all over the world, in developing countries, people who have just started out that are working solo or part-time, and people who are running a 12 person team and have been doing it for 20 years.
So there's a big mix of people in there. So part of the challenge of, conducting a survey like this, and I'm not like, this isn't my thing, or I don't know a whole bunch about it. Like I said, I was just curious and was the one that did it. I'm not a stats nerd. I barely, Graduated high school because of math.
and, disclaimers there. so representative as a whole, there was 1,144 freelancers and agency owners. On average people had 11 years experience. That's when we average everybody's experience together. 73% of the people who filled in the survey are running their business full time.
the average team size is two. The majority of the people, 475 of them came from the USA that was followed by the uk, which was 134 people. Australia had 83, Canada, 82, and then a whole bunch of countries behind that. as we talk about these numbers today, those are looking at everything as a whole. so those numbers can be skewed, like I said, by the people who've been doing this forever or the people who are just doing this part-time.
So we're, that's the picture that you need to paint in your mind. However, on the page that you mentioned, you have access to the Airtable base, which is how I collect all these, surveys. And you can go in there and actually sort and filter all this information. So one thing that I think is interesting, and that's where I think the gold really is in here, is you could narrow this down to say, okay, I only wanna look at the results from people in the United States like me, who have been doing this for at least five years, like me, who are working solo like me.
And then you can filter out everybody who doesn't meet that criteria and then see how all the numbers break down so you can get some really granular information there. Of course. With only a thousand or so entries, as you start filtering all those things down, you have less and less data, so it becomes a little less reliable.
So all that's just to say, yes, I know these aren't perfect numbers. This isn't, the rule and the definitive answer on all these things, but it does give you an idea and a taste.
[00:18:51] Nathan Wrigley: mTOR. Yeah. by the way, just so that if you carry on this survey for the next 20 years and you receive exponential growth in the way that you have, 1.2 billion. WordPress professionals will
[00:19:06] Kyle Van Deusen: the problem is upgrade my
[00:19:08] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's not good. yeah. Slim it back. Okay, so we've got that intuition.
We know that the data will be slightly skewed in one way. One of the curious things that comes outta that though is the 11 years experience thing. That is, honestly, I just have this intuition that this industry is people who just ebb and flow in, try it for a couple of years. with the tools that we've got these days, give it a go.
Drop out. Don't carry on com, go com, go. But 11 years, that's a career. If you've been doing something for 11 years, you are really committed to it. And obviously that's the average. Presumably there's ones that are significantly higher and ones that are significantly lower.
[00:19:44] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah. And I think part of this depends on like when they decided, they started doing, a lot of people started building websites in high school and then didn't have a business till they were 30. so they might count their experience from when they were in high school, grain of salt, like with all of it.
[00:19:59] Nathan Wrigley: it's skewed very heavily towards the USA, 475 of the participants are based in the US and then the uk, assuming this is the data that I'm reading is, the top to the bottom, uk second 1, 3 4, then Australia, then Canada. and we can read into that what we would, but here's the first data that comes out of it, or at least the first one that you have picked as of interest to us.
72%. So really roughly two, three quarters of people charge less than $5,000 for a website. Did you supply the $5,000 figure and say, are you beyond that or are you below that? Or is that just how it came out when they put in their numbers?
[00:20:40] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah, surveying is so difficult. I didn't wanna do fill in the blank 'cause then it comes, becomes really hard, to parse all those numbers. So I gave people ranges. So the ranges were from a hundred to $999, a thousand to $2,500, 25 to 5,000, 5,000, 10,000, 10,000, 20,000, 20,000, 40,000 and 40,000 plus.
So you had a range to choose from and people just selected, where are their average websites, in those ranges. and then for the headline of this little stat, I ended up pulling out that 72% were less than $5,000. That was based on. 34% of people about, were in the 25 to $5,000 range.
About 26% of people were in the thousand to $2,500 range and 11% of people were in the a hundred to $1,000 range. So adding all those together, I thought that was the more important number there. 5,000 seems like one of those milestones. I know when I started it was like that was way out there.
I was never gonna charge $5,000 for a website, and it feels like one of those humps that you gotta get over, So I thought that was a good number to look at these numbers from.
[00:21:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess if you can, if you are in the region of $5,000 and you can turn around if you've got a real solid pipeline of clients and you can do what, I don't know, 30 of those in a year, so let's say one a week or something. who has that pipeline? I dunno. But that, would be quite an impressive thing, I guess Then you're in the region of what, $60,000 a year?
I don't know what the current cost of living in the US would be, but in the UK I think that would be it. It wouldn't be a, you wouldn't be living a very particularly affluent lifestyle, put it that way.
[00:22:23] Kyle Van Deusen: and you gotta be thinking too, like that's, gross
and all expenses and
[00:22:28] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. So it, for many people, this industry is, quite a tough thing. to make a good living from. and actually it's interesting that your stats, you've got the, so on underneath each of the stats on the, admin bar website, there's like a little accordion that you can click and you can reveal the, the up and down trends and the op trend in the low ballpark number.
So below $5,000, that's trending up, 5,000 to 20,000 is trending down. Curiously, 20 to 40,000 is trending up. So if you're in that little sliver that's, that's a nice place to be. And then there's half of 1% of people are charging 40,000 or more. So it's becoming a harder industry if you are not able to charge a, a decent amount, say 10,000, 20,000 per website.
That's what I'm reading from it anyway.
[00:23:26] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah. And a couple, I don't want to do caveats the whole time, but I've just gotten so much feedback from this. I don't want to give people the wrong impression or feel like I'm trying to tell them one thing that's not true. you can look at numbers so many different ways, right? one thing about the trend lines is we're not necessarily surveying the exact same people every year.
So it's hard to know, is that really going up? Last year we had 600 people. This year we had 1100 people. Some of those are the same, and obviously a lot of them are new. So the trend things are, a, little bit tricky. and the, 20,000 to 40,000 that's going up, I believe that's going up just like a fraction of a percentage point.
So it was up but not a ton. it is interesting though that, and we'll get to this later when we talk about recurring revenue. If you are gonna do projects for less than $5,000 a website, then Yeah. and you're not gonna have recurring revenue as a big part of your agency, then yeah, you're gonna have to crank out a ton of websites to make a living, way more than I wanna build in a
[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you really have to have a solid pipeline of, yeah, 40, 30, 40. it's one a week, probably multiple a week, every week without fail. And, if you're solo, goodness knows how you're gonna manage that, that whole workflow, but Okay. That's fascinating. That's really interesting. So that's the top level stat.
Let's zoom down. Let's go to the next one. 68% of businesses surveyed has a, had a gross revenue of less than, a hundred thousand dollars in 2023. So yeah, any intuitions around that is a hundred thousand dollars. Is that like a, number in USD, which represents, I don't know, a reasonable lifestyle? Or you can get by on that.
What does that look like?
[00:25:08] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah, I've realized now I'm getting old too, and I'm the guy who says I can't believe what things cost
[00:25:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. I can't believe.
[00:25:16] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah. a hundred thousand dollars is traditionally been a big milestone. Like six figures is a pretty decent salary now. It's not as much as it used to be, but I think most people that are making a hundred thousand dollars especially, as, like a salary would feel they're doing just fine.
Now, this is. Top end gross revenue. This is not profit. and we gotta remember that this is an average of people who have two people on staff. maybe we say our business don't have, our businesses don't have a lot of expenses. Let's say 25%. So now we're down to 75% and you're gonna have to share some of this with the people you employ.
so there's another, so yeah, you're probably back at 68% of these people making less than $50,000 a year, which we'll get into that here in a second. because we did ask that question, but a hundred thousand dollars was like one of those first milestones I got in my agency of Okay. Now I feel like things are going okay because I, I did my first $100,000 in a year.
So it's a bit arbitrary. Like the last question, people's answers were a dropdown with different ranges, zero to 50, 50 to a hundred, to 150, and so on. so you can see the different ranges. People fall in, The biggest, percentage was 45% of people were in the zero to $50,000 gross revenue range, which I just have to imagine are people new to the industry.
because if those people with 11 years of experience are making less than $50,000, I'm gonna assume this is a side
job.
[00:26:48] Nathan Wrigley: unless I guess geography might play a part, if you are based in a different part of the world where the cost of everything is a, is cheaper, that I guess that could represent a, decent income. But yeah, if we're just basing off US dollars, which I suppose, most of us are.
Yeah,
[00:27:07] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah, and we, like I said, you can go into that Airtable and drill all that down and find out exactly where all these people are. But if we're just talking about kind of the average in the survey, the top countries where the us, uk, Australia, and Canada and all those are gonna have a higher cost of living compared to, developing nations.
[00:27:23] Nathan Wrigley: So the next one is very much tied to it's, it is based around this a hundred thousand dollars thing. Again, only this time we're flipping it and we're saying more than, and is this, so you've used different language here. You've said make more than previously. The previous question was how to gross revenue of this means this next question is, makes more than, is that after?
Is that net? Is that profit? so it's 10, less than 10% of freelancers, agency owners make $100,000 per year. So over to you for that.
[00:27:53] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah. So if you look at the, I just realized now I have a mistake now that I explained this. The little yellow eyebrow text above the bigger text on there shows the question I asked in the survey. so the last question we talked about was your agency's total revenue for the year. This question now is how much did you pay yourself in 2023?
So this is assuming you're a freelancer or an agency owner, and you get to decide your own salary based on that. How much did you pay yourself? this is a new question we hadn't asked before. In the past, we asked like that gross revenue question and then. Your profit margin, to try to get at this answer, but people's math was all over the place and they were unreliable results.
so this year we decided just to go straight at it and ask, how much money did you put in your own pocket this year? And so that breakdown was 41% was less than 20,000. 29% was between 29 and 50,000. 19% was between 50,000 and a hundred thousand. And then we had 6.9% paying themselves between a hundred thousand and 200,000 and just two, 2.7199999999999998% paying themselves more than $200,000.
Now, people can answer this question in different ways. at least here in the states, a lot of people want to pay themselves less, on paper because then they pay less taxes and then they take dividends and things like that. So hopefully, on average we got a guesstimate of how much money goes into your wallet.
But I just thought it was interesting to see, what's typical for somebody to pay themselves to be a freelancer or agency
[00:29:24] Nathan Wrigley: That is really interesting as well because it definitely skews towards the lower end of, so for example, over $200,000 is not 3%, 2.7%. the combined over a hundred is just shy of 10%, nine point something. and then the vast majority, so 90% is 99,999 or less with a full 41% in the category of 19,000 or 20,000 or less.
So again, there's loads of caveats depending on how you decide to pay yourself and the structure of your business and what have you. But the data that's coming out of there is that there's a, this is an industry where a, lot of people are. Struggling to make ends meet, I would imagine.
[00:30:14] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah, and we'll see that later in the survey too. I ask about people's biggest challenges, but this number did surprise me that it was on the lower end. and I don't want to say that to throw shade at anybody or anything like that. I want all of our industry to thrive. I want us to all make more money.
Now, not everybody does this to make money. There are people in here that work full time, but their spouse brings in money and they don't, have to do this to make a living. So there's all kinds of different ways of looking at this. Or, for some people, I, have three young kids. So the other thing that's very important besides money is time to be able to spend with them and take them to their million and a half activities every week.
so there's lots of different, benefits we get from running our own business, but the truth is we have to make money to live, right? So it's an interesting thing to look at. It would be interesting to talk to all these people and find out, are they in the less than 20,000 and trying to get more, or is that a comfortable number for them?
And this survey doesn't really tell us those numbers, but it's still interesting to look
[00:31:15] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, my head is going in all sorts of directions from that question. E, especially around the ease of making a website nowadays. the tools that we've got in the WordPress space are just so breathtakingly easy in so many cases to, to put something out there which is half decent and, there's loads of educational material out there so that you can get yourself up to speed doing something which is credible fairly quickly.
And obviously, when something is difficult, you can command a higher salary. When something is easier, you clearly can't. And yeah, that's just where my head went. the ease of building websites with WordPress. definitely, I presume driving the cost down a little bit of what you can actually charge.
Okay? Next one. th have I got this right? Is it the next one? Yes. around 32% of freelancers or agency owners make the majority of their income from recurring revenue. So this is a, this is over the last decade, 15 years has become such an integral part of everybody's business and getting this strategy right.
You mentioned, it's a big part of what you are doing. getting this right is really important. 32%, making it the majority of their income. Okay, over to you.
[00:32:32] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah. to me that's such a huge positive in this survey. where I might have been a little bit. Saddened to see the overall revenue numbers. I'm really excited to see how many people are making a majority of their income from, recurring revenue. So the, question we ask people is, what percentage of your revenue is from recurring revenue sources?
And then we just gave them some percentage breakdowns there to choose from. For me, the recurring revenue has been about, not about raising the roof of how much I can make with my agency, but raising the floor of how little I could make if I didn't do anything new. You know what I mean? Anytime you start a new business, the, thing you worry about is the ups and downs, and you got bills to pay and mouths to feed and all those kinds of things.
And there's just risk associated with that. That's, it's not the same level of risk you have when you take a salary job. So one way to mitigate that risk is to get a lot of recurring revenue in place. So at a minimum, you bring in X amount of dollars. So my goal starting out was always I wanna get my recurring revenue to cover my minimum bills I have, that are my responsibility in the family, right?
So if we need to pay the mortgage and the utility bills and all that, if I could get my recurring revenue to cover all those things, and then project work one-off things, were all gravy. On top of that, I feel like I'd be in a pretty good spot. And I think there's a lot of people aiming to do the same, which I think is definitely the best place to be in.
Through the admin bar and then through the mastermind groups, that I run. I think the majority of people who leave this industry are burnout or decide, they couldn't make it work. One thing most of 'em have in common is there was not enough recurring revenue there, and they were just on that rollercoaster of gotta hustle every month to bring in enough money, and that's hard to sustain over a long
[00:34:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, much more hand to mouth. This is, yeah, this is the golden goose, isn't it? If you can crack this one and make this work for you. So yeah, that's fascinating and, really nice that a lot of people are managing to put that into place. okay, let's move on. So I'm reading the results. You are ending up reading the questions, so let's keep going with that.
the average hourly rate for anyone surveyed is $94 an hour, which is $2 lower than last year. I guess obviously if you're into building projects, this is gonna be significant. If you can put the recurring revenue in, it probably matters less. Again, I don't live in North America, I don't know what that means, but if, you could put a 40 hour week in at that rate, I'm sure that would be okay.
But it's probably not the story for most people. I imagine there's an
[00:35:10] Kyle Van Deusen: The reality of hourly billing is you can't bill every hour. You're actually working, right? I think most of us try to avoid hourly billing. Most of the people I talk to anyways, hourly billing is not the, focus of the way they wanna charge things. But in my experience, you end up billing some things hourly or basing some kind of.
Fixed price based on how long it's gonna take you. Like I'm not into trading time for money as much as I can avoid it, but at some point you do have to relate how much something costs back to how much time it's gonna take at some point. So this was just to get a sense of what is an average hourly rate?
We do have this come up in the group fairly often. my client asked me, how much this was gonna take. I told 'em it would take two or three hours. How much do you charge per hour? So to get a sense of where the industry is at, sounds like about a hundred dollars an hour is where people are at.
Came out to 94. Last year it was at 96, which are, fairly close in there, but I would say, a hundred is average. So what I've told some of the people in my mastermind groups is, if you think you only do average work, then charge a hundred dollars. But if you think you're above average, and I know that they are, they need to be charging above average prices.
So if your prices are below a hundred dollars and you're. In the uk, Australia, United States, Canada. I would definitely encourage you to look at that and see, that, that's the average of what people are charging and you're probably doing better than average work, so you should probably charge accordingly.
[00:36:35] Nathan Wrigley: Kind of interesting thing there though, is also what the market can bear. So if you are, I don't know, a plumber and you need a website, you're probably gonna be going in with an intuition of, okay, that's, what it costs. I've had a bunch of quotes in, it's all coming out around there and it's not.
It's not minimum wage, put it that way. And, I know it's hard to charge 40 hours a week at that rate, but it is not minimum wage. So your skillset is valued. but whether or not you can find that is, is obviously another question. Okay. This next one is, oh. This was the one that stuck out for me, actually.
and not necessarily for the right reasons. I, am not gonna pretend like I've got this piece of the jigsaw puzzle, in place in everything that I do because I don't, it's the accessibility question. So nearly one 10th of, and actually it's interesting that you've chose this bit of data 'cause it really does scream, doesn't it?
nearly one 10th of freelancers and agencies don't consider accessibility. And here's the key phrase at all, when building a website. So it's not to say that lots of websites aren't accessible, it's just that one out of 10 projects by the freelancers that you surveyed, just it. Not even coming onto the radar.
It's just not a thing. I dunno if you've got any commentary on this,
[00:37:52] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah, so obviously I also have to present this information in a way that makes it intriguing and makes it easy for people to talk about. I could have, just as easily said, 90% of people do
[00:38:03] Nathan Wrigley: right,
[00:38:05] Kyle Van Deusen: that headline isn't, doesn't, test as well. I don't think so. I, decided to go the other way.
I think this one is, this one's really hard to survey too. so I gave people three choices. They don't consider accessibility at all. They strive for best practices, we'll come back to that. Or they adhere to WCAG GA guidelines. adhering to WCAG guidelines is fairly straightforward in black and white.
We only had about 9.31% of people that do that. we had 9.4% of people who don't consider it at all. So either end of the spectrum, I know you guys brought this up on the, weekly show and somebody mentioned it was the perfect bell curve
[00:38:42] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. That's right.
[00:38:43] Kyle Van Deusen: the way, the way it works out.
see, I do listen every week.
[00:38:47] Nathan Wrigley: Thank
[00:38:49] Kyle Van Deusen: so the mushy part in the middle is where it's hard strive for best practices. 81% of people are striving for best practices. I can tell you when I go to 81% of websites, it doesn't look like they were striving for best practices. But it is encouraging to look at these numbers, especially over time and see what's going up and what's going down and striving for best practices going up and don't consider accessibility at all is going down.
And that's the trend we want. We want more people paying attention to it. Like you, I'm not an expert at this. I get things wrong in every single build. What I want to encourage and what I'm trying to do myself is exercise the muscle of, before I hit publish, did I question? The accessibility of everything I just edited or created on this page.
Just like we used to have to remember, oh yeah, I need to go check if it looks good on tablet and mobile, right? You would just be hitting publish and then remember to go do that. I want people to build that same muscle with accessibility before you hit publish. Let's at least ask the question, even if you don't get it perfect, if you got it 10% better, that's absolutely an improvement.
So I, I just like to see that this number's going up over time, that people are at least trying. I think as laws are coming into effect, both in Europe and eventually here in the states as well, adhering to guidelines is gonna be become more popular. I think, the agencies that thrive are probably gonna be the ones that actually do that and understand those guidelines and how to adhere to them.
So it's, it'll be interesting to see how that number changes once we have 1.2 billion people answering the
[00:40:18] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. 20 years from now. but you're right. I think the ambulance chasing lawyers. That are going to start to become more and more prevalent because there will be low hanging fruit all over the place. they'll make this an imperative. And the other thing to say is it's not a, it's not, a hundred percent on nothing.
This bit in the middle of the bell curve where you've done what you can with the skills that you've got and the budget available. I think that's gonna become a bigger piece of the pie. But yeah, interesting and slightly alarming, statistic of a 10th doing nothing at all. And I guess maybe that speaks to the people that are coming into the industry.
picking up WordPress page builders don't really know that's even a thing. It's certainly something that you can avoid. You don't have to do it, you probably do in law, in order to press publish, there's no requirement for you to fill any of that kinda stuff out. yeah.
Okay. That will
[00:41:10] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah, and I think when I started this seven years ago, like nobody was talking about accessibility and now you have a conversation about accessibility all the time. We did a results of. Group call, with some people, when I revealed these results and one of the people on the call was Miriam from Elementor and she was talking about some of the improvements Elementor has been doing in accessibility.
And what's amazing about that is like when Elementor, who publish it, who helps run millions of websites, when they do an accessibility update, that immediately improves the accessibility of millions of websites at a time. So it's not just on us as freelancers and developers, obviously we need to be doing it, but we need to be having these conversations and bringing these things up.
And if, nothing else from this question. Now I've had about five different conversations with people about accessibility. Hopefully that at least makes, people think about it and talk about it more. And may we expect more out of the tools we have as
[00:42:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Good point. there's an SEO one here, 96%. So almost the full Monty of respondents offer basic or thorough, SEO. So in the same way that nobody was talking about accessibility 10 years ago, if you go back 20 years ago, nobody was talking about SEO 'cause, it was like Yahoo Index and things like that.
There was no Google, there was no way of gaming Google or anything like that. Now it's just it's everything. You can't, not SEO your site, how, could you possibly have a site that you shipped where the client hasn't come and bludgeoned you about, oh, we're gonna do well in Google. And so this is maybe where the, accessibility debate will end up in a few years time.
But, so basically everybody's given it a go.
[00:42:47] Kyle Van Deusen: Yep. and I could almost probably get rid of this question next year. We'll see. But I think the interesting part about this is that there's so many disciplines within our discipline, especially for people like me who are solo. And I know a lot of your audiences as well. Like you have to think about copywriting and accessibility and design and development.
And SEO, there's a lot of disciplines that go into this. There are people who, their entire job is just SEO. So the fact that you're supposed to be keeping up with this is really difficult. But it's interesting for, I think for new people that are coming in the industry to see Okay. You pretty much are gonna have to offer some sort of accessibility or SEO services through your website builds to just keep up with the standards of what the industry is doing.
So it's basically everyone at this
point.
[00:43:31] Nathan Wrigley: that's a really in interesting point that you just made about the, fact that the industry is made up of lots of little sub industries. So SEO is a thing. You could totally do that as a job. O obviously, there's limited work, but you could forge partnerships and I'm sure work with agencies and what have you.
and accessibility. I've got the feeling that in a few years time there will be people, there already are, but there'll be more and more people who that's their thing, consultancy work and, helping other agencies and freelancers out with that side of things. okay. The future is bright in that sense.
Okay, and then we've got one which is like glowing. and it's glowing because I guess you find this one particularly interesting. without paid discovery, only 12% average $5,000 or more per project with it, 68% do, I'm struggling to pause that in my head. can you, help me out?
[00:44:26] Kyle Van Deusen: I struggled writing this, I even got checked VT to help me and this is the shit I end up with. the idea was, do you offer paid discovery? So are you charging clients to go through a discovery process? We ended up with the answer being 45% of people never do. 10% always do, and 44% sometimes do. so what do we get out of that?
So this is one of the questions here where just seeing the results of who doesn't, who sometimes doesn't really tell us a whole lot other than only 10% of people are always charging for discovery. However, one of the cool things that you can do is cross reference some of these results with other results in the survey.
So that's what I did to get this top line headline, which you read and makes no sense and I'm gonna try to explain now.
[00:45:11] Nathan Wrigley: I didn't mean it like that.
[00:45:12] Kyle Van Deusen: no, I, struggled with this one too, so I'm glad you pointed out. Maybe I can workshop this. so basically what I did is I went back through and filtered out the survey and said, okay, of those people who never charge discovery, what percentage charge $5,000 or less per project.
So if you don't charge for discovery, there was only 12% of people who charged, more than $5,000
[00:45:34] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I get it. Okay. Okay.
[00:45:36] Kyle Van Deusen: majority of people who don't do discovery are charging less than 5,000. Then I flip flopped that and said, okay, now I only wanna see the results of people who always charge discovery.
And that average project price of $5,000 or more went up to 68% from 12% to 68%. So what I'm trying to infer with that is that the people who are charging for discovery are on average, charging a lot more for websites. So there, there are reasons for this, right? So what that top line headline says is if you charge for websites, there's a 68%, or sorry, if you charge for discovery sessions, there's a 68% chance you're gonna charge $5,000 or more for a website.
But if you don't, there's only a 12% chance you'll be able to charge $5,000 or more now.
[00:46:22] Nathan Wrigley: that is a really interesting statistic. And obviously, statistics, easy for you to say Nathan. but the, that is fascinating. there's a real credible line between doing something which everybody could do going into an office or what have you, and doing discovery with them, doing it on Zoom, whatever.
And the presumed credibility or whatever it is that, that, that, brings in Trane, that enables you to pitch a higher rate. the, perceived credibility, whatever it is that comes off the back of that is really important. And they're not just slight differences. And again, the data is readable in all sorts of ways, but from 12% to 68%, that is a giant difference.
So everybody, I'm guessing your advice would be do discovery.
[00:47:13] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah, so it's been transformational for my business and the reason I, made this answer glow on the page was because it's something we've talked about quite a bit inside the admin bar. it's helped me tremendously, and I think there's a couple reasons why this number changes so much with the people who do and who don't.
One if, and the point I would like to get across to people is when you do discovery and you charge for it, you're much more thorough about doing it than when you do discovery and you don't charge it for it because now you feel like you owe them to do a really good job. And when you do a really thorough job at discovery, you're just gonna find that there's more to the project than you thought there
[00:47:51] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, boom. That's
[00:47:52] Kyle Van Deusen: And chances are, you're gonna charge more for all that work because now you've spelled everything out in great detail. And now all those things need to be accounted for. So I think just naturally you're gonna charge more. I also think that. Skewing this number is the people who are charging for discovery are probably further along in their business.
People probably don't do that in their first year, so the people that are further along are also probably charging more. So there's some of that mixed in it as well. but I know from my personal anecdote, so we'll say a survey of one, as soon as I started charging for discovery, I started charging a lot more for websites too.
And I think the numbers back up my experience on that as
[00:48:32] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Yeah. That whole discovery process does teach you a lot, not only about your, business and the kind of things that you want to ask, but about yourself, teaches you what, how good you are at getting in a room and, getting information outta people who, in some cases are just bored rigid and don't want to have anything to do with the website, but it's their job and you've gotta the stuff out of them.
Fascinating. Okay, so let's move on. we'll do this question here. we're moving into sort of like products in the WordPress space a little bit now. The first one is BrickX Bricks is a page builder. It's grown enormously in popularity over the last couple of years, and, according to the survey, bricks was the only page builder to increase its numbers over the last year racking in 32% of the total.
Do you have an intuition that's some skew with the audience that you've got in your group? Is there like a, is there just some sort of general love of bricks in the community that you have or.
[00:49:26] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah. So I think there's some of that. Now, just going back, three years ago when we first did the survey, Brix was really, new. They came in at 0.3%. basically nothing. Last year when we did this, they had rose to, and I'm sorry, I didn't have all this pulled up. they had rose from 0.3% to 12.4% and then this year up to 32%.
So they are ascending no matter how we slice up this data. This obviously does not go to the point of which Page Builder has the most users or has the most websites on the web. those numbers are completely different. This is the way this, question was phrased was, which page builder do you currently prefer?
And then so people picked. Now I have a bunch of Elementor sites that I've built and that I support and that are still online, but I don't use Elementor. It's not my preferred page builder at this point. So part of what this question is asking is not necessarily which page builder is the most popular.
It's which Page builder are most, are people most enthusiastic about today. so we can see that Elementor numbers went down. That doesn't surprise me based on. The conversations I have in our community elements are still huge. It still dwarfs bricks in an amount of users and amount of websites, but there's a lot more conversation today in our industry about bricks as there is Elementor.
so the numbers were partially skewed because this survey got picked up by somebody in our group that went and shared it in the bricks Facebook group. And a lot of people, in BrickX then wanted to go fill this out to support their page builder. Now, people who just filled in the survey and answered one or two questions, I deleted all those submissions because I felt like there was an obvious agenda to that.
So I tried to protect against that a bit. And when this was shared in the Brix community, there was probably a couple dozen submissions that just chose Brix and nothing else in the survey. So I filter those out. However, this was skewed by the fact that this was shared in that large community. However, I. There's lots of Elementor users and people who work at Elementor in our community that knew I was doing the survey and they didn't bother to share it in the Elementor group. Which goes back to me to say a little bit about the enthusiasm of this. So people are, that are using bricks and prefer it today are more enthusiastic about it than people who are using Elementor.
[00:51:49] Nathan Wrigley: is shiny.
[00:51:50] Kyle Van Deusen: that's something.
[00:51:51] Nathan Wrigley: it's shiny. It's very shiny. And okay, so it goes like this. BrickX is at the top, in the survey that you've got followed by blocks. no sweet in particular, just blocks. which was just over, sorry, just under 20%. And then we go down, element or dvy, beaver builder.
Oxygen. The interesting thing for me there. Is a, that bricks is at the top and that rises meteoric and you honestly, you've gotta b living under a rock to have not noticed the conversation about it. It is very, popular. But also that Elementor is, is lower than blocks in that survey. I honestly would've thought that blocks would've been like a, distant relation there, but Okay.
But it's down from the previous year. But maybe that's because Brix is eating its lunch in that audience. Okay. So let's talk about generate blocks. 50% of respondents who build with the blocks they're using generate blocks. And again, have you got any intuitions about that? We spoke and we actually talked about generate blocks just a moment ago.
So do you think there's some skew there?
[00:52:51] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah, so I definitely do now. so in the last question, if somebody chose, blocks as their preferred page builder, they got a second question that said, okay, which block package do you use? now I have probably like 200 videos on YouTube of me talking about generate blocks, and then those people come to our community.
I've definitely skewed these numbers by the fact that a lot of people know me for generate blocks and then filled in this survey. What I thought was interesting here, again, this isn't indicative of how many active installs, 'cause I think Cadence will beat all of these, by a wide margin. so this, to me that the only interesting thing about this was it was cadence and generate blocks in the lead and everything else in a real distant, we went from 50% with generate blocks, 32% with cadence, and then the next highest was spectra with 4%.
Now I think Spectra has more installs than generate blocks does. and there are reasons for that as well. But, just an interesting tidbit. I don't think there's a ton to read into this other than, I like seeing generate blocks do well,
[00:53:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Woohoo. Yeah. We love Tom. hooray, Tom. okay, let's move on then. referrals remain the most popular way for agencies to source leads with 71% of respondents listing it as the number one lead source. you've, that I'm guessing I could have actually made that number up myself. I probably would've even put it a bit higher, but there we go.
71%, as the number one source. Be nice to your clients, in other words, and get them to do advertising for you when you finish the project. anything to add?
[00:54:33] Kyle Van Deusen: yeah, I think some people might look at this and think, I don't wanna say anything bad about referrals. Referrals are great. They're way easier to sell 'cause you've already got, a referral. Somebody's already said something great about you, but I do worry about the putting all your eggs in one basket and that can be there.
There's also like a, there's a division in referrals between. Proactive and reactive, right? So some referrals are just, you do a good job for your client and your client goes out and mentions you to a friend and that's great, but you didn't really do anything other than provide a good service, which is important.
But there's a difference between doing that and being proactive, like setting up some kind of referral program or asking for referrals or, one thing we talk about in, in some content is like putting a little PS in your email saying you're looking for referrals. There's some proactive things you can do that I think could boost those numbers better.
but it's interesting to see. The other options were networking organic slash search paid ads and cold calling and networking got 15% but nothing else broke double digits.
[00:55:36] Nathan Wrigley: Isn't that interesting though, that, the networking, and everything below that was nowhere near the, the combination of every other way of getting clients just didn't even come close. So I would've thought that. Paid ads would've been a, reasonably successful way of doing it. Cold calling.
how many Facebook videos or YouTube videos have you seen with, the great claims of we've got this great way of making cold calling a thing which can spin revenue into your business? it looks like it's not working in this industry. Naught 0.8%. So less than 1% of people, having success with cold calling.
but I think you're right. I think that's a really good point about not putting all your eggs in one basket, but it does seem to be successful. I guess it depends where, which part of the world you live in as well. Like where I am, the physical location where I live, it's very community driven. and that really does work.
Brian knows Jane and Jane knows John, and John knows Brian again. And there's this virtuous cycle that you tell one person and all of a sudden a hundred people. No, it's very effective.
[00:56:46] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah, I think that the danger in that though is you typically get referrals for people who are like your existing clients, right? So your clients hang out with people like them in the same, economic class and things like that. So if you are trying to scale up and get bigger and better clients, that's harder to do through referral marketing than you would think, 'cause you'll end up with a lot of the same types of clients. Sometimes that can be great 'cause you wanna stay in a niche or an industry or whatever that may be. But there can also be some challenges with that too. So I don't think it's necessarily a good or a bad thing, but it's something that you should probably be aware of and maybe think about having a second source of leads that does something
[00:57:24] Nathan Wrigley: my, my advice would be hire a Ferrari and some bling jewelry and take a picture of you hanging out in front of a private jet that's gonna work.
[00:57:33] Kyle Van Deusen: that's always
[00:57:33] Nathan Wrigley: that's the way to do it. Okay. moving on. We're gonna have to whisk through a few of these, I think really, 'cause we're nearly at the hour mark and we've got loads to go.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna just gonna hand it over. we've got about halfway through all the questions. You've got a flavor of what this survey is. Dear listener. Are there any that we haven't got to, that you think are worth pulling out that would be worth exploring for the next few minutes?
[00:57:55] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah. So I, think two we could, probably land on and then tease everybody. They can go see the rest of these if they go to the admin bar.com/ 22 4 survey.
[00:58:04] Nathan Wrigley: nicely done.
[00:58:06] Kyle Van Deusen: I've done this before. Yes. so do you have a well-defined niche or audience? So we had, 40% say no, 38% say somewhat and 21% say yes. I did.
Similarly to how I did on the discovery question to ask like, how does this change how much money you make? I. 28% of agencies without a niche got over a hundred thousand dollars while 41% with a niche got over a hundred thousand dollars. So that was my way of showing that having a niche might make you more likely to make more money, which anecdotally, I believe is true and I've seen in my own agency and the numbers did back that up.
But again, we can look at these numbers a bunch of different ways. but if you go and break this up, the people who have a niche end up making more money than the people who don't have a niche. And that's just what the numbers bear out.
[00:58:55] Nathan Wrigley: Just apropos of nothing, and I'm sure you know this, we don't say niche in the uk. We say niche
[00:59:02] Kyle Van Deusen: I, apologize. I should have said niche. I should have known my audience here.
[00:59:06] Nathan Wrigley: Kyle Niche.
[00:59:07] Kyle Van Deusen: You cannot take the out of me. I.
[00:59:10] Nathan Wrigley: That's, yeah, it's one of those words where every time I hear it, it take, I have to pause. What is that? Oh yeah, that's this one. For some reason it just doesn't get into my head. Okay. So that's a nice one. Let's do a couple more or one more, whatever it is that you've got.
[00:59:24] Kyle Van Deusen: I, have so many British that I follow that talks about the state in which I don't wanna say it out loud to influence here, the state in which the next word camp us is gonna be located in Portland.
[00:59:35] Nathan Wrigley: Oregon.
[00:59:36] Kyle Van Deusen: Okay. See? You nailed it. He says, Reagan, and it just blows my mind every time. I'm
[00:59:41] Nathan Wrigley: Is he from the uk? No, We say, oregano, the spice, the herb, and you say oregano. I think we say oregano, but we say or as well.
[00:59:51] Kyle Van Deusen: See, I say it like you just to be fancy when I'm in the kitchen, If, we put on a British accent, people just think we're fancy. there were a couple questions here about AI tools, which was, this was the first year we were able to do that. 'cause last year when we did the survey chat, GBT was just really hitting the scene, which is interesting.
Doesn't tell us a lot. Now, other than 56% of people are paying for an AI tool, 53% of people said that they're now using an AI tool for something that they used to pay a human to do, which is exciting and a little scary, depending how you wanna look at it. we'll see how those numbers change in the coming years.
I don't know, we can draw
[01:00:28] Nathan Wrigley: I have a prediction for you, Carl. They're going way up.
[01:00:32] Kyle Van Deusen: Yeah. Yeah.
[01:00:32] Nathan Wrigley: The AI tools usage is just, I, they're just getting better at an exponential rate, aren't they? And the idea that you can do something by clicking a button that used to take you ages. So a, good example is the show notes for this. I drop it, drop the audio into, an app, and it just gets 99% of the words right?
It'll get niche wrong, but,
[01:00:52] Kyle Van Deusen: I was gonna say can't wait. See how out? That little bit of
[01:00:54] Nathan Wrigley: and Oregon, it'll get that wrong, but in most cases it gets it right. And a couple of years ago that just didn't exist. You had to type it all out. And obviously, in, in this line of work, which is completely aligned to what AI will be good at, because it's gonna be good at doing things that are based on a computer.
this'll be interesting and I do foresee the day where you just talk to your website. So as a graphic designer, the other red, move it over a bit. Gimme a cat. No, not that cat. A ginger cat. Okay, great. Perfect. Now check if it's responsive, show me it in this orientation. Anyway, I could go on. I, I think it's gonna be brilliant and terrifying in equal measure.
[01:01:35] Kyle Van Deusen: That's exactly how I feel about it. Scared and excited. the last one I just wanna make sure we talked about was, I asked the question, what challenges are you currently facing? And then I gave people a big list of questions. Funny enough, I had chat, GBT help me with, possible things people might be struggling with.
so a lot of these were just based on things I hear in our community, things I personally struggle with. And then, chat gt filled in some of the gaps. It was also had the ability for people to fill in their own answers, which I don't think was completely intuitive 'cause not many people did. but what I thought was interesting, this was the first time we asked this question.
had I guessed before I, I should have had a hypothesis on all these. I would've said not enough work would be the biggest
challenge,
[01:02:19] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that was, that would've been where I would've gone. Yeah. Yeah.
[01:02:22] Kyle Van Deusen: It actually came in second behind work-life balance, which is very interesting. This was a, you could answer multiple things in here. You didn't have to just pick one.
It's all that apply to you. Work-life balance is definitely a huge struggle of mine, and I'm in good company with 30, 31% of people listing that as a challenge. And, I thought that was pretty interesting. It's not something we talk about a ton in our industry that I listen to your podcast, I listen to other podcasts.
I'm in our community that has, 30 posts a day and we just don't talk about work-life balance being a huge struggle. but silently, 31% of people are really struggling with that, which is interesting.
[01:03:03] Nathan Wrigley: That really is interesting. Not enough work coming in second, keeping up with technology. That's interesting as well. We live in a, in an industry which is changing rapidly. I imagine there's industries which are changing more rapidly, but we, you have to keep up if you are, I don't know if you're a plumber or something, I'm guessing there's not many innovations happening each year that you need to be aware of.
Whereas we've
[01:03:24] Kyle Van Deusen: we, me and you talked about this before you hit record. We were talking about, I was asking you if you were still doing any agency work and, you said that you weren't, and you said there's young people that are keeping up with all these things, so to me that kind of sounds like the keeping up with technology part of it was probably part of the reason you're not doing
[01:03:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it, I think it is a, it's a struggle and I, think when you throw a AI. Into the mix. The, ability for the technology to get away from us is gonna be interesting. Be really interesting to see how that goes. Okay, oh, exactly. More or less, exactly on the hour mark, we, we've gone through, I would say we went through about 55% of the questions, something like that.
okay, so as Kyle said, you can find [email protected] slash 2024. They're numbers, by the way, dash survey.
I'll put the link in the show notes and you'll be able to do, you'll be able to do a quick search for it on Google. I'm sure. The, other thing to say is, as Kyle did say, another interesting thing to do with this data is not just read what Kyle has extrapolated from it, but you can actually go find the air table where all of the data is newly sort and go knots.
Find something out for yourself. There might be some little chestnut in there that has yet to be discovered. Kyle, anything else you wanna add before we knock it on the head?
[01:04:38] Kyle Van Deusen: No, that's, it. I really appreciate you having me on here and being able to share about this. It's, it's a little bit nerdy, but it's fun and, I hope people will, if they're interested in this, go check out the database. the survey's completely anonymous and then everything that I collect from it is completely open.
Anybody can do anything they want with it. I think one, one thing people are worried about is having an agenda. I have no agenda other than this just fascinates me and I just wanna make sure everybody knows it's completely open for anybody to take and do what they want with it. I have heard from a couple big WordPress agency, companies in our space, hosting type companies, things like that.
They actually, have meetings about this data every year, which is, blows my mind.
[01:05:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's mind blowing. Kyle Van Deusen, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.
[01:05:25] Kyle Van Deusen: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
[01:05:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's all I've got for you today. I really hope that you enjoyed that. If you've got any comments about that, head to WP Builds.com and search for episode number 384. And leave us a comment there. I would really appreciate it.
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Okay. That truly is all I've got time for. I hope that you enjoyed it.
We'll see you for the this week in WordPress show. Coming up on Monday 2:00 PM. UK time. WP Builds.com forward slash live.
If not, we'll be back in your podcast player of choice next Thursday for an interview episode, just like this one.
Okay. Here comes some cheesy music. I'm going to say stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
