[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You have reached episode number 399, entitled Joost de Valk talks about Progress Planner, his new website productivity tool. It was published on Thursday, the 21st of November, 2024.
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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well we have Joost the person, not the company, but he was the person that started the company, but now he's no longer with the company. It's very complicated, but Joost de Valk is talking to us today about his new project.
It's called Progress Planner. And it's a really fun, interesting way, of helping you or possibly your clients keep your website updated.
Joost describes it as a bit of a hybrid between between, well Fitbit for websites and Duolingo. Gamification put into the, well, let's be honest, drudgery of keeping websites up to date.
It could be something that you use. It could be something that your clients use. But Joost today talks about how it works, why he built it, who it's for and all of the different fun bits and pieces inside. It's really interesting. And I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Joost de Valk. How you doing Joost?
[00:05:02] Joost de Valk: I'm very good. Thank you for having me.
[00:05:04] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what? It's so difficult for me to say the word Joost and not think of the Y-O-A-S-T thing, but you're Joost, you are the Joost from Yoast, but now not from Yoast. It makes life tricky.
[00:05:16] Joost de Valk: It does. can you imagine what it's like when it's still your company and people are saying that word, the whole bloody day. And you can't really do away with the trigger. Like when people say your name, you will respond, whatever happens. So that, yeah, it drove me mad.
[00:05:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thankfully, your name is not Progress planner. so nobody's gonna be saying that out loud. because that's what we're gonna talk about today. It's an exciting new thing. Honestly, this is, I. Totally different from anything we've ever mentioned before. There is no chance that you've come across a plugin that kind of has this interaction with the real world.
You've got actual things to hold in your hand that work with the plugin, things to write on it. It's just. Interesting. So it's called progress planner. I guess the prob the thing to do, right at the top is to say that you've captured the perfect URL. congratulations for that. I dunno if that was a tricky thing or not, but, if you head to progress planner.com, no hyphens or anything.
In fact, really pause this. Go to progress planner.com, poke around. You'll have a much better understanding when you come back. Progress planner.com. And then come back, and resume the podcast and you'll know what we're talking about. So it's, the idea I
think could be summed up in a few words. It's to destroy procrastination, right?
[00:06:43] Joost de Valk: Yeah, I, think about it as a bit of a Fitbit for your website,
[00:06:50] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,
[00:06:52] Joost de Valk: with sprinkles of Duolingo on it in terms of gamification. yeah, the general I idea is people don't maintain their websites.
[00:07:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.
[00:07:09] Joost de Valk: we, wanted to, figure out a way to help people do that more easily and to also make it a bit more fun so that the boring tasks of updating plugins and updating pages that really need to be updated, get a bit of a fun effect to them.
And, that's what we're working on. It's still very early days. We're, as we record this, we'll have our, launch day, tomorrow and on which we will take off the beta label from the plugin. It's actually working quite well, so you can just install it. and we are planning our first progress plan pro release because of course, money needs to be made as well.
But, yeah, it is, the general goal is just to help people build better websites and maintain their websites better. one thing we see, especially I've seen a lot at a lot of hosts, is that people will build a website, set up the pages, et cetera, and then not come back to it for years. is why we all go to websites when we are, when we want to go to a restaurant or to the barber or whatever it is that you want to go to, and the website's not up to date.
[00:08:29] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, geo Cities, man. It's like still from the 1980s or something. yeah. Restaurants seem to be a real. They, seem to be the places that have stayed with GeoCities, so I totally agree. Like websites for you and me who obsess about WordPress probably more than is healthy for us. Like getting into WordPress and doing stuff in there is actually quite fun 'cause you like poking around and you like seeing what's new and all of that.
But I imagine for 99.9% of people. It's exactly the opposite. the, millions and millions of websites, there's a few thousand of us who work directly with WordPress, but there's millions who don't logging in. It's a chore. it's uninteresting. it's a job that they've been handed by some senior executive.
They don't wanna do it. and so you've identified this trend and you've thought to yourself, how can I, duo is a, is an app that you can get on Android and iOS and all of that, and, they seem to have nailed. The gamification piece turn a boring thing. I say boring. It would be uninteresting to me.
It's difficult learning a language. Sprinkle in a bit of fun and gamification and out the other end testimonials would prove. It just works. They've just nailed it, right? They've got happy customers and people have learned languages. So the idea is sim simply the same here. Take the boring task, sprinkle in a bit of fun, and make it so that
task is less, less boring for the people, right?
[00:09:56] Joost de Valk: Yeah, and it's also, it's not just boredom.
so it, what we will do in Progress Planner Pro is we'll actually guide you a bit more in what you should be doing. So one of the problems that people have is if you have, so if you're not in the web industry and someone tells you that you need an about page, what are you gonna put on that?
About page?
[00:10:23] Nathan Wrigley: Huh.
[00:10:23] Joost de Valk: What is a good about page? How do you even know what is a good contact page?
[00:10:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, usually I have to sign up to some web development course or Yeah, and people dunno, and nobody really explains the
[00:10:35] Joost de Valk: basics. And so what we will do in Progress Planet Pro is what we've actually already built is, courses that will, that are literally in the editor. So you, the sidebar. In Gutenberg is replaced by a, course bar that has like text and a checklist that you can check off on per post with like things that you need to do and videos of me and Marika explaining to you why you need to have that page and what should be on that page and why that's important.
Relatively short, like couple of minutes per post type and things. And it's, so what we really want to do is get people underway and get them building proper websites because this is hard. We, I think as a web developer community, we think it's simple, far
[00:11:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. 'cause we've done it like 200 times, So it's really obvious. You need an about us page and it's a no brainer. I'm not even gonna explain why you need it. You just need it. Trust me. But do you know what's interesting there is, I've seen so many times the kind of embedded in a WordPress website video, but it's not the why.
It's the how. It's always the how. click this, do this. But you are doing the why
[00:11:50] Joost de Valk: Yeah.
[00:11:52] Nathan Wrigley: so an about us page, here's why you need it. This is the reason behind it. You need a contact form.
Here's why. This is the kind of thing you can do. Okay. That's an interesting pivot. I like that.
[00:12:02] Joost de Valk: And it's, very much, all of this is very much about getting people to do the right things and then also maintain them. So another part of Progress Plan Pro is that we'll give you suggested tasks that you can do in your website. So things that we think that you should be doing in your site.
Now these might include updating your plugins and your themes, but they might also include, Hey, you've written your about page a year ago. It might be time to go check it again. and see if it's still, if it's still true. And if it's all still fine, perfect. you check off the tasks and you, task and you go on to the next one, but.
People need this help, they need this, these reminders and these basically a, bit of a simple, I just like the term project management system because that's not what it is. But, it maybe it gets you the idea of what it, could be. and just guiding people to, to have good websites and then maintain them properly.
[00:13:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it my analogy would be it, hopefully when it's finished and it's all working, it would be that really helpful teacher that you remember from school. The teacher that really figured it all out for you. And when you couldn't do maths, that was the teacher who said, come here, I'll help you through it.
and you did it together and the, teacher was approachable and you got great memories. You always see people on telly who've become really famous. They get the award, they've got the Oscar or something and they mentioned their primary school teacher or something like that, and it's in their head.
So maybe this is a bit like that. But another piece, I guess to mention in terms of. Credibility of it. anybody could have put this together if they had the coding chops. But in the background is your years and years of experience with Yoast. So we're talking now, Yoast, not you, the individual. Yoast plugin, and we've all heard of Yoast.
We know it's like massive and really successful and obviously doing the right thing in terms of SEO.
So presumably tons of that data is just in your head about what websites need.
[00:14:08] Joost de Valk: It is, and it's also not just my head or just marika's head, but we have, a couple of colleagues that we're very happy with that, that bring a lot of that experience too, and a lot of experience on. larger sites and smaller sites and just doing this for a long time. I've been in the web industry for more than 20 years.
my, I've got all the gray ass to.
Yeah, I, we do bring a, wealth of experience, I think, and, as we go on, we'll slowly expand on, on, on what we can do and what we can help people with. Progress Planner Pro will have a couple of things that, that I think are quite unique. One of the things we'll do is, is we'll run challenges.
These will be. Between four to six weeks where we're, we'll give you a report up front about a particular facet of your site and we'll help you improve that facet. So this might be broken links, site speed. what we've seen in all of our years at Yoast is that people would install the plugin and think that would magically make everything better.
[00:15:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:15:20] Joost de Valk: As much as I love what we built at Yoast, and it did actually make some things magically better, but the people that were really successful with it were the people that actually put in the work. And the thing is that these people that put in the work were the people that knew what the work was supposed to be.
And now we know what we can tell people like, Hey, we suggest you do this next and this, and then next week we'll give you another set of suggested tasks. actually email you every Monday morning. Hey, this is what you did last week. This is what's on your own todo list? And then we'll add some suggested tasks to that over time.
[00:16:04] Nathan Wrigley: I guess, dear listener, if nobody's told you there's no replacement for hard work. sorry. it's a
revelation. It's a bit like me joining
the gym and feeling that I'm gonna get better because I joined the
[00:16:18] Joost de Valk: Yeah. and actually in a time of ai.
You can do a lot of that work faster than you could before.
[00:16:25] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.
[00:16:27] Joost de Valk: but you have to actually get to doing it.
[00:16:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. And, that's the point, right? And we'll get onto the NIS and the nitty gritty of how the whole thing works. I've gotta ask though. So the websites, obviously we could just use that term websites, but in amongst that, we might have all sorts of different niches, I dunno, a bricks and mortar store website and an e-commerce website.
A I don't know, one for a charity or a nonprofit or something. We might have something with just five pages that doesn't get updated all that much, that just needs. From time to time, what I'm trying to say is one size doesn't fit all websites are a thing, but in amongst all that is a whole different load of variety.
Does this accommodate that? Does it accommodate some sort of, okay. My, my intention here is to, I'm happy to do three hours a week, or this is my full-time job, or it's an e-commerce.
do you take any of that into consideration or is that future roadmap stuff?
[00:17:24] Joost de Valk: to a small degree, we already do it right now, so
we'll give you feedback about product pages if you have them, if we recognize that you run WooCommerce or EDD or something else, and we will, we'll say, hey. Okay, so we have a, separate small course about product pages and a checklist specific vote, and we can do that for many different page types and, different plugins.
So we, we have all the infrastructure set up. Already to be able to do this quite well. right now it's a bit, the way we've built it so far has been very much, it's one website, one basically one person. We, are slowly pivoting that already now to Hey, we are, you might wanna work with more people on a website.
so you want to maybe assign some of these tasks to someone. but. We're looking at that nothing has been built there yet, but I think that will come because indeed, you're very right. There's websites that are maintained by one person or not even maintained by one person, barely maintained at all.
And there's website where people, websites where people do a lot more and, actually do a lot of weekly work. We'd offer to help both. We, so we want to just be there to, to, to energize you and, basically get you indeed out of that procrastination state into Hey, you actually need to do stuff.
[00:18:53] Nathan Wrigley: can I ask another question? is there any real world component to this? And ignore the things that I'm holding in my hand, and dear listener, you can't see the things I'm holding in my hand. We'll get
to that. But do, would there be like a community which might grow out of this? So in other words, I don't know.
Yeah. Yeah. So a thing where, I don't know.
once a month you, you hop into a call with a bunch of progress planner.
[00:19:16] Joost de Valk: So these challenges will actually have monthly webinars.
[00:19:20] Nathan Wrigley: that's it. That's what I was meaning, yeah.
[00:19:22] Joost de Valk: so we, we have actually planned two monthly webinars. So we'll, what we'll do in these challenges is, we'll, in the first bit, we'll explain to you with an outside expert or one of our own experts, what we're talking about that month, why that's important, what you need to do, et cetera, that those will be free and available to everyone who uses.
Progress planner for your paid, and then we'll have a second workshop for our paid users where we'll actually hold you by the hand and tell and help you figure out how you do this on your side. The best.
[00:19:58] Nathan Wrigley: That's nice. 'cause I feel, that you're gonna scoop up a, different proportion if you offer the real world thing because I, don't know. I, just feel that, zoom call that personal touch and I'm holding something up now, which represents personal touch. It's just between me and Yoast. it makes the difference. Oh, yeah. I'm basically holding a handwritten thing. I won't reveal the content of it, but I'm, so when I, came across this, Marika, who, is with Yoast in this project, as well as life in general, I got a handwritten note. and I, honestly, it actually
made me smile.
Like I got a real woo. That's
interesting. That's a bit different some.
[00:20:48] Joost de Valk: Has been amazing. so my wife is definitely the better marketer of the two of us. She.
[00:20:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:20:56] Joost de Valk: But it's also it's genuine, right? We wanna know your opinion and we wanna know, what, so we've, sent that card to quite a few people and we've had a lot of very good feedback, some of which will lead to more features, some of which is just, appreciation and cheering us on, which we love.
But it's, it is very good to have that. And it's just in this. WordPress world, we need to lean on each other and we, what we're introducing here is pretty much a new type of plugin. And, that also means that we need to, there is no market yet. We'll need to find the market and in, or invent the market.
And, yeah, that requires some creative marketing.
[00:21:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. threading the needle though. The, reason that I raised all of that was because I do think the idea of a call, a zoom call or whatever. Platform you're gonna use. It's just a really nice way of gathering in those people who would just like that little bit of extra encouragement.
now is probably the time to, to raise up into my hand the things that we've got. okay. Through the post came a letter, right? And it had the postcard from, Marika. And, again, the content of that is between me and Marika, but there it is, right? But also. A shiny book. I'm holding a shiny book, and it's like Lamin, it's like a whiteboard kind of thing.
I'm sorry. Yo, I have to describe it 'cause everything's audio. and it's like a shiny book, that kind of whiteboard feel. And it's got like one of those, I think they call 'em Sharpies or something. Typically we call them something else. But, so you can write in the book and then it comes with, I'm holding up a, like an eraser.
It's like a cloth that you can erase things
with and what the heck. It's a plug in with a shiny book.
[00:22:57] Joost de Valk: Yeah, I'm not ll send that to everyone. It
might be a good idea. No, so yeah, it's called the
correct book actually. it's an amazing company as well, that makes those and, and does good things with the money that they make from it. there's a
[00:23:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,
[00:23:15] Joost de Valk: about that back. yeah, so it's a basically a reusable to-do list
and.
That's pretty much what we, one of the features of, A progress planner. the free version is that we add a to-do list, not just in the progress planner, page itself, but a dashboard widget on your WordPress site that has a to-do list where you can just create to-dos for yourself and tick them off.
So you can have a to-do list per site if you have multiple sites. I've found already that it's quite useful to have a, to-do list per site because it makes it a lot easier. You log in and you go, oh yeah, I wrote down that I needed to do that. yeah, it, we, have a lot of ideas. This is really just like the first iteration of something very new, but we, very much believe in release, early release often.
and we're having a lot of fun building
this. I hope it shows. I.
[00:24:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, it does. So, we've identified the problem. You've got people who've made the endeavor to build a website and then for some reason life gets in the way. It goes stale. And so that's where progress Planner gets in. And really on the website, progress planner.com, we've got these four kind of U AVPs if you like, and it's, make real progress, overcome procrastination, gain insight.
And earn badges. And so all of this, I'm guessing, is happening in the WP admin. What are the, hooks then that you're gonna draw me into? How are you gonna turn me into the, I don't know, the lazy, can't be bothered with my website character? How are you gonna turn me into the successful person?
What are the, carrots that you're throwing in my direction? And what are the sticks that you're
beating me on my head with?
[00:25:02] Joost de Valk: well,
sticks. We don't do.
[00:25:04] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. That's good.
[00:25:07] Joost de Valk: But, maybe a bit.
[00:25:12] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Call it a twig.
[00:25:15] Joost de Valk: So what we will do is we'll send you a, an email on every Monday and we'll show you the stats of what you've done on your website last week. And it does, it's a point score that we calculate and actually that point score will go down over time if you don't do anything. And it'll start to look pretty dim and red when you, haven't done anything for a month on your.
[00:25:38] Nathan Wrigley: C Can I ask, does that point score, pull against my previous self or against just like other, so it's just me. So if I set myself, so basically it's me against me each week. It's not me against some arbitrary database that says you should be doing this much each week.
[00:25:56] Joost de Valk: it is right now. It is very much us against, so our opinion of what you should be doing, what we will allow you at some point is to put it higher so that you can set your goal higher. But this is what we think is the bare minimum. And, yeah, so we basically, we tell you to log in every week and to update your plugins.
at the bare minimum, right? That's what we wanted to teach people to do. and not just your plugins, your theme and everything, but basically update your site. and then we will we'll slowly guide you to Hey, maybe you should write a new post. Maybe you should update your about page.
Maybe you should. If you haven't gotten a contact page, you should create one. If you have one, have a look. It's if it's still okay, and then we'll, lock in the date where you did that. And then we, have content reminders scheduled automatically or based on okay, so you've been, you've written that contact page a year ago.
We'll tell you to go check it again and you can change that. the frequency a bit. so it does, it is very much email and nudges in the admin.
[00:27:14] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.
[00:27:16] Joost de Valk: because where can we, where else can we nudge you? we might at some point implement a WhatsApp business, API or something like that and start sending you WhatsApp messages.
[00:27:25] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Oh, okay. So you're really opening yourself up for 24
7 nudging. Yeah.
[00:27:30] Joost de Valk: yeah, but the thing is that you need nudges.
[00:27:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You do.
[00:27:33] Joost de Valk: And what I've, found really interesting is that
as I looked at this, I was like, why didn't we build this into WordPress core a bit as well? Why do, why doesn't it have that? Because honestly, some of the techniques we're using are not new.
They've, been used by internet marketing companies for like forever.
[00:28:00] Nathan Wrigley: The, so we get the weekly email, which gives us an indication of like how we've done or what we might need to do. And we log into the website and we, get ourselves, what's listed on the website? Your website is website activity score. And at the moment the image shows, whether or not you're publishing content, enough content, whatever that may be, whether your content has been updated.
So you've been using. The example of an about us page and whether things have been updated in a timely way. So plugins, themes, whatever it may be, all of that being updated. And then from there, the gamification sort of seems to drop in. And I'm guessing that you, you start to accrue badges and we all love a badge.
It turns out who knew? in America, I don't think they call them
badges, I.
think we call them pins, but the, the idea of something which you can attach to yourself and it's look at me.
[00:28:50] Joost de Valk: I.
[00:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, good. Yeah,
I'm going with badges. and the, more you do, the more badges you get. I'm guessing.
[00:28:58] Joost de Valk: Yes. And we will have special badges over time
and per month. Later on maybe as well. We have lots of ideas about how to, basically how to keep you engaged because that's the whole point, right? to keep you engaged, keep coming up with new stuff for you to do so that you are actually still working on your site.
Because that's what procrastination is to a degree. It's it is because you find stuff dull or you're not, really well enthusiastic enough to do the actual work and we, and give you the gimmicks that will make it, that will make you enthusiastic like that.
[00:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: I love the idea of, it being gimmicks. I, honestly, that for me is the hook. There are a lot of things in my life that I procrastinate about, but the idea of like little gimmicks, little treats, little, I don't know, little bits of fun along the way really do sweeten the bitterness of, tasks like this.
And. Obviously, as we identified at the beginning, most people I think, logging into our website, there's gonna be quite a bit of procrastination. So having like a helping hand, is gonna be great. your target audience then presumably is not people who think they've got a handle on their website, you are squarely pitching this app.
People who got a website already did that bit. Now I've just made the, I've got the intuition that. I'm not really making much use of it. I know it could be a
useful tool for me. I know my business could get greater success. They're your ideal people, right?
[00:30:33] Joost de Valk: For now. Yes. But we also definitely have
ideas about how agencies could be using this. So we have, I told you about these, these mini courses that we have in the, sidebar, we've actually built a system where an agency could put in their own. So they could, put in their own, like to-do lists or, and checklists for, specific types of pages.
I definitely think that we can make this work for a whole lot of people.
[00:31:05] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so how, wait. So the idea there would be, if I, as a website agency, if I want my clients to have this engagement, that's good for me, right? If my, if the websites that my clients are using are more successful, that's in the end, that's more business for me. Is this then a license that I know you haven't built it, but is the, idea that.
Me agent would buy it to deploy on my client websites, or would I say to my,
clients, go and buy the, yeah,
[00:31:35] Joost de Valk: It's definitely one of the things we're considering. I'm definitely
also, open to and actively talking to hosts about, Hey, maybe this is something you should just give all your clients, because I, it is in their interest as well, to, to keep people active on their site for so many people. This is true for sites that have been built by agencies as well. For so many people, they don't actually use the fact that they have a content management system. They might as well have written their sites in static HTML because they're not updated in three or four years anyway,
[00:32:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:32:17] Joost de Valk: so we try to get away from that and try to try to.
nudge them into doing more. And I think that is actually something that is true for many websites. There's only a very small sub, a subset of websites that's actually maintained by a team on a daily basis. The large majority of websites is an afterthought, or at the very least, one of the things that they need to, that someone needs to do in their weekly or monthly tasks and not necessarily the thing that they think about most.
[00:32:50] Nathan Wrigley: I am guessing that there's, this kind of process is ripe for ai, and this may be blue sky thinking, the idea that in some way the progress planner system would be able to work out. I don't know what that would be like. Okay. We've noticed that you are creating content about cars. you're probably a car salesman, so here's some suggestions for the kind of content you might like to do.
We've noticed that you write on a Thursday, maybe you should pepper a bit on a Tuesday as well as a Thursday, but also we've looked at your. Analytics software, and we've noticed that, you rank
quite well for this, but this would be a good thing to
[00:33:34] Joost de Valk: It. It's funny that you you are doing exactly what we are doing is as
[00:33:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:33:41] Joost de Valk: up with way too. which is never a problem for me in any sort of plug in. But here it's been particularly bad. yeah, and I'm not saying no, we're not gonna do that. Might very well be that we, will end up building stuff like that right now that we're not there yet, but we are definitely.
Trying to move fast, but building fun things and, and also having a bit of fun ourselves in, in, in the process. And what I want is to get it out into more people's hands so that we get more feedback about, okay, what's useful? What should we change? How we, how do we, how do we do this better?
[00:34:25] Nathan Wrigley: Can, I ask about that? If, if you're at the beginning of your journey and I've just thrown a bunch of ideas at you and you listened, that was lovely. Are you at that point, are you at the point of onboarding, customers and being. Open about what might go into it? or is it more driven by you and the team?
Because I, always think that's quite a nice time to get in a product right at the
beginning where you feel like you're one of a hundred customers, so your voice is louder. 'cause it's just
[00:34:55] Joost de Valk: I agree. No, and we're definitely open. we sent out
about 200 of those cards asking people for feedback because that's what you need, right? When you need to feel like, is this something that people actually do? Because it might feel very good to us.
[00:35:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:35:16] Joost de Valk: and the, one of the, challenges with this is that a particular group of people will always ask for more things than others.
So in, in your SEO, people always ask me for features that would add settings. I want a setting to turn this off. I want a setting to turn that on. I, and that's what's also very important is to then say, no. And to say, okay, but we have to keep this simple for the average user because otherwise they're gonna be completely overwhelmed.
So I think there's a lot that we can do and we want to hear all that feedback, and then we'll look at okay, what are our ideas about how this should work and which of these fit in? And we will definitely listen and try and accommodate the very good ideas. And then also try and keep it relatively simple because I do think that a lot of people who've never built products don't really appreciate how hard it is to build a simple product.
[00:36:25] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. The simple ones always have the most success, I feel, actually. okay. So I have to ask, you don't have to answer this. Did you build this because you were
procrastinating? I.
[00:36:42] Joost de Valk: No.
[00:36:42] Nathan Wrigley: It's not like you were sitting around one day thinking, oh, I
[00:36:45] Joost de Valk: No.
[00:36:46] Nathan Wrigley: what to do with today.
[00:36:52] Joost de Valk: this is a common thing that Marika jokes about. I tend to, when I'm procrastinating, I tend to build plugins, which annoys the shit out of her. She's yeah, but then you're productive when you're procrastinating. That's,
[00:37:05] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. That's pretty good. That's all right. I think take that better than just, I don't know.
[00:37:09] Joost de Valk: Doesn't change the problem that I'm
[00:37:11] Nathan Wrigley: No, no better than mindless scrolling of Facebook or something like that. But, yeah. But on a, serious note, the, I was being quite flippant there. You obviously didn't build it on the back on a whim, but, you, this is something that you are putting your heart and soul into, so we know that, you're not connected at the hip with Yoast, the SEO plugin anymore.
We know that you've got. Yeah. Okay. At all. I didn't wanna say that just in case there was some tendril
[00:37:39] Joost de Valk: no. I'm, I'm not
connected to it At all,
neither economically nor other than that, it's my brainchild and I will, love it forever. It, is not, no, we're not connected to it anymore. Neither me nor Marika. know that you've got, you've got your fingers in pies through
[00:37:58] Nathan Wrigley: Emilia Capital, your sort of venture capital funding in the wor in the, I was gonna say WordPress space. I dunno if you've
reached
[00:38:05] Joost de Valk: we do some stuff outside of that too, but a lot of it is in the WordPress space.
[00:38:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. but this is a big part of your future, right? You wanna make this a thing? This is what you are
[00:38:16] Joost de Valk: we, we do this with, the, a sister company to Emelia Capital calls, Emelia Projects. And, we actually have more projects like this planned as well. So it's not gonna be just this, but we have more ideas for things that we, think need fixing in the WordPress space.
[00:38:35] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just say I'm, I've got this tool that I could recommend if you're trying to achieve, getting a few projects built, there's this thing called project planner, right? It's really good at, it's really good at like making you more. More productive. Yeah. And if you've got a website, it'll take totally take care of that.
you can find it at project plan, sorry, I dunno why I said project. You can find [email protected].
anything you wanna
add before we knock it on the head, yo?
[00:39:05] Joost de Valk: No, thank you for all these wonderful questions and the good suggestions and thank you for having me.
[00:39:13] Nathan Wrigley: So go and check it out. You can get your foot in the door early, whether you're an agency, that, that's obviously something that is on the cards. Possibly worth going and exploring it 'cause you might be able to in the future at some point, deploy it on your client websites. Or if, like me, you are the procrastinator of a website builder who just quite can't quite manage to make your website as good as it should be.
Go and polish it up. With progress planner.com, check it out on the WP Builds website. We'll have links in the show notes to all of the bits and pieces. Thank you Yos for chatting to me today. Really appreciate it.
[00:39:45] Joost de Valk: Thank you Nathan.
[00:39:46] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. An absolute pleasure chatting to Joost de Valk today, all about his brand new tool, Progress Planner.
If you like that, and you would like to make a comment, head to WP Builds.com. Search for episode number 399, and leave us a comment there.
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Okay, that about rounds off the podcast today. I hope that you enjoyed it. Hope that we'll see you for This Week in WordPress. WP Builds.com forward slash live, this Monday, 2:00 PM. UK time. And if not, we'll be back next week for episode number 400 of the WP Builds podcasts. That should be enjoyable.
See you soon. Stay safe. Have a good week. Here comes some terrible cheesy music. Bye-bye for now.
