[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 459 entitled Ben Pines on building a sustainable WordPress business with authentic marketing. It was published on Thursday, the 5th of March, 2025.
Just a few very short bits of housekeeping before we begin.
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And also thank you for listening to this, the podcast. So we do two bits of content each week. We do the This Week in WordPress Show. That gets parceled up as a podcast episode, and that comes out on a Tuesday. We also do this, the podcast, the thing that you're listening to now. So that's two bits of content each week.
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Okay. What have we got for you today?
Well, today I am chatting with Ben Pines. Ben Pines was actually one of the first people to come on this podcast, oh, nearly 10 years ago now. Back then, he was really in charge of the Elementor marketing push. He's moved on since then. He's had a few forays outside of the WordPress space, but now he's back and he's trying to help businesses in the WordPress space, and not necessarily entirely bound in the WordPress space, but that kind of thing. He's hoping to be able to help with his marketing skills, and no doubt the rise of Elementor was in some way contributed to by him. So he has the chops.
So we talk about his background. What it is that he's been doing in the more recent past. What does he think about the WordPress community and where we are? AI plays a bit of a role, because we talk about how that is making it more and more difficult to get your marketing messages out in front of your audience.
And so he is promoting a founder led model, in which the founders, and the people of significant interest in products, get out there and be authentic, be themselves. Market as individuals. And so he explains all about the rise of founder marketing and how it all works, and it's really interesting.
And if you've got a product or service or, as you'll discover in this podcast, I do, then this is a really refreshing episode, and Ben explains how you can be yourself, and market effectively at the same time.
It's all coming up next. I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Ben Pines. Hello Ben.
[00:03:44] Ben Pines: Hi, Nathan.
[00:03:45] Nathan Wrigley: It's been a while, hasn't it?
[00:03:47] Ben Pines: Been years. I think our first stock was like 10 years ago when Elementor launched.
[00:03:52] Nathan Wrigley: If memory serves, and we'll, let Ben do his bio in a minute so they can tell you all about what he did. I think you were one of the first podcast episodes that I did. Not the first, probably, within the first 20 or so. I can't remember. I'll have to look into the archive, but it's been a, it's been a while since we chatted.
tell us where you're at right now. What is it that you're doing, but maybe just preamble that with what did you do in the WordPress space? What have you who have you worked for and things like that.
[00:04:18] Ben Pines: yeah, I was in the early days of Elementor when you just got started and no one wanted to hear about it. And, a couple of people like, like you, Matt Madeas, Brian Lee, that, that really helped early on. So, thank you. yeah. And it became the, huge thing that it is. so a bit about me.
I've been in. Content marketing and marketing for 20 years. I did SEO, built WordPress websites, joined Elementor Spender a few years, then did a tenure of like a few years, at an, AI company, like an AI tool. And then I decided like, about a year ago to pursue my dream, leave the comfy job as an employee, and, do founder led marketing and start my own business.
[00:05:07] Nathan Wrigley: So that's where we're at today, right? You're, in the, you're in the market for, for founders. are you, bound to WordPress or is it, online? Do you do any offline stuff? Do you have a specific niche?
[00:05:18] Ben Pines: So funny thing is I didn't think about WordPress so much. the niche that I was thinking was actually SaaS and startups and founders, which was my area. and then. Somehow I happened to, just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in. So I happened to, to, get an interest and get some clients that were, running, WordPress companies.
And I the, points and figured out that it's actually a great fit. And my mindset and the way I'm building my service actually is a perfect fit for the. the mindset of, WordPress and how it's built and community in, in it.
[00:06:08] Nathan Wrigley: you hear in the, acting space, I know we're segueing a little bit here, but you hear about this thing called typecasting where, you know, an actor that's been doing such and such a thing for a long time. They then, when they try to move and do something different, people always associate them with that thing, Oh, you are always the baddy, so you only get badie roles and things like that. Or you are only the, goodie, you only get goodie roles, that kind of thing. Did, was there any of that, have you ever. experienced a bit of that in your life. Like, oh, Ben, he's, the guy that worked with Elementor.
Have you had to remove a little bit from your life?
[00:06:42] Ben Pines: For sure I was the Elementor guy. People thought I built the company. I was the face of the company for years. And, definitely there's a, part of that because people still recognize me and, it's helpful. I'm like any typecast like Kramer in Seinfeld, like it has, its, its pros and cons.
I think there is another element to it. It's something that the CEO of Elementor actually said. Yoni said, told me in a conversation a, a while back, which is there's a certain type that is the WordPress, person, the, person who becomes, this service provider who builds websites for a living.
It's the. Outsider, the person that wants to build things on their own doesn't accept, like, doesn't necessarily accept all the, tropes is a little bit suspicious. Like there are a few, you can describe this persona. And I think iFit that persona. And I think that's part of why kind of that trust was built between, WordPress and the Elementor community early on because they, What I said resonated a bit like that contrarian view of like, listen, we're trying to build something. It's a community. We're trying to help each other. What? Like, that's not what Gary V is saying. So I think that's, some part of it.
[00:08:08] Nathan Wrigley: the, email inbox that I have gets filled up every year gi given that I've been podcasting for quite a while now. I've become a bit of a foil. I think people, when they've got a new product, they have this notion that a good way to promote that is with a bunch of people, like, I don't know, people who've got a YouTube channel or people who have a podcast and what have you.
And so I get quite a few email each year from people who have built a thing, usually in the WordPress space, very, infrequently outside of the WordPress space, but usually it's a plugin or something like that. And what becomes pretty obvious. Over time is that there's a lot of very skilled developers out there who are building what are probably really remarkable products that satisfy the market really well, but they have absolutely no idea, of how to market it.
Not just no idea, but they've also left it to the 11th hour. To market it. So they've spent lots of time probably resources built the thing. And then once they've built the thing, had this notion that, oh, I've built it. Everybody's now gonna flock to my brilliant thing. And of course the reality is that's really not what happens.
I dunno if that's the market that you are trying to serve, these people who are, who've built a thing, got a thing, it's ready to go. And then what do they hire you to do the marketing piece?
[00:09:30] Ben Pines: So let's. delve into it for a bit. So everything you said is right. You have a developer who's not marketing oriented, they want to. Get it, off the ground. They don't have any VC backing and they're facing this, problem. How do I market it? They, if they go to, any of the influencers, they don't understand the WordPress ecosystem, their budget constraints, the way the audience, the website builders who are not like big spenders.
So honestly, there aren't. Too many ways they can market. So let's look at four ways usually products market themselves. You have basically sales led, product led, marketing led, and founder led. That's the categories. I
[00:10:17] Nathan Wrigley: Can you just say those again? I want to get those in my head.
[00:10:20] Ben Pines: Yeah. Yeah. So sales led. Sales led. That means that it's a big, usually it's a big product.
Like if it's HubSpot. If it's HubSpot or sales Salesforce, you get a few thousand dollars every year. You can spend the money building a sales motion, and sometimes you build a small plugin and eventually you also try to sell to Enterprise. But that's not the first step. So sales is pretty much off.
you have product led. these are products like Slack, products like Gamma more recently, Canva, that basically they sell themselves. There's a way that it becomes viral. You have referrals, you have people selling to, others. So that's product led. That's, big. in a way, the repository is some sort of product led,
[00:11:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yep.
[00:11:11] Ben Pines: But in order to get like huge numbers of product led, the repository is not enough. You need to have, you need to invest a lot in, and not every product can be product led. It has to have a, an element of virality. for it to work like a technical product in WordPress will less likely be, product led.
okay. And, then there are marketing led. Basically you pay money, you have an ad campaign or you do SEO. This was the main thing for the last 20 years. I know, because that was my profession. I did a whole lot of market over the years, like I did every type of marketing led. and it is not working.
Anymore, especially to, to small, solopreneurs like micros and solopreneurs. Why is it not working? the paid, that's obvious, indie, developers, they, it, they never use paid because that's much too expensive. You need VC backing. but SEO, that's the thing that changed. They used to, it used to work.
I started my, career in SEO used to be great work. You produce content. It produced money, it produced, users. that's what we did. part, of the, way Elemental group, it's not working anymore because, with AI you can produce these, this content and people are not interested in it anymore.
plus the, ai, ChatG PT and the likes are getting all the traffic. They're not sending it to sites, so that's not working anymore. So that leaves founder-led. Why is that The uprising thing that I recognize and that's why I started this business. because in the age of AI content, people are more confused.
So people are always thinking when they analyze the market about the producers, it's so much cheaper to produce content. Let's do, they're not thinking of the audience. Does it change audience behavior? And it does. The more you have AI content, the less people are interested in using this. they're not interested in your AI content and you're still producing, you're still, but they're not interested in it.
They're changing their consumer behavior. Where are they changing it to? To, exactly. Trust people, they trust. It's not a new thing like founder led. You have people like R Fishkin and Annie Cina, like trust having, one person that is saying something that you can trust and you can follow them and you get more and more of their content, and you're exposed, especially to their content.
Nothing new there, but it was only a fraction of the people that were, that needed to, to. To do that. Only 1% of the, of, the content creators needed to be these trust pilots. I dunno, these trust
people. The rest were like third world writers. I dunno. Third world, country writers that produce cheap, content that's not working anymore.
So the new thing is like founder led marketing where. The person who's the most knowledgeable, who has expertise, who built a product, who is on customer calls, who knows stuff because they, just, from the fact they built it and they interviewed so many clients, they understand the needs. They, there's, so I can go on, but the founder has a unique knowledge.
And then, so that founder has two options. Either they outsource it. They outsource this, task someone else, right? Go write my content and then more AI slope and more and content that they're not connected to and no, no real value, or they can go according to my system. And basically, they sit with me for one hour a week. and I pick their brains and get their expertise, turn it into, I take the, all the elements of production from them, turn it into repeatable content. and that's their marketing early on.
[00:15:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let me just read that back to you then, so I'm sure that I've understood. So four strands. You've got sales, product, marketing, and founder led, and the first. The first three are obvious, and the one that you were most involved with was marketing, but for reasons that you've described, that's that's becoming less and less easy to manage because I don't know, the budgets are going up, the attention is going down, and so we're now in this sort of founder led scenario in which it feels like the word that you would use to describe that is trust.
You are in the business of. Slowly but surely building up trust, building up something, approximating a relationship with these people so that when they see your face, when they hear your voice, they immediately associate it with that product. And because you've been doing it for years and years and you haven't mistepped and you haven't done something gruesome and stupid, and you've said nothing, which is, nothing silly overblowing, overpromising, that kind of thing. You've basically, you've been authentic, and so over time you become your own. Marketing channel. So I have, a question about that.
When you say founder led, you were using the sort of singular there, like it was a, an individual does, can founder led be done by somebody like you were at Elementor. So you weren't the, you weren't the person who founded the company, but in effect, you became almost like the founder of their marketing.
You became that sort of trusted voice. Does that work or does it need to in some way be the founder?
[00:17:08] Ben Pines: yeah. There are certain, examples where it worked. Eric Dotty from, dock, that's, one marketer. I know, like there are certain. People that do that. And if you can, that's, great. I, just wanna say one thing, like the trust, that's the element of it, but there needs to be a whole system.
So what I'm pitching is like this, tell me if this pitch works, if it makes sense. I'm a founder. I have two options. I know I need to produce content because I'm looking in LinkedIn, I'm looking at XI, I'm seeing all these companies doing marketing. I know marketing is the thing, not a new feature in my product.
I know that, but I have a company to run. I don't have time. So either I ghost write it and say, I don't want to deal with this. And we explained why this doesn't work because it's, not giving any value to, you're not connected to it. You're not reading your stuff at all. And the other way is like, I'm doing it.
I'm spending an hour, a week and I'm producing things. So the missing element here is that's not all I do. Meaning when I work in that hour, it's true that we're talking about, like creating the consistent content, which is the marketing, but I'm also looking at the whole thing, the whole marketing operation.
Like where do they go afterwards? How does the profile look like, what do the, what does the landing page look like? What's the copy? Like, what, are sales talking about, like. The business needs to make sense. If someone is working with me, I want them and they're plug, they're promoting a plugin.
Could be a small plugin. I need that small plugin to sell. Okay. They know don't need, to create content. So the way I see it, content is like a foot, at the door for me. and. I think what, why this makes sense to your audience is I think that same is true for someone building a website. So I'm building a website, this is what it does, and someone will say, yeah, but AI and that's it. I'm not just building a website. I've built enough websites and when a client comes to me, I'm building their website. But I'm also looking at the whole funnel. So the website has a squeeze page and, there's a, free, service. So when the yoga instructor comes to the person who is building the website, they're helping with the, with, the website part.
But I think they need to look at the whole thing, like, I'm helping you sell. That requires a lot. That requires you as a someone who builds websites to spend time figuring how out, how to make a business work, not just how to prompt an engineer, how to, automate your workflow. It's not something you're going to sell.
You're not gonna say, listen, go to my, website, building business and I'll fix your business. You're not saying it. You're just saying, listen, I'll build your website. But when a client comes in, you're building their, business. You're helping them succeed, make money, and if you make it, they're, they'll be so grateful.
You're, they paid you x you gave them two x. If you do that's the basic business logic. They paid you X, you gave them two X because you understood their business.
[00:20:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:20:57] Ben Pines: Then you just repeat that and you repeat that enough, and you have a business that's not, AI buzzword or, confused. It's like, it makes sense.
[00:21:09] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned AI a couple of times and it sounds like you've got a fairly dim. View of ai. I'm, very conflicted by ai. I can, on the one hand, I can see how clever it is and how remarkable it is, but also I'm getting a sense, so we're recording this at the beginning of the year, 2026.
It's January. I'm getting a sense that. Out there in the real world, people are beginning to have intuitions which are more kind of suspicious about ai, nervous that it's gonna flood the landscape with, as you described it, AI slop. If that is the case. It feels like maybe the year 2026 for the founders that you talk about, if they do this right, they can really position themselves as the anti ai, if you like, and there's maybe a, nice big leg up that you can get at this moment where being, a human being and not being the AI slop generator is gonna work in your favor.
[00:22:11] Ben Pines: I don't think it's the anti ai and I thought of a few. Definitely the human side is important, but it's not enough. So I'll, say it like this. If you go, if you have the idea of like, I'm pro AI or I'm against ai, you've got a wrong idea. It's not like that's not the case. AI is like alcohol. You take it at a party, suddenly you're the life of the party.
You say, oh, this thing is great. I need to use this thing. But then you become an alcoholic. the problem with AI is us as humans, we're, addicted. we can get addicted very fast and go on the bad route of bad decisions. The bad decisions are the worst part. So I think what's interesting is saying.
What's your antidote to bad ai? That's what I think is interesting. Like if I were to interview someone, I would say, okay, you are pro ai. You're against ai. What's your antidote? My antidote making business sense, just getting the basic business and cycles work. Having the basic idea of like, I'm a service provider.
I offer a service to someone, they pay me. I run them through a few actions and then they get the value. Once I have that nailed down, it's not easy to nail down as a manual service. Okay. I do this. Let's say I'm doing everything manual. I'm spending way too much time, let's say, figuring all the ins and outs of this.
then when I, once I have a hypothesis that I'm saying, oh, this works only then I think I can say, okay. If I can automate this part, if I can. So that's how I'm thinking about ai. So for example, I discovered that getting, like when I meet the founders, having the know-how of, like what happened in the news and what happened with influencers in the last few weeks really helps me.
Because I can, if they haven't been connected because they're busy, I can tell them, listen, this and that happened, maybe we can write about it or address this. with ai, I can do that with no sophisticated automation, fairly easily. and I can get the, amount of information. That I can get is, huge.
You need, you, I need, still need the human part of how do I do it, right? So for example, one of the things that I do, if I were to you to work with you, Nathan, I would say, what are the sources that you find already reliable? So you give me, I like this one. Like, like Jay Zo, like Andy Cina. I put this on the list and then when I research AI, I'm gonna say, okay, for the last two weeks, I'm gonna like hit on those people first.
That's already going to produce results that are, we're constantly in a state of over information and I'm always thinking, okay, how can be I be the gatekeeper so I can have less information both to my clients and to their audience, let's say.
[00:25:21] Nathan Wrigley: Just circling back on the, sort of founder led marketing and then trying to bind it to what you do. let's imagine that I'm a founder and I come to you and I say, Ben, I've got a WordPress plugin. I'm a busy developer. I, I don't, I'm not really that comfortable writing my own content. I'm not really comfortable appearing in front of a camera and things like that.
What are the kind of things that you are gonna get into? Discussion about with them and, ask them to do. And then I guess we could take it, the opposite way, where I am comfortable writing, I am comfortable appearing in front of the camera. H how might we approach that? What are the kind of content things that you would create?
How are you creating buzz? How are you creating, recognition outside in the wider world? Let's go with the example of the more introverted founder first. The one who doesn't wanna write content, doesn't, wanna appear in front of the camera. What, do you do for them?
[00:26:12] Ben Pines: Yeah, so it's super important to have a clear understanding of. All the strategy and the basic elements, like how does it work? Who is the target audience? Because the thing is, we are flooded with information, like everyone is flooded with information if you're producing over and over again, content every week.
So my service is the founder will produce every week content that he will put out. He or she will put out, So that has to hit home in terms of the target audience, in terms of relevance to the product. in terms of a contrarian view, having a framing it and in a, way that's not obvious, we're, in the stage where that's also necessary to, so people can understand what you're saying.
It has to have a certain, a certain format. basically you have to, have, once you have that idea, who is the target audience? then we can start to think of the type of content that will stand out so that, founder and founders vary according to their expertise. Some of them have a direct connection to their customers so they can have sales calls and that will give them insights, or they've been out there doing their experts in their field.
like yourself, you're building podcast
[00:27:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. A podcast plugin. Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
[00:27:43] Ben Pines: So for your example, you know your shit, the industry inside out, everything there is to know as a podcaster, but someone else who has a, product and their target audience not necessarily is what they did.
So then we need a, different approach to reach, like the knowledge, like we have to
know what are the struggles that. Their audience. Let's say their audience are, WordPress developers. What do they struggle? What are they thinking? What's in their newsfeed? Okay. So once we have that, we have the expertise side.
Then we phrase it as something that you wanna say, like, what is broken in, the world? Like what is the thing? So there's the smaller circle, I call it smaller circle, which is like what your product does. And then you write about it, you write about the results, et cetera. But there's the wider, circle that is also interesting, that is also including in your expertise.
So for example, for yourself, you have. podcast solution that does X, Y, and Z. But maybe that your expertise will be on the wider range of, let's say, podcasts in general, or let's say channels in general. So maybe you have something to say about, listen, it's, the industry is broken. AI podcasts are not working like.
YouTube is all AI slope. I don't know, like it
takes time to figure, figure it out once we have it and we phrase it very simply because every time you produce something, if you're producing every time. Weekly, every, like a new content piece, weekly. You can't go back to like the five page, 20 page strategy.
You need something like a very concise thing that you're saying. Like, I came here and said like, I, I think the way people build, service, business is broken, then once you have that, then you can think of, okay, what's the format? What's the channel? And you start producing. and it needs to be different than the advice.
We're no longer in the advice how to era. It needs to be sharing. So building public things. You are building that's of interest of your, to your audience news that happens. You give your take on it. Something happened. I dunno. WordPress came up with their new version. You're giving your take. Why it matters.
What do you think about it? so a few formats that are working nowadays, giving proof, like for example, a client share the story. So you have insight from the industry itself or data from your plugin. So these are not new, but I think the definitely the advice type of content went down.
[00:30:42] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting because this is the bit that I find really difficult is trying to figure out. What is in the heads of other people and what will push their buttons, because as a, person that's been working, building this plugin for, ages, you you know that it works, you know that it works for you, but you And also in my case, I'm scratching my own itch. This plugin that we're building, it does a lot of the things that I need this plugin to do for me personally, and I figure that maybe there's a bunch of people out there who have the same issues that I do. So this will help with that, but it's very difficult to, to Judge what that is, and it's very difficult to understand what everybody else would understand. And also from the sounds of it, a lot of the content that you are advising people to make isn't necessarily the kind of thing that you would see, let's say on a TV commercial, look, here's a feature, here's another feature.
Here's the cost, bang. It's more kind of. Here's our industry. Here's the kind of things that are going on. Here's some interesting news. Here's what a customer said. It's just this kind of wraparound bigger, I don't know, I'm the authority, trust me, kind of thing. So it's that, that I imagine would give people.
there's, a bit of a pause going on there for me because I'm thinking to myself, how much time do I need to put into that each week without knowing whether that bit of content lands? Obviously, over six months producing all of these bits of content, I'm gonna have this really credible, persona out there in the wider market.
But each time I produce a piece of content, I think there's gonna be a bit of me in the background going, is this bit gonna land? Does this bit actually. Serve the needs of the marketing that I've got. Do you know? Do you know what I mean? So there's that sort of, yeah.
[00:32:27] Ben Pines: It's the old, it's the old saying of like, how does this promote? I'm just giving value here. How does this promote
[00:32:33] Nathan Wrigley: Right.
[00:32:33] Ben Pines: business? So I'm saying exactly like you hit home. It needs to make business sense. So what I'm saying is you spend between one and two hours producing that one piece that's connected to your business.
It may come from a sales call, it may come from. you went to a conference, you gave a lecture, or you're interviewed in a podcast. Basically you're running a business, a simple business, and maybe your clients are, you get them by outreaching. You're sending, LinkedIn outreach or you have some sort of business sense with even without marketing The content that you're producing is like a layer of consistency that helps every part of your business. So let's say you outreach someone, listen, you run a big community, you have 5,000 people who are my audience. Can I come to do a webinar? That person will go into your feed and see, oh my God, like this person shows up and you've built.
A brand, maybe they already saw you. You've built a consistent brand and you know that because you've been
[00:33:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:33:43] Ben Pines: years. You are known, like you're the example, you're the poster child, like everyone knows you. That brings, that gives you, I don't know if you know how much leverage that brings you as opposed to someone who's been developing in the dark.
so yeah, it's like you need to look at your business from all angles
and. Have It, make sense. There's a few people in the WordPress space. I won't mention any names, but if you've been following the WordPress space in the plugin space and WooCommerce and things like that, there's a few people in the WordPress space who just share all sorts of content, and some of it is direct marketing.
[00:34:20] Nathan Wrigley: they're just telling you, we, we've got this new thing. Here's our new feature, or our new, price point, or we've got a sale on, or whatever it might be. They do a bunch of that. Then they also just do curious things like, I don't know, they'll have a conversation with somebody and they'll put that online as a video blog or something, and then they'll do like an end year, summary of how our finances went this year.
So none of the content kind of maps to sales? some of it does, but the majority of it isn't to do with sales. It's just building up this rounded picture of here's our company, here's what we do. Here's why, here's how long we've been around. Here's us trying to just demonstrate that we're good human beings and on, on all the while it's just building up this, like, like I said, going back right to the start, it's building up this trust it's something I can't quite get my hands on how much of a something it is, but it's definitely a something. And if I was in the marketplace for the things that I know these people produce, because they're showing up all the time, they're right at the front of the queue for a reason. I can't explain.
They're just end up at the front of the
queue they showed up.
[00:35:28] Ben Pines: I'll tell you, the missing link. Everyone is saying trust, I think there's only one way to produce trust that way is to think of the business sense to make sense in a business way. Okay? And I don't think all creators, even those who prop trust are doing it.
What do I can build a business, okay. And I'm doing build in public, so I'm sharing my journey. If I'm doing it I'm building my business to be sustainable, to actually, a profitable business. So I'm sharing actual business sense. Okay? It makes business sense. It's working. I'm sharing what's working for me.
'cause I thought about it, it's not happening by mistake. I thought of the right product, the right way to do marketing, to outreach. I thought of all those things and I'm sharing it and people appreciate and it builds trust. The other way is like I'm giving value. So I'm actually, I thought of how my clients or my audience will actually get value and I do it.
I give them, and they get value. It's not. Like most of, the content out there, I'm not sure even the top one. I, I'm not sure if someone listening to Tony Robbins, I'm not sure if their business will be better if a WordPress, maybe it's not specific enough. If a WordPress developer listens to Tony Robbins, I'm not sure if their business will improve.
but if they listen to someone, that makes it. So that's what I'm saying. It had the only way to build trust is to make sense in a business way. I, you listen to me and you're not listening to me because I am, Ezra Klein that I'm doing political, you're listening to me too, because you wanna improve your business.
So, I think, yeah, thinking about trust as there's only one way to build trust and that is to make business sense either for my business, my client's business or my audience, business I need to make it work,
[00:37:41] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of the sort of concrete, nature of what you are proposing, then you mentioned one or two hours there. That seems like a really nice light touch. So if I'm a founder, obviously I wanna be spending most of the time inside my business and the marketing whilst important. you've got a.
Focus on the business. So is that kind of it, are you, proposing like one morning or one afternoon a week will be enough in consultation with you? I come to you, you gimme the ideas. I go off, make that content and it's like few hours. That's it per week. That
should be enough. Yeah.
[00:38:14] Ben Pines: but why is that? Because a marketing, like I, I heard, Lenny. Ky, podcast interviewer recently where interviewed some, someone who was early worker at, Facebook, and she said early on at Facebook, they had three goals, three business goals, like increased engagement, increased revenue, I, forget, but they were focused on three goals.
If you're focused like I am doing marketing, you have your, new product that you want to market. If you're doing one research and one, I dunno. A video series and one, you're spread out and you're doing all that. It's like opening a restaurant in your backyard. You open a restaurant, but you did it in your backyard.
You didn't really ga give it the attention it needed. It needs for something to lift off in terms of marketing and content. Needs to have consistency over time. Read, dedication, you need To, to do it for a while. So what I do is when I start working on, we're cleaning the plate and just experimenting.
we're building up a hypothesis in order to build, the marketing for the podcast, tool. We're going to, put out this thing. This will turn to down the funnel, to this and that, and the whole marketing. Hypothesis then we're spending a few months proving that hypothesis at the end of that period, I dunno, something like three, four months.
We either refute, we say it didn't work, we failed, or we say, oh, it worked. We got the results. We wanted. Most, plugin developers and, businesses in general, they reach the three months, three, four months. And they're saying, okay. And I don't know, I don't know if it work. I switched, I already switched to something else, like it didn't work.
I think,
[00:40:07] Nathan Wrigley: are you available for hire at the moment then? Are you actively finding, are you actively seek search, let me start that again. Are you actively seeking clients to, to fill up your roster? Is that something that you're
[00:40:20] Ben Pines: I, I'll do the marketing speak of, I have a few last, spots and, yeah, no, people can, definitely. Reach out, on LinkedIn and, talk to me even if they just need some advice.
[00:40:35] Nathan Wrigley: are you limited to like the online world? So for example, WordPress plugins, WordPress themes, block, any WordPress thing, plus the whole SAS universe as well. Is that, kind of where your. marketing advice would end up the sort of online world as opposed to, I don't know, bricks and mortar shops and things like that.
[00:40:55] Ben Pines: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. less much. So in terms of if it's a business of, and digital products and all that, it's also relevant. But yeah, brick and mortar less much,
[00:41:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And, just before we knock it on the head, Ben, what is the best place that we can find you? I know that you've got email and do you have a sort of website where people can look you up or any of that?
[00:41:16] Ben Pines: Ben pines.com and I'm usually on, on, on LinkedIn and hopefully in 2026 also we will up my, YouTube game as well.
[00:41:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. it's eating your own dog food, physician, heal thyself, and all of that. So yeah. That's brilliant. Thank you, Ben, for chatting to me today. I really appreciate that. I hope that the, the service that you're offering resonates with people and that you are, inundated and this marketing channel, proves it's worth.
Thank you so much for chatting to me today.
[00:41:47] Ben Pines: Thanks, Nathan.
[00:41:48] Nathan Wrigley: You are welcome.
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