Transcript [00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the interconnected WordPress ecosystem and how to build partnerships and trust. If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players. If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there. So on the podcast today, we have Zach Stepek. Zach is what you might call a unicorn in the tech world, having held roles in design development, and much more. His experience spans everything from Cold Fusion and Flash, to JavaScript, WordPress, and WooCommerce. He’s worked with brands like IBM and MTV, in varied industries from medical records to e-commerce, and has spoken at WordCamps, WooConf, and contributed to the WordPress community through both agencies and product companies. You might know about WordPress, agencies, product companies and hosting, but might not have thought about how partnerships actually work in this ecosystem, or why they matter right now. Zach is here to explain just that. He starts off by sharing his journey into WordPress, his early challenges, and how an unexpected viral moment led him deeper into the ecosystem. He describes the three interconnected pillars of WordPress success, agencies or individuals, product companies, think plugins and themes, and hosting or infrastructure, and how each depends on the other to thrive. We discuss the current state of partnerships, how companies collaborate, why trust and values driven approaches are essential, and why the rapid rise of ROI driven, transactional thinking, is at odds with WordPress’ open source routes. Zach explores the perils of short-term wins, and the value of nurturing long-term, mutually beneficial, relationships especially as economic uncertainty and the changes in the broader world are beginning to reshape how companies interact. Then we talk about the challenges faced by hosting companies, the role of product companies in innovation, and how agencies often bridge these worlds. Zach makes the case for cultivating relationship equity, not just revenue, and how a rising tide can lift all boats, if the community keeps its collective focus. Towards the end, we discuss how the landscape has changed. Why community contributions matter more than ever, and what the future might hold as WordPress partnerships reach an inflexion point. If you’re curious about how these invisible partnership threads bind the WordPress ecosystem together, and how true partnership drives success, this episode is for you. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well. And so without further delay, I bring you Zach Stepek. I am joined on the podcast by Zach Stepek. Hello Zach. [00:04:00] Zach Stepek: Hey Nathan, how you? [00:04:01] Nathan Wrigley: Zach and I have been talking for a fairly lengthy period of time, probably close to an hour or something like that. And we’ve strayed into a variety of subjects, none of which have been related to this podcast, but it’s been very enjoyable. He’s a thoroughly sociable and humorous chap, let’s put it that way. So I’ve appreciated the last hour. It’s been an absolute bonus. You’ve cheered me up no end. However, the listeners to this podcast, they may not know about you. They may not know what you do, or what you have done or whatever it may be related to WordPress. It’s a banal question, but I always like to introduce the podcast with it. Will you just tell us about yourself? [00:04:36] Zach Stepek: Yeah, so I am what you would hear referred to in the industry as a unicorn. I’ve been in multiple roles, from design to development. I started my career as a Cold Fusion developer, moved into Flash back in the day. Taught the Flex Framework everywhere from IBM to MTV. Spent time doing the teaching thing for about five or six years as an Adobe Certified Instructor. And then the bottom fell out of that industry, because of a letter that was written about Flash that you may remember. All of my contracts disappeared overnight. Within a week almost a million dollars worth of potential revenue had been cancelled. Back then I was very nice with my out clauses in my contracts, and I learned a very harsh lesson. Spent a year working support at a company that may have had something to do with the collapse of my industry, working for their care division and learned about the support industry there while learning new things. And one of those new things was WordPress. I worked as an Experience Designer at a medical, an electronic medical records company, working on the design of their EMR software for a while. And then worked at a company called Comply365, where I dove deep into JavaScript and did a lot of demos of their forms platform, which is used by airlines all over the world to do the submission of service forms for aeroplanes. The company actually started as a way to get rid of the giant binders that pilots used to carry that had the manuals. The company started as a digitiser of that material into a tablet application that pilots could carry in the pocket of a briefcase rather than it being a briefcase itself. So worked there. Throughout the years I was working on WordPress. I had been involved in bringing a record label back to Rockford that had folded. Rockford, Illinois is where I live. And we built a WooCommerce site to
