Ship Quickly. Break Things.

Short week in the office for me this week, as I’m flying up to Maine on Wednesday to see family for a few days. I just checked the weather and…. the high temps for a couple of the days we’re there are literally less than 10F. So…

This Florida boy may not survive. 😜

Of course, we’re expecting to see snow. Which, for us, is a novel concept. Although, I heard northern Florida actually got a little bit of slow yesterday. 🤯

Anyway, let’s get into it. Let’s talk about launch speed and why you should…. ship quickly and break things. Also, a lesson from last week on why support licenses for your plugins are pretty important. 😇

Let’s do this…

Ship Quickly. Break Things.

I just bought a new (to me) car. It is a Tesla Model S. Great car. The funny thing is, though… the more you learn about Tesla, the more you see how the company went through major growing pains.

The early days, there were numerous quality issues. Crappy paint, panel gaps all over the cars, you name it. Clearly, the company was in the process of working out their full manufacturing systems. But, it didn’t stop the company from launching the car.

Despite those early growing pains, clearly the company has grown to be one of the top companies on the planet. But, they did it by shipping quickly and perfecting their processes “on the fly”.

In the early days, they even incentivized consumers to take the risk. Things like free supercharging for the life of the car. Heck of a perk right there! Nowdays, they don’t do any of that…. because they don’t need to. The demand for Teslas is there no matter what and the company is doing well.

Facebook was known for their mantra in the early days of “move fast and break things”. The culture was to ship fast, lean forward, innovate rapidly. And when things break, fix them on the fly and adapt.

I think the same thing applies to our own businesses and websites.

Launching a new membership site? Awesome! Ship quickly – even without all the features you want. If something breaks, fix it on the fly.

I’ve watched FAR too many people sit there and spin in endless circles preparing to launch. Adding new features, working on all of their content, constant testing of every little possible thing, going through every single settings screen to make sure it is all just right. It sometimes boggles the mind the things people will do to keep themselves from just… shipping it.

The whole time, they’re building for an audience of one. In their head, there’s an army of people just waiting to flood the site. And everything has to be perfect! If it isn’t, all those people will just leave and you’ll miss your opportunity! Right?! Right? 🥴

If Tesla had done that, we wouldn’t even be talking about it right now. Same with Facebook. Same with a lot of companies.

And trust me, NOTHING on a WordPress site comes even close to the level of complexity or seriousness as a car company. If something doesn’t work right on a WordPress membership site, nothing bad happens. Nobody dies. At worst, it is mildly annoying and you get an email about it. You’ll live! 😜 And so will they.

So yes…. ship quickly. Break things.

Multiple months of preparation for launch makes NOOOOO sense. All you’re doing is delaying and making up an excuse for why you’re doing it.

You’ve gotta ship it. Get it out there. Start testing and iterating with ACTUAL people. See what works and what doesn’t. You NEED actual real world exposure on your site ASAP…. so that you know what to build and (more importantly) what not to waste your time with.

If something “breaks”? Well, it doesn’t really matter, does it. You just fix it. Not a big deal.

I can pretty much tell you – based on my YEARS of experience with this – that sites with the longest build times while the owner sits there and fiddles with it forever in private… are usually the ones that never go anywhere. Even if the idea behind the site is sound, they hold themselves back and cripple the whole thing.

WordPress sites can move quickly. These aren’t cars. They’re easy. Plugins just tack on features within minutes. These things are plug-and-play, for the most part.

So, start lean. Don’t make it complicated. Ship it quickly. Be OK with breakage and fixing stuff on the fly. Figure out how to make it work – as early on as possible.

You can always make it “perfect” later.

Concierge Weekly Update

Let me tell you about the “Unmanaged Sites” option now available for Concierge clients. Now you can bring in your little hobby sites and consolidate your billing…

WordPress News & Updates

Conversion Bridge Update. Conversion Bridge has been updated to 1.12 and now have several new integrations, including Fluent Affiliate, Fluent Community, and more. It now also has a deeper integration into blocks in WordPress, making custom event tracking around your site even simpler. Click here to get the full details.

Matt Has Attitude? Yet again, nerds find something to be annoyed about when the official WordPress account on X posted a snotty post making fun of the new FAIR project (Federated and Independent Repository). If you don’t recall, FAIR is the new, up and coming plugin repository that is indendent of the control of WordPress.org and Matt’s whims. It is an important project, IMO. But, clearly, it is new and… they’re shipping fast and breaking things. 😜 And, I guess WordPress (assumedly Matt himself) decided to poke fun at it. In the end, yeah… it is kind of unprofessional. But, I also find it funny that so many people seem to expect Matt to act like a stiff without any opinions.

SureForms 2.3.0. SureForms was updated to 2.3, supporting easy option to clone forms, protected forms, and new integrations with Google Sheets, MailerPress, Keap and Zoho. Click for the deets.

WordFence Explains XML-RPC. In a post on X, Wordfence provided a short explanation for what XML-RPC is in WordPress. In short, it is an older way for external systems to interact with your WordPress site. Most people don’t use it, and for this reason I usually shut it down on sites since it is a potential attack vector on any WordPress site when left enabled for no reason.

WordPress & WooCommerce Left Behind?. Google made a big announcement about a new “Universal Commerce Protocol” (or UCP) that is meant to enable agentic ecommerce. In other words, using AI to browse and purchase products. The platforms supported in the beginning are the really big names – but left out was anything related to WordPress and WooCommerce. Joost de Valk published a post about this saying “the silence is deafening” and saying changes are needed in the management of WordPress so as not to be left behind. My take…. Joost is being alarmist right now – likely because he has a personal beef with Matt and the centralized control of WordPress that became apparent when the WPEngine spat spun up. But, we’re early. Agentic ecommerce is going to be huge – and I have very little concern about WooCommerce stores being compatible as things mature.

Divi 5 Launch Date. After over 3 years of development for Divi 5 (from Elegant Themes), they have finally announced the official release date will be February 26th. Full details here. It sure did take them awhile, so I hope it does well for them. Divi was in desperate need of modernization because the old platform, while powerful, was slow and annoying to use (in my opinion, anyway).

Why Plugin Licenses Are So Important (A Lesson)

This last week, a situation came up on one of my clients with his membership site. ALL of the member protections… disappeared. So, all of his customers (and he has an order history of over 9000 orders) could not access anything they purchased. Obviously, that’s not good. 😜

I had just moved this site over to Concierge Cloud, so at first I thought it might be an issue related to that. But, even when I checked the backups, the same problem was there.

Long story short, the plugin being used to do protections is a pretty old plugin. It has been around a long time. It IS being updated and maintained, but these developers clearly don’t want to talk to anybody. There are NO support options unless you pay – and my client was not paying for the license. Secondly, even the support options which existed were half-assed. This company didn’t want to do support.

So, your’s truly – as the dutiful Concierge that I am – had just become top-level support for a plugin I know nothing about. 🤷‍♂️

And, I handled it. Took about 3 hours, but I was able to re-build all permissions. I used some AI tools to reverse engineer the plugin, figure out the basics of what it is doing behind the scenes, and then custom coded a solution to re-index permissions. Frankly, this is something the plugin developers should have done, but of course they didn’t.

Now my client has this code on his site so it can be re-used if the situation ever occurs again.

But, here’s the thing…

This client was in Concierge, so at least he had me to try to figure this out. But, outside of that, he had NOBODY to go to. He did not have a valid software license for this plugin. This wasn’t some decision on his part, either. The plugin was chosen by a previous agency he worked with – literally like 8 years ago. My client knew next to nothing about it. But, without a valid license, there was no help from anybody.

Not to mention how janky this plugin is/was, so I would have never recommended it to begin with.

There are two big lessons I was thinking as I fixed this for him. They are:

• Don’t let a site rest in a static way as the plugins age. This site was running on something which has not kept up with the times at all, as far as I’m concerned.
• Don’t use unlicensed software for something potentially so mission-critical. Because then you have nobody to turn to when something goes wrong.

I’ve talked before about why I pay so much money for software licenses for the tools in the Concierge Toolkit. I know I can get a lot of it via GPL for free. I know full well that some other agency providers out there do exactly that – basically installing non-licensed software to their client sites. So bad. And here’s why…

There’s no HELP! Having the team of developers at your disposal if an issue arises means things are more secure if an issue does arise with one of these tools. Without the license, you have no help. Then, I am the first and only “line of defense” for anything that happens.

And I don’t like being in that position.

WordPress is a world of mostly GPL themes and plugins. Technically, they’re free. But, licenses matter. Updates and SUPPORT are the name of the game. And especially when you have a site sitting there generating revenue as your main business platform, you don’t want to be in a position where you’re all on your own.

At least, in this case, he had his site enrolled in Concierge. So, I was able to take care of it for him. 😎