#210 – Zach Stepek on the Interconnected WordPress Ecosystem, Partnerships and Trust

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 sell digital music. And that was my first exposure to WooCommerce.

Went on from there to work at a company and organisation called Oscar Mike and the Oscar Mike Foundation, which helps injured veterans participate in adaptive sporting events. They are a great organisation that had a WooCommerce website that was failing under traffic. In fact, the way I got that job was I knew the founder, Noah. And Noah had called me on Thanksgiving during dinner with my family. And he said, hey, I need your help. My website is down. And I said, okay, where is it hosted? And he said, I’m not sure.

So four and a half, five hours later, we got the site back up. The problem is, he had been featured in an interview during an American football game. The interview was aired during the Thanksgiving Day game between the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears. And so, you know, classic rivalry, the interview had happened in the Chicago Bears Locker room set, and was aired on TV all over Chicago. And so they were getting hit by a ton of traffic, and they got 14 orders before the hosting that was supporting their site died.

[00:08:29] Nathan Wrigley: It went viral. One of the first examples of going viral.

[00:08:32] Zach Stepek: Exactly. And so they got 14 orders and then the server just stopped. And so I had to do root cause analysis, and figure out what had happened. And we determined that it was because the email spool, because there was an email server on the same server as the web server, had filled with the new product order emails from WooCommerce. And because the server didn’t have a lot of power to begin with, it was a small VPS that had been donated to the organisation. Very grateful that that had happened because that was what got them started. But it was never designed for the level of traffic that they had received. And so after those 14 orders, delivering three emails a piece, the server ran out of memory because the email spool ran the server out of memory.

And when a server runs out of memory, it causes a cascading effect that basically took down the website and everything related to it and hard crashed the VPS so that it could not recover. We didn’t have a login to go in and reset the VPS until four and a half hours later. So the window of opportunity had already closed by the time I had the login information, could reset the server, and we figured out what was going on. That led to me working there.

Worked there for a little over a year and a half. And I fell in love with WooCommerce and WordPress through that process, and ended up talking about that site at WordCamp, Milwaukee, 2015. And at the time Patrick Rauland was the Product Manager for WooCommerce at WooThemes, and he flew from Denver to Milwaukee to see my talk. And that led to a relationship with the WooCommerce team that has not stopped since.

So it was really, really cool. I got to speak at WooConf as a keynote speaker in 2017. I had started an agency that started out small and became a force to be reckoned with in the three years that I was with it. Pivoted out of that for reasons that we don’t need to get into. And then moved into the hosting space, and I’ve been there since.

And in that space I’ve been focused on partnerships. So as of today, I am a freelancer who is doing fractional work in the partnership space and also doing some work on WordPress websites again, so WooCommerce sites and the like. Making recommendations for hosting infrastructure and stability for scaling those sites.

[00:11:17] Nathan Wrigley: That is such an interesting story. I mean, you’ve run the gamut of all of it really. And dear listener, there are so many other stories that could be filled in in between those things because Zach’s got a lot going on outside of the day job and the things that he’s just described, there’s an awful lot of other things going on as well. So what a rich and interesting life you have had.

I hate to drag it back in a way to what we’re going to talk about, because given all of that exciting stuff, this may seem, you know, a little bit dry. But we’re going to get there because Zach wants to talk to us today about partnerships basically.

Just for the listeners Zach, this isn’t for your benefit, this is for the listener’s benefit, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of the people listening to this podcast, we’ve got developers, we’ve got people who have been in the space for years and years and years, but I get quite a bit of email and a lot of it says, you know, I’m new to WordPress and that kind of thing.

And they really don’t know that events take place, that there’s this whole tapestry of people interconnecting, and hanging out in the real world. And that some of the companies that they may have heard of, they partner up with other companies. So plugin companies might partner up with hosting companies that then do other different things.

Do you just want to paint a bit of a picture of what a partnership is in the WordPress space in 2026? Now I know that’s a very open-ended question, because there’s no two that’ll be alike, but just give us an idea.

[00:12:37] Zach Stepek: So I like to divide partnerships into two types. One is the relationship between creators or builders or agency owners, and the hosting companies that they use to host the websites for their customers.

And the other, well there’s two forms of the other, and that is product companies that build products around WordPress who partner with either agencies or hosts.

I’ve been writing a lot on LinkedIn lately about how I feel about partnerships, and part of it was this pivot into thinking in terms of ecosystems. And I’m not the first one to say that. Jonathan Wold has been saying that for a few years now, how WordPress is an ecosystem.

But there are basically these three layers that are interconnected and work together, right? And so for most successful site builds, you have either an individual or an agency who’s building the site. You have the product companies that build the software that is layered into WordPress that powers the site, whether that’s a theme like Ollie or Kadence, or a plugin for anything like Gravity Forms for forms or for Formidable Forms, or any of the other forum companies who will be really upset I didn’t mention them by name. Or an SEO plugin or any of these other ancillary tools that make WordPress more capable.

And so those two things, the agency and then the products need to work in harmony because the agency needs to understand the products well enough to implement them, and the product companies need to understand the agency’s needs well enough to serve them through their products and through support for those products.

And then there’s a third layer, and it’s a layer that a lot of people think about in terms of more a vendor relationship than a partnership. And that is the hosting side, the infrastructure. When you start a company and you’re a retail company, one of the first things that you do is you go out and you look for where you’re going to put your retail store, right? And so you look for real estate.

You want a couple of things. You want high traffic areas that can handle bringing you people, and that can also handle the amount of people you’re going to just get naturally, right?

So you’re looking at things like traffic numbers that are going to go past your retail space. You’re looking at, population density, all of these other things. And where are you going to advertise in town? How are you going to be bringing people to you?

And the internet is very similar in its structure to what we do for a physical retail store. So your infrastructure, your hosting is like the address that you’re putting your retail store at. And so if you skimp on hosting and you go for somebody who offers $3 a month for unlimited websites, you’re putting yourself in the cheapest rent you can possibly pay for your storefront. And by doing so, you’re not going to have the ability to handle the same traffic as say, a location on Madison Avenue in New York might be able to. It’s different, right? It is a different setup. You could be on, in the Miracle Mile in Chicago. That’s great retail space. It’s incredibly expensive, but if your business can support it, that’s the place to be.

There are some other parallels we can talk about with some of the SaaS companies like Shopify that have created almost a mall. Because they’ve created this payments platform that allows them to expose stores to people, right? So shop pay will give you suggestions of other things that you can buy if you open the shop app on your mobile device. So it has a built in kind of discoverability, but that discoverability comes with a price. And that price is a percentage of your business forever. Even on their high end tiers, they still are getting a percentage of your business on Shopify Plus. That’s just how they make money.

So all of that to say, there are parallels between how we host a website and how we might position a retail space, right? So premium hosting is a big deal. It’s a huge deal, especially in e-commerce where scale matters because every visitor is a potential sale. Every sale is the only way your company makes money, right? The impetus of e-commerce is transactional. It is, somebody comes to your store, buys a product, you ship it to them, they receive it, and you have completed your contract with them to deliver the product that they asked for.

Because of that, if they come to your website and your site fails because you’re getting too much traffic, for example, it’s akin to if you were walking through a Best Buy and as you’re walking through the store, things around you just start to deteriorate. If you were walking through a store where the products you were looking at just stopped existing for fractions of time, like how long would you stay in that store?

[00:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: Or you couldn’t quite pick the box up. You could get your hands on it, but then everything just stopped. You couldn’t lift it off the shelf. Yeah, that’s, you wouldn’t stay long is the answer.

[00:18:22] Zach Stepek: No. No. And that’s the same thing that happens with bad infrastructure for e-commerce sites. So that’s that third pillar of partnership and what makes a successful WordPress site.

[00:18:33] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask a quick question around that? So before we penetrate deeper into that. So you mentioned these three things and you’ve got the, and you did them in that order. So we had agency, or that could be an individual, I guess, but let’s go with the agency word because it’s easier. Which then has some kind of relationship with the product companies. So themes, plugins, whatever that may be. So that’s the second tier, if you like. And then there’s the third tier, which is hosting, stroke, infrastructure. But let’s, again, let’s just call it hosting.

So you listed those things in order, but I’m imagining, and I could be wrong, that instead of it being like a layer cake, it’s more of a kind of an overlapping Venn diagram. The three things are in concert with each other. So a triangle if you like. So the agency, whilst in your description, it’s kind of next to the product company, well it’s also next to the hosting and infrastructure side of things as well.

In other words, the partnerships that we’ll get into, it’s not bound from layer one to layer two, and layer two to layer three. Three goes to one, two goes to three, and so on. Have I encapsulated that right?

[00:19:35] Zach Stepek: Yeah, think of it almost as a Celtic knot, right?

[00:19:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. Go Google that, dear listener.

[00:19:41] Zach Stepek: It’s this never ending connection of multiple pieces all forming a whole. And the interconnected nature of it doesn’t end, at least when things are working well.

There are product companies that have terrible support. There are infrastructure companies, hosting companies, that have terrible support. So those things, there are agencies that have terrible support, I mean this is not something that is only relegated to the product and hosting companies. Every layer has the potential for having pieces fall apart. The strength of the whole is only as strong as the weakest of the parts in the partnership.

[00:20:22] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating. So we’re imagining that these things are not just overlapping, they’re holding each other together. And at this point I’m kind of imagining almost like a bubble that you blow with those bubble kits that you get as a child. The whole thing is, those three things are holding that bubble together, but it just takes one of them, the little pop with the needle and doop, the whole thing sort of comes apart because, they are the underpinnings of each other. That’s really interesting.

Can I just make an observation at this point? And again, you can rail against it or agree. I don’t know where you’re going to go. It feels like the revenue side of those things, the giant if you like, in the room there, the one that traditionally seems to make the money, all the money, most of the money, lots of money, is the hosting infrastructure side of things.

And then the two other layers, you know, the product companies, the theme companies, the plugin companies, whatever. There are a few examples that escape velocity and managed to pull away from the earth’s gravity, you know, Gravity Forms might be a good example in fact, who have that trajectory, but they’re big. But the rest of it is just lots and lots of much smaller entities. So thousands, many, many thousands of smaller entities with a single theme, or a collection of plugins, or what have you. And the same, I think would be true for the agencies. Just lots and lots of that spread out.

So in terms of demographics, the hosting companies, that seems to be a small number, but they make lots of revenue. Whereas the other two, the agency and the product companies, large numbers, all making less revenue individually, potentially. I know I’m drawing a lot of parallels that maybe are not necessarily going to hold up to scrutiny, but you get what I mean. That’s quite an interesting dynamic, because they’re relying upon each other and yet in some situations, you have a few players which might be able to punch above their weight because of their bank balance and the size of their business.

[00:22:11] Zach Stepek: No, absolutely. I mean we’re all familiar with the larger WordPress VIP level agencies, right? They’re the people who are out there in the community giving back the most frequently a lot of the times. So, you know, you see companies like Fueled who now has 10up as its WordPress practise within Fueled, right? And Fueled gives back a ton of open source technology just to the community.

It’s stuff that they built to serve their customers that they’ve given back to the community, because Jake has always been a good steward of the WordPress community in general. So he understands and recognises that the true benefit of an open source platform like WordPress is not only the things we can create on top of it because we have access to the code, but the community that can be created on top of the solutions we create.

So look at something like ElasticPress as an example. ElasticPress is an open source tool that also has been commercialised into a hosted product by Fueled. And it replaces search in WordPress with something that is much, much better, right? ElasticSearch is much better at searching indexed content than SQL is at searching a relational database for anything within it.

It replaces something that is a bit of a hole in what WordPress can do with something that is better. And they gave it to the community. They gave it to the community, because it’s based on open source server software. So it made sense for the plugin that enables the use of this open source server with this open source CMS to also be an open source plugin. And because of that, they have community members that contribute back to the ElasticPress product when there are bugs that they find, and solutions to things that they find. And they have a constant feedback loop of how to improve their product.

And that all happens because they decided to be good stewards within the WordPress community. They’re not the only ones. There are many. WebDevStudios just released Theme Switcher Pro. If you haven’t heard Brad talking about Theme Switcher Pro yet, you haven’t been on the internet around WordPress, because are absolutely right to be marketing what they built.

It was, again, something that was built around a need. They saw a need for an easier way for people to move from where they were with classic themes, to block-based themes more gradually. So in large enterprises, it’s sometimes hard to just wholesale replace the theme of a website. So they built a solution that allowed you to replace parts of it, a little bit at a time and move to a block-based architecture over time rather than all at once.

And so these companies are building tools around what WordPress can do to fit needs that they’ve found working with their customers. So in these cases, the agencies become the product companies, right?

And then there are product companies that, they were built around solving a need. Things like Gravity Forms, or other form plugins, that were built to solve the problem with form submissions in WordPress. And all of these things are all participating in the same ecosystem, right? But if you build a site that has 75 plugins installed and one of them doesn’t play well with others, the whole thing comes tumbling down.

[00:26:01] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s a good analogy.

[00:26:02] Zach Stepek: You look at that, and the reason we’re, that I’m focused right now on ecosystem building and on building this, a network of people who want to work together is because a rising tide lifts all ships, right? We want WordPress to continue growing as an ecosystem. And like you mentioned, hosting companies tend to be the ones with the most money in the room. That’s not always the case, but they make a good amount of money on hosting.

And I think that hosting companies have a responsibility to be good stewards to the community in the same way that I just talked about WebDevStudios and Fueled being good stewards of the community.

And so hosting companies are in a unique position where they can drive these values based partnerships that allow for agencies to meet product owners and product owners to meet agencies who are all part of their partner programmes, right? They all can invest together in their mutual success.

Values driven partnership is a long game, right? It’s kind of the difference between planting a forest and picking apples off of a tree. If all you want is the apples, you just strip the branches of all the apples and you move on. But if you’re planting a forest together, you’re thinking about ecosystem, right?

So in the best partnerships, both sides are invested in that mutual success. You care about your partner’s customers, their teams, the reputation they carry in the community. Revenue matters, but the revenue is just the result of doing all the other things well.

[00:27:45] Nathan Wrigley: There’s so much to unpick here and I’m going to try and do some of that. So you’ve got this rising tide carries all boats thing, which I think is so important. We forget that at our peril.

But also I want to use the word synergy, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You know, WordPress is so impressive because all these three layers, the agency, the product, the hosting company, because they’ve got overlapping concerns and it’s just over the last 20 odd years, it’s worked somehow.

Often on this podcast I say, I want to rewind, and that’s what I want to do. I just want to rewind back 22 odd years. There was no playbook for how this would turn out. We didn’t know that any of those three layers would exist. We didn’t know that there would be a thing like an agency, that there would be a freelance web developer, that that would be a thing. These industries didn’t exist.

We didn’t know that product companies would pop up because the plugin architecture and the theme architecture in WordPress would enable that, and it was okay to exchange money for those things. It turned out that was a thing with WordPress that you could do that other CMSs kind of pushed back upon. And then that hosting would become the bedrock of that whole thing as well. We didn’t know that.

And 22 years later, with a lot of agreement, but a fair level of disagreement, I imagine along the way, those three pillars, for want of a better word, they’ve evolved and they’ve become what they are now. We are recording this in the year 2026, and I feel like there’s a change that’s happened at some point. I don’t know when it was, but it feels like that synergy, that unwritten, and yet completely understood by the WordPress community, that unwritten, unspoken, contract, in many ways. It feels like that’s maybe disappearing a little bit.

I’m probably overemphasising that, but do you sense that a bit? That the maker taker thing is kind of skewing it. That money has become such an integral part of the WordPress project, so many lives bound up with the money, the revenue that’s generated by the company that they work for and what have you, that it’s so easy to lose sight of that bigger piece. The rising tide carries all boats.

And instead of the rising tide, what we’ve got is circling the wagons. You know, looking out for ourselves, and making sure we’ve got what we need to survive. And of course, just forgetting, wait, the very fabric, the foundations upon which our business is built, we must maintain that in the next year, in the next two years, in the next five and ten years, otherwise we’re just, well we’re standing on sand, we don’t have a firm foundation. There was a lot there and there certainly was no question, but discuss.

[00:30:26] Zach Stepek: No, so what we’re seeing is this move toward, it’s unfortunate because I see it happening in a lot of companies right now. Where they’ve taken on investment. They no longer are fully in charge of their own destinies, because they now have people to answer to that want to get a return out of the money they’ve injected into the WordPress community.

And the only thing that private equity generally sees is the dollar, or the pound, or the whatever your local currency is, right? That’s all they see. That’s all they see. And when you talk about an ecosystem of interrelated, interlocking pieces that all have to work in harmony, and then you have a force that’s in an industry that is interested only in transaction, that is at odds with how an open source community is built, right? So taking things to a transactional level only chases short term wins, because that relationship only lasts as long as you can continue to squeeze money out of it.

[00:31:37] Nathan Wrigley: It is such an interesting juxtaposition with broader society. So you live in the US I live in the UK. We’re both democracies, and we’re both capitalist democracies. And from a very early age, the subliminal message being delivered to all of us is, work hard, produce things and just see what you can get out of it all. Charge what the market will bear, and the rest of society will figure all of that out. The market is the thing, and somehow it’ll all beautifully work and balance.

This is so different to that. This is something else. It’s some, there’s a philanthropic outside to it which, it’s very hard to encapsulate, but the whole 22 year history of it is built upon the shoulders of many, many thousands, tens of thousands of people who didn’t necessarily have that as the basis upon which they were working.

You know, there was a lot of philanthropy, a lot of volunteer time, for want of a better word. And so projects like WordPress, it feels like, if the only metric for success by a WordPress company is going to be ROI for whatever reason, you mentioned having to repay the venture capitalists or what have you. But if ROI is the only metric upon which anything is based, you aren’t thinking about the rising tide carrying all boats. You are just thinking what’s the next month going to do, and what’s the next month going to do?

And again, I haven’t got a question in there, there’s just an observation. But there’s something intangible there. There’s something that our ecosystem requires in order to survive that it feels is harder to, conjure up in the real world in 2026 than it was say in, I don’t know, 2017 or something like that.

[00:33:24] Zach Stepek: Yeah, well, and here’s the thing, okay. When you focus on these short-term wins only, and you ignore the potential of long-term partnership and of ecosystem building, you lose out on potential revenue because of shortsightedness, right? If all you’re trying to do is close the next sale as quickly as possible to make people who don’t really know your business happy, then you’re losing sight of the potential that comes from investing in long-term sales.

And agencies understand this, especially the more enterprise focused agencies who have sales cycles that are 12, 18, 24, sometimes even 36 months long. So when these companies start to put profit ahead of people, ahead of partnership. When profit is the priority, then anything they call a partnership programme is really just a house of cards. It might stand for a while, but it’s fragile. And when people get treated like line items instead of collaborators, that trust erodes very quickly.

When every conversation becomes transactional, everyone, every layer that we talked about starts to just focus on protecting their own interests. And the irony is that the strongest growth comes from the opposite approach, right? When partners focus on people, they focus on shared wins. Those successes create real social proof.

And then the community sees it. And the customers see it. And that reputation, that long-term investment in the community as a whole, in the ecosystem, is more powerful than any potential short-term revenue spike. Trust and reputation compound over time. It’s not something you develop in a single conversation.

And then the other thing that’s really important about this is what the community perceives, right? Love it or hate it, the WordPress community is very harsh to companies that they see as just trying to eek out profit without giving back, without doing the things that are required to support the very ecosystem that allows them to make money. And so community perception is hugely important, and that perception drives long-term growth. Short-term thinking damages your brand equity, long-term thinking builds it.

Trust, in this case, is the durable asset, right? It’s not what your MRR is or your ARR is. Those things are important because they allow you to support the business and the livelihoods that you are supporting as a company. But trust is the most important asset a company has. And when that starts to erode because the company stops acting like it used to, before the injection of capital, and starts acting like a business that is focused on only its capitalistic pursuit, trust starts to degrade, and then eventually it’s just gone.

[00:36:43] Nathan Wrigley: I’m imagining like a, I often like to kind of encapsulate things in my head and I’m kind of imagining a really tall skyscraper. And the scenario that you are describing is more death by a thousand paper cuts. It’s this slow erosion of that building. You know, imagine that building where the way that you’ve just described things, you might be removing one brick one day and then you come back another day and take a couple more. Before you know it, the whole thing starts to look shaky.

So it’s not that giant, swinging wrecking ball that’s coming and in one hit has just demolished the whole thing. This is a slow, but potentially with a certain critical momentum and enough steam behind it, enough erosion of the fabric of the whole thing that it’s inevitable. Unless the brakes are put on, that slow erosion, the building will fall down.

I’m wondering if that’s more a consequence of where we are at. And I don’t mean you and I or even the WordPress community. The confidence in economies worldwide, and the nature of what’s going on in the broader world, I wonder if those kind of concerns play in.

So you know more about the corporate side of WordPress businesses than I do. I don’t know what is happening at the top tier of a lot of those bigger businesses. The sort of third tier that you mentioned. I do wonder if there’s a more, how to describe it, bean countery kind of approach to businesses.

I wonder if the calculus is much more now, what is the ROI? If we don’t see ROI, it’s not happening. Whereas in the year 2017, it would be, what’s the ROI? Well, yeah, we’ve got things which we can say we’ll make a profit from that, but we’ve also got the long bets. We’ve got the community side. We’re going to fly people to that event. We’re going to sponsor that person over there, two days a month because we know that they’re contributing to Core, and that’s part of this bigger rising tide carries all boats metaphor that we’ve been using. I don’t know if it’s true, but I wonder if the state of the world that we’re in, I wonder if that contributes a bit to it.

[00:38:42] Zach Stepek: I think it does. I think there’s a lot of fear right now because the economy has not been as strong as what it had been in the past. We all dealt with a period of extreme recession. And despite some governments not wanting to say the word, right? The COVID-19 pandemic caused a shrink in economic factors across the board. And it was inevitable that that was going to happen.

Some countries were hit harder by inflation as a result of that than others. But it’s a reality that we’ve all had to deal with, because demand for things went up and the supply went down because the workers simply weren’t there to make the things. And that’s just basic economics in a capitalistic society, right?

So, yes, there’s a lot of fear. There’s a lot of fear that is causing businesses to make decisions that they wouldn’t have, you know, as you mentioned, just eight years ago in 2017. And all you have to do is look at the sponsorship page on any WordCamp or any tech event. Even events as large as CloudFest. Look at the sponsor pages. Look at who’s there and compare it to what you’ve seen in the past.

The numbers are dwindling, right? The people who are willing to continue making those investments are dwindling. Companies, whether they are product companies or agencies or hosting companies, but especially hosting companies this year, are deciding not to send people to events. They’re just not. I have heard from multiple people that work at hosting companies that are not leaving their home countries this year. It’s a belt tightening across the board.

But I understand that there’s a desire to tighten the belt and make sure that the company can survive through this current economic shift. And for hosting companies that own their own infrastructure, and even those who are renting infrastructure from a hyperscaler like Google or AWS, there’s a very scary thing on the horizon that we’re seeing, and that is the shortage of components for building servers.

And there’s this little thing that is an artificial term called Artificial Intelligence. They’re large language models people, they’re not Artificial Intelligence. There’s no intelligence there. They’re just regurgitating things they have read and digested, right? But these AI companies, these large language models take a tremendous amount of processing power.

And I’m reminded of the first time that I visited a data centre. And I was in the data centre and across the aisle from what I was there to see was an AI company. And they had their servers there and the data centre had to retrofit additional cooling for the area where those AI servers were running. Whereas you could probably just wear a T-shirt and be fine in a data centre, in most cases. If you were in that area without a coat, it was bitterly cold, because there was just so much air that was chilled air being shot at these machines that were filled with graphics processors that were generating massive amounts of heat.

And so you think about that, and you think about the level of hardware required to generate that amount of heat out of a simple server, and the difference in the number of components, the amount of RAM, the amount of processors, the number of graphics cards at $2,000 a piece that have to go into these massive beasts of servers. And the component shortage has a lot of hosts scared too. Not a lot of them thought in advance to buy a ton of RAM and a ton of processors, because we’ve never had a true supply shortage in that area except during the pandemic.

And at that time, everybody was slowed down. Now, nobody has slowed down. Demand is higher than ever before for hosting, and the infrastructure just isn’t there to support it. So as the prices of things like a stick of memory have gone up, the cost, the raw cost of hosting will go up too. And we’re just starting to see the beginning of that effect. But I think that companies that were built on $3 hosting are going to very quickly find that their model is no longer supported by component cost.

So yeah, there’s fear. There’s fear that is causing people to make decisions that are focused on revenue rather than relationship. And I think it’s incredibly shortsighted. I understand it. I get why fear is such a motivating factor, especially when you have lives that you’re responsible for. I’ve been there. But the important thing is remembering that, in everything you do, there are real humans behind these brands, behind these products, behind these agencies.

It’s really easy to talk about a whole bunch of companies like their logos on a slide. And in fact, that’s what some of these partner programmes are designed to do, collect logos. But that’s transactional, right? And all of these people are people. All of these teams are created from people, founders, developers, support staff. They’re all people, and they care deeply about the work they’re doing. At least in most cases, right?

[00:44:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Just sort of interjecting there as well. The fear aspect that you mentioned for all of the reasons you’ve just described is so understandable where we are right now in 2026. And so ROI, it feels like it’s becoming the thing. The thing instead of anything else. And I wonder if that’s because there’s a vacuum on the other side where anything philanthropic, so let’s say for example, I don’t know, you contribute something by giving somebody a day a week to work on Core.

The calculus there is, well, we could do the ROI thing, or we could do this other philanthropic thing, but nobody will know about it. Only we’ll know about it. And if we write a blog post, then a few people will know, but almost nobody will see that that’s happening. And so there’s no kind of quid pro quo on the other side. There isn’t the recognition.

But it feels like the wheels are beginning to turn, the cogs are starting to move around that. There seems to be some initiatives that are coming, which are going to try and address contributor hours, or badges, or whatever it is that you do. Some way of recognising, okay, that company did this, we need to lord that, and praise that, and recognise that, and write it down and keep a record of it so that we know in the future.

And maybe that will be something which will be put into the spreadsheet. There will be an ROI on that thing because it’s more tangible. It will never be as tangible as the ROI of the dollar that you get back from the dollar that you spent. But at least it will be something. It’s not just sort of shouting into the void, we give that person a day, a month. Nobody knows. Nobody knows give that person a day, a month to contribute to Core. And maybe if we get to the point where those kind of things are recognised.

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know how we make that and inflate that into something important. But maybe those kind of things start to need to matter in a way that they never did matter before, because they just didn’t need to matter. But now the landscape has changed. They now do need to matter, otherwise the revenue from these companies is going to dry up.

[00:47:03] Zach Stepek: Yeah, I think that’s, it’s really interesting because when you look at all of this, first of all, partnerships, what we started this whole conversation around. You mentioned the spreadsheet. Partnership success doesn’t often show up overnight on that spreadsheet, right? It’s like tending a garden. It’s not flipping a switch.

So every partnership you grow, see what I did there, it takes time. You have to build the trust. You have to learn how each other’s businesses work. If it’s a vendor relationship and it’s only built on affiliate income, right? The agency recommends you because you give them more money than another host to do so, well, are you going to learn about that agency’s business ever? No. But if you invest the time, you build that trust, you find out how each other’s businesses work. Over time, those relationships bear fruit. And the first casualty of fear is patience.

[00:48:07] Nathan Wrigley: I like that. That sounds like the strap line from a movie.

[00:48:13] Zach Stepek: You know, revenue is just a signal. It’s one signal, right? It’s not the only signal.

[00:48:20] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so interesting this, and it’s so difficult. So here we are, we’re doing this dance. It’s even difficult to describe even though we’ve poured the last, you know, hour into thinking about this, it’s very hard to get hold of. It’s really difficult to describe. It’s very difficult to work out, to calculate. And that maybe is it. Maybe that’s the problem where we’re at. We can’t calculate it.

Like you said, it’s growing the garden, it’s turning up, doing things, things will blossom over time. It’s keeping the faith. It’s less circling of the wagons, more the rising tide carries all boats mentality.

Certainly this year feels like we’re going to go through something. And whatever comes out the other side, it will be interesting to see whether it was that wrecking ball, or whether it was people just taking a brick one at a time. Or whether it was adding stories to the building, you know, adding extra floors that didn’t exist before. It’ll be really interesting to see how this pans out because I think we’re at an inflexion point.

[00:49:23] Zach Stepek: We are. And I know, you said it’s hard to measure. And I do agree that it’s hard to measure the impact of something like partnerships. Revenue is the most common signal to use for that, right? It’s the thing that makes the most sense to a business mind. And the revenue is what fuels business growth, I get that.

But I would posit that there are a few other metrics, a few other things we can start to look at to measure success beyond revenue. Now, like I said, revenue’s a signal. There are other signals too. What’s the trust between teams? How often are partners collaborating proactively? If you’re a hosting company, you see this pretty actively. How often are your customers having better outcomes because of the partnerships you’ve forged?

Relationship equity precedes the revenue. These outcomes matter. Partnerships compound slowly. And when you’re in an environment where patience is thin because fear is high, taking the time to develop true partnerships is hard. But it is always the people that do the hard work that succeed in the end.

[00:50:36] Nathan Wrigley: I think that’s the perfect place to put a pin in it. That was such an interesting conversation. I don’t claim to understand the nuance of it still. I don’t, certainly don’t claim to have the answer but it was fascinating chatting that through with you. I think there’s things to be addressed in the year 2026, and that certainly was an interesting foray into that.

As much as I don’t want to end the conversation, I think now is probably the moment to do that. I just want to give you an opportunity to tell people where you are. You obviously had your bio at the beginning, but I don’t think you dropped a website or anything like that. So if you want to drop a social handle or a particular URL that people can find you, if they want to get into this conversation more deeply, go for it.

[00:51:18] Zach Stepek: Yeah, so all of my eCommerce consultancy is done through mightyswarm.com. That’s my agency. The fractional partnership stuff that I’m working on, the fractional help, it will also run through that. It’s not quite updated to include that yet. You can find me at zachstepek.com, which is my personal site, talks a little bit about what I do. I’m in the process of rebuilding that, so it also encapsulates the other part of my life which is my concert and music photography, which we’ll talk about it another time. And I’m zstepek pretty much everywhere. So Z S T E P E K on all the social platforms that matter.

[00:52:00] Nathan Wrigley: I will make sure that I put whatever you’ve just said into the show notes. So if you go to wptavern.com and you search for the episode with Zach Stepek then you’ll be able to find it. If you scroll down to the bottom, it’ll be under the beginning blurb, and the transcription and things like that. Go to the bottom. There’s a useful link section so it will all be there. So Zach, what a fascinating conversation that was. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for chatting to me today.

[00:52:25] Zach Stepek: Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. It’s always good to talk to you.

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 ColdFusion 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, themes), and hosting / 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 roots. Zach explores the perils of short-term wins and the value of nurturing long-term, mutually beneficial relationships, especially as economic uncertainty and 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 inflection 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.

Useful links

ElasticPress

Theme Switcher Pro

Mighty Swarm

zachstepek.com

Zach on X

Zach on LinkedIn