How Beaver Builder got me into the WordPress community – #025

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Welcome to episode 25 of the press forward podcast. I’m Nathan Wrigley and I’d like to welcome you back to the podcast and if this is your first time listening, it’s great that you found us. The press forward podcast is created by WP and UP. We’re a non-profit working in the word, press space to help you your colleagues. In fact, anyone you can find out more about the mission at WP and UP dot org On today’s podcast. I’m going to be talking to Justin Busa. He’s one of the founders of the popular Beaver Builder page builder plug-in, but before that the little bit of housekeeping we’d love for you to get involved with WP and up and that can be done in multiple ways. You could talk about this podcast on social media or talk about it on your own website. You could write us on Apple podcasts or you could subscribe to us on your favorite podcast. Which can be done by going to WP and UP dot org forward slash podcast – feed. 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So please help us so that we can continue to support the WordPress Community those URLs again WP and UP dot-org forward slash never give up and WP and UP dot org forward slash donate. Thank you. The press forward podcast is brought to you today by Green Geeks. Green Geeks offers an awesome managed web hosting platform that’s built for Speed security and scalability whilst being environmentally friendly. Enjoy a better web hosting experience for your WordPress website backed by 24/7 expert support and we do thank green Geeks for helping us. To put on the press forward podcast. So today is another episode which was recorded live in the halls of the Estral hotel in Berlin. This was the location of wordcamp Europe in 2019. You’re going to be hearing some background noise as I found it nigh on impossible to keep 3000 WordPressers quiet. we did many recordings and most of them have already been released. You can find those in the press forward podcast feed at WP and Ua dot org forward slash podcasts. Okay, so onto today’s episode today. I’m talking with Justin Busa. Justin is one of the founders of the Beaver Builder plugin. I’m sure that you’ve heard of it. But if you haven’t it’s a drag and drop interface for building out posts and Pages quickly. I’ve met just in several times before and so the conversation flowed freely. We talked quite a lot about the plug-in but also about his company how it’s grown how its moved from an office to a distributed model recently and how all of that actually works. We also chat about Justin’s thoughts on the WordPress community and how he feels that he fits into that and the role that wpn up is playing to keep that Community healthy. And so without further Ado I bring you Justin Busa. Right. I’m here today. I’m stood in. I don’t know where I’m stood. I’m in the hallway in wordcamp Europe and this chap just walked up and and took the took the headphones off the mic put them on his head and said. You know, come on record me and his name is Justin Busa. Justin Busa: [00:05:15] Hello. Hey Nathan. Thanks for having me. Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:17] That’s not what happened. Is it we know scheduled this thing? How are you doing? How’s it going? Justin Busa: [00:05:22] I’m doing good. I can’t be better. I’m really excited to be here after you know doing all the WordCamp in the u.s. Coming here to see this one and it’s something else is amazing. Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:32] Is this your first Europe WordCamp? Justin Busa: [00:05:34] No, actually I did London last year. That was the first one but this is my first WordCamp Europe. That’s I Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:40] think that’s what I was meaning. So do you do you sort of see this as a nice chance to get away from the office drag the team the beaver Builder team out into a different part of the world and basically have a nice holiday or is there a is there a purpose to this involving Beaver Builder you here to meet and greet and schmooze and all of. Justin Busa: [00:05:58] Yeah, a little bit of both. Actually, I’ve could because I brought my wife with me and we were able to leave the kids at home. So there is a vacation element to it. But with all the camps, I’m really excited about the people and get us getting FaceTime and be able to reconnect. Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:14] Are you good at the whole connecting thing? I struggled at the first couple kind of stood there awkwardly. Justin Busa: [00:06:21] No, I still stand there awkwardly. Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:24] Yeah, do you? Justin Busa: [00:06:25] I enjoy and I’m definitely an introvert and I have a hard time doing it, but I just forced myself and I feel really good about it afterwards. Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:34] Yeah, what do you do? Do you like have a like an opening line that you’ve kind of adopted or do you just. Right go and just get on with it. Justin Busa: [00:06:41] Yeah, I kind of just go and it’s like you’re on autopilot like, you know, sometimes you’re driving your car. You may be thinking about something and then all of a sudden you’re where you ended up and that happens to me all the time. You’re like, I wasn’t even looking where I was I looking I kind of feel like that’s how it is. Once you start to get the conversations going they just flow. And you really in the moment and then it’s all over and it feels like a whirlwind and I’m like that just happened. Nathan Wrigley: [00:07:04] Yeah. Did you did you bring your wife to the actual WordCamp or just bring her on holiday to Berlin? Is she going to be going into the talks if she got any interest in WordPress at all? Justin Busa: [00:07:14] No, not really. Yeah. I mean I asked her if she wanted to and I told her she didn’t really need to and you should be coming to the after parties. Yeah, I mean that her the other night. Yeah. She’s looking forward to meeting everyone because I do talk a lot about a lot of people. I mean I told her about you as like a man, greae guy from London. Well, okay not London met you out in London. That’s very kind. Nathan Wrigley: [00:07:33] Yeah, it’s very kind. So here we are three thousand people the WordPress community en mass in one space. Do you sort of think this community is a bit different a bit special the you happy that you chose WordPress all those years back as opposed to I don’t know Magento or something like that. Justin Busa: [00:07:52] Well, I guess they don’t have a lot to compare it against but I do think it is special. It’s really friendly and inviting. I don’t feel you know, like the Imposter syndrome you get sometimes I feel very comfortable. Around a lot of people that I look up to and this community. It’s very inviting and yeah, it’s about camaraderie. Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:13] Have you got like a laundry list, did you and your team the guys that came out? I did you did you prepare like a list of right. These are the things we want to achieve when I meet this person this person talk to this company. Make sure we lock in this deal or is it way more lazy further than that? Let’s just show up and see what happens. Justin Busa: [00:08:30] Yeah, it’s kind of let’s show up and see what happens. But we individually I think have our lists, you know, I usually go through the attendees list, you know start to get excited. Oh that person’s going to be there that person’s going to be there. And so, you know, we’ll have our own little like kind of agendas on like who we want to catch up with and then also to it’s just like people we haven’t met before or that we’ve only talked to online. That’s what’s really exciting to me is meeting people that I’ve only ever seen their Avatar. I just got done puneet from Power Pack, you know, we’ve been working together for the last three years because the work he does with Beaver Builder in person, really? Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:09] Yeah, that’s nice. Justin Busa: [00:09:10] So it’s really exciting, you know to put the human elements into it, you know, because we’re sitting behind the screen so much. Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:17] Yeah, we do sit behind the screen and awful lies. Just nice to get out. I’m looking. I’m just enjoying kind of Milling about and meeting new people. I’m probably not going to be attending many other top. So you got any talks penciled in? Justin Busa: [00:09:28] I was going to play it by ear. But Matt’s doing his mat on WordPress at two o’clock. Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:34] Have you seen the size of the room? Justin Busa: [00:09:36] I’m sure it’s quite large Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:38] It’s really big. I couldn’t imagine going up and standing up in front of 3,000 of us. Justin Busa: [00:09:43] Yeah, you and me both. Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:44] Yeah that be amazing. So no apart from that. Nothing no major. Justin Busa: [00:09:48] Yeah, I haven’t really yeah, cause I guess it’s just kind of starting I haven’t really looked at the schedule too hard. But um, yeah, I’ll grab a talk or two over the next day or two, but I do you know, the hallway track is the big one. Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:00] So let’s talk about little bit about Beaver Builder. How’s it going? How is the page builder industry? Justin Busa: [00:10:07] It’s good. It’s good. It’s wild, you know, I mean, obviously there’s been a lot of ups and downs over the last like two years. Gutenberg and everyone, you know kind of asking us if we were still going to be in business when that launched but just you know. The mission hasn’t changed. We’re helping people and we’re trying to make their job easier. And that’s that’s we’re still we’re still succeeding in that so I’m pretty happy with that. Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:33] Is it is it growing and you got a bigger team than since the last time I saw you. Justin Busa: [00:10:37] Yep, we’ve just got two new hires this year actually our first marketing higher we and then a new developer who is focusing on SAS for us. So we’re getting into the. It’s a space which is I feel like as a company were kind of improving our knowledge and proficiency on Technologies rather than you know, like one person going out and saying, okay. Well you need to learn this. We’re just growing the team. So the company is a whole can. Can have more experience and knowledge and areas Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:06] Who’s in charge of all the so hiring and all of that business then when you think to yourself, okay, we need to get one more person to fill up this role. Is that does that fall on your shoulders or is that Billy or Robbie or somebody else. Justin Busa: [00:11:16] The three of us usually kind of tackle that together but you know, we all have our proficiencies. So if it’s a developer, usually I’ll be more in charge of it and marketing Robbie and so on and what not Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:27] and where are these people based? Justin Busa: [00:11:29] Anthony is actually kind of close to us. He’s from California much for originally, but he was living in Orange County and then now he’s in Arizona just south of California,and then Fred is actually he’s just a half an hour away from me and my hometown. Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:43] Okay, that’s pretty good. Justin Busa: [00:11:44] Yeah, so. Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:45] Haven’t either ex United States. I mean, I know that you’ve got a couple of well, I know one in the UK, right Danny , Simon – yes, I’m in as well anybody anywhere else? So it’s UK America Justin Busa: [00:11:59] And then we are for in the Philippines. Then you may have heard of was actually our first Tire. We’re still doing client service work back then even so that’s exciting that he’s stolen the team and then we ended up hiring his brother. And then we had two other hires out in Philippines that are still with us as well. Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:16] How do you manage that? You know, I think that the the word the people use now everybody used to talk about remote working and now it’s distributed teams. How do you manage all of this stuff? How do you get work done? What are your tools of choice? Are you in slack or. Justin Busa: [00:12:31] Yeah, I mean mainly slack to be honest. We do a lot of Zoom calls, but I think we also try and be careful those because they can turn into kind of, you know, you’re like if we are on the physical office and we were just having boardroom meetings every day all day then, you know, there’s the kind of interrupt getting the work done. But yeah slack and we’re really good about that. We have, you know, all the channels set up appropriately and different private channels for different teams and things like that. Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:59] Would you would you say that your employees are your friends do you get along are not so friendly level do you do so social events? And if in fact you I know that automatic with the an amazing 900 employees. I think they try to put them all in one place at the same time. You do any of that you will meet up actually in the real world. Justin Busa: [00:13:16] We haven’t done a full company meet up though. We wanted to but it’s just like the logistics no one’s ever really said okay. I’m going to take that on and make it happen. Although Robbie did say recently so he’s listening. You know that I’m like you said that he’s going to do it but we what will our strategy has been though is to. Different parts of the world like Robbie and I went to London last year for what camp so the one team came out Robbie’s in Philippines and work camp out there with the Philippine the team from the Philippines and then work Camp u.s. Usually people from the states will come to that with us. So we’ve we’ve kind of made it a point to try and connect with the team that way your question about being friends though. Absolutely. Oh no. You know Corey Miller. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with him. Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:01] Yeah speaking to him a couple of times. Justin Busa: [00:14:04] Yeah. Yeah, we early on when we were just starting out with Beaver Builder. We got a lot of good advice from him and one of the things he really drove home was company culture. So we’ve really made it a point to focus on company culture and you know for us it kind of trickles down from how we are just kind of being relaxed and not a lot of pressure friendly environment. But we yeah, we definitely have fun even though we’re all just in slack one of our big things that we do is we make Photoshop memes of each other. Oh nice, so there was actually one in slack. I think maybe yesterday or the day before that Danny had made. Where are you know, I was looking like the German guy with the suspenders on and the big Stein and all that. We got hoes and yeah, but with my face got a lot of that going on, Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:51] So it’s a nice culture you happy with the team. You’ve got. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And you see do you see more hires in the future? Is it does it look like rosy the future for Beaver Builder, you know, he’s planning to be around in five years time. Justin Busa: [00:15:04] Yeah, I think so. I mean you can’t predict it. I mean, I wish I could probably sleep a little better at night, but. But yeah, no, everything’s looking good. I definitely see more hires in the future. But our approach has always been to hire as we need need to not like, you know, specifically say, okay. Well, we’re just gonna hire a bunch of people so we can just start to do more stuff. It’s more like we kind of figure things out and say okay. This is who we need for this role in that kind of thing. So… Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:29] Do you consider like this is going to be the wrong word because it’s because the reality is it’s born out of a lot of hard work, but do you ever sort of take stock of your life and like pinch yourself and think wow. I’m doing this thing. I get to travel and I get to work. I mean from home and I’m in charge of a team building something inside of a great community. Look at that moment of this is cool. My life’s really nice. Justin Busa: [00:15:55] Yeah every day. Actually, it’s still surreal. I can’t believe it even to be honest. Like yeah. Absolutely. Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:03] It’s amazing. I just think. You know the people that I talked to very often it’s plug-in theme people and you know, they’re making they’re making a living so word. So there’s the internet and then there’s WordPress in the internet and then within WordPress this page Builders, and there’s a handful of those and everybody can make their there in you know, they can make a living out of the little niche that they’ve got and it’s pretty amazing. Justin Busa: [00:16:28] Yeah it is. I mean, especially when you think of like, you know, the whole pie scenario, it’s just such a big pie in the WordPress space. There’s a lot of room for a lot of people to do a lot of things. Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:38] Yeah. Have you got any nice plans for Beaver builder in the next year any fun things coming around the corner? Justin Busa: [00:16:45] Um, you know, nothing that I can like concretely talk about because we’re experimenting kind of experimental phase. Maybe I guess you’d say, I mean Beaver Builder as it is today, we’re still working on improvements and stuff. We got to just released a couple and like an alpha release with some new features and that will continue but in terms of like big Innovations where well it is exciting we’re getting into SAS. You know something I can talk about where Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:10] yeah. Tell us more. Yeah. Yeah interested in me. Justin Busa: [00:17:13] Yeah, I mean it’s kind of hard because you know, when people ask well, what does it do or like well, it doesn’t really do anything right now, you know, I kind of would attribute it to you can’t build a house without laying the foundation first and that’s really what we’re focusing on as a company. We weren’t proficient. The technologies that you need to be proficient in to build this kind of software. So, you know, we’ve hired and we’re working with actually another company that’s proficient in SAS and we’re building a platform what that platform is going to allow us to do is a lot of cool things with you know, the cloud Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:43] is it is this assistant. Yeah exactly Justin Busa: [00:17:45] Assistant is kind of the gateway to the SaaS. It’s almost like a jetpack model if you think about it, you know assistant the plug-in in the repo on its own. Well provide value and a feature set. But once you connect to the SaaS to the cloud your account, that’s where we can start to try out a lot of interesting ideas. And the reason we’re doing this is because we have so many ideas, you know again hard to talk about because they’re all I kind of hypothetical right now. I’ve just be tripping over myself Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:14] but backtracking and two weeks time. Justin Busa: [00:18:17] Yeah, or yeah just not making a whole lot of sense but. You know the goal is with this is that we can start to try a lot of different interesting things. You know, some things may not work people maybe like, oh, well, they just don’t catch on and some things may and but we’re it’s still revolves around like a core user which is always been like professionals. We do have some crossover obviously with like DIY. I was like, you know, People that want to do it themselves, but we’ve always been focused on Creative professionals. And so that’s kind of the features that were looking at is like, okay, where can we add value to people that are doing this every day? What are the pain points things like that? Do you put in a 12 like an eight-hour day do you get up Monday to Friday? And like I’m doing Beaver Builder? From nine until 5 or do you is your work like random and sporadic and you just fit it in it’s gotten it’s gotten a lot more structured over the last year. I used to be. I have some unhealthy work habits where. Which didn’t really bother me because I’m self-employed and because I’m you know in the position I am I can decide when I want to work, but I would you know have days on end where you know, they were a lot more than eight hour days and then maybe you know the next week I would barely work. So I go kind of like in sprint’s if you will, but I’ve been a lot more structured about it recently where I’ll wake up and I’ll have my morning routine. And then maybe I’ll do like a three or four hours stent and then I’ll take a break and maybe go exercise or read a book or something and then I’ll have a half an hour or not half hour afternoon where then that’s more of like communicating with the team and emails and things like that. But if I do any development work, it’s usually in the morning. We’re even maybe I’ll set myself away in slack and I can have three or four hours where I’m just focused on like that project. Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:00] Did you have you adopt this more? Conventional working hour apart if you’ve done that because it I don’t know that it wasn’t working out or you needed to give time back to the family or something like that. Justin Busa: [00:20:11] Yeah, I mean definitely giving time back to the family, but I think it was just for my own like feeling good, you know, I was kind of getting burnt out. And I just yeah, I was you know, like doing things outside of your your work life feels good and then I’m realizing that it translates back into the work life. When you’re feeling good. Then you can be more productive. You know, I’d stay up late a lot and be like, oh, you know, I just gotta finish this one feature, even though it’s one in the morning and then you’re just worthless the next day if you know now and then I will still get on the computer at night, but I’ll get myself a time limit, but.you know if I’m just got Netflix on or something my wife sitting there in the kids are in bed. And we’re just on the couch. I got my laptop open all day. All right, let’s see what I can do in an hour. But after that shut the laptop, I don’t care if it’s done or it’s broken or whatever. We’ll look at it tomorrow. Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:58] It’s interesting. I think in this in this day and age and this is one of the WP and UP things. You know that we’re all kind of learning those for all making those same mistakes, you know, we’re staying up at the not everybody clearly because you’ve kind of fixed it in your own life by the sounds of it, you know, staying up late doing things. That are not necessarily great for us not getting enough sleep checking Facebook too often getting all caught up in the social whirl wind and and all that but you’re happy. It’s made you a happier person having this sort of norm normal structure in your week. Justin Busa: [00:21:26] Yeah exactly in again. Like I said, you were remote workers. So I mean, you know in any given week I could. Don’t all the wind and decide to you know, do it differently or sleep in late or whatever. But for the most part I do like to have my routine it allows me time to focus on my hobbies to I picked up a Guitar again after like tells great. , I still feel never probably in my entire life feel like I’m any good at it. But you know just having some give it allowing myself some time to dedicate to those type of things. It just brings you Joy and it kind of I think fills up your soul and then you know that translates back into better world. Nathan Wrigley: [00:22:01] Yeah. That’s great. I made a commitment to myself about 18 months ago to play the guitar more. Oh nice. Well, no failure complete and utter failure. Like three guitar lessons because I thought okay, that’ll be a good idea to have some lessons and and then something happened the routine got broken. For some reason. I couldn’t go to the fourth lesson. And that was it it just it all just ground to a halt but I know exactly what you mean. I’ve kind of developed other things I like to do. But yeah the guitar, that’d be really nice now speaking of working remotely. I’m interested in your side of things but spoke to Robbie the other day. Yeah, so Robbie’s been been working pretty remotely. How’s that? How’s that going for you? Are you is it like the beaver Builder guys? That’s cool. Go Robbie do it, you know enjoy go around the world and enjoy yourself or does that presented challenges for you? Because he’s not there and in the u.s. all the time. Justin Busa: [00:22:47] No, I mean wouldn’t be any challenges. I mean the time zones got tricky but aside from that. I mean it’s kind of business as usual since we are already distributed when he’s in the states. It was sad when we lost the three of us started with an office together. So that was kind of sad to have to go remote but yeah works out great. I mean I kudos to him. I’ve done, you know my fair bit of traveling not that much and but usually when I travel I’m a little bit more unplugged because it’s not for such an extensive period of time but you know since he he’ll be gone for you know, a month or two at a time, you know at some point you have to actually like focus and he you know, he does a good job at it. I feel like it would be a lot harder for me to do the The Nomad lifestyle. I mean, there’s the remote work lifestyle, but then there’s that Nomad lifestyle that. I think you really got to be disciplined to do that one. Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:34] I totally couldn’t do it. I would say I would I would always pick the beach. Yeah better than laptop. Yeah Beach laptop Beach like yeah, I’ll go for the if the beach. That’s amazing. It’s amazing that he’s got the skill to do that. So let’s just talk about like word WordPress and word can WordPress community and all that do you do? People in this space in this event you if you got like real friends here apart from like Robbie and stuff. Do you regard people in in the WordPress Community is your your actual friends? Justin Busa: [00:24:06] Yeah, I’d say so I mean, you know, there’s obviously a lot of acquaintances because you only see each other every so often and you do some communication online, but I think there’s some people that I’ve definitely gotten close with, you know, I mean yourself included, you know, I mean, I’m you know, whenever you light up when you see somebody, you know, that’s that’s a good feeling and I get that from a lot of people in the WordPress Community excited to see him. Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:28] It does puzzle me how that can happen because I remember going back years that you know, the whole online dating thing started and remember very cynically thinking that can’t work, you know, these people have never met in the real world and I because because the internet was a new thing I kind of incorrectly assumed that actually friendships have to be forged. In with what I was seeing people being in the same space as completely wrong. Absolutely 100% wrong because like over there is a couple of guys. I mean you can see them. There’s Dan and there’s this pole then there. It’s not my actual real mates now so much so that WordPress is kind of reflects. A lot of the people that are used to hang out with I kind of hang out with far less. So my real world friends of kind of changed and now I’m spending a lot more time with these guys from the WordPress community. So you’ve built actual friendship. Yeah the community. Justin Busa: [00:25:19] Yeah, I’d say so absolutely. I mean, you know people that you can come with and you know, you don’t have that kind of like awkward like silence when you just jump right into a conversation with them, you know, it’s like a old pair of shoes as they say it, isn’t it? Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:31] Yeah, I was I was very very skeptical. Like I said that this could happen and now well, it’s definitely happened. Um, yeah, are you planning on something like this is going to sound contrived and a bit silly, but do you plan to come to these events to. I make new friends dude. Are you wanting to meet new people or are you happy to meet the collection that you’ve already met over and over again? Justin Busa: [00:25:52] No, absolutely. I mean, I think that’s one of the goals like we, you know talked about earlier and like do we have an agenda and you know, I’m like, well it’s pretty loose but that you know, I. But almost personally see that as like a measure of success for the event if I’ve met a few new people, you know both for of the business and then just me personally, you know kind of branching out of my, you know, getting out of my shell. Yeah. Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:12] Where do you take it then? So let’s say for example that you meet somebody at this event. How do you how do you keep that going? Are you like it? Do you communicate with people on Facebook or you know, I don’t know if the actual old-fashioned phone or is it email or. Justin Busa: [00:26:25] I used to I don’t do it so much anymore. But I used to make it a point to do like an email follow-up after events and just you know, give it like a personal like me a nice to meet you and all that kind of stuff and now it’s more just kind of organic online on social but I’m terrible in social so Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:42] I don’t mean yeah, you’re terrible and social.AI mean, yeah, I’m turned on social. Justin Busa: [00:26:46] And just it’s you know, it’s social has gotten just a little bit overwhelming. So sometimes I just like to stay away from it. And then I’m like, oh you don’t want to connect with these people. Um, you know, like I set up a Twitter account thinking I was going to be Twitter and then I didn’t. Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:59] I can’t do Twitter. I actually had to get somebody to the day to explain to me how to look at replies. I literally did not know because I needed to know that somebody had replied and I was I had to be taught how to do it. Pretty terrible. I should probably do well on the sort of the nature of this charity. Do you know about. What we’re doing? Justin Busa: [00:27:19] Yeah, I follow you guys on social so yes, so I kept up on it. Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:23] I don’t know if this is anything that you identify with. But with the idea is that you know people who well, there’s obviously no statistical measure of this which is accurate, but there is a connection between people who work and computers all day long and sort of. Isolation let’s say you know people they struggle with us or stuff. And so we’re coming to these events hoping to promote this charity get it get it more widely recognized so that people can come. To the charity and receive some free support in return. Nice. Yeah. It’s interesting. We’re at the phase where we’ve kind of mapped out all the things that sort of need to happen. It’s a nonprofit that what you call it a non-profit. Yeah, we’ve got a charity so it’s probably the same thing. Yeah. And and we’re now at the point where we want to be able to actually offer this stuff. So if you if you phone up or you send an email or something we can then turn around and match you up with somebody. So if it’s a problem with your business, you know, you know, you’re not sure about how to file your tax return or something like that. We can maybe hook you up with somebody who knows about that. But if it’s more. You know mental health say we can hook you up with somebody who’s maybe done something similar before you have ever gone and you’ve gone through any of those sort of issues before? Justin Busa: [00:28:37] Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I could probably sit here for another 45 minutes and talk about it. But you know, I mean I did touch on a little bit when we’re talking I was like the the schedule and the hobbies and things like that, but remote work, you know, I think it’s been probably about three and a half. Almost four years now since I was working in an office with the guys, the first year was fantastic, you know, just the kind of freedom and you know, the eat it’s easy not have commute. Although I didn’t really have a commute before but going from your bed your desk in the house is pretty quick. But I think as time went on I definitely was feeling the isolation and you know, we’re all doing the remote work thing so I can kind of Imagine that everyone doing it at some point probably are a lot of people probably feel that and it I felt we felt weird saying that I was feeling isolation because I do have my wife and two kids at home and my wife’s a stay-at-home mom, but it’s just that connection with other people. It’s you know, you type a few things on slack and then you’re done. Whereas if you’re in the office together, you know, you can lean over say something or step into someone’s office and. Just a lot more, you know in person comradery. So I definitely had to deal with that probably still dealing with that to be honest. Like one of my goals is to go to more meetups in my hometown and I’ve kind of failed at that Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:59] Likeme with the guitar. Justin Busa: [00:30:00] Hey, yeah. But definitely focusing on myself and trying to get better habits is like starting to make me feel better. Nathan Wrigley: [00:30:09] Where have you like? I find I find it’s really easy to identify in my own life what my problems are but finding the answers much more difficult. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Where do you where do you go to look for the the solution to these things? Justin Busa: [00:30:23] Let’s see. I guess, you know some of it seems like it’s common sense, but maybe not so much like the simple answer is never really the simplest. Or whatever but you know, I do a lot of reading online. I thought even Google stuff like the simple like questions like, you know, but. You know, I hear certain things, you know, like one thing that stuck me recently. I forgot where I heard it. I was like a Mind Body Spirit and trying to focus on those three things. And so just try to like kind of I can better myself and like how like make sure I’m as good as I can be and like be like the most you know, the best version of myself. I think we all know what we want inside like the best version of yourself looks like and sometimes maybe we know that we are achieving that and that can bring us down a little bit. So that’s what I’ve been kind of focusing on like once I heard that like our mind need to start reading more books and I read something that said, you know Branch out of your your skill set and your industry like read things that. I’m going to introduce you to New Concepts and ideas beyond what you do everyday body. I’ve been trying to be more active. I mean for me it’s been just you know, your typical gym type stuff, but I think for anybody could really just be going on hikes or walks or if there’s this particular sport you like but it makes you feel good, you know, like a brain chemistry and all that kind of stuff starts to really activate when you’re being more active versus sit in front of the computer for 8 10 12 hours or something. It’s going to weigh on you. Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:52] Yeah, I could well infrequently do sit on the computer for 8 10 12 hours and I don’t really spot it in myself. But I think that’s a cumulative effect of that. Is it you know, it’s not a happy not a happy Nathan. Justin Busa: [00:32:04] Yeah, that is drags you down. Yeah, you’re not like completely bummed out like, you know, you can just be more invigorated. I guess type of thing and to be honest, you know, I’ve been thinking about you know, the whole thing of you know for. We’re like blessed to be on this planet. We only you know at this period of time where there’s so much prosperity and all that kind of stuff too. Like I want to be able to take advantage of all of it. Not just you know, wake up one day and be towards the end and be like, wow. I’m looking at that computer for 10 hours a day was really really awesome. Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:35] I did 12 years of looking at the computer for 12 hours a day. Yeah, where did life go? Justin Busa: [00:32:39] Yeah, so thought of balance because you know can’t we like you’re saying, you know love to just choose the beach every day, but that’s you know, that’s not like a reality. So it’s a lot of balance and making sure it’s. It’s probably going to be a lot no one’s ever going to completely figure it out. It’s like a lifelong like just kind of got to look in the mirror and be like, okay, how am I doing? Do I need to make some adjustments or whatnot? Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:59] It’s easy. Like I said, it’s easy to be introspective and find the problems and the answers are yeah difficult. How about growing the business? Does that side of things like does that keep you awake at night? You know now that you’ve got payroll and people that require require your your plug-in to be successful because that’s that’s their job. Justin Busa: [00:33:17] Yeah. I’ve come I’ve made peace with that because we’re like Beaver Builders had like a five years anniversary. And then we’re doing the client services stuff like three four years before that. So yeah, I mean, there’s definitely a lot of stress and like worried, you know, just about keeping the lights on and like, you know, we got to make sure we’re successful now because you know people depend on us like not only our customers but also our employees. But I think over time I’ve just kind of like made peace with like, you know, I can’t control a lot of this. So it’s not that I don’t worry about it because I do have to be on top of it but. I just don’t let it affect me or bring me down as much. Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:53] But there’s no there’s no strategy you is it literally just don’t look at that stuff and kind of make sure that you know the end of the month. It’s one quick looked. All right, everything’s fine. Justin Busa: [00:34:03] But no. No, I mean, it’s definitely yeah look at it for sure. It’s yeah, like I said, it’s not that I don’t pay attention to it. I think it’s just experience. It’s like having gone through it so much that at some point something changed, you know, I didn’t choose so. That’s probably not helpful. That’s probably like it. Sounds like I’m telling people like you’re just going to have to go through it for a few years and you’ll get you’ll get through it. Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:23] No because some people just have a they’ve got a different kind of we call it blue touch paper, you know, the thing which you like the firework that thing some people have a different thing that it sends them off andyou know might be easy to cope with the the struggles of the strains of growing a business. But if you know, you might struggle with finding out to sleep or something, but equally, you know, you might not struggle with sleep but struggle with growing your business and all those kind of things and turns out that every single one of us has got different problem. And that’s that’s what this Charity’s trying to do is trying to figure out where to put that support. We did a we did a survey. About ended about I don’t know. Let’s say a month ago or something. We got I think 1500 WordPress people, all kind of walks a life filled it out. And the questions were although there was no personal data taken, you know, the nature of the questions was quite personal you had to if you wanted to complete it yet. Just tell us about what was going on in your life and the data that came out of that was was really interesting and in some ways a little bit. Troubles, you know worrying. A lot of people. Yeah, really really in this industry struggle with all sorts of, you know, dark thoughts and and what have you and I feel slightly blessed that I don’t have to deal with that too much right? I know there’s a lot of people that do. So Justin Busa: [00:35:41] yeah. Yeah, it’s like the the iceberg thing where you know, you see everything on top but there’s all this stuff Corey Miller again. Yeah, of course. Yeah, he’s definitely influence. Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:49] He’s actually one of the trustees. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. He’s one of the trustees of the charity. I think I don’t know. If I don’t know if that will ever get onto the airwaves because I don’t know if that’s public knowledge yet, but he has signed up and I did a did a podcast with him talking about exactly that, you know, the iceberg thing. Yep, you know, here’s what the public sees this polish. Nice version of myself and yet underneath there’s all this stuff working and it’s dark and it’s it’s difficult. Justin Busa: [00:36:15] Yeah, and I think hearing that helped me to realize that when I see a lot of stuff online and like, oh, I’m not you know, like is successful or you know, these you every just I realized that there’s more to it, you know, when I see these things and not not to read so much into it because there’s you know, there’s always more to it that you’re not seeing online. Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:34] Do you have you in the past of judged yourself against other? Like similar products should we say do you do a bit of that? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, Justin Busa: [00:36:42] yeah. Absolutely. I mean I and again it comes with like I just haven’t gone through it for so long that now I don’t worry about it as much and I’m really like focusing on like what’s our mission. Rather than like trying to compare myself to someone else. I mean, it’s the same with just people outside of work, right if but you know, if I’m looking online and I’m like, oh, wow, these people are all attractive. I’m not attractive. Like don’t worry about everyone else worry about you and then you know good things will happen because. Nothing’s going to happen if you don’t do anything. So Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:11] Did you have a you have a pivoted beaver Builder? I got this sort of notion that in you’ve kind of decided to make it more of a focus towards professionals. That’s the word. I’m going to use word professions is that of I got that about right? Is that where you’re aiming the product out more now? Justin Busa: [00:37:26] Yeah, and I don’t think we’ve ever decided to Pivot Beaver Builder. That’s just because like it’s our professionals is like what we know and the people we’ve hired also know that too so it’s just like. The company is a whole kind of understands that I think if we did want to Pivot we’d have to bring in some other expertise and it’s better to stick with what you know, really Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:46] Do you happy with it? You like it when you look at Beaver, but when you open it up. You like do you ever use it? Justin Busa: [00:37:52] Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean not as much anymore if the Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:55] Stupid question yeah, did you ever actually build a website and try to try to use the menus and see what works and you know what needs a tweak? Justin Busa: [00:38:02] A lot of times. I’ll actually when I’m doing testing I’ll go try and rebuild popular Pages like Spotify is homepage or I did wordpress.org one time as a joke just to you know. Look how well you can do this with Beaver Builder, too. But yeah, so a lot of that these days since we’re not doing client work anymore. We do have our own properties that we work on to. Since I I used to do a lot of design work and then I focus on code now just I lost that muscle. I never flexed it for years. So yeah. Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:33] But when you come to an event like this, well, actually no, let me go back to that. First question. Do you like it? You like proud of yourself? You know, when you look at what what has come, you know five years ago. I don’t know what the number is a number of years ago when Beaver Builder didn’t exist. Up to now, I know that nobody likes to say, oh, I’m proud because it’s a weird thing. But are you gu happy with it? You look at it and go cool. We did a cool thing. Justin Busa: [00:39:00] Yeah. Absolutely. I mean at the same time to you though. I do still like have like a lot of imposter syndrome. So I’m like. You know like oh, I’m not as important as the next guy but you know on the yeah, absolutely. It’s exciting to come here and it’s exciting to come here to meet people that have like use Beaver Builder and that are like super grateful. That’s just really humbling. Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:19] Do you get that you got people coming up and just giving you the story of how they’ve used it. And yeah, that’s so nice. Justin Busa: [00:39:25] It’s the weirdest thing, you know, because I just feel like, you know, I’m an introvert so I’m like, oh, I don’t want, you know, praise, we just do it. This was my job. Yeah, but it’s super cool to see I mean that’s I think helps remind me like what we’re doing and what our mission is is like helping people. Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:43] I mean, it’s an amazing product. I use it all the time. Thanks. I’m getting I’m going to make you feel proud. I love a builder. It’s awesome. Yeah, right. Should we not sure we knock it on the head as I as we say Justin Busa: [00:39:56] Sure. Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:57] Absolutely. Thank you Justin Busa from Beaver builder. Justin Busa: [00:40:00] Thanks for having me Nathan. Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:01] One of the purposes of the press forward podcast is to lift the lid on topics that don’t get talked about enough. To allow people to share their stories so that others might listen and by listening they may gain an understanding that they’re not alone. There are other people out there who have faced the same situations that you are facing. They have found a way through and can offer support to you on your journey. Maybe that person’s already in your life, but they might not be and that’s what wpn up is here for to connect you with the support that you need. If you can help WP and UP with the donation, then please visit WP and UP dot org forward slash donate. 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