#154 – Anna Hurko on Managing a Growing Plugin Business

Transcript

[00:00:00] 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 managing a growing plugin business.

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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 Anna Hurko.

Anna is the CEO of Crocoblock, a company with a suite of dynamic plugins designed to help developers build complex websites. With a background in computer science, Anna transitioned from support roles to leading Crocoblock, and has been with the company for over 11 years.

Anna quickly rose through the ranks due to her technical knowledge and effective communication skills. Crocoblock, which started with just a handful of team members, has now grown to 85 employees. They offer a wide range of specialized plugins, such as JetEngine, JetSmartFilters, JetBooking, and more, primarily aimed at agency and freelance developers.

Anna shares her journey and discusses the growth of Crocoblock. She highlights the company’s flexibility and commitment to meeting developers’ needs, adapting to both the rapid changes within WordPress and the increasing demand for dynamic site capabilities.

Anna also talks about the company’s marketing strategies and their active, and growing, participation in the WordPress community through WordCamps and Meetups.

If you’re interested in how a company evolves within the WordPress ecosystem, and the challenges and successes that come with it. 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, Anne Hurko.

I am joined on the podcast today by Anna Hurko. Hello Anna.

[00:02:53] Anna Hurko: Hi Nathan.

[00:02:54] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to connect with you. I should probably say at the outset, Anna has several names. So if you know Anna better as Vanessa, or any combination thereof, it’s the same person. So do you just want to clear that up? How is it that you’ve got two different names?

[00:03:09] Anna Hurko: So it’s from the beginning. I have started to work as a supporter, and it was like tradition to choose a nickname for support agent. And I decided like okay, I’m already Anna, I want something other, but which will suit me. And I decided to be Vanessa.

And for a few years I was Vanessa, but somehow all my colleagues remembered me as Vanessa, and we used it till now, even if I don’t need it anymore. And that’s how it works. But now I feel more Vanessa than Anna because in whole work, so even financial departments, they say Vanessa, not Anna. Even the ex coworkers who are not anymore working with me, but they’re my friends, even their children say I’m Auntie Vanessa.

[00:03:46] Nathan Wrigley: So several names, but hopefully by the time this podcast is finished, you’ll have figured out, dear listener, who it is that we’re talking to. But I’m going to go with Anna because that’s probably the easiest thing for me to say.

So Anna, we are a WordPress podcast, so I guess it would be a good idea right at the outset to give you an opportunity to just tell us who you are, where you come from in terms of the geography and maybe the company that you work for, things like that. So really it’s a short bio moment. So could you just tell us a little bit about yourself?

[00:04:13] Anna Hurko: Yes, sure. So I’m from Ukraine, from south of Ukraine, and the company is the Crocoblock is project I’m working with now, and it’s located in Ukraine as well. All our team members are in Ukraine, in one city actually. So now a little bit different. So I’m CEO of Crocoblock and I work for the holding company about 11 years for now.

[00:04:32] Nathan Wrigley: So, what is Crocoblock? And I hope I’ve pronounced that correctly. By the way, everything that we mention will be linked in the show notes. So if you head to wptavern.com/podcast and look for the episode with Anna in it, then you’ll be able to find all the show notes. But, what is Crocoblock and what does it do?

[00:04:49] Anna Hurko: So Crocoblock, I have always a long and short answers. Crocoblock is project who is making plugins for developers to build dynamic complex websites. And the idea was to have ecosystem which has all tools for developers needs.

But for me as a CEO, Crocoblock is a team. So it doesn’t matter which technology will come tomorrow and what happened to WordPress, we are a team who can build products. So that’s why I have two answers.

[00:05:14] Nathan Wrigley: Now, you mentioned at the outset that you are from the Ukraine originally, but just before we hit record, you talked about the fact that you are no longer in the Ukraine. But maybe that would be an interesting way to begin this podcast properly.

I’m guessing that from the description, living in the south of Ukraine, that you moved against your will, possibly. You’ve had to move because of the situation over there.

[00:05:36] Anna Hurko: So the are three years of the situation. I was in Ukraine, I just moved in September after WordCamp US. I just didn’t come home and then stayed in Europe because I am trying to visit more WordCamps and WordPress meetups. And if you’re in Ukraine, it takes too long time to get out, because you don’t have planes and you need to go with a bus to Europe and to take plane, and every country in Europe takes me two days to move.

So I decided to stay in Romania because it’s kind of in the center and then can visit more events. So last year I visited about seven WordCamps, because I want to go closer to community, to customers, to speak offline with them, and we have results. So we have already ran a little bit growing in comparison.

[00:06:20] Nathan Wrigley: The situation in Ukraine in terms of web development and tech, it always seems like Ukraine punches above its weight. I don’t know if there’s a particular kind of, I don’t know, like drive in school or anything like that to head towards technology and software development. But it seems, when I look at the about page of a lot of products, especially in the WordPress space, but technology more generally, it always feels like Ukraine is overrepresented with the amount of companies. I don’t know if that’s something that you think is true or if that is true.

[00:06:53] Anna Hurko: It is true, but I think it’s not because of good reasons. Somehow we didn’t have good factories and job places, and web was very easy for people to just find a job and to have good salary because a lot of companies working as outsource, or they have customers from US and Europe. For example, like Crocoblock, we don’t work with Ukrainian market actually, we work with Europe and US.

And it’s not something, we have good studying in school and university. Unfortunately it should’ve developed better. For example, I have studied computer science, but it was like old technologies in university. Just because we don’t have normal working places, people starting to self-educate and they work in IT. And somehow it’s very good now. So even government programs, they’re all digitalised.

So from my phone, I can pay taxes, I can marry now from phone, but only with Ukrainians, of course. I can get any document I need, I don’t need to go anywhere. So now, for example, I’m outside of Ukraine, but I can have any document, new driver license. I can sell car with one application. So it’s somehow built in us.

[00:07:59] Nathan Wrigley: So the propensity of Ukrainian web developers is as a result of people looking to improve their own lives and finding that distributed work was something that they could do, and they could earn a good, in air quotes, good salary if they took the initiative and did, what? Self-taught learning, that kind of thing.

[00:08:17] Anna Hurko: Yes, yes. Because in university, school, it’s really bad now, I’ll say. It’s not practical. But, for example, as I have studied computer science, it was all technologies. It was like Pascal Delphi, if you even know, C++. Something very difficult and not attached to WordPress, for example. But it gives me understanding how database works, for example. And it helps me a lot, even now, I don’t work with WordPress itself, so I don’t build product, I mean. I work with a team. It helps me to understand my developers and how it works.

[00:08:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, well, it’s a nice idea that the CEO of the company actually has a background in technology. I think that’s interesting to be able to speak to the developers on their level.

How did you start in the WordPress space then? I think you said that you started working with the support side of things over at Crocoblock. And if that’s the case, going from support to where you are now, CEO, that’s a pretty big move. How did it all begin?

[00:09:09] Anna Hurko: First I need to say that I didn’t realise it’s a big move before attending WordCamps. Because it’s for me everyday life and it was kind of 10, 11 years. So when I have studied computer science, by side I was in NGO and Youth Politic. And I told, I will never have anything with programming languages, or with IT, or even with websites because we had website building in university as well, but it was, you know, when it was on the tables and HTML and so on. And the teacher was so awful. So I told, I will never do it, and now I’m here.

So after I finished with Youth Politic, I have started to just looking for a job which need English language. So because I didn’t want IT and I sent a CV for everyone with English knowledge, and they picked up me in the holding company as a support member because I knew English. But somehow as I knew computer science, it was very easy for me to deal with WordPress. And in three months I was already a night shift team leader and I have started to mentor people and so on. So I have started with support, but my background with computer science helped me to be very good, very fast.

So until now, I think it was the best thing I can do in my life is to be a supporter. Even now I think so. And because I have done Youth Politic, I had soft skills which helped me to communicate with customers in a nice way. And we have started to rebuild the support team as well, and there are rules in support and so on.

[00:10:31] Nathan Wrigley: So you started out in support, and fairly quickly you rose through the ranks. And you mentioned just there that, you called it the, what did you call it?

[00:10:38] Anna Hurko: Holding company.

[00:10:39] Nathan Wrigley: The holding company, that’s it.

[00:10:40] Anna Hurko: Yeah, we have holding company, it has several projects on side. And now Crocoblock is totally separated project.

[00:10:45] Nathan Wrigley: So what’s the holding company, and is it a sort of WordPress thing, or is it just technology in general?

[00:10:50] Anna Hurko: It’s a recent WordPress thing. So we have started as a team in Template Monster. And, yeah, I was a support member in Template Monster first. Our developers started as well with templates before the templates were starting to die.

[00:11:04] Nathan Wrigley: And do you have a background in using WordPress, or has your experience with WordPress been on the journey in Crocoblock?

[00:11:12] Anna Hurko: I don’t have my private experience, so I never worked for an agency. But what I need to say is that in support, when I have started support, it was not like just us answering general questions. I was very technical support member, very quick. And customers in Crocoblock even now, but even before when I was working, they come with the real projects. And they just come and say, I don’t know what is wrong, just do something. And you log in on the website and you start building it.

And that time, to start working in support, we had training for one month. About four hours theoretical training, and then five hours of homework. And this first month, I never went out of my house, only for my grandmother’s birthday. And what we have done, we haven’t learned WordPress, we have learned CSS, JavaScript and HTML. We have built websites, and working with database was as well. So somehow I started to work with the websites first, but just I don’t have commercial experience, I think.

[00:12:07] Nathan Wrigley: And what’s the structure of Crocoblock then? How many people do you have deployed into that project? If you are the CEO, I guess you’re at the top of that pyramid, how many people are working with you, for you? However you want to describe it.

[00:12:18] Anna Hurko: We have started six years ago with five people, five, seven people. We don’t know exact number. All of us have different story of it. Now it’s 85.

The story begins when we were in Template Monster and we have built templates. In some point we had new people for it and we needed more amount of it and so on. And we have started to build frameworks to speed up the process, and to have less errors because if every quarter developer makes it in own style, we have too much issues with it.

And then we started to sell it. So because it was product for ourself, but it was too good and we have started to like, okay, can we just start to sell plugins? And then we have started it, it was enough, seven people. It was developers, one support member, and guy who was before me, the CEO.

[00:13:00] Nathan Wrigley: So if I go to the Crocoblock website, which is crocoblock.com, and I look at the products that you’ve got. It opens up a fairly giant mega menu, and there’s literally dozens of things in there.

When I first heard the word Crocoblock, firstly I assumed that it was plural, that it was Crocoblocks, and my assumption was that, okay, that’ll be a suite of WordPress blocks. So you’ll download a plugin, and then you’ll have a bunch of blocks that you can put into the block editor.

And you go to the website and you realise, no, that’s really not what it is. That’s not even close to what it is. So what is it that you are offering into the market? What are the different products that I can find in your product section? I mean, there’s too many to talk about, but maybe just pick your favorites or a few that are particularly popular.

[00:13:47] Anna Hurko: Yeah, so short answer is, well, it will be JetEngine and JetSmartFilters. But the issue is that we have invented the Crocoblock name before Gutenberg. There were no blocks, it was Crocoblock, and we have it because it was an old project that we had already some traffic and we left it.

Now we have actually two names, Crocoblock and JetPlugins because all of our plugins are JetPlugins.

And the issue is that the project was started with supporters and developers. We didn’t have marketer for a few years. So I have a head of marketing only last one year. That means we didn’t thought about the things like name, and now we have a lot of difficulties with it.

And when I had started Crocoblock we have the first document with idea about what Crocoblock is, and it was one sentence that will make us laugh for even now. Crocoblock is not about dynamic, it’s only about static and nice design. And what is fun about it? Because it’s now only about dynamic plugins. So now we have big menu with a lot of plugins because it’s like our history and we can’t delete them, because people use them.

But our main focus is on dynamic websites, and that means JetEngine, which is a competitor for ACF, but it has much more inside. JetSmartFilters, JetThemeCore, and all plugins, which helps you to create complex structured websites, like real estate, multi-vendor and so on. You can track user data, and you can manage what to show to different users, or see the user behavior and connect to it.

[00:15:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there really is a lot in there. You really do run the whole gamut of what WordPress can do. So for example, there’s something called JetBooking, which I’m imagining helps you with booking. And JetGridbuilder, again, it speaks for itself. JetProductTables, JetWooBuilder, JetProductGallery, Jet Appointments, JetFormBuilder. You get the idea. You’ve got your fingers in everything.

[00:15:35] Anna Hurko: The idea was to build this structure where developer has ever seen. We have started with Elementor. When Crocoblock was invented, it was few builders on the market, new builders. Elementor, Oxygen, and maybe, I don’t remember, Brizy or something like that. And they were on the equal stage. And our previous CEO came to us, I’m like, what will we choose? He asked me, and he asked our CTO. And we choose, both of us choose Elementor because of user experience and because of the cleanness of the code.

Our idea was to build everything except hosting and page builder for building websites. So we have tried, at the beginning, to close all the tasks for users and it was very fresh. So we appeared at the same time when Elementor was developing. And Elementor had less features inside of it.

So first of all, we have tried to close all tasks, and now we’re more specifically working on dynamic. For example, Elementor, in JetElements we haven’t added any new features for few years, but it’s still our best plugin in sellings. But we don’t develop it because we don’t like to develop, so I mean we’re fixing bug issues or compatibility issues, but we don’t add new features because Elementor has added all new features, HappyAddons. And we don’t want to build, if it’s already on market, we don’t build it. It’s a philosophy of Crocoblock. We don’t want to build anything which already exists.

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: So over there I can see, what is it? 21 on the mega menu, there’s 21 things there. I’m guessing that, probably started with 1 went to 2, 3, 4, and we’re up to 21 at the minute. How do you keep this going? Are you intending to go from 21 to 22, 23, 24? Do you keep adding products, or is this more a case of, okay, we’ve got what we’ve got. We’ve covered everything? How are you making decisions about what it is that you’re going to do in the future?

[00:17:18] Anna Hurko: So as I came from support, when we invented Crocoblock, we had only one support member, and all developers were supporting as well. We have very tight connection with customers and what we’re building, we’re building after customer’s request. So it depends. If it will be need on market to build one more plugin, we’ll build it. If not, then not.

So I can tell you we have strategy for number of plugins. We have strategy to cover developers’ needs. So now, for example, we have user interviews, some pools, research and market to find what else developers need. So it’s not about number of plugins, it’s about to close the needs.

For me, I don’t want more plugins, so it’s not the goal. But if it would be better to build it as a separate plugin, we’ll build it. For example, the JetProductTables, it’s a new plugin. It was a result of R and D departments, I would say. We have new department, new for one year and they made resource. It’s like an experiment. So we don’t have any goals and number of plugins. It’s just to make developers life easier.

So we have some projects, for example, we have ideas for projects not related to plugins itself, but to developers. I can’t tell you now what will it be.

So for me it’s, you know, like CEO, I don’t like a lot of plugins and I don’t want to have more team members. It’s always something you don’t want, to have more, because it’s easier to focus on one plugin. And as you say, it would be easier to focus only on JetEngine, but somehow Crocoblock can’t stop.

[00:18:44] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned at the start that you began the business with Elementor in mind, and Elementor, if you haven’t been keeping a track, dear listener, Elementor really has had just the most astronomical growth since its inception, and I think really is singularly responsible for a large proportion of WordPress’ rise.

Now, I don’t know if that is the sort of page builder of choice that you’ve hooked yourself into, or if you’ve got into the sort of more WordPressy way of doing things. And what I mean by that is, you know, the Block Editor and Full Site Editing and things like that, because that’s obviously where the Core of the WordPress project is focusing its energy. But obviously on the periphery of that, you’ve got all these different page builders.

What do you do with all of that? Do you hunker down and stick with Elementor, or do you decide you’re going to go with like the Core way of doing things? How does that all fit in?

[00:19:33] Anna Hurko: So we of course love Elementor and it helps us in the beginning so much. We have the same philosophy as Elementor in a lot of things, like treating customers and so on. And I think it was right choice to start with. But once it was announced, the Gutenberg project, and then WordPress started with Gutenberg, the same in half a year or something like this, we have started to rebuild our plugins.

So all our main plugins, not design plugins, but all our main plugins for dynamic websites. So when the Gutenberg project was started, we rebuilt them, and they all are working with Gutenberg as with Bricks now and Elementor. So Elementor is just one of the builders customers need. And then Gutenberg is the core. So we have rebuilt inside the plugin, the code in the way it can work with Gutenberg and we can easily add other integrations. And we always perform something with WordPress and Gutenberg native features. It’s in the core. So of course Elementor has grown up.

So the company itself, it’s 20 years in market and we have all the 20 years experience. And we know it can shine as a star and it can die next day. But WordPress, we believe will stay for a long time with us. That’s why all our main plugins are built for WordPress and Block Editor. And we try to connect it more natively.

The issues we have, it takes a long time. For some of our projects, for example, we have JetThemeCore, it’s a plugin which builds templates for archive pages, WooCommerce card, profile page, so all sorts of pages you can make the structure with it. And for some time we haven’t developed it because we were waiting for FSE, for some new features from WordPress itself. But it take too long time, and we didn’t want to build something that WordPress will build natively. Or you need to wait or you build it, and then users will have it twice, once in Crocoblock and then in WordPress.

So we have these issues, but we’re trying to work around. For example, we have JetStyleManager, it’s a free plugin. It was created specifically for Gutenberg, because when we have made integration and compatibility for our plugins, Gutenberg was very new and it didn’t have a lot of style options. And we have built separate plugin just for Gutenberg to make styles possible. And now users have this solution from every plugin provider different, and we will rebuild it because WordPress have changed and so on.

So what I wanted to say, and it took a long time, even if you use Bricks, Elementor, and we will add some other integrations for Builder, WordPress is in Core and we would never ignore it. We’re part of WordPress, first of all.

[00:22:04] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned a few sort of little frustrations there with the pace of WordPress. So for example, you may want a particular feature, and you know it’s coming, but you take your foot off the pedal of your own project so that you’re not building it twice as you said. But what about the way that Gutenberg and Full Site Editing, but Gutenberg in particular has changed over the last six or seven years?

I mean, there must have been times when, the fact that it was altering so rapidly, and in such a drastic way, you know, from one release to the next it might be an entirely different UI for a particular thing. And then you’ve got to scratch your head and think, okay, we just shipped something, and we did the documentation, and it all looked like that, and now it looks like this, we’ve got to redo all the documentation.

Being honest, has it been a straightforward process or has it been a fairly frustrating process? I mean, it could have been a bit of both, I guess.

[00:22:53] Anna Hurko: It’s both. It was frustrating because we so believe in WordPress, and we have waited for some changes before, early, and it took too much time from our opinion. But it’s part of WordPress life. So it’s part of probably open source and so on, so we’re okay with it. And I can say that probably we don’t feel that frustration all the time because Crocoblock itself, growing and changing so quick as well.

In six years we started with five people, now 85. You can imagine how quick changes processes inside our team as well. Because every time, in marketing, you have few new people, you need new process. Or in developers teams, they have started like three, four developers and now 15. Every two, three, developers, you need to change the process. So what I mean, in our philosophy of Crocoblock, we are okay with changes. It doesn’t frustrate us. What frustrates us, if nothing happens.

[00:23:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And over the last decade or more, we’ve just seen the line of market share for WordPress go up and up and up. And if I was a product maker in the WordPress space, that would’ve made me feel great. I’ve got a credible product, it works. We’ve got a load of people using it. And look, the amount of people who might use it just keeps rising. And then we get to about 43% of the web, whatever that means, I mean, we can ignore exactly what that means, but the point is the line just kept going up.

More recently there’s more discussion about stagnation in the marketplace, and maybe that line tapers a little bit and it goes flat. Or, and I don’t really want to get into that, we’ve got this period of change at the moment, there’s a lot of politics inside of WordPress. I’m just wondering what your thoughts are on where the business is pitched. The fact that you are using WordPress is great, but do you have any concerns about the market share sort of stagnating, or do you feel that you still have a massive audience in WordPress that you’re still yet to reach?

[00:24:41] Anna Hurko: We have different periods. For example, last years were very challenging for us. Because Crocoblock started, when we started it grows in geometrical progress, it was very quick growing. And then of course as a five, six years project, you have not so big changes in your revenue, but it’s good, it works. And last few months we have very good results. So I think we don’t feel that stagnation so much because we have started Crocoblock without marketing, it was selling itself, and of course with help of community influencers.

And we have just started last year to build a brand and to work with marketing. It means we have a lot of potential yet. So if market is stagnating or it still feels for us to develop our customer base and so on, because we didn’t use it before. You know what I mean? So if you haven’t selling in right way, then now we have started. So we still have a lot customers.

[00:25:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh I see what you mean. So it was more kind of organic growth, or maybe it was social media or YouTube or what have you.

[00:25:38] Anna Hurko: We have started with product team, and that’s why we didn’t have real marketing. No one from us really understood the marketing itself, because we have just done what people need. And somehow the product was built first for ourselves and for our needs. That means we know our customers, not only from support team or interviews, they know them because they are we. So we didn’t need marketing.

And it was a time in our Crocoblock life when we didn’t believe in marketing. And we thought like, okay, marketing is just wasting of money. It changed. So last year we had head of marketing and I developed a marketing team as well. That’s why it’s very new for us and we still have where to grow.

And about market share, we could say something about stagnation, but after we see new numbers of Elementor, and we can see where is no stagnation. And about the drama and the situation with WordPress, which we had since September, we don’t feel it.

So for me, it was surprising that my life was only about the drama and no one in Crocoblock community talked about it. So we have 30,000 people in Crocoblock community in Facebook, and it was only two posts asking about what happens, that’s it. With five comments. So I think the companies care, but customers not so much.

We have some feedback from agency customers. So our customer is an agency or freelance developer. They had few issues from clients, but not so much. So the main reason is to keep ecosystem healthy and that’s it.

[00:27:05] Nathan Wrigley: And now that you’ve moved into marketing, by the way, I think you were right about marketing. If you spend your marketing money badly, it probably is an absolute waste of money, but if you spend it wisely, it’s probably the most effective money that you can ever spend. So where are you pitching that then?

So if I just rewind and re-ask that question, who is your audience? Who are the people that are using this? Is this a product which is used by agencies to deploy to their client websites? Do you find that you are being purchased by, I don’t know, people who’ve just got one or two websites? Maybe it’s just a solopreneur, something like that. Is there a segment of the market that you identify with?

[00:27:41] Anna Hurko: Yes, of course. First, when we have started, we were growing just naturally and we didn’t ask ourselves these questions. Now, we have made a lot of researches, and it’s the same answer. Our customers are agencies and freelance developers. They’re about 30, 35, 40 years old with five, six years experience.

The issue is the Crocoblock is quite complicated solution. It gives you total freedom. You can build from admin panel anything, we have query builder where you can use SQL and other complicated stuff. You don’t need to go to database. You can reach your SQL database from the admin panel, or complex relations and so on.

But to use it, even from admin panel by clicking buttons, you need to understand how it works. The learning curve is complicated. And our developers building product quicker is that all other 80 people can produce a content for it and tutorials. That means, so if you need one website, it’s not a marketing answer, but if you need one, two websites, you don’t need Crocoblock. It’ll be too complicated for you. But Crocoblock will save your time and 50, 60% if you have more websites, if you’re an agency.

[00:28:47] Nathan Wrigley: Right, I understand. So if you’ve got a portfolio of websites and you’re willing to put the time in to learn over 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 projects, you’ll get a return on your time back. But if it’s just one website, maybe the learning curve, unless you really into that kind of thing and you just want to learn for the sake of it.

[00:29:04] Anna Hurko: I have visited a lot of WordCamps last year and meetups, just to talk to our customers. And we have a lot of fans who paid us once lifetime, but they’re still our fans and they talk about us on meetups and so on. Even unpaid, it’s so pleasure when someone talked about you, about meetup, and had presentation and you never paid for it.

And it’s always about four or five people in agency who are building websites. And because of Crocoblocks, they can build one website in a week, starting from design into the launch. It’s very nice because we have components and query builder and glossary, so you can make some predefined elements and then reuse it all the time if you have some websites you built then, for example, booking and so on.

[00:29:47] Nathan Wrigley: So do you sell your products separately? So all of the different ones that I mentioned, plus all ones that I didn’t have time to mention. Do you sell them as individuals or do you tend to sell it as a sort of bundle that people buy? How do you pitch that?

[00:29:58] Anna Hurko: You can buy them separately or a bundle. So it’s a subscription for one year, but you can buy one plugin, we have custom subscription, you can choose a few plugins, so you can buy a lifetime with all the plugins or all inclusive yearly for all plugins. So it depends what you need. So of course the most popular is lifetime.

[00:30:16] Nathan Wrigley: Do you get yourself involved in the community? I know personally you said you’d been to a load of WordCamps and things. Does Crocoblock give back? Do you sponsor events maybe locally or some of the bigger ones? I don’t know, maybe you even contribute time to Core in terms of developers or something, I don’t know.

[00:30:30] Anna Hurko: So it was our plan. Honestly, we haven’t started to contribute into Core, but we sponsor WordCamps and we attend a lot of WordCamps. We have started from last year, I think, but because of the war, we couldn’t start before. So I mean, the Crocoblock started with all of these things. But from last year we started to sponsor big WordCamps and small WordCamps.

[00:30:50] Nathan Wrigley: I mentioned the URL earlier, but I’ll say it one more time. It’s crocoblock.com, so C-R-O-C-O-B-L-O-C-K dot com. That’s where you can find all of the different bits and pieces that Anna’s been talking about. If anybody wants to speak to you, Anna, personally, do you hang out on any social media platforms, or have a thing that you’d like to mention where people can find you?

[00:31:10] Anna Hurko: Yeah, Facebook or Twitter, but I’m as well in LinkedIn. And I can tell you the secret, and if you write in Facebook room community, you can find our CTO Andrew. And if you write him in DM, he will answer you as well.

In all WordCamps I told to customers if they have complicate, but interesting case, they come to contact Andrew, and if it’s really interesting, he will help you. And even make some changes to plugin sometimes because of customer requests. So we are very reachable. I mean, all Crocoblock team will answer you if you write in DM.

[00:31:42] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you very much for chatting to me today, Anna. I really appreciate it. One more time, if you want to find out what they’re doing, crocoblock.com is the URL. Anna, thanks so much for chatting to me today, I really appreciate it.

[00:31:52] Anna Hurko: Thank you.

On the podcast today we have Anna Hurko.

Anna is the CEO of Crocoblock, a company with a suite of dynamic plugins designed to help developers build complex websites. With a background in computer science, Anna transitioned from support roles to leading Crocoblock, and has been with the company for over 11 years.

Anna quickly rose through the ranks due to her technical knowledge and effective communication skills. Crocoblock, which started with just a handful of team members, has now grown to 85 employees. They offer a wide range of specialised plugins such as JetEngine, JetSmartFilters, JetBooking, and more, primarily aimed at agencies and freelance developers.

Anna shares her journey, and discusses the growth of Crocoblock. She highlights the company’s flexibility and commitment to meeting developers’ needs, adapting to both the rapid changes within WordPress, and the increasing demand for dynamic site capabilities.

Anna also talks about the company’s marketing strategies and their active, and growing, participation in the WordPress community through WordCamps and meetups.

If you’re interested in how a company evolves with the WordPress ecosystem, and the challenges and successes that come with it, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Crocoblock website

Anna on LinkedIn