#105: Artur Grabowski (Extendify)

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:00:01]:
WordPress got a 1/3 of the web when it was truly unusable for most users. I really see that there are a lot of likes there. And it's and, again, our the bets that we're placing and the investments that we're making is to make that even more approachable to really just, you know, someone who would otherwise maybe just make a Facebook page for their business, like, make it approachable for that person.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:22]:
Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are telling the stories of its entrepreneurs and those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern. And today, I had the pleasure of speaking with Arthur Grabowski. Arthur emigrated from Poland to the Cleveland area at the age of 8, where he later attended Case Western Reserve University and got exposure working both with a hardware measurement instruments company and a Silicon Valley software startup that later became a unicorn. Arthur then transitioned to the business world, working with KeyBank's investment banking team here in Cleveland and with the startup ecosystem while at Silicon Valley Bank in the Bay Area. After completing an MBA at the University of Chicago, Arthur returned to San Francisco to join Adobe, where he led acquisitions and investment and launched Adobe's early stage investments through the Fund For Design.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:20]:
Arthur then returned to Cleveland and joined Automattic, the company behind wordpress.com, to lead their acquisitions, investments, and strategic initiatives. Most recently in 2019, and where we will spend most of our conversation today, Arthur left Automattic to cofound Extendify, where they are on a mission to help web hosting companies deliver delightful WordPress experiences and has since raised venture capital in support of this mission with the initial investment led by Village Global and subsequent investment from a variety of angel and strategic investors, including his former company, Automattic. WordPress powers an almost unbelievable 43% of websites on the Internet today, and Arthur is set on supporting those in this Goliath ecosystem. Arthur has really great perspective on the landscape of the Internet, building a fully remote company before it was the popular thing to do so on venture capital. And I feel he has a refreshing and unique take on many aspects of the whole entrepreneurial journey overall. So please enjoy my conversation with Arthur Grabowsky. Sometimes there are these facts that you come across that are like so profoundly shocking, that they're hard to believe. And then they're hard to stop thinking about.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:45]:
And one of those is one that I came across in preparing for our conversation today. And it is just like the absolute dominance of WordPress on the Internet. And especially because, I mean, I I didn't know this. I I have a feeling most people do not know about this at all. And I feel like that may be as good of a place as any to start, you know, kinda through the arc of your career, you know, your path to automatic, which I also think most people probably don't know about and and how that kinda sets the stage for the the work you're doing today with with Xtendify.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:03:20]:
Yeah. Definitely. I'll I'll give the short version of the arc up to automatic, and then we can circle back on any of it if it's interesting. But Yeah. Yes. I went to I attended CAES undergrad. I spent a few years working on various tech projects in technical roles. I enjoyed that, but I was working with a start up in California called, Melodys, later now known as SoundHound, and got to do some early user acquisition.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:03:50]:
We'd call it kinda growth hacking nowadays, and it was really fun. And so I made this hard pivot into the business world, and and I spent several years there working in Cleveland here at KeyBank. I moved out west and joined Silicon Valley Bank. And, eventually, after graduate school, went back to California and joined Adobe Systems, and kinda did the full Silicon Valley thing. It was a lot of fun. I learned a ton. But, eventually, my wife and I decided to move back to Cleveland. This is kinda 2017, 2018 ish.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:04:22]:
Mhmm. And as part of that, I wanted to stay in tech, stay in software, but live in Cleveland. And I had known from my time at Adobe about Automattic, the company. And Automattic, spelled with 2 t's at the end, which is gonna it throws everyone off, is the company kind of loosely, it's described as the company behind WordPress. And WordPress is what you were referring to there with this with this super surprising statistic, which is today, it powers 43% of the world's websites.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:54]:
Yeah. It's crazy.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:04:55]:
Which is only a few years ago. That was 34%. And so that market share is not only massive. It's growing. And if you actually just look at, websites that use some sort of content management system, which content management system, in short, is CMS. It's the tool for authoring, managing, and publishing content to the web. If you just look at websites that use some sort of CMS, that market share is over 60% for WordPress. So, really, this is dominant dominant software, and it's an open source project.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:05:25]:
And Automattic is kind of the main contributor to the open source project. The cofounder of WordPress is the CEO of Automattic. So I find myself at Automattic. You know, it's one of those you you mentioned the statistic is surprising, and and what you realize once you really dive into it, though, is a lot of people that you know use WordPress. And the reason it has grown to be so big is because when someone wants to start a website, they'll ask their friend, their uncle, their whoever, hey, I want a website. What should I use? So nowadays, people do use Wix and Shopify and Squarespace, but still the the dominant answer is WordPress just because of the critical mass of it, and and the momentum is in that direction. But the other really cool thing about Automattic was it it was from the very beginning a completely distributed organization. And that really was reflective of it being a company behind an open source project.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:06:16]:
Many open source software projects have contributors around the world. They're sort of, you know, people working wherever and and and contributing their time to to build the software. And because the people working on WordPress early on were distributed, Matt Mollenweg, the the CEO of Automattic, thought, hey. Let's just keep it that way, and let's just hire people wherever. And so at the time that I joined Automattic in 2018, it was, call it, 700 ish, 800 ish people in over 60 countries. So, really, then you think a couple of years later when COVID happened and all all the kind of, you know, work from home stuff happened. A lot of people came to automatic, came to me and my cofounder in in in Xtendify, asking, like, how do you how do you do this? Like, how do you

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:03]:
go distribute it? How do you work from home? Doing it before it it was it was cool.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:07:08]:
Before it was cool. That's right. So anyway, that was that was certainly another transformational part of my career was was was experiencing that distributed work. But, yeah, eventually so that precipitated the kind of idea behind Xtendify and us leaving Automattic to to start building Xtendify.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:24]:
So what was the nature of the work that you were doing at at Automattic?

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:07:28]:
Yeah. So Automattic was, you know, a kind of 800 or so people, a relatively mature organization. But, nonetheless, there was it was a large technical organization, large support organization, but there was still a lot of opportunity on the business side of things to grow grow both organic and inorganic side of that business. And so so my role there was my title was director of corporate development, but I I I'm not sure that really means anything to anyone. But, really, what I was doing was a combination of kind of internal strategy and operations work around everything from pricing to new products to business model questions, as well as acquisitions and investments. And so there's, so I led some acquisitions of companies within the WordPress ecosystem, as well as outside. Probably the best known company was, Tumblr. We acquired Tumblr from Verizon Media, which had been part of the Yahoo acquisition.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:08:21]:
So that's sort of a lot of lot of history there. And then also investments, kind of, early stage venture investments, again, inside and outside of the WordPress ecosystem. And the combination of the sort of outward looking part of my work there, and getting to spend quite a bit of time with Matt, who was both the CEO of the company, but more importantly, the leader of the open source project, Just give us a lot of insights about what's going on in the ecosystem. And, frankly, I don't know if low hanging fruit's the right description, or, you know, just maybe some not best in class operations around the ecosystem where a lot of people had lifestyle businesses. A lot of people were doing things in kind of an open source manner that was I mean, worked well in that ecosystem. But when you compare what some of those software companies are doing in WordPress to what's going on in Silicon Valley, for example, you realize that, hey. For something that powers over a third of the Internet, like, there should be more investments here. There should be more companies of scale.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:09:26]:
And Yeah. It just really wasn't it was a lot of kinda hobbyists and and kind of small 1 and 2 person shots building stuff in WordPress.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:33]:
So just on that point, because I I'm I'm kind of fascinated with this. And, again, it is it's just from the kind of enormity of the statistic. Like, how is WordPress and an automatic? I don't know if this is the right word, but like underbranded, you know, why why is there this dearth of understanding of like the reality of these organizations that automatic even exists and and the the the sheer presence of WordPress on the Internet.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:10:01]:
Yeah. It's interesting because despite the number of people that use WordPress, if I just ask someone where would they go to build their website

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:10]:
Yep.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:10:11]:
Usually, they'll give an answer. Like, they'll they'll name it closed platform like Wix or Shopify, or they'll sometimes name a host, like GoDaddy. They'll say, oh, I'll

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:21]:
just go to GoDaddy by

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:10:22]:
my domain name, and, you know, they have something to build a website. And part of the problem there is that WordPress itself is not a company. WordPress itself does not have a marketing budget. And really, the the brand awareness, brand building, all that happens through all of the stakeholders individually, rather than by one single behemoth that has 43% market share. You know, when you think about the different business models that are common in open source, you know, you have to sort of and and over the years, this has developed in what's most in favor, but you've had historically kind of the services based model where people will start using open source software, and then you'll have some sort of professional services organization come and implement that or provide some customization. You have sort of the add on business model, where there's a core piece of technology, and then people sell kind of premium pro add ons to that. And then you have kind of the managed services business model, where, essentially, you have companies offering hosting, for lack of a better description. And that applies not just to web hosting, but to other types of hosting.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:11:30]:
For example, you may have some open source, big data storage or analysis technology. The core technology is open source, but you still need to sort store that somewhere. You still need massive, server volume, etcetera. WordPress, primarily, the the biggest business model, historically, has been that managed hosting business model. And so, really, when you think about who is driving and deriving the most value from the ecosystem, it is the web host. It is the GoDaddy's, the Bluehost. Automatic itself is primarily a web host. And so each of these hosts individually is marketing WordPress, but, really, they're trying to market their flavor of WordPress because they are also competing against the other WordPress hosts.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:12:13]:
And so you have this it's not quite like infighting, but you have this competition that instead of everyone marketing together against Wix or marketing together against Shopify, they're all just kind of marketing and trying to acquire users, the same users who are trying to build this, you know, online store or some sort of blog or whatever. And that definitely takes away from the that brand awareness as as you're describing it. And I think the core project has tried to have a chief marketing officer before, a CMO, and it hasn't worked. And I think that's still a work in progress. How do how does the marketing side of this come together?

Jeffrey Stern [00:12:52]:
So in your role at Automattic, it seems like that maybe would have been the best place for you to get an understanding of what are the problems that folks are experiencing within this larger ecosystem. And so, you know, maybe as we we make our way towards extend to find the work you're doing, I mean, for 1 more on the entrepreneurial motivation side, you know, is that something that always, you know, resonated with you as something you wanted to do, something, you know, you wanted to to try and build something? And then, you know, more in the in the context of the problem that ultimately you're you're trying to to solve here, how did that start to come to to be?

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:13:35]:
Yeah. I feel like as so many people you know, everyone's got their list of ideas. I hear, you know, 20 different start ups, 20 different products I could build. No. So that that was certainly always on my mind. I had the opportunity early on to work on some early stage stuff I alluded to earlier, kind of Bay Area tech, and I enjoyed that. I also also always viewed entrepreneurship as kind of a a means, not an end in of itself. And so I always thought, if the best way for me to accomplish my current goal is by starting something, I'll do that.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:14:15]:
What if it's joining something that exists? I'll take that path instead. And so I was not on a path to be in to just start something so that I could say I started something. Not to say there's anything wrong with that, especially now I realize how much I've learned by going down this path, that I I I think there's just value in starting something for the sake of of of of going through the experience. But but for me, it was definitely going to be whenever I found the right opportunity. And I'd say what an automatic is as you sort of describe there, it was this chance to see the dynamics of the WordPress ecosystem, see what how a web host worked specifically, get to meet with a lot of stakeholders outside the company just because of my role. I was talking with folks about acquisitions and investments and such. And I'd say the biggest kind of moment for for me and my cofounder, my cofounder was also at Automattic, was when we realized how high the failure rate was for WordPress users. Despite how how big it is, how large the installed base is, the fact that it's still growing, many, maybe most users fail when they first try to get started.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:27]:
What what does fail mean?

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:15:29]:
You look at their website when their subscription is about to renew, it still says, hello, world, and they're and they're contacting support to cancel the subscription.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:38]:
Got it. Okay.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:15:39]:
It just literally didn't get anywhere.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:42]:
Yeah.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:15:42]:
And I had very hands on experience with this because one of the really cool thing cool things Automattic does is no matter what your role is in the company, everyone does customer support. The first 2 or 3, I think, 2 weeks when you first start, and then a week every year, you do customer support. Whether you're the CFO, or an engineer, or a marketer, it doesn't matter. So we would see this. Like, we would see users fail, and then we started talking with other folks outside of Automattic, and realized that this wasn't anything particular to Automattic. If anything, actually, Automattic did a better job than everyone else, because automatic had it some of its own added tools for for its WordPress hosting. And that was this clear moment for us where we saw there's a big user experience problem. It is meaningfully hurting unit economics for WordPress hosts, and is also depressing the addressable market for other software developers within WordPress, where you have companies building tools for WordPress, and they're kind of maxing out the size of their business in the kind of maybe tens of 1,000,000 of dollars.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:16:49]:
Whereas in other ecosystems like Shopify, you have businesses with 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars of revenue. And so we really saw a few of these dynamics that came together, and it just felt right to to a degree that it hadn't with prior ideas that I'd explored. There were just there's enough key insights here, we felt like, that it seemed like we just had to go and do something about it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:17:13]:
So what does going to do something about it look like?

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:17:18]:
Yeah. And it's I think, as is almost necessary for anyone on the entrepreneurial journey, it has evolved. And the core kind of mission or vision has been consistent around, how do we make these users successful? How do we make hosts in the WordPress ecosystem successful? And in doing this, keep users within within WordPress, more money gets reinvested into WordPress, the whole ecosystem continues to grow. So that has remained unchanged. I'd say our view has evolved on the importance of add on tools versus the core onboarding, the initial experience of getting started with WordPress. Essentially, our view has moved as to where users fail, how early they fail. The more we've dug into it, the more we've realized they fail earlier and earlier. So whereas early on, we thought once a user got to a certain point, they were lacking some tools that are present in other ecosystems, like a Shopify ecosystem.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:18:21]:
They're not present in WordPress. So let's offer those tools. We realized that users failed much before that. Users failed on the first time, you know, we don't kind of have a visual here. We're just talking, but if I showed you what the WordPress dashboard looks like, the first time someone signed up for hosting, they bought their domain. They Yeah. They sign up for their hosting plan. They get dropped into WordPress.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:18:41]:
And the first reaction you hear from people when you when you do some user testing with them is, oh, so I have to, like, do this myself. And and and and at that moment, people have to decide, am I going to pick up a new hobby, watching YouTube videos on the weekend, and figuring out how to become a junior web developer, or am I just gonna go use Wix? And what we realized is that point where users fail is much earlier. We have to catch users before they hit that wall, and, really, they get them started down the right path. And and that's the reason that, in the end, we decided that our true partner and customer is the web host because that is who we can work with to get this world class experience in front of a user before we hit that wall.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:25]:
So that's kinda fascinating in that on the flip side of the coin, if you look at people who are succeeding in WordPress, does that mean they are succeeding in spite of, you know, like, how how are so many people succeeding then?

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:19:40]:
Yeah. So they have they have a surplus of resources. Those resources being either time or the money to hire someone to help them. And so if someone is really just if someone is just just hustling, trying to get their business going, whatever, maybe maybe they sell cookies, or maybe they have a laundromat, or maybe they're, you know, whatever. And they would just want to get a website started Yeah. When they hit that wall, they quit. Now if someone has the time, has the resources to to work on this, this is their priority, they already have a business going, they're trying to add another marketing channel, etcetera. Those folks do fine.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:20:22]:
They figure out a way to get it done. But, really, what what this highlights for you, though, what and and with high high the churn rates are we hear from some of the hosting partners that they lose more than half their users in their 1st year. So fewer than half users are are are returning or renewing their subscription. But then actually realizes if WordPress is still growing despite retention numbers that are that poor, means WordPress can easily double. And, really, when when when when Matt, the the kind of leader of the WordPress project, talks about WordPress, his his ambition is for WordPress to power 85, 90% of the web. And if we fix the retention problem, that's completely feasible.

Jeffrey Stern [00:21:07]:
Wow. That's exciting. So kinda grounded in, I don't know, what what you would call an onboarding problem. That that's really the the crux of of the inspiration here. How do you begin to start to tackle that problem? Like, what what does how did you approach it? What what does an MVP look like? You know, what what were you first trying to validate as you take on what what is really an an enormous problem in in the context of the Internet at large then?

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:21:34]:
Yeah. Onboarding is a term that we use ourselves internally, but we also know that it's misleading because what we're doing is we're building products that also live with the user throughout their journey with WordPress. So it's a term we use ourselves, even though it it it only represents part of what we do. But the first part we built of our product I I don't want to get into too many of the technical details of WordPress itself. But, essentially, when we started working on this, there was a new kind of editing experience within WordPress. It was very nascent. A lot of people didn't know what to do with it, and we built a set of tools on top of WordPress to make that easier to use for for most users. And that was part of how we proved out kind of the approach we're taking to design, to how we help people create content, create pages, bring new content to their sites, and was also an opportunity for us to build out some of the systems that power what we're doing.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:22:34]:
So Xtendify is a SaaS offering. It is connected into WordPress, but is a stand alone offering that where we generate designs, we generate content, and we bring all the these smarts to a user's website. So building this first component, and we called it the library, kind of a, library of templates and designs, that gave us sort of a a good starting point for how we built the technology and how we prove that users find value in making WordPress easier. From there, we then expanded on the same kind of technology stack to build really that's that sort of onboarding piece. And what was so amazing was we went to this hosting conference in Europe, where we met with dozens and dozens of web hosts before the onboarding piece was built. And so we we had one product in market. It was, you know, probably had tens of thousands of monthly active users at that point. And we went to talk to hosts.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:23:31]:
Hey. We're gonna leverage what we've built, what we're using. Lots of people are finding value in this. We're gonna leverage this to build this experience for you, for the web host. And every single host said, yeah. Let's do it. Like, that's that's that's our problem. And so and and so we told them, oh, this doesn't exist.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:23:47]:
Like, this is it's like, cool. This has been, like, a great conference for us,

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:50]:
but, like, we haven't actually built

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:23:52]:
it yet. So that's what we then kind of went back and did, is is is build that experience. And, really, we built that last year, and last year started shipping that to hosting partners. And, you know, it's been amazing to actually get that live on web hosts around the world at this point, who are onboarding users. And when those users hit WordPress, the first thing they see is not this super clunky agent WordPress, dashboard. They see Xtendify. And we brand it with our host so that it is an extension of the host experience. And by the time that user gets to WordPress, they have a functioning website, and it takes them, like, 90 seconds to do.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:24:36]:
It's a it's just complete kind of night and day difference relative to users who are just starting with vanilla WordPress and trying to figure out themselves.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:45]:
I mean, it it sounds like the the proof is is in that that pudding then, which is very exciting. So the the path to realize that to to develop the product, you know, maybe just give us an overview of, you know, what what the company looks like today. You know, you had to raise some some capital. You had to build out the team. What what what was kind of the the history and evolution of of the company, you know, kind of, in parallel to the the product vision?

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:25:14]:
We raised money initially in March of 2020, which was essentially we raised money within a week of the country shutting down if we're with COVID. And it was very funny dynamic where we we started fundraising. It was just an idea. We didn't have any product. There was no code written. We're we're we're fundraising. You know, luckily, my cofounder and I both had sort of experience and access to to fund to funds and and and, angel investors and

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:50]:
and and and folks.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:25:52]:
And in most cases or I'll step back. We had decided from the very beginning we were going to follow the WordPress and automatic model of building a distributed team. If we're working in the WordPress ecosystem, the people we are going to hire are going to be all over the place. They're used to working remotely. It's just going to be easier. It's going to give us access to more talents. Just everything about it is going to be more straightforward and, also, less expensive, at least to a certain degree. I mean, you know, there's I think there's increasingly kind of compensation parity around the world.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:26:21]:
But and so when we went to talk with investors, it was I mean, some investors always are actually just and it's not interested. It's not a fit for them, but we were running into investors who would say, yeah. I like the idea, but this distributor thing, this is never

Jeffrey Stern [00:26:33]:
gonna never even take off.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:26:34]:
It's so funny to think about, retrospectively, but at the moment, I didn't blame them. Right? It was still relatively you would hear about a few companies, like, Automatic or or Basecamp, or, you know, there's there's a handful of these larger examples, but we couldn't really blame them. And what really the way we really connected with our initial lead investors, Village Global was one of them and doing there. He's he's been amazing. Michael Levinthal is another early investor. He's a really well known investor from from Mayfield Fund, back in the day. And for them, it was, like, a plus. So we weren't trying to convince them on why this distributed thing was, like, okay.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:27:17]:
For them, it was, oh, that's awesome. Like, you guys know you guys can take advantage of this sort of, labor supply, all this stuff, and you've done it at automatic at scale. You know how it works. Perfect. Like, this is this is a competitive advantage. And that just just really resonated. There's such a different tone of conversation for us versus trying to sell people on this model. And then as it happens, you know, once you kind of raise your initial money, everyone else kinda says, okay.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:27:43]:
Well, I guess other people are okay with this. So that's, we're we're we're okay with it too. But, yeah, it wasn't obvious. And and and we were also again, we're we're fundraising, essentially, off an idea, which which also is has its own challenges. But we use that funding to largely hire. I mean, our approach has always been to acquire users in a very efficient way, capital efficient way. And so when we our initial product that we released, that sort of our testing ground and and and our way to build technology, we distributed that by integrating it with other relevant products. And so we weren't, you know, doing paid click ads or whatever, paying directly for user acquisition.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:28:32]:
We were doing that through a more kind of product integration, product distribution strategy. And similarly now, when we're looking at distribution through our hosting partners around the world, this is kind of a relationship based sales effort, partnership effort, where we go and reach out to those customers. We're not we're not spending tons of money on user acquisition there. And so, really, we've been able to be quite capital efficient and really spend our money on hiring awesome people.

Jeffrey Stern [00:28:59]:
So just to help, I think, set the stage a little bit in terms of what the the market looks like here. And I also don't, like, fully grasp this yet, so I think it would just be good to get that perspective. But is your competitor like, how do you think about competition? Because solely you are operating within the world of WordPress. Right? It's not like helping onboarding for Squarespace or Shopify, where they probably have similar, maybe not at the same scale, but, you know, some kind of onboarding problem as well. Right? So this is this is a a a play for WordPress Mhmm. Just to start. Right?

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:29:37]:
Yes. Correct. Well, I'll expand on just one bit of that. You're you're right in what you said. I'll just expand on one element. We've talked to a lot of companies, including large public software companies that have tried to reach the WordPress ecosystem with their products, and they can't because it's this open source. It's a really tough nut to crack. And so these companies talk with us about reaching using us to reach the WordPress ecosystem with their products.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:30:06]:
So we are onboarding people to WordPress, so that doesn't mean that we're just onboarding them with WordPress solutions. We're gonna onboard them with whatever the best solution is for them to run their small medium business online. And so the the platform will be WordPress, but they may use Mailchimp, or they might use whatever other tools to to get their job done.

Jeffrey Stern [00:30:26]:
Got it. Okay. That that is helpful. And so how do you think about competition then? Right? Like, what what does that even look like?

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:30:34]:
Yeah. It's like one one kind of funny anecdote from from our fundraising journey is at some point, we're talking with an investor, and she asked us, how are you gonna make sure that the new user growth in WordPress is going to continue relative to a Wix or or or Shopify? And my answer was, I don't care. That's not my problem. WordPress is 43% of the web. Last month, it was 42. The month before that, it was 41. Like, I this isn't a problem I have to solve. That's not my problem.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:31:04]:
My problem is, how do we make these users successful? And so one of the cool things is, I don't really care what's going on in Wix or Squarespace or whatever. Yeah. Our competition, in most cases, is against this status quo of a really choppy experience, but one that some people are just used to. And so it's like, okay. I know this is hard, but it's just like what we've done for the last 20 years. WordPress is 20 this year. We view our kind of target market as essentially every web host. There are thousands of them.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:31:40]:
As, essentially every web host, there are a handful, and I really do mean a handful, like, single digit, hosts who are trying to do what we're doing just for themselves. And so they are building a better onboarding experience, but not something that is accessible to other web hosts so that they're opening up to the community or anything like that. They're just trying to make their own version of WordPress better. So they are a competitor to us in terms of just us selling to them directly. So they have, like, an internal product team that's building a competitor to Xtendify just for their own hosting. We don't care that much about that. Now, we think our product is better, and, eventually, they'll adopt ours anyway once the sort of, like, they see the numbers. But whether or not that happens, that competition is limited to sort of their own slice of the pie.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:32:26]:
And this really kind of

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:27]:
I don't know

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:32:27]:
if it's a helpful metaphor, but this kind of metaphor I use is that that every web host out there views WordPress as this pie, and they cut out their own slice of their pie, and that is how they make their money. They have their own, you know, 1% or 2% or whatever of the WordPress ecosystem. For Acxentify, we are a host agnostic solution. We don't have our own hosting. We never wanna be our own host. Our goal is to be this kind of, like, delicious frosting on top of the entire pie. Like, we just want to make WordPress better for every host, and in doing so, also grow the pie because a lot of the partners that we work with, their growth has slowed. Right? Competition is stronger from other hosts or whatever.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:33:07]:
And because the retention rate is low, they spend a lot of money on customer acquisition, a lot of those users leave, and the host doesn't grow. We help those hosts reignite their growth by making sure those users that they're paying to acquire actually stick around, spend more money on hosting, and and build successful businesses there. Anyway, so the competition really is we just think about the WordPress ecosystem, and within the WordPress ecosystem, we really are are just showing people why the default, what they've been accustomed to for 20 years or so is is hurting them and and and why there's a there's a better option.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:43]:
Got it. This this makes sense. So perhaps even though it is not your your problem, do do you have a a perspective? You know, you mentioned that Matt's thinking, like, 80%, but, like, on on the longevity of WordPress dominance. And I don't know, I always find myself coming back to this Jim's Barksdale quote that the there are like 2 ways to make money. One of them is bundling and one of them is unbundling. Yeah. And it's just like a pendulum that swings back and forth. And I it's still a I don't know.

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:12]:
I'm very caught on the the the, like, dominance of WordPress and how that probably creates this attack vector for the the Shopify's and the Square Spaces and the web flows and whatever comes next to, like, you know, shoot to to carve their own space of the Internet out away from from WordPress. How how do you think about this? The you're you're tied to a a platform and the platform risk, I guess, is is the the general term there.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:34:36]:
Yeah. I'll answer the second part just because it's easier, and then and then come back to the first part of the question. The platform risk is another thing that often was on our minds early on, and and something that also came up when we were fundraising quite a bit. I often thought back to, probably 2,010 ish, plus or minus. You had tons of companies being built on top of Facebook, specifically gaming companies. And then and one day, Facebook changed some dynamics in how those marketplaces and APIs and everything worked, and businesses essentially disappear overnight. True platform risk. Right? Like, there is a there's some sort of gatekeeper there, and and if they close the gate, the the the business is done.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:35:21]:
What was really important to us from the beginning is even though we were building on top of a platform, because it's open source, there is no gate to close. So a given partner, a given host could say, we don't wanna work with you, and that's fine with us. We don't have to work with, you know, any any specific partner. But even when that happens, even if a specific hosting partner would doesn't wanna work with us, their users can still choose to work with us. And that because we're or WordPress is open source, the flexibility at the end of the day just lies in the user's decisions, and rather than a centralized company that can make some change to fundamentally disrupt a a business that is built on top of WordPress. The the question of the market share and competition from outside, it's real. There, for sure, are lots of companies trying to take that market share. There's a big business opportunity there.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:36:14]:
And, historically, if you look at some of the numbers, even though Wix's market share has been much smaller, they've done a better job of monetizing the users users that they have. And so there's a real opportunity there for other businesses to come in. It may be a case of being shortsighted and not seeing some sort of disruption coming. But when I look at WordPress right now, the critical mass of not just the hosting companies that are distributed around the world. Right? Like, every country has lots of little hosting companies that are Yep. Acquiring users in those geographies, but also all the service providers. There are so many freelancers and agencies that if someone wants to build a site, they come to to a local agency, and they say, hey. I want a website.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:36:57]:
Most likely, that agency is gonna say, oh, let's use WordPress. That's what we know. That's what we've always used. And I think there is enough of that critical mass there that it really would be hard to change the direction of this in the near term. And what's been so shocking for me is until 2018, the website editing experience within WordPress was the equivalent of building a website in a note taking tool. There's no ability to add layout, structure, real media elements to a website. It was really just like a text editor. It was terrible.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:37:34]:
And so people had to install lots of add on functionality to make WordPress usable. And nonetheless, WordPress grew to, at that point, around 35% of the web. Since then, WordPress has released a brand new editing experience, a block based editing experience, that has grown, now, WordPress to 43% of the web. And that experience is getting so much better. Like, it is to the point where it is maybe on parity with a Wix now and going to exceed it. And so when I think about, wow, WordPress got to a third of the web when it was truly unusable for most users, I really see that there are a lot of likes there. And ex and, again, our the bets that we're placing and the investments that we're making is to make that even more approachable to really just, you know, someone who would otherwise maybe just make a Facebook page for their business, like, make it approachable for that person.

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:24]:
What has you then most excited when you think about, you know, the next year for Extendify? And then perhaps a little bit longer term, right, like, what what does success mean to you in the context of this? What what is the the impact that that you're hoping to to have here?

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:38:41]:
So our goal is definitely to be the that that onboarding insight, building experience for, I mean, essentially, most websites in the world coming online. We want to just keep working with hosts and really represent a massive chunk of those websites coming online. But what's really cool about that is I alluded earlier to the fact that we use this term onboarding internally, but it's kind of like a a narrow definition of what we do. Because once we onboard a user into WordPress, then our goal is to keep guiding them along that journey to know what the next most important thing is that they're supposed to be doing. That might be setting up WooCommerce, which is an ecommerce solution for WordPress. It might be setting up an SEO plug in, so that their search engine optimization is is kind of really dialed in. Could be lots of different things. And that gives us an opportunity also to recommend other products and other solutions that are going to make them successful.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:39:42]:
So, for example, let's say that you had, the domain lay of the land dot net or something, and we saw through our partners that lay of the land dot com was available. And we knew from statistics, some of our users that that would likely increase your traffic by 11%. That is then something that we can offer to you that is probably the most impactful thing you could do in terms of growing your traffic. And that could really be anything. We could be offering products. It could be services. If if if, you know, we think that you would benefit from working with someone to customize your abandoned cart follow ups or something like that. There's a lot that we could do there, and that's where we get really excited about We wanna get users started, but we also wanna be there to help them really grow and and and and build that website, build that visual experience.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:40:34]:
And I think that that's where we really become this trusted partner for the web host as well. And it's something that we've seen there's demand for, even through we set up a newsletter for web hosts that covers, like, what are the most important things for a WordPress host? Not for WordPress users, not for WordPress agencies, for WordPress hosts. Like, what do they need to know? And people just give us amazing feedback about that. And and and all these things, I think, give us an opportunity to be this trusted trusted partner for for WordPress hosts so that when they have a question, when they wanna launch a new product, when they wanna grow, they come to us. We work with them on that and and and help them help them productize that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:41:07]:
So one of the things that I always loved and was surprised about the WordPress ecosystem, having built a few WordPress sites in my time, is really the extensiveness of the of the ecosystem, right? The the plugin library and just anything that I've ever needed to do functionally, someone has already thought of that, and then built the plugin and it exists. How much, you know, across the WordPress ecosystem? Are are you guys plugged into, you know, collaboration? And is that part of the, you know, the diagnosis of where people are experiencing friction and how you can, you know, recommend, you know, certain offerings to them that that already exist is Yeah. Just, you know, the ecosystem map.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:41:55]:
It is huge. Yeah. So the wordpress.org directory of plug ins right now has right around 60,000 plug ins. And so plug ins, you can think of as, essentially, like apps. So, like, for your phone, you download an app to do something, to track your workouts, or to, you know, send emails. And so there are these apps or plug ins for for WordPress. And it's such a such a kind of cool resource for users to just like you described, they have a problem, they look it up, they, you know, hey. I wanna really easily integrate Google Analytics on my site.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:42:32]:
They look it up. There's a plug in that will do it for you. Install it. Set it up. Great. And most of them are free. Some of them have paid upgrades, and it's it's it's really cool resource. The problem is, of those 60,000, maybe 50,000 aren't supported.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:42:47]:
They were built by someone as as a hobby. There there's this dynamic where if you want some functional components that you install, for example, all of your own websites, You could manually move it to all your websites, or you could actually submit it as a plug in to the WordPress directory of plug ins. And then on each of your sites, you can just install it from the directory as opposed to moving it around yourself. So, really, you just created that plug in for yourself. You put it in the directory for yourself, and then for one reason or another, it caught fire, and now thousands of people use it. But you're not supporting it. You're not answering support questions. You're not updating it when the new version of WordPress is released, but none of those users know that.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:43:25]:
They have no idea, beyond seeing how many installations there are, whether this is, like, a real product or not. One of the things that we're focused on so we do know all the major work with plug in developers. And one of the things that we're focused on is when we recommend functional components, making sure that these are real companies building real products. And so when we think about onboarding a user, it it's not just about kind of preview designs. I mean, we we don't let people make ugly websites. So, like, it is about websites that look at but it's not just about pretty designs. It's really about functional websites. And what that means in practice is a goal oriented onboarding, where a user tells us what are the jobs to be done, what are they trying to accomplish with their website.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:44:06]:
And based on that, we will install functional components like plugins. So as an example, someone might want to send out a newsletter. They don't know that if they want a newsletter, if they need a form to collect emails, then they need some sort of CRM, some sort of database to hold those emails, manage them, manage, unsubscribes, all that kind of stuff. And then they need some sort of email sending to actually send out those emails. We don't want our users to have to know that. They tell us they want a newsletter. Awesome. We set everything up for them.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:44:36]:
They can they can have a newsletter. And we think that's really important, and as part of that, we vet those plug ins. We make sure that what we pre install, what we recommend for users is really solid. And we leverage that directory of 60,000 plugins, but just a small fraction of

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:49]:
it that we think is really kind of

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:44:50]:
up to par with the the the quality level that we think is necessary.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:54]:
I really love that from a kind of a product management approach of essentially productizing jobs to be done Yes. Which is this product management framework into your product. That is awesome.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:45:07]:
Yeah. We we, it's one of those things where when we tell people about it, like, everyone kinda gets it immediately, but no one else in the ecosystem does it as a starting point. And so we we, we found so so I'm saying it's, like, product market fit in and

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:22]:
of itself when we when we share that with with hosting partners, etcetera. It's like, oh, awesome. I'm glad you're doing it that way. Right. Yeah. Because no one no one wants to learn how to to do the the use all the tools to piece it together. They just wanna do the thing that they're trying to accomplish.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:45:39]:
Exactly. Yeah. SEO is the perfect example of that. Most people don't even know what SEO stands for, search engine optimization. But everyone wants it. Like, who doesn't want their website to be found through Google? Right? And so that's a

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:50]:
piece where we're just, like, okay. Yeah. Let's just take care of that for the user. Let's not ask them if they want an SEO plugin. Right. And no one needs to necessarily know all the things that go into making that work on on the back end.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:46:01]:
Yeah. Exactly.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:02]:
So earlier on, you you, you know, as part of the starting of of extendify, you mentioned, you know, there there's value just in and of itself starting something. And, you know, I'm curious in in the reflections of building this company so far, you know, what what are some of those takeaways that that that you have about I think we can go in a few directions here, but, you know, just high level takeaways from, you know, company building and and startups. And we could we could touch on, I think, you know, that you have built a remote organization, you know, before that idea was kind of, you know, introduced, I think, holistically to to people. And just, you know, thoughts around so, you know, I I think what a lot of people are are are struggling with a little bit today is, you know, how do you develop culture, you know, in a remote environment and avoid somewhat of the transactional nature of of how it feels to to interact solely online and and what what culture looks like for you at Xtendify and and and what and what's important there?

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:47:10]:
Yeah. So kind of the first part of that around kind of learning from entrepreneurship and and and such the there's a a large number of learnings around the operation side of starting and growing a company that have been interesting. I've learned a lot. It's not something that I would seek to do again in and of itself. Right? There are things related to accounting and legal stuff and setting up, whatever, unemployment insurance in some states that has, like, a really clunky system. There's just things like that that are like, okay. I get it now. I I I might have to do it again in the future if I start another company, but it's not yeah.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:47:55]:
That's one's enough there. And and I think that that's also why, you know, so many people go out and start a Gusto or whatever other company because they they realize how hard Right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:05]:
Well, it's the parallel is, like, what's the failure rate for startups? Right? Like, where are people giving up? And it's

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:48:11]:
That's exactly right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:12]:
Yeah. There's way too much logistical overhead.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:48:14]:
That's exactly right. And so but then in terms of some of the learnings that I've really appreciated are I think this is kind of all all of it's just it just sounds so obvious when it's said out loud, but I think it's still so different when you experience it is it really just figuring out scalable, repeatable customer acquisition is such a journey and such, challenge, and there's so many ways to approach it, to think about it, to test it. You know, some tests you run have really short turnaround cycles, and so you know right away if it works. Some things, especially when you're doing direct sales, can sales cycles can be super long. You don't know if something's working for months. Just the the customer acquisition part of it, I think, is so fascinating, and it's been, such like an ongoing project and will forever be an ongoing project, and I've really enjoyed it much more than maybe I expected to. I've always been kind of a product guy, and I've always thought, hey. We built some cool stuff.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:49:11]:
Like, it'll be I mean, obviously, very aware of of of the common problem of, you know, build it and they will come doesn't doesn't usually work. Right? But, nonetheless, I mean, the products side of it is so tangible in some ways, and it's just, like, fun to work on, and to iterate, and run AB tests and whatever. It's cool. Like, you just kinda you can imagine it. You can do it whatever. The growth, the user acquisition, the sales, all that stuff, I I I think is so interesting, and you learn so much from talking to people, and you you it it really changes the way you think about business. I think in particular for people who work at big companies, like I have, you know, companies of 15, 20000 people is you can't take for granted that, like, people buy your stuff all the time. Right? Like, there's just, like, revenue that comes in the door, and you just, like, take for granted that tomorrow, people are gonna also come in and buy stuff.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:50:03]:
But there's there is this massive inertia that, like, allowed that to be true. And when you're a startup and, like, you get your 1st sale, there's no guarantee you're getting a second sale the next day. And it may have been just a total fluke. Someone may have misclicked, but accidentally bosses. Right? They have no idea. And and I think, like, really getting a sense of that that so much goes into the distribution equation and and how that looks going from 0 to 1, I think, is is is fascinating, and I've enjoyed that. I think I'll always enjoy that. Around the team and culture building side of things, I think that distributed is always gonna be different.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:50:44]:
I think team meetups are critically important. It's harder when you have a global team, but that's what we have. And so that's that's just kind of how we how how we think about it is we get the team together. We're getting the team most of the team together in Germany in a couple months, and I'm really looking forward to that. Mhmm. And most of that time is hanging out. It's not work. It's not, like, you know, certainly not hands on keyboard, but it's also not even a lot of, like, whiteboarding or whatever.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:51:12]:
A lot of it's just kinda hanging out. But I also think that we've made, to some extent, a decision that we're not gonna try to force an in office culture without an office. So we're not gonna have a, you know, whatever, an online chess league. I was looking for the idea.

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:31]:
But whatever. You know, we're

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:51:32]:
not gonna do something because we can't have an in person soft ball league. Right? Like, we're not we're not just going to try to replicate it. And, like, let's come in. Like, everyone just, like, works really well together. Everyone enjoys like, we have a team meeting. Everyone enjoys kind of, like, you know, spending time together in that way. But we're not going to force something just because that's what we've done historically while we're in person. And I think as long as people are aware of that, that, hey, we're not being, like, negligent here just because we don't care about culture.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:52:02]:
It's just, like, we're aware of the limitations of not seeing each other. We don't have a lot of meetings. Like, that's huge for us. We we we communicate asynchronously. We let people have a ton of flexibility as to when they work, and we just lean into it. As rather than think of it as, like, a limitation, we just think, like, that's one of our strengths. People work wherever, and I think that's a decision you have to make. Which is also why, in the distributed work world, I think pretty much everyone agrees, distributed works, in person works, hybrid is a nightmare.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:52:32]:
I I

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:32]:
don't I probably don't even have

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:52:33]:
to sort of, like, you know, describe the issues with it, but just it it it creates so many, interpersonal issues, so many collaboration issues that I I think that's something consider. We'll never consider opening up like a like a, you know, r and d or sales or whatever office somewhere. We'll always just keep everything distributed.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:51]:
Yeah. No. It's it's very fascinating because I you know, obviously, it it was forced on on so many and I they're really to my knowledge, is like there weren't too many who were really doing it from the onset, but beforehand intentionally. And I think it it was you had this, you know, like like I think your colleagues at Village Global, you had this, you know, insight into the what the future was going to look like.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:53:18]:
And I'll tell you though that I am not one of these purists that thinks I will never go into an office again. Mhmm. I think, again, for me, is the best way for me to do the thing that I wanna do is to go into some office, because, you know, there's a team locally doing some really cool stuff or or whatever. I think that's totally reasonable, and I I I I think it it is a path that I would consider. I mean, I love the flexibility of working from home, and the you know, it's mind boggling to me having lived this way for many years now that if I wanna go to the gym in the middle of the day, or go to the park for a walk or something like that, like, I just do it, and then there are so many people that in jobs where there's really no reasonable limitations why they can't do it. Culturally, they can't do it. So Yes. I I I I very I'm very much aware of that.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:54:06]:
But, nonetheless, I think there are some things people are doing really cool things in in offices, and I I think that's totally fair.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:13]:
Well, it's it's in line with your

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:54:16]:
I don't

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:16]:
know if you call it a philosophy, but that, you know, even just entrepreneurship is is was it the right means to the end that you have? So that that that that checks out. Yeah. There's a consistency in your philosophy.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:54:31]:
That's right. Yeah. I'm trying to.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:32]:
Cool. Well, I'll, as we we kind of work towards wrapping it here, I don't know. I'll leave just, you know, greenfield space here if there's anything that you think is is really important that that we haven't touched on yet, and then we can, we can bring it to our our traditional closing question.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:54:51]:
I no. I think I think we pretty much covered it. I'm I'm glad that we got to chat for a minute about the customer acquisition side of things. It's something, you know, I had the opportunity on on a few occasions to go and chat with some of the students at at Case Western, for example. And and and the thing that I I try to hammer home there, when I look at these people, you know, they're 20 years old, plus or minus, starting out in this career of, hey, like, there's some, like, real, like, fundamental things about, you know, you wanna grow a business, you need people to pay for stuff, and, like, how do you get those people? And and and I think that's such, like, a a missed opportunity often to to break it down to these, like, basic components of of starting and running a business that, I have really become a kinda, like, a key theme for me as well. So I'm glad glad we got to chat about that for a minute.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:39]:
Yeah. It is. It's always the it's it's the things like you said that when you say them out loud, they they sound very simple, but, you know, you you need to bring revenue in the door Yeah. For for the business to work.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:55:51]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:51]:
And, how involved are you personally still in sales? And, like, how do you view, you know, your role and responsibilities as, you know, leading the organization and and how that maybe changes over the stages of the company?

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:56:06]:
Yeah. It's definitely evolved a lot. I I try to have 100% of my time now on kind of sales and partnerships. I just inevitably, I get distracted by things and get pulled away to do other things. But if I could send all day every day just talking to the hosting ecosystem, I would. And, you know, we're getting to the point now where we have some of our partners are so excited about Xtendify that they're now pitching Xtendify to their friends who also run hosting businesses. So that's, like, this amazing spot

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:38]:
to be able to get something. Like right where you wanna be.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:56:40]:
Yeah. It's got some, like, WhatsApp message messages last week that, you know, one of our partners was at a dinner and was just selling another host really hard. I I I work with them. I said, that's amazing.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:49]:
Right? Like, that's, like, a really cool place to be.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:56:51]:
But, yeah, if I could if I could do sales, all day, every day, I I would. And, and my cofounder is really focused on product, and kind of this next iteration of, of these experiences that we're building. And, obviously, we're, you know, as cofounders, we're working super closely on all this stuff together and dropping a nod on meetings when it's helpful and just, you know, talking all the time. But but that's that's the division of responsibilities today.

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:17]:
Cool. Well, we'll bring it back here to Cleveland to wrap it up. I'll ask you the traditional closing question here. But no, I even just before we go that, I think it's it's it's fun, talking to you about, you know, how you've gone about it as well because it it is a little, I don't know what the it's not it's just a little bit different, I think, than than a lot of the the mindset of of company building that I think people maybe historically have had here. And I think it's a it's a it's a good example for people to be aware of, particularly as the, you know, the nature of things changes, as well.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:57:59]:
It's funny when you say that I even I even reflect on the fact that I'm sometimes not totally aware of what company building in Cleveland has looked like. I know, I mean, you you and I, chatted a few weeks ago, and we, we're we're talking about the the idea that even though I have a company in theory based in Cleveland, I mean, you know, I'm the only one here, I can happily work from home. I could build a $1,000,000,000 business here and not know a single person in Cleveland. And and there is this element of and and I think still a lot of it's definitely on me as well, an opportunity to get to know the entrepreneurial ecosystem more. And, certainly, if anyone listening here, wants to wants to chat, I'm I'm I'm always open to connecting with people. But, yeah, there's an element of, you know, what what how have other companies been built here?

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:52]:
Like, I don't I don't actually know.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:58:53]:
There there's some folks that I know the, you know, Scout RFP guys. There's just some people that I just know from, like, personal experiences. But in terms of moving back to Cleveland and and running a company here, you know, might as well be in Alaska, and it would, in a lot of ways would be no different.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:08]:
Yeah. Well and and again, I, you know, I don't know if there is a a prescriptive right model, but I I think, you know, the more anyone can be aware of, like, what the possible paths are to, you know, figuring it out, I think the the better it is to have that perspective.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:59:24]:
Agree.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:25]:
Cool. Sorry. I will ask Lee ask ask you the the closing question here, which is for not necessarily your favorite thing in Cleveland, but for something that other folks may not know about. A, a hidden gem Yeah. If you will.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:59:42]:
So I inevitably end up thinking about this

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:46]:
way too much in advance.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [00:59:47]:
I'm chatting just because I've heard, your podcast so many times, and I'm well aware of it. And so, anyway, I'll give it more of a philosophical and more of a practical answer to this. The or I don't know if philosophical is the right word. The the the sort of, like, slightly more philosophical one is I since coming back, I've really loved Case, Case Western, as a place to hang out, even if you have nothing to do with the organization with with the institution. Like, I feel like it's one of those things, like, it's certainly not a hidden gem in the sense of everyone knows it's here. But I feel like if you have no business to be there, if you're not a student, if you're not teaching there, you know, whatever, people don't go there. People don't go to case and, like, hang out. And there is something that I think is so energizing about a university campus, and I think Case's campus is a really cool kind of mix of, sort of, like, urban, but still relatively secluded, at least on some of the clouds, that I just love going down there, grabbing coffee, meeting up with someone to walk around or something like that.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [01:00:48]:
Like, I the I think the energy that it brings is fantastic, and it's really been a, a cool place for me to to visit as often as I can and catch up with some of the some of the people that I know there. And I recommend that to anyone, even if you have no real good reason to be there, just go, like, hang out and be on a college campus again. And I think, you'll really appreciate the energy. Just one other, one of the things that I really missed from after leaving San Francisco was sort of some some elements of the outdoorsiness. Actually, Cleveland is quite outdoorsy with the metro parks and all that, but, some elements of that. And, I end up finding this this, climbing gym

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:27]:
on the east side in Shaker Heights, where I

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [01:01:28]:
live, called Shaker Rocks. And it just reminds me of a lot of the energy of San Francisco. Just the people there are, like, take the time to slow down and are, I think, just generally, folks who care about their community, care about the ecosystem, care about nature. Right? These are people who love, you know, climbing outdoors, etcetera. It's been this really, really cool microcosm of of, I think, folks who, or sort of type of community and type of people that I've missed from San Francisco. And I've really enjoyed spending as much time there as I can, sneaking out for a lunch climb when when I can manage it. So anyway, there are 2. I cheated.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [01:02:10]:
I gave 2 answers, but that doesn't

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:11]:
Oh, no. Those are the more the more the better. You know? I some point, I'm gonna have to pull together a map of all of them and put them on there, and I should do that some way. I'll use extendify to make that website. Good. Awesome. Well, Arthur, I really appreciate you coming on and taking the time. It's it's a really cool story and really excited about the the work you're doing.

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:35]:
It's it's a it's a big ambitious, undertaking.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [01:02:39]:
Yeah. Thanks thanks for having me. After after having heard many, many of these, it's always really cool to, actually have the opportunity to join. So I appreciate you making the time for me.

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:47]:
Absolutely. If folks had anything they did wanna follow-up with you about, what would be the best way for them

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [01:02:54]:
to do so? So, my my work email is always great. My name can be confusing to spell, although I'm sure in the show title or notes that'll be apparent, but it's just my first name, artur@xtenify.com or, Twitter, my first name, and then g r a b o. It's my Twitter, Twitter username. You can reach me there as well. But, yeah. Always happy to chat with people. If someone wants to reach out, just let me

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:19]:
know. Wonderful. Well, thank you again. Really appreciate it.

Artur Grabowski (Extendify) [01:03:22]:
Thank you.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:25]:
That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show, so if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffrey@layoftheland.fm, or find us on Twitter at podlayofthelandor@sternfa, j e f e. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land. The Lay of the Land podcast was developed in collaboration with The UP Company, LLC.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:07]:
At the time of this recording, unless otherwise indicated, we do not own equity or other financial interests in the company which appear on the show. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of any entity which employs us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next week.