Podcasting with Podcasters: Carrie Dils and Office Hours

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Thanks, BrandBucket for sponsoring. Now, Let’s start the show.

Hey everybody. Thanks for joining me on How I Built It, a podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” I am here with my guest today, Carrie Dills of Office Hours FM. Carrie, thanks for joining me today. It’s great to have you on the show. I’m glad to be able to talk to you at least. We worked at Crowd Favorite a little bit together for a while, so I miss not being able to talk to you face to face more regularly.

Carrie Dills: I know, right. And I don’t even see your drum kit behind you today. So I feel disoriented.

Joe Casabona: I know. I moved. I’m in a new apartment. My married life apartment and there’s not like a place for my drum set that doesn’t, there’s not a good place for it. So we’ll have a house in a couple of years and I’ll have like my real drum set, and my electric set, and it’ll be great.

Carrie Dills: Yeah. Well, so I hear about husbands. They have to get rid of a lot of things, kind of run off the bat. So.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I think I’m doing okay so far because Aaron has let me hang up my Han solo, a big canvas painting in the living room. So not in a place where only I see it, but all of our house guests will see that. So.

Carrie Dills: Yeah. That’s prime real estate.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. So I think I’m doing okay. So great. Why don’t we just jump right into the questions then? You run Office Hours FM. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about that and how you came up with the idea?

Carrie Dills: Yeah. So Office Hours FM is a weekly podcast where I interview people that are smarter than me and that the topics are kind of broad. But they fall under the general umbrella of people with WordPress-focused businesses helping them with the sort of the business side of things. 

And the podcast, didn’t start out with anything to do with that. It actually started out as a show to answer technical questions related to the Genesis Framework. And then just over time, it sort of more taken on a life of its own. 

Joe Casabona: Nice. So, yeah. So you’ve also like developed Genesis courses and stuff like that too. Right?

Carrie Dills: Uhum.

Joe Casabona: Cool.

Carrie Dills: Indeed.

Joe Casabona: Okay. So when you first started, it was just literal Office Hours. Right.  How did that go, and how did you kind of evolve that into a business-oriented podcast? 

Carrie Dills: Yeah. So the podcast, I started it to help alleviate all the emails in my inbox cause people would, you know, email me questions, how do you do this with Genesis? Or how I blogged a lot about Genesis at the time. And so I was, I guess, a lot of people’s go-to for answers. And you know, you can only answer so many emails. So the idea struck me for a podcast where I could just go on the air, do an Office Hours and it would be live so people could,  you know, get their questions in while the show was live. And I would just answer them on the spot. And then, you know, be done. So if anybody emailed me more questions, I could just say, “Hey, show up next Thursday during Office Hours.” 

But the first episode was so I’d never podcasted before. And it was just so painful and awkward to do,  and being on air by myself felt really, really strange. Cause I was, you know, just like talking to myself. So the second show I invited somebody else on, just so we could have some back and forth conversation. And actually, even from those very earliest episodes, people started asking questions that weren’t necessarily technical. They were more curious about the people I had on and like what tools did they use in their workflow? And, you know, what local server set up did they prefer, blah, blah, blah. And then over time, it sort of morphed into more of the business side of things. Sorry, this answer’s kinda long and rambling, but that morphed into the business side of things because what I saw was a lot of people in our space that are very talented, either designers or developers or, you know, whatever their skill is, but they didn’t necessarily have a lot of business skill to put behind that. So they, you know, kind of constantly feel like they weren’t making enough money or really making any forward progress on the business front. So that’s when I kind of started shifting to some broader business principles that are very specific to people who are dealing with WordPress, you know, things on like how do you, you know, manage client relationships. And how do you come up with a product launch strategy and all that kind of good stuff? So that’s been this kind of rebirth of the podcast. And I’m actually about to wind down Season Two, take a little break, and then spin up Season Three. So I’m not quite sure what Season Three will have in store for us.

Joe Casabona: Nice. Nice. So, I mean, that covers like one of the questions I like to ask, which is what kind of transformations has your project gone through? And it’s, it sounds like a lot. So, and you do all of this live, right? So like even the podcast now is still live?

Carrie Dills: Yep. And, that brings its own unique set of challenges. But for me, they’ve actually been easier challenges than doing a pre-recorded show. In this next season, I think I’m going to probably vary up the format where I do a combination of pre-recorded and live shows. Again, not sure exactly what form that will unfold in, but I would like to, I would like to introduce that pre-recorded element to help take a little bit of the burden of a weekly live spot off.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, totally. Cause I mean, that could be tough. We just edited like 14 minutes of me just saying, in this podcast. So, awesome, awesome. So, well, you also started a this is a relatively new thing, right? The Office Hours FM community. 

Carrie Dills: Yeah. So this was, you know, Joe, we’ve got some things in common and, this is just something that I want to kind of try it out and see if it would stick. And really time will tell. I’m not quite sure yet whether it will. But the idea was to have, since the podcast is live and people ask questions, like people sort of get to you, you get to know people’s names just because I’m either mentioning them on the air. Like, “Hey, Jackie has a question” or you’re seeing their tweets go by. So I wanted this idea of a community to extend beyond just that one hour a week. So I created a spin-off membership website were folk who join up and interact with each other and really talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. Be it, you know, business or a particular tools they were finding helpful, and their work. And I originally opened it as a closed community or rather a paid community. And that did not get as much traction as I had hoped. So I guess a few weeks ago, I took the payment down and now it’s free for anyone to join. And I think it’s grown about 80% in that time. So that certainly tells me, uh that’s that was the right move,  to go that direction.

But, yeah. I love bringing smart people together, and that community seemed a way to facilitate that, and do something beyond just the podcast.

Joe Casabona: Nice. And so when you were building out this community, did you do any research or was it just kinda like, there are people online, I want to bring them together. I’m just gonna build something and see if it works?

Carrie Dills: Yeah. That the latter was my approach. I mean, I can’t be bothered with reading the instructions or doing research. Being a technician, I just went and built it. And, so now, you know, from there kind of trying to figure out what needs to, you know, what could be added on or what could be removed. I remember I was having a conversation with Remkus de Vries and he’s a BuddyPress and bbPress guy. And so I was asking him for some help with the site, cause that’s what it’s built on. And I was asking him about all these different features and he was like, backed up, like, stop with all the features. Like you don’t need to build Facebook overnight, just get the very basics up and running and then see how your community reacts to what they’re asking you for. And then if you’re asking for features, add features. But don’t, you know, you don’t have to build the entire thing up front. So that was his advice was actually quite helpful. It got me to push the publish button and back off of the development. 

Joe Casabona: Nice. You get to like an MVP, right, a minimum viable product. And I mean, we both build stuff. So, you know, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’m halfway through coding something and I’m like, I could add this too. And then, you know, it’s we scope creep ourselves, right. So.

Carrie Dills: Yeah, we get mad at our clients for doing our own worst enemies when it comes to {Crosstalk 10:21.93]

Joe Casabona: Absolutely. So, well, let’s see. So you talked to Remkus, are there, you know, I have, I found recently that talking to people helps a lot. You know, Cory Miller was somebody who was very helpful. Shawn Hesketh and Brian Richards are both people who were very helpful. And are there other people that you talk to regularly about this stuff?

Carrie Dills: Absolutely. My probably number one go-to is Diane Kinney. We do pretty much daily, going back and forth on Skype. And her background is different enough from mine that she brings a really interesting perspective, and sees things that I wouldn’t necessarily or typically see. So she’s been a really great one to kind of collaborate with and push me to think about making some changes in the way that I’m presenting the information. And hopefully to grow the audience is really where we’re at for this next season. So she’s got some great marketing background, so I’m hoping that she can bring that out and help assist us. 

Joe Casabona: Basically, all of my guests so far have mentioned that they’re part of a mastermind group. So I think I want this podcast to be like a massive public mastermind group. Right. And it’s working out so far. So, yeah. I’m really lucky that people are willing to, I don’t know if it’s just like, I mean, my New York Italian charm or what. But people are very willing to share, and I’m grateful for it. And hopefully, the listeners are also grateful for it. 

Carrie Dills: So true. Charm.

Joe Casabona: Oh, thanks. I’m shocked. So, yeah. You’re a developer. You put together this community. I would love to know how you built the Office Hours? Just like the whole site in general. Right? Cause you’re doing podcasting, you have the community aspect and other stuff. So what tools did you use? How much custom code was part of it?

Carrie Dills: Sure. So the membership site is a completely separate website from the podcast or it’s on a subdomain from the podcast. And it’s built with BuddyPress and bbPress taking care of the forums and social components. And then I’m using WooCommerce, and WooCommerce subscriptions to sell the membership portion of it.

Of course, now I don’t need to sell the membership portion of it. So I might’ve set up more than I initially needed to. But it is in place there at any rate. And part of this gets long and winding. But you’re a developer, so maybe you can appreciate it. But why I chose or went with WooCommerce? I wanted, I liked that it had that subscription and membership capability, the ability to, you know, charge people on a recurring basis. And then I also wanted to be able to sell some physical goods, like t-shirts or other kinds of podcast swag, you know, for when Office Hours FM goes street and everybody’s wearing a cap.

Joe Casabona: I would, I would buy a cap.

Carrie Dills: Shoot. Okay. Well, I gotta make a cap. That’s on my, marked that down on my list. So I researched various print fulfillment shops, basically where they all, you had to do is upload your design and pick, you know, whatever product you wanted to put it on. And then they would actually do on-demand printing and ship it to people, which is great. Of course, they take a huge chunk of your margin for doing that. But then, you know, I don’t have to carry inventory or mess with shipping or any of that. So, I researched various companies and ended up using one called Printful. And Printful already had an integration with WooCommerce and that was, you know, that saved a lot of steps. I don’t have to, you know, a custom rig that one.

So it ended up being then a combination of Printful, WooCommerce, memberships subscription, and then a BuddyPress and bbPress on the backend. And then the theme, so that’s just the works.

The theme I really struggled with because I love building themes. And I was like, sure, of course, I’m going to build my own theme. And then I started getting into like, how do you actually style all of these components because, oh my gosh! bbPress is actually not too bad. But BuddyPress has so many views. Like the idea of styling, all of that got fairly overwhelming. Like I was actually kind of knee-deep in theming it before it’s like, oh my gosh! I’m just really tired of this. So I ended up buying a third-party theme. It was a shop I hadn’t heard of, but they had a theme that was out-of-the-box style to work with both WooCommerce< and BuddyPress, bbPress. So, yeah, so that’s the one I picked. And still, I don’t really love it. And I’ve thought, “Okay, maybe I need to go back and finish the theme.” And that time investment could be worth it because then I could sell that theme. But this is it again. It’s like Scope Creek, cause then I started writing it. Like I was going to do a public release of the code, like a slowdown. Again, we’re just trying to get an MVP out the door here. So as it still stands, it’s with a premade theme with just a couple of modifications. But I don’t know, one day I may pick up the torch and try to finish out a custom theme.

Joe Casabona: Nice. A man preparing a theme for like public releases, just a whole other thing. Right. I want to do that with mine and Aaron’s wedding site because I’m pretty proud of it. The design, and then the features, the functionality. And I was like, I can package this as a plugin and a theme. And then I’m like, “That’s a lot of work to do that.” Like, and like, I don’t know. Like how many people are going to buy a WordPress wedding theme. Like I’m not, you know, I guess I could go on Envato and see how many people are buying those wedding themes. But I know exactly what you mean.

So, okay. So you have a ton of components here, and by and large. Most people I’ve talked to again for this show so far have mentioned that they are using WooCommerce for some aspect of their site. And it does come down to, you know, it’s, I think Brian Krogsgard was telling me it was either WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads. But he may want to do physical, you know, sell physical goods like t-shirts and event tickets and stuff like that. That’s really interesting.

And, I know that there’s a, I think Chris Lema put out an article about WooCommerce and Printful. So, I will link that in the show notes because I’m doing something very similar where I want to make a t-shirt site for like remote workers. And that just seems like a really easy avenue.

Carrie Dills: Awesome. Well, I can just put my coat up and you can fork it. Just change out everywhere. It says Office Hours FM. Just do a copy, replace. 

Joe Casabona: Yeah. That sounds perfect. So I’m going to use like Fiverr to like find designers, cause I’m not a graphic designer at all. So you’ve also made another T-shirt apparel site. Is that right?

Carrie Dills: I did. But it got shut down in a hurry.

Joe Casabona: Uh. Didn’t really?

Carrie Dills: Yeah. So it was, I jumped on the Pokemon go bandwagon and got a little bit obsessed. I may still be a little bit obsessed and I thought, well, how fun I’ll build some t-shirts out around it. Some custom designs using, you know, Pokemon is sort of the punchline or the focus. And I busted out. I’ll like, I spent an entire day on it. It’s just doing t-shirt designs and uploading them to Printful, and setting up the WooCommerce store, and went through all of that. And then within 24 hours, I got emails from Printful like one for each product I had uploaded and they were like, “This does not meet our terms of service.” That dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And I counter back. I said, “Man, no, none of those are copyrighted images. Those are all hand-drawn or images. I have permission to use from the people that drew them.” And they’re like, doesn’t matter. It’s pretty clear that it looks like a brand infringement. And if he, and you know, they’re just covering their ears, which is totally fine, but never wants to be let down. I instead went to a, I’m an Amazon affiliate as are [Inaudible 19:10.83]. And, I went and set up a little Amazon store that’s just Pokemon junk, and embedded that in my site. So I think it gets approximately zero visits a day, according to analytics. So, you know, this is, it’s not a get rich quick scheme. But it was kind of more of just something fun easily within my capability. And I thought, well, you know, why not try it out? 

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s like half the fun, I think. And I mean, I think you’ve illustrated here that, you know, with a few plugins and just like knowing the right resources, you could set up an apparel shop or a membership site, you know, relatively quickly without a ton of, you know, without hundreds of hours of development now. And that’s thanks to WordPress, and WooCommerce, and BuddyPress, and all that. And so, again, that’s the whole reason I started the show is to let people know the inner workings, right. Because even like five or six years ago, maybe like 10 years ago, you’d have to like custom code all of that stuff. 

So your stuff has seen quite an evolution. And I’m curious, so you say you’re not quite sure what season three of Office Hours is going to be yet. But, I’d love to hear your plans for the community at this point, if you have any?

Carrie Dills: Yeah. Well, I mean, my plans aren’t anything deeper, incredibly intelligent. It’s more now that the doors are open, just continue inviting people and then see really what they tell me that they want and then make some adjustments from there. I’ve already added a Slack group when folks said that the forums were, you know, kind of cumbersome to come check those and whatnot. So, now I’ve got the slack component going on. And then from there, I don’t know what’s next. I’ve really got a hankering to do webinars to fire up a lot of educational webinars, and I’m not sure if the community is going to be the right place to publish those. The idea is still pretty nascent at this point. But, anyway, hoping it will continue to be a place where people can connect and get their hands on good content, get feedback on their ideas, and all that good stuff.y

Joe Casabona: Nice. And so you’ve got the podcast. You’ve got, you want to do these webinars, you’ve got the community, you’re still doing free. Are you still doing freelance work?

Carrie Dills: Yes, but not much. Actually, since I left Crowd Favorite this spring, I have, I tell people I’m avoiding client work. And I’m still taking on some of my previous clients who have come back to me, and I’m still doing just kind of small, small projects here and there. But for the main part, I’m trying to spend my time focusing on my other endeavors. You know, a large part of that’s podcast. And then also, teaching the lynda.com courses. And here’s a sneak preview. Previously unreleased on the internet, I’m working on the books.

Joe Casabona: Whaaat?

Carrie Dills: Yes! It’s always been on my bucket list to write a book. Earlier this year, I put out an ebook for the podcast and it’s, I’m really proud of the way it turned out. But I didn’t write it. I just collated a bunch of information and published it. So I felt like that was sort of cheating. I don’t get to cross it off my list. That one doesn’t do it. So I’m really hoping around the holidays that I’ll, or at least that’s the deadline I’ve set for myself. And that’s actually a collaboration with Diane Kinney as well.

Joe Casabona: Nice. And so this is going to be like a self-published ebook or is it going to be like…

Carrie Dills: Yes, self-published.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. Very cool.

Carrie Dills: The beauty of the internet, nobody has to say, “Wow! This is really good. I’ll Publish it.” We just say, “Hey. This could be a piece of crap. But let’s publish it.”

Joe Casabona: Yeah. “Hey, people buy it.” Right. That’s I mean, that’s awesome. I, you know, because when I went through a publisher for my last book and they sadly like it since I think they’ve been reduced to like one person in the department. So Peachpit was my publisher and I think there’s only one person as part of Peachpit now. And they’re still part of Pearson. But it’s, yeah. I was like kind of hoping to do like a second edition or something like that. But I think I’m kind of running into the same sort of problems or not problems with the same sort of decisions you’re facing. Where I need to pick where to focus my time between my full-time job, and these other projects. And I have a little one on the way in March now.

Carrie Dills: Congratulations!

Joe Casabona: Thank you. Thank you. So we’re calling the baby. It’ll be virtually. No, right now it’s just piglet in Italian. So we’re very excited, but you know, I want to make sure I want to get things in place so that when the baby comes along, I can do my fatherly duties. So.

Carrie Dills: That’s awesome. And man, okay. So you’re hitting all the major life changes. Moving, marriage, having a child, you’re just launching a podcast. I don’t know if that makes the list. That’s a lot going on.

Joe Casabona: I know. I know that’s, I think, you know, I just turned 30. I want to keep myself on, you know, spry and on my toes. You know, like woke up with back pain the other day. I’m like, what is happening to me already?

So, we’re coming to the end of our time here. And there’s one more question. Do you have any trade secrets for us?

Carrie Dills: Trade secrets? And I’m in a…Man, I feel like this ought to be really, really good. So this is just random, it’s not really even a trade secret. It’s just a tip and maybe a tip that everybody already knows about. But when doing a Google search, you can narrow the search result by timeline. So whether something was published in the last month or last week or last year, and which is really awesome when you’re searching for WordPress, like WordPress questions or code questions, because for some reason, those stupid WordPress forums are ranked tremendously well in Google. But you’re getting answers that are eight years old, and completely irrelevant. So if you sort by like last year, you get fresher answers. So there’s a trade secret.

Joe Casabona: That is a most excellent tip. Because I’m sure lots of people have no idea that you can do that. And it’s so frustrating to find this, like to find a solution that’s seven years old, like WordPress is a whole new thing at that point. So, awesome.

Well, Carrie Dills, thank you so much for joining me, and sharing all of your wisdom about building awesome communities, and just kind of going off and doing things. And I think the big takeaway here is just try stuff. Which is really the reason I started the show. Right. So you can learn how to build stuff. So that’s a great takeaway.

Carrie Dills, thank you so much for joining me today. I think we’ve learned a lot here.

Thank you to everybody who’s out there listening in podcast land. Make sure to tune in next week. We’re going to have Chris Coyier talking about CodePen.

Thanks to BrandBucket for sponsoring. Go to BrandBucket.com/howibuiltit to check them out.

And finally, go out there and build something.

Have a great week.