Hey there,

I’m Justin, you’ll get little updates here from me about all the interesting things going on with JackalWP.

Back in 2014, I was quite unhappy with my job and was looking to get into web development. I used to stream retro games on Twitch, and one of my viewers offered that I help him with his company.

It was a little crazy. I didn’t know him enough to say yes, but I just wanted something new, so I took the offer anyway.

I quit my job, moved multiple states over, lived with some random stranger I met on the internet along with his wife. They were immediately very welcoming, but I had already dealt with some scary people as a livestreamer, so I was slightly paranoid. I specifically recall thinking the first meal I ate with them was going to be poisoned, so I ate slowly to see if I’d feel any effects hit me.

Of course, I wasn’t poisoned, and they were exceptionally wonderful people to get to know and befriend.

I spent 1 year in a live-in working environment, building out WordPress sites and learning the ins and outs of website development. It was a great experience, and I am so glad that ravioli wasn’t my final meal.

Eventually I landed my first corporate web development job, where I learned so much in the first few months that I swear it turned half my beard grey. It was totally outside of WordPress, which was the only ecosystem I knew, and I was really only doing simple WordPress work before this.

Building landing pages and HTML emails, managing ad campaigns, updating old website code, getting used to working in a team environment with pulling, pushing, merging, writing JS and PHP instead of doodling with CSS and page builders. I loved the puzzle of it all.

However, you see, I had a bit of a long-term pen-pal who lived far overseas. She became a flight attendant and actually landed pretty close to where I lived. She invited me to meet her, we dated, and I could only see her for 5 days a month, if we were lucky, because it was based on her flight schedule.

My role could not transfer to remote, so I decided I’ll find a new role. Once I landed a remote job, it was time to move to Taiwan.

While there, I also decided to teach part time. Technically, I think you’re supposed to have a college degree to do that, but I figured I’d just ask around. Feeling like a dork, I walked around with resumes and handed them out to local schools.

I was able to do a mock teaching at one before they found out I didn’t have a degree, so they said no. But, the students loved me, and I did a good job, so a week later they called me back and I was able to split my time as a remote web dev and an English teacher. It was an incredibly rewarding experience helping these students learn and making it fun.

I spent 4.5 years in Taiwan, and it was the absolute best time of my life. That pen-pal that became my girlfriend then became my wife. We got married, ate great food, drank so much green tea, and we made good use of her flight benefits to see the more of the world together.

Anyway, a couple years into that experience, some random person messaged me on LinkedIn. Generally speaking, I have to work painfully hard for everything I have in life, but on that particular day, I guess bad luck forgot to find me.

The person asked me if I wanted a job with some really big WordPress company. I did some research and figured we’ll see where it goes.

They hired me and I spent nearly 5 years working for them. I was hired as Technical Support and within 3 months moved up to Support Team Lead. I love both WordPress and helping people, so this was quite perfect for me.

While there, I kept finding little operational issues. We could remove full processes if we just make a central hub for X. Since this is a process that gets repeated why don’t we turn it into an automated process? There’s a disconnect between this team and that team, how about we build a bridge and then apply the bridge to all teams?

Eventually, it became pretty clear I had a natural inclination for just making the business run better, so I was moved over to Business Operations Analyst, and eventually moved up to Business Operations Specialist.

Yep. I found my niche.

Automating operations, helping people, and if WordPress is involved, even better.

There is something special about WordPress. I know nearly half of all websites that exist are built on WordPress, so that includes all sorts of businesses. But in my experience, the people who work with WordPress are often self-starters, they’re interesting, unique, always have a story to tell, and probably started a business or two of their own. It’s a cool space to be in.

But, whatever the CMS, I generally think people should work less. Automate your alt text and hang out with friends or family, go for exercise, take care of yourself, play some Zelda, whatever it is you want.

There are plenty of reasons to automate. Maybe you want to eliminate roles at your company, maybe you want to move the manual efforts up to more important things or client-facing roles that should be face-to-face. Maybe it’s for more personal reasons, like you are working 2 jobs and want to get more output with less hours.

Whatever it is, I know both businesses and individuals benefit from automations. I imagine, reasonably so, some businesses would be concerned about dropping the cost of a subscription for JackalWP. But when you consider how much time and salary you’re saving by automating these processes, for most businesses, it’s an easy choice.

Eventually layoffs hit, and I got swept away with the many others. I did get a new role, and I’m thankful for what I’ve got, but I know I can do a lot more with the value I am able to offer. So, I built something.

It was honestly a very hard year filled with lots of loss, hundreds of job rejections, interview rejections, uncertainty. Sometimes the best things in life are built on desperation, spite, or a general ‘screw it’ mentality. Here I am, let’s see how this goes.

So now we’re here.

JackalWP is launched!

The automations I’ve built so far are little tools I personally believe to be highly valuable to any business, whether you’re a major corporation with millions of clients or you’re a solo developer looking to be more productive.

With websites I’ve worked on, I consistently ranked 1, 2, or 3 in Google and AI searches. It was all about the rich snippets. Sometimes it would kind of ruin the flow of the articles, but it’s well worth it for both the reader and your website. If you don’t want JackalWP, no problem, let me share some tricks with you.

The second paragraph should be the answer. Short, precise, clear, neutral tone – just the answer that those searching are looking for. This can be recipes, top 10 bullet point lists, or direct paragraph text. Search engines and AI love this. They can pull it in, display it, they give their customer exactly what they want as quickly as possible. The person doing there search has a good experience, because they had their question answered, and so they remember “this is where I go to get good answers.”

Searcher returns to the good search engine or the good AI tool. In return, you’ve built authority. The search engines know you give good answers that people asking questions about your topic want. AI, search engines, they want more of that, so they’ll recognize you as a good source. You show up more, you’re in the minds of the searchers more, it’s a win all around.

It really was a total game changer for me, which is why I offer it as a tool that comes with JackalWP Core, the first tier.

JackalWP is essentially my toolkit of tricks that have worked for me, customers I’ve worked with, clients I’ve worked for, and I package them together to ensure you’re getting good value and saving time.

If any of this resonates with you, take a look at what I offer. I’d love to help automate something for you.

There are prepackaged toolkits: JackalWP Core, or JackalWP Pro.

But if you’re not sure what to build, you just know you’re spending too much time, hitting a bottleneck, or just don’t want to do X task anymore, no problem. Send me a message through the form and I’m pretty good at identifying the best routes forward.

JackalWP awaits you. Sign up or send me message. I look forward to getting you up and running!

– Justin