I’m Matt Schwartz, the founder of Inspry, a WordPress and WooCommerce agency based in Atlanta, Georgia. I was born and raised just outside the city and I still call Atlanta home today. I started building websites way back as a teenager, using good old Dreamweaver (table-based layouts!). Boy have we come a long way since then.
Inspry grew out of more than a decade of building and maintaining sites for clients. Alongside the agency, I’m also the founder of CheckView, an automated testing platform that makes sure WordPress forms, checkout flows, and key functionality on a site actually keep working, not just that the site is online. Between the two, my world is equal parts client work, product building, and the operational reality of keeping hundreds of sites healthy.
The Journey Began
Before WordPress, I was still building sites, but with Joomla and Drupal and boy was it a lot more work! WordPress made things easier, not to mention the community and marketing behind it is so powerful!
I first discovered WordPress way back in 2009 while interning at Disney. They were looking for a new CMS for some internal work at Animal Kingdom and they had me try out WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. I will be completely honest, I went with Joomla at the time.
WordPress was still very young and was missing some CMS must have’s at the time. But fast forward to around 2011, I started my own web agency and built on both platforms for many years until WordPress won me over completely (as it does!). While its simplicity made development much faster, the ease of content management won over our clients and that is what ultimately moved the needle and had us dedicate our agency to WordPress.
The Need for “CheckView”
Yes, so when we first started down the journey, we had a few clients needing daily testing of their checkout and forms as they were business critical. A few hiccups and awkward conversations with clients later, we knew we had to do something.
We looked at competitors out there like Ghost Inspector which did work, but they still took a lot of time to set up that agencies like us don’t have time for, so we decided to build our own automated testing platform. Not only would it have a nice GUI like others, but it could automatically build and test forms and checkout specifically for WordPress. Plus, unlike other platforms, it handles things like CAPTCHA bypasses and disabling form integrations natively where on other platforms we discovered every test was going to be a massive amount of effort and configuration.
It was not an easy platform to build out, I will be honest! This was pre-AI code as well. The good thing is our code is written better due to that. WordPress is the king of edge cases and we butted heads with this many, many times while building things out as websites and even form plugins had particular issues and nuances we had to work through. Every plugin does things a bit differently so we had to write a lot of logic to account for this, but the beauty is we did this logic for our customers so now they don’t have to. We do dogfood our own product and use it at our WordPress and WooCommerce agency here in Atlanta. We used it for a full year with over 100 sites before we released it publicly.
So many good pieces of software in WordPress! Our agency is big on using WS Form or Gravity Forms for clients, both amazing, well-engineered pieces of software that make things rather limitless, but reliable. We tend to use block-based builders such as Kadence for lightweight, forward-thinking setups that work well with Woo as well.
We ourselves have a few plugins on the WordPress free repo. Obviously, the CheckView plugin which you need to run CheckView, but what you might want to checkout is our free agency plugin called the Agency Toolkit that adds all sort of life improvements for agencies who need to manage client sites (its completely free and our contribution to WordPress!).
Myself with my Brilliant Team
Advice for Business Owners
Find a mentor! I didn’t have one and man, it made things harder. I think I ended up doing well, but I went through a lot of hamster wheels to get there. I think having a mentor lets you learn from their experience and move faster with more purpose.
Obviously with AI coming along, working with small businesses on their AI and WordPress needs together will be a goldmine.
WordPress & Beyond
On the CheckView side, we are working with some industry partners to bake CheckView into more platforms and grow the user base. Also just started an affiliate program with 30% forever commissions each and every month. If you are looking for WordPress affiliate programs, check it out at partner.checkview.io
I think WordPress will be forced to grow and evolve with AI and honestly in some ways become a bit more specialty. I think it will thrive as the base infrastructure for websites that need stability and reliability though. This will be especially true for e-commerce and complex, functional websites where WordPress has very good stability.
On the low end of the market, think small brochure or information landing pages, etc. I do think competitors are a massive threat to WordPress as many owners of such websites are often building them to check off a box, not necessarily grow their business through their website directly. This part of WP will have to level up to stay relevant in my opinion.
My Love for the WordPress Community
Yes! WordCamps and conferences are a huge reason why I have stuck with WP so long. I try to always go to WordCamp US, but skipped it this year to go to WordCamp Europe in Poland and it was fantastic, highly recommend! PressConf was earlier this year and loved the authenticity of it. Headed to CloudFest next!
As I already noted, Kyle at The Admin Bar for sure is a huge advocate for CheckView and just an all-around fantastic guy. I am in one of his TABLE agency groups and my peers there have been amazing.
I would say Aurelio Volle has been a huge inspiration, quite amazing what he and his team have done with WP Umbrella. Let’s be honest, the WP management platform space was already somewhat crowded when they started, yet they did it anyway because they saw the value of what they could add and it has worked out amazingly. From the beginning, they have put the customer experience first and it shows. Heck, early versions of CheckView were heavily inspired by their UX.
How I Keep Myself Updated
The WP Minute and WP Builds podcasts are definitely fantastic places to stay up-to-date with the pulse of WordPress. The Admin Bar’s YouTube channel has some good tidbits too.
I Have a Life Other Than the Work
Well, work is a huge part of my life, but I love working out, running, hanging with my girlfriend and our dog, seeing friends and my fam, doing all the normal human things. Honestly AI experimentation has taken up a lot of my free time this past year :)
It depends, but we typically see my girlfriend’s family in Colorado or Vegas for some holidays and see mine here in Georgia. We don’t tend to go places on holidays (those airport crowds!). But we might make an exception this year for Christmas.
I love San Diego and Miami in the US. Portugal is an amazing country, love Porto. Need to be by the ocean!
I have one amazing doggo, Xan. We won the dog lotto and I don’t know how I will ever find a better dog.
I Reward Myself by
Boy, I am not great at doing this, but I am trying to learn! I tend to take trips a lot, travel is what humbles and grounds me (followed by the ocean). Trying new snacks from the grocery store or international shop is a nice pick-me-up. Love me some matcha as well!
Connect With Me
Definitely connect with me on LinkedIn
Also contact me on CheckView if you have any questions or want to say hi 🙂
