Episode 177 – A Chat With Toby Cryns

Introducing Toby Cryns Toby Cryns is owner of The Mighty Mo!, a WordPress and SEO lead generation agency in Minneapolis, MN. He wrote for WPTavern.com and helped plan BuddyCamp, WordUp, and the first few WordCamps in the Twin Cities. Show Notes Transcript: Topher DeRosia: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher, and I’m here today with Toby and I’m going to make you say your last name. Toby Cryns: Cryns [CRINES]. It’s a one-syllable German name. Topher: All right, cool. I know very little about you. I met you when we were both in the Tavern Project. Other than that, I don’t know anything about you. Where do you live? What do you do? Toby: Yeah, I live in Minneapolis. I’ve owned The Mighty Mo! Design Co. for 18 years and we’re a WordPress and SEO agency. Prior to that, my first job was milking goats- Topher: Nice. Toby: …with an umpire for a little league. I worked in politics for one of our two major parties. I was a sports writer for a newspaper. Oh, and then I worked at the University of Minnesota for four years before I started Mighty Mo. Topher: What role did you do in politics? Toby: I was a campaign organizer. So I managed a team of at any given day between 10 and 15 paid employees and 20 to 50 volunteers. We canvassed and we tracked data. We basically tried to get people to vote for our guy. Topher: All right, cool. Why the name Mighty Mo? Toby: Do you remember the movie Vacation with Chevy Chase? Did you ever see that one? Topher: Yep. Not in many, many years. Like maybe when it came out. Toby: In that movie, they drive across the Mississippi River, and he goes, “The mighty Mississippi.” And my dad used to say that. And at some point he started saying ‘The Mighty Mo’ when we crossed the river. So that’s what it is. Mighty Mo for nothing less. Topher: Nice. What is your role there? Toby: I run the company. Right now I do all the sales. I have three full-time employees and then a couple of… a bookkeeper and then a part-time social media person right now and designer. I have a project manager who really does a lot of the day-to-day management of projects. I do all the selling, make sure I manage all the bank accounts, make sure everyone gets paid. I still do a little bit of like development and stuff, but I’m trying to get to a point where I do zero. That’s my goal is to focus primarily on let’s say account, client accounts and whatever that level type of stuff is. Topher: I am sure you’re aware of the radio station. Toby: Oh, the Mighty Mo in Missouri? Sure. Topher: In Montana. Toby: Oh, it’s in Montana. That’s funny. I wonder if there’s one in Missouri too. Topher: I don’t know, but it’s a 107 FM in Helena, Montana. It’s Montana’s best place. Toby: It’s the best place in Montana. Topher: Nice. Toby: I think there’s also a Missouri one. There’s also a battleship, I think from World War II or something. Topher: Oh, I’m sure. Yeah. I think you could do that a lot of Missouri. Toby: Yeah. I think there’s even a brewery called the Mighty Mo. Topher: Cool. What WordCamps have you been to? Toby: I’ve only gone to local ones here. I planned a couple of them. I co-planned the first two WordCamps here. And then I co-planned or I led the Buddy Camp planning team for one of those. I also planned a number of non-affiliated WordPress events. So we did something called Wordup a couple of times and some other things, but all locally here. Topher: Okay. I’ve been to work at Minneapolis. Toby: Oh yeah. What year? Topher: 1912. Boy. 2016. Toby: Okay. Yeah. Cool. Topher: Yeah. And then I went to another conference that was in Minneapolis that was not a WordPress… Well, not a WordCamp. You remember that? Toby: Was it WordPress-related? Topher: Yes. I’m looking up my history here. Toby: PrestigeConf probably. Topher: Yes. I went to PrestigeConf. Toby: So I spoke at that. So maybe you saw me there. I don’t know. Topher: Oh yeah. Well, I’m sure I did. I was there. I only went in person to one of them, but we watched the other one on TV. Toby: Oh, cool. Topher: Yeah, let’s see. I’m looking it up here. Oh, oh, it’s not on WP World. Toby: It needs to be on there. Topher: You know about thewp.world? Toby: No. What’s that? Toby: Marcus Burnett made it. Basically it is a list of everybody in WordPress, but on your profile, it has all your WordPress, WordCamp, no WordPress badges, all your contact info, where you can find me, what plugins you’ve made, what photos you submitted, your latest posts from your blog. You can make yourself available as a speaker, and it lists every WordCamp you’ve ever been to. Toby: And did you say WordPress.world? Topher: Nope. Thewp.world. Toby: Ah, cool. Topher: I attended 63 events. Spoken at 34. You should go to more. They’re good for you. Toby: Yeah. Cool. Topher: So, what about personally? What do you do for fun? You married? Kids, dogs, cats? Toby: Yeah. Married kids. The whole ship, whole kebab. I have three kids, three lovely children, lovely wife. You know, I fix guitars in my free time. And so- Topher: That’s cool. Toby: Yeah. There’s a music school down the road that I’ve been… they just moved in a few months ago. I fixed two of their instruments so far. Just for fun. I don’t charge anything for it. But I had a friend drop off this really, really sweet guitar that’s like probably 40 years old and he played it in a music video that I loved. And he also played on my album in 2010. And I was going back, I’m like, “Did you play this guitar on that album?” And he’s like, “Did some research.” He’s like, “I did.” Topher: Wow. That’s cool. Toby: Really neat. So stuff like that with these guitars. When someone’s had a guitar for a long time, it has stories that go with it. And this particular guitar was neat because it was just dusty and gunky and never been wiped down with a damp towel, you know? And I was like- Toby: Oh yeah. Yeah. Topher: Oh, yeah. Toby: It’s like an Epiphone Firebird, which is classic-style guitar. It’s like, “You want me to clean this?” He’s like, “No. God, no. I’ve gone 40 years without cleaning it. Why clean now?” Like now- Topher: Right there is blood from this… Toby: Yeah, totally. Topher: That’s funny. Toby: Guitars are neat like that, I think. I never thought of guitars in that way until a couple of years ago and I’ve been playing for 40 years. Like 30 years, I guess. But just at the last couple of years of like my… I guess just have a different perspective about guitars that it’s like, you know, just like the river of life flows through guitars, you know? Topher: I was in flight school 35 years ago and my instructor, I don’t know, 15 or 20 years before that, had decided he wanted to learn to play guitar. So he bought a kit and he started building his acoustic guitar. Toby: Wow. Topher: And he loved building it. It was wonderful. So he sold it and bought another one. And when I knew him, he was on his seventh or eighth guitar and it was a beautiful 12 string with gold strings and 45 different kinds of wood and mother of pearl inlay and all that stuff. And his kids said, “If you sell that, we’re just going to kill you now so we can take it.” And he still didn’t know how to play. Toby: Wow. Isn’t that something? Topher: 10 or 15 years making guitars and he didn’t know how to play, but he had a wonderful time, you know? Toby: Yeah. You know, some of the most respected luthiers in the world, like professional guitar builders and errors, they don’t know how to play guitar or they don’t know how to play well. It’s like a mechanic doesn’t necessarily know how to drive a race or, you know, the guy building the car, the board plant, maybe he doesn’t drive over 55 miles an hour ever. Topher: That’s funny. So we were both part of the tavern project. It’s been long enough now. Those who are listening, who don’t know what happened, the lead editor of… the only editor of wptavern.com resigned. She moved on to another job and there was no one. And so Matt, the owner said, he’s going to do a contest and hundreds, maybe thousands of people signed up to be allowed to be in the contest. And he picked five and you and I were both one of the five. I think it was five, right? Toby: Yeah. That sounds about right. Something like that. Topher: Oh, just a second. My wife is sending me a note and I will be… just a moment. Oh, come on. It broke. So instead of writing, I did videos. I don’t remember what you wrote about. What was your topic? Toby: To kind of juxtapose it, so I wrote about kind of longer form, more evergreen topics. So by comparison, some of our colleagues wrote about today’s news in WordPress. Like, this plugin was released. There was a vulnerability discovered there. And I’m not really interested in that stuff from a writing perspective, unless there’s some neat angle. So my writing was like… I was trying to like… one of the articles, it was trying to figure out what the most used WordPress theme is. And there’s like a bunch of data sets from, and there’s no like definitive answer in WordPress because you know, everything’s disjointed. Who knows how many Elementor sites there are really, you know, like that sort of thing. So I did like an article about that. I did a couple of accessibility articles that were really interesting to me. Part of it was interesting. Like we have companies that are like… they’re actually trying. They’re investing heavily in accessibility stuff. But when I looked into it, just for me as somebody who’s not an accessibility pro, they missed very, very obvious things that I would… and I asked them about it and the response was… and these are the most popular WordPress plugins. I should say not all of them. Some of them better than others. But there’s two that come to mind that are… you can go to WPtavern.com and read the articles. Actually, I didn’t put this stuff in the articles. I didn’t want to do a hit piece. It wasn’t really what I wanted. But just the stuff that didn’t go in the article was that I was just blown away by the obvious stuff that was missed by these companies who are really trying and really, really investing. One of them had a part of their setup process, you install the plugin, the first form is like an email form and it’s… or no, it’s a license. Enter your license here. And to this day, and it’s now been a couple of years, I think, I told the CEO or I told the CMO, whatever, whoever I was talking to, CMO, I’m like, “Do you see this?” I pointed it out to him, he’s like, “Oh yeah, we totally missed that. Well, we’ll fix that.” And it’s two years later, they haven’t fixed it. And same with this other thing. It was one of the most popular themes in the world. And the default font choice colors were not accessible. And I brought this to their attention, they’re like, “Oh yeah, yeah, we’ll get to that.” And still nothing, you know, two years later. It was like, these are easy things. The code is not hard to write. That’s what I was interested in. I don’t know. I just wanted to write stories that hadn’t been written before that were interesting. Topher: I’m jumping to the end. Toby: How about you? Topher: Oh, yeah, go ahead. Toby: Did your experience go there? Topher: You know, I’m going to turn my video off because the audio is chopped up. I’m on Starlink. Toby: Oh, just asking how your experience at the Tavern went. Topher: I had… you know what, hang on a sec. I’m getting a spinning beach ball on Zoom. I hope this doesn’t crash. Okay, can you hear me? Toby: Mm-hmm. Topher: Okay, good. So, you want to know how my experience was? I had a good time making the content that I did. I was going to cover events. So, I covered an event. I did a five-day series. I didn’t get any feedback whatsoever. I have no idea. I mean, they didn’t pick me, obviously. But I have no idea if it was well-received. I didn’t really get any feedback from listeners either. Like, I have no idea if people were interested in what I had to say. But it was fun to make and it was an exciting time, you know. I bet a lot of people don’t know that all five of us were in a Slack channel together talking the whole time and supporting each other and helping each other. That was really cool, you know. Toby: It was really cool. Topher: I mean, it was a competition and theoretically three of us were not going to get jobs. In the end, four of us did not get jobs. But, you know, it was a very interesting experience. But I’m curious, what were you going to do with Mighty Mo if you had gotten a full-time job writing for the Tavern? Toby: I like gamed it out a little bit. But I don’t think I would have accepted the job. When I thought through it… because the assumption is, in what we know about the way that automatics policies work, is that I couldn’t run the Mighty Mo. Topher: Right, yeah. Toby: And so, if you take that as an assumption, it would be a big… I mean, just like when I just think of giving up something that’s relatively certain for something that’s relatively uncertain and with, you know, less financial upside. As I was thinking about it later, I was like, I don’t know that I would have accepted a reasonable offer from Matt if I had to give up the Mighty Mo. I think I could have done the work and run the Mighty Mo but… Topher: I was unemployed at the time. And so, for me, it was a possibility of a job. And it was very difficult to not hear anything at all for weeks. First. days, and then weeks, and then- Toby: Months. Topher: Yeah, months. And then, do you remember we got that thing from, I think it was JustWorks, said, congratulations on your offer and it wasn’t real? Toby: Oh, gosh. You know- Topher: I think we all got that. Toby: I don’t recall. Yeah, maybe. I just can’t remember. Topher: They just needed some information. Like, “We need you to fill out a W-9 so we can pay you.” Toby: Oh, it went through their like automated system. Topher: It did. Yeah. So I got the email that said, “Hi, we’re going to send you an offer. Get ready today.” I’m like, “Woo, I’m in.” Toby: Oh, yeah. Topher: So from that perspective, it was pretty painful. Toby: I told Matt this too, Matt Mullenweg. By the way, I never spoke with Matt. I emailed him once or twice. I don’t think he ever emailed me. That was the nature of the relationship. And I was totally fine with it. I didn’t ask for anything more than that. But I said this to him too. For me, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. I’ve respected that publication for a long time. And was and remain just really grateful for the opportunity to contribute in that way. Topher: Yeah. I was pretty excited to see the Tavern continue. And I’m sad that it’s not anymore. I feel like it’s kind of been supplanted. Like, there are other places where I get that kind of information now that I’m very happy with. I would be sad to see them go away now. Toby: It makes me wonder… the thing about the Tavern, and it’s maybe different, it’s just like, if somebody were to take it over again, it would have to be personality-driven, similar to how it was. You know, like one person in charge. I think Andrea was in charge for a long time. Is it Andrea? I can’t remember, but- Topher: Sarah. Toby: Sarah. Right. And so you got to know what kind of content she was producing. And you know, if you like it, then you

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Episode 177 – A Chat With Toby Cryns is an episode from Hallway Chats by Topher and Cate DeRosia.

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This episode was published on Aug 9, 2025.

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