Last week I received this email from Automattic. That’s the company that owns WordPress.com and that is a trustee for WordPress.org.

As more collaboration is happening remotely and online — work yes, but increasingly also school and personal relationships — we’re all looking for better ways to work together online. Normally, teachers hand out homework to students in person, and project leaders gather colleagues around a conference table for a presentation. Suddenly all this is happening in email, and Slack, and Zoom, and Google docs, and a dozen other tools.

At WordPress.com, our 15 years as a fully distributed company with over 1,200 employees working from 77 countries relies on P2: an all-in-one team website, blog, database, and social network that consolidates communications and files in one accessible, searchable spot.

It powers work at WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Tumblr. And today, a beta version is available for anyone — for your newly-remote work team, your homeschooling pod, your geographically scattered friends. P2 is the glue that gives your group an identity and coherence.

The email invited me to set up a site using P2 for internal team communications. So I did. Then I went to a different browser to take a look at what the site I had made looked like to a non-logged in viewer.

And the answer is that the site is marked as private, which is what a team would want if they are using P2 for internal communications.

Is this P2 or P2 version 2?

All good so far except for one thing. I had a P2 site years ago. I am as sure as I can be that that there was a P2 theme in the WP.com repository. And I am sure I used the theme and set up a private P2 on a self-hosted site.

Colour me confused.

Want to Get Your Own P2?

Go here >>> https://wordpress.com/p2/

It’s driving me nuts. Well, not nuts exactly, but I keep thinking of it. What is a product that I can sell, that has a market, that is easy to scale, that is easy and cheap to ship, and which I would feel pleased to market?

I am due to be having a postponed conversation with someone I met who coaches on approaching problems by looking at them from an un-possible perspective.

The way it works is that you define what you think is the problem and then you reverse it. So for the thing I talked about above, you would reverse it and say ‘something that is not easy to scale’ – and then look at what the options are for a product that satisfies that criterion. So for example – paintings. If I painted a picture, the market would be limited by how many paintings I could paint. Of course, that presupposes I could paint and paint something that would have a market, but you get the idea.

So, I am due to have this conversation – it’s a two-way street conversation because I will, or may, come up with some ideas for what he is developing.

So why am I entertaining you, dear reader, with this meandering thought? It’s because of an email from WordPress that I received today. It started by saying:

“Earn Money on Your WordPress.com Website with Premium Content and Paid Newsletters.
Make money while you build an engaged following for your website: use the WordPress.com Premium Content block to offer monthly and yearly paid memberships that give your followers access to the premium content you designate for a predictable income stream.
To use Premium Content blocks, you’ll need a WordPress.com website with any paid plan — Personal, Premium, Business, or eCommerce.”

And I am thinking, yes of course. Not.

Perhaps you are in a similar position and have the desire to market a product to validate your self image. If so, you are doubly welcome to join the conversation. It will be on Zoom or maybe Google Meet on Tuesday the 30th in the afternoon, UK time.