Reuben Hochstetler

I am a web developer, podcaster, writer, and heir to a King and my purpose is to glorify the Creator of the universe.

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

@MarkJSzymanski Congrats man! Kids are the best. I didn’t get it until our first.

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

Over the weekend my brother-in-law asked me what the biggest challenge is in marketing.

I don't know that I gave him an answer, but earlier that day, I spent a few hours using AI to write a messaging guide for a new product I'm offering, and then write the homepage copy.

This was largely a test to see how I can leverage AI and to try and push the limits of what I believe it can do for Touchdown Tech.

It was better than I expected. It was good, not great, but good, and maybe good enough for many business owners.

I shared this with my brother-in-law and told him, the challenge or struggle is the balance between when is “good enough” actually good enough. Because there is always room for slight improvement in messaging or refactoring code and at some point, it is “good enough”.

A few days later, I was thinking about how other industries have changed over the years, and I think there's a pattern that AI is bringing into marketing that we've already seen and experienced in the last 100 years.

Let's look at home building. The materials used today are manufactured quickly but not as durable. The lumber is less dense, more prone to mold and rot. Hollow doors replaced solid wood doors.

These “fast food” homes are focused on function and less on beauty. I guess the silver lining is that these homes won’t last 100 years.

But guess what, there’s still a market for master craftsmen in construction building homes with durable material and I believe there’s still going to be a market for master craftsmen in marketing and web design.

I pride myself on doing exceptional work in marketing, web design, development, and messaging. I don’t plan to lower the quality of what I’m creating so that it can be created faster. If and where AI can help, I’ll use it, but I’m not interested in mass producing websites.

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

@JamesWelbes That’s encouraging. I’m about hslfway done with a web app idea. And if it goes well, plan to have a professional review too.

Did you hire an agency or a freelancer to review your plugin?

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

I tend to like to keep things as simple as possible. However, Willow Voice (@WillowVoiceAI) has a feature that I finally took advantage of, and I immediately am seeing the benefits. Willow Voice is a voice-to-text app that runs on my computer, and they also have an iPhone integration, although it's not great compared to what you can do on a desktop.

Anyway, the real cool thing is that you can set up shortcuts so that it will insert things like a phone number, mailing address, email address, website URL, etc. with a simple voice command.

So instead of dictating out my phone number, I can just say, “my phone shortcut” and it’ll spit out my phone number formatted the way I like with parentheses.

This whole post was dictated out with voice to text using Willow Voice. If you want to check it out, here's my referral link: https://t.co/OY2jFmV7D3

Here's a screenshot of some of my stats.

[Sybre Waaijer @SybreWaaijer]

100,000+ stores run this WooCommerce plugin. I doubt any of them know their payments are broken. Any store with $1M ARR could be missing $700k+ in revenue. If you run WooCommerce Subscriptions, check your store.

Yesterday, I reported a bug to WooCommerce that silently broke subscription payments after a product switch. Then I got worried: if they missed something this obvious, what else did they get wrong? So I started auditing. Within hours, I had found three more bugs. There were 121 affected subscriptions, and $43,274 in lost revenue.

Here's what I found.

WooCommerce Subscriptions has an internal flag that controls whether a subscription charges the customer automatically or waits for them to pay manually. When a customer checks out with (for example) Stripe or PayPal, this flag should be set to "automatic." If it isn't, subscription renewals silently stop working: no charge is attempted, no failure email is sent, and the subscription goes on hold until the customer notices and pays manually, or doesn't and churns.

Bug 1 (stale cache): After saving subscription dates, the order cache was never cleared. Subsequent saves could serve a stale object with the flag still set to its default: manual. Fixed in subscriptions-core 6.9.0.

Bug 2 (broken HPOS backfill): Missing getter/setter methods prevented subscription metadata from being properly synced to postmeta in HPOS when data sync is enabled. Fixed in subscriptions-core 6.5.0.

Bug 3 (unnecessary re-fetch): wcs_create_subscription() returned a freshly fetched instance from cache/DB instead of the already-configured object. Any unsaved state, including the corrected flag, was silently discarded. Fixed in subscriptions-core 7.1.0.

These three combined accounted for roughly 7% of all subscriptions created at checkout that were silently born broken, despite the customer paying successfully. For 7+ years (we have data from 2017–2024). Automatic payments NEVER fired for these subscriptions. Users never got renewal emails, either. The only way to know they were broken was if the customer noticed they lost access and contacted support, or if the merchant audited their database manually.

Bug 4 (switch): When a customer upgrades or downgrades their subscription, the switcher flags the subscription as manual renewal; it only corrects the flag if the payment gateway changes. A customer switching plans while keeping the same gateway (e.g. Stripe to Stripe) cements the flag stuck on manual. I discovered this two days ago, when I found a happy customer in the store overview that I had just helped upgrade, with multiple valid cards on file, put "On Hold" because of a missed payment.

For years, I've offered to help WooCommerce improve its code quality and performance. I dry-run code: I find bugs by reading. All four of these bugs are clearly visible in the source without needing to use the software. They could have been caught early. They weren't. The incompetence is immeasurable (well, actually, with the diagnostic queries in my next post, it might be measurable). Our store is small. WooCommerce Subscriptions powers hundreds of thousands of stores. If 7% of subscriptions were silently broken across even a fraction of them, we're looking at potentially millions of dollars in spoiled revenue industry-wide that could have been prevented. Perhaps even billions.

None of this was disclosed well or at all. No admin notice. No email. No advisory.

The fixes shipped under vague changelog lines like "Make sure we always clear the subscription object from cache after updating dates" and "Ensure proper backfilling of subscription metadata." One fix was labeled "Dev" instead of "Fix." Two don't appear in the GitHub release notes at all. No remediation tool or diagnostic query was provided. Store owners have NO way to know they're affected unless they manually audit their database. The woocommerce-subscriptions-core repo was archived in May 2025 after the code was absorbed into WooCommerce core — making the fix history harder to trace.

If you run WooCommerce Subscriptions and used HPOS before mid-2024, check your store. Queries are linked in the tweet below.

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

I couldn't help but open this email when I saw the subject line tailored to Touchdown Tech, my marketing agency.

I don't know if this is part of a wide marketing strategy by @kinsta but it's great.

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

@thekevingeary I think this is great and plan to put donning on my site like you’re suggesting.

I may even add a comparison showing what AI slop looks like vs what we build.

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

@formerfatguy Northern Indiana about 25 miles from Michigan.

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

This morning was tough. The toilet stopped working. It’s raining. Everything outside is muddy. Did I mention we're living in an RV?

At the same time, I feel overwhelmed with blessing. My office is 100’ from my RV and it’s dry and clean. And I have capable help to troubleshoot the toilet issue (🤞🏼 @NicholasHo24).

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

@thekevingeary @bgardner I don’t get it. Looks like Bricks 2 years ago, Oxygen 5 years ago, Elementor 10 years ago.

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

@rilwis Wait what? I thought EmDash was an April Fools joke.

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

@MikeWingerii I was concerned for a second.

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

When someone you trust tells you something over and over again, listen.

Simon from @webnestify has repeatedly told me the best backup and migration plugin for WordPress is All-in-One Migration from @servmask. What kept me from using it for so long is I was confused by their website.

I wasn’t sure what add-on I needed or was or wasn’t included.

Initially I just wanted the add-on for Google Drive. So I tried and somehow was able to purchase it. This was about 1 year ago. I never used it because I couldn't figure out how to download the Google Drive add-on (FYI, you don't need to download it separately).

Now, after talking with support I realize, if I buy the “Pro” plan, I get all the add-ons. But it’s not super clear.

I’ve used it to backup and migrate over 20 sites in the past few weeks and now I can’t imaging using a different plugin.

Another thing I wanted to do was save client website backups to a storage that they can easily access if they ever want to use a different marketing agency. I don’t have this done yet but now I have a great tool that makes it possible.

Thanks Simon for your advice and support!

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

@thekevingeary @EtchWPOfficial For anyone on the fence, I’ve never regretted a purchase from Digital Gravy. And I think Etch is their best product by far in how it’s helping me build scalability and maintainable websites for clients.

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

@MarkJSzymanski If it works, you’d get me over the fence without question.

You should document the journey in livestream.

I often wonder how long vibe coding actually takes.

Also not sure how to publish something where it’s outside of the vibe coding tool.

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

When I was a teenager, I never would have thought cleaning up brush and fallen trees in a woods would be relaxing or fun.

But this past week I was able to do just that. I think part of the excitement is cleaning up a physical space when in contrast so much of my day-to-day work is digital. Moving something in real life just hits different.

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

@NicholasHo24 What’s different about the Q1 v2 compared to the V6 Max?

What type of keyboard is the Apple keyboard?

[Reuben Hochstetler @ReubenHoch]

@thekevingeary This is very very cool!