Talk Time: Episode 002 – Chris Badgett

5,421 words, 29 minutes read time.

Chris is widely known as the creator and co-founder of LifterLMS, but his story goes far beyond WordPress products and online education. Before building learning tools for WordPress, he spent years in Alaska running sled dogs, working in remote places, exploring the outdoors, and learning lessons from nature that still shape how he leads today.

In this Talk Time conversation, Chris shares his journey through WordPress, entrepreneurship, open source, AI, education, family life, outdoor adventures, food memories, oysters, omelets, kitchen stories, and the mission behind LifterLMS. His interview reminds us that contribution can take many forms, including products, teaching, mentorship, community support, free tools, and the consistent choice to lift others through learning.

So grab your favorite drink, pull up a chair, and enjoy this adventurous second episode of Talk Time by WPKitchen.

👋 INTRODUCTION & BACKGROUND

Let’s start by getting to know you. This section covers your background, current work, interests, and the experiences that have shaped your journey.

Please introduce yourself.

I am Chris Badgett, creator and co-founder of LifterLMS, a leading learning management system for WordPress. My company mission is to lift up others through education. I am a highly technical online person, but I am also very into nature, with a lot of experience in long-distance hiking, mountaineering, world travel, and time in the wilderness and remote places. Before WordPress, I spent about a decade in Alaska running sled dogs, and I became the manager of a helicopter-supported sled dog tour operation on a glacier, a couple hundred dogs, reachable only by helicopter. That chapter shaped a lot of who I am and how I lead.

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What’s your hometown, and where do you currently live?

My hometown is Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I currently live in the mountains of Maine with my family.

What do you do professionally?

I steward the LifterLMS project as an active, involved founder and operator.

What is your educational background?

I graduated from Appalachian State University with a degree in cultural anthropology, with a focus in sustainable development. I also have a minor in philosophy and religion, and I almost got a minor in appropriate technology.

What are you working on these days?

LifterLMS is my full-time professional focus. I am also mindful of creating a sustainable lifestyle and contributing in a positive way to the economy through jobs for talented people all over the world.

What achievement are you most proud of?

Honestly, it is not any single thing, it is a collection, and what ties them together is that they were all a little counterintuitive. If I had to name the one at the center, it is taking the risk and making the sacrifice to launch LifterLMS with no safety net as a bootstrap founder, and staying focused on that project for over thirteen years. I am still in love with it as much as the day it started. Alongside that: running 100 miles solo across the entire state of New Hampshire, curing the chronic back pain I carried for more than twenty years, and raising my daughters as empowered, self-directed learners. None of those were the obvious path.

What hobbies do you enjoy outside WordPress?

I have a lot of them. Long-distance running is a big one. I recently completed a self-supported 100-mile run across the entire state of New Hampshire. I love camping with my family, taking my daughter fly fishing, and spending time with good friends relaxing in nature.

What motivates you in life?

Having strong alignment, for myself in my personal life and for the world in my business life. Lifting up others through education and learning, empowering learning wherever it exists between the teacher and the learner.

What is something the WordPress community doesn’t know about you?

The thing that is most misunderstood about me is that people see me as a marketer, a salesperson, a micro-influencer personality. What I am actually most passionate about is the discipline of product, which is very misunderstood.

How would your friends describe you?

I have friends in a lot of different tribes, so it depends which group. My outdoor friends see me as the adventurous one, game for expeditions and time outdoors. My entrepreneur friends see me as a companion on the shared journey of building an online business and a software company. The one thing all of them would say is that I am a good listener who genuinely cares about other people.

🔍 DISCOVERING WORDPRESS

Every contributor has a beginning. Share how you first discovered WordPress, what attracted you to it, and how your journey started.

How did you first discover WordPress?

Around 2007, I was trying to figure out how to build a website so I could blog about one of my favorite topics: leadership. My first WordPress site was a blog (long gone now) called outdoortribe.com, where I wrote at the intersection of leadership and the outdoor world. I found a YouTube tutorial on how to build a site with WordPress and fell in love. I could see that anybody in the world could find my content, and that I could build a website without being a developer.

What was your first WordPress project?

The Outdoor Tribe blog, outdoortribe.com, an outdoor leadership blog. That was my first WordPress project.

What attracted you to WordPress?

I followed a random YouTube tutorial and saw that anybody could create a website with WordPress. I got in during the very early days. I thought I was late to the party, but I fell in love with it. It felt like WordPress was made for creators like me, before we even had the word “creator.”

Who helped you when you were getting started?

Chris Lema really helped me in the early days on the business front. I would also like to spotlight Dan Martell for helping me grow as a software entrepreneur. A lot of the technical side I taught myself off YouTube, but those two shaped how I think about business and building software.

What was the biggest challenge in your early days?

Money, and the uncertainty. There was a winter in the Costa Rican jungle filming a permaculture course with almost no money, eating beans and fruit, with a Christmas tree made from a jungle stick and one string of blue lights. I could not have been happier, but it was lean. Learning to build a real business on top of the technical skills was the harder climb than the code.

When did you realize WordPress would become part of your career?

When my client work in the course and membership space kept hitting the same wall: there was no good, unified WordPress LMS tool. Some of the custom platforms my company built were grossing serious money for their owners year after year. That gap was the whole opportunity. That gap became LifterLMS.

What was your first contribution to WordPress?

I have made a lot of contributions over the years, but my first major one, back when I was figuring out WordPress and falling in love with it, was creating a course on Udemy called How to Build a WordPress Website in a Weekend. It also launched as a YouTube playlist. I just wanted to share my love for WordPress by showing other people how to create a website really quickly. Later, my first contribution through the official channels was helping organize WordCamp Portland, Maine, and releasing the free version of LifterLMS on WordPress.org was my first major product contribution.

What skills did WordPress help you develop?

So many, from the technology of building websites to interpersonal skills like running an online business and communicating with people all over the world. It made me a better writer, a better communicator, and a better creator in general. I give WordPress a lot of credit.

What advice would you give your younger self?

That the key to success in life is compounding with consistency over long time horizons. If you fall in love with WordPress, or whatever niche of web development or content creation you are in, just stick with it. Choose something you know you could stay passionate about for over a decade, like I have.

What keeps you interested in WordPress today?

I am a big believer in the power of open source and open-source freedoms, and democratizing education in the digital classroom is really important to me. I love the idea of decentralizing learning and helping educators and students be empowered all over the world, mostly for free.

< /> CONTRIBUTION JOURNEY

Contributions are at the heart of the WordPress project. Tell us about your contribution, experiences, motivations, achievements, challenges, and lessons learned along the way.

What does open source mean to you?

Open source, to me, is all about the freedom to create and consume, and connecting with other humans and their ideas, their art, and their content, anywhere in the world, mostly for free.

How did you get involved in contributing?

I have been around WordPress a very long time and contributed in a lot of different ways. I first got involved by creating free content and being a brand evangelist for WordPress, before that term even existed, just sharing my passion in content and on social media. My first contribution through the official channels was helping organize the last WordCamp in Portland, Maine, back in 2017.

What was your first contribution experience like?

I have contributed so much over the years that it is hard to remember the very first. Organizing a WordCamp stands out. It was great to connect in person with real people who were just as passionate about WordPress, without getting on a plane. A funny one: the very first time I drove to the Portland, Maine WordPress meetup, I drove a couple of hours through a snowstorm to get there, and when I arrived there was a sign on the door saying the meetup was canceled because of the weather. Funny, because most of the people who would have come lived right there in Portland, and I was the one who came from two hours away. Even so, it was great to find the others, people doing something significant and having fun giving back.

Which contribution are you most proud of?

Creating the free core LifterLMS plugin and giving it to the community. We have far more free users than paid users, and that is a contribution I am genuinely passionate about. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to give away our best stuff for free. When we launched, LearnDash was taking off but was paid-only with no free version. It felt good to bring a free, open-source option to the community and to stick with the project this long. A lot of other WordPress solutions have sold and their founders have exited. At LifterLMS I am just as committed as I was thirteen years ago, still happy, still having fun, and not looking to sell. Free, open-source solutions need great stewards whose consistency compounds over time.

Which teams or projects have you contributed to?

Through the official WordPress channels, I have been a WordCamp organizer, I have helped for free on WordPress.org support, and I spent time helping the WordPress training team. I have also sponsored WordCamps many times. And I worked with Matt Mullenweg and other WordPress LMS leaders to figure out ways to make WordPress LMS solutions easier and more integrated with each other.

What motivates you to contribute?

I have benefited so much from the WordPress community and the project that it feels natural and easy to want to give back.

What have you gained from contributing?

The most important thing is relationships with awesome people in the WordPress community.

What challenges have you faced as a contributor?

The biggest challenge is that so much contribution happens outside the official teams. I do not get hung up on it, I just do my own thing, but there are so many great WordPress content creators who are essentially the marketing department of the open-source project, and they do not get much acknowledgement or organization around what they do. The other challenge is that contributing a free plugin is sometimes not seen as a contribution, because people view it as a marketing expense, a bit like sponsoring a WordCamp (which is another form of contribution I have done many times). I come at the free plugin from a spirit of contribution. Yes, it generates some leads to paid customers, but my heart is in the mission and vision of LifterLMS: free, distributed learning for all.

What contribution would you like to make in the future?

I will keep innovating and improving the free core version of LifterLMS. I think it is unfortunate that the broader New England WordCamp scene kind of fizzled, and I would love to help organize that again if it ever comes back. Lately I have been contributing a lot of free content on how to work with WordPress and LifterLMS using AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT, and I will do more of it. It reminds me of the moment when I, as a non-developer, discovered I could build a website. With AI, that moment is happening all over again. We are democratizing development, technology fading into the background, and that is a lot of fun.

How has contribution changed your career?

Mostly, contributing has let me give back. I always try to create more value than I consume, so when I contribute it feels good to add value with no expectation of return. You do get some business return, of course, but the real reward is the love and joy of contributing to a creative, smart, open-source community.

Why should others contribute?

If you get a lot of benefit from something, it is deeply fulfilling to give back to whatever benefited you, ideally in larger volume than what you received. It comes down to a higher vision of creating more value than you consume in the world. That is a fulfilling way to live, and there is a lot of gratitude in it.

🗓️ COMMUNITY & EVENTS

The WordPress community is built by people. We’d love to hear about your experiences with meetups, WordCamps, community building, and the connections you’ve made.

What does the WordPress community mean to you?

For me it is simple. The people in the WordPress community are some of the smartest, most creative, most interesting people I have ever met.

What was your first WordCamp experience?

I believe my first WordCamp was WordCamp Sacramento in California, which was a lot of fun. I met some great people, some of my own users and customers, along with other plugin creators, theme creators, and agency owners. My very first WordPress community experience, though, was actually Chris Lema’s CaboPress, which was hugely impactful for me. I believe I went six times, and the relationships I got out of that have been essential to my success.

What is your favorite WordCamp memory?

A couple stand out. WordCamp US, and especially WordCamp Asia in Taiwan. What I loved about Asia was the shared journey: you work remotely with all these people and industry partners, and then you come together in person on the other side of the world and just hang out, learn new things, and enjoy time together. Experiencing a culture different from my own was really fulfilling.

Have you organized a meetup or WordCamp?

Yes. I organized WordCamp Portland, Maine.

What makes a great community event?

A great community event is affordable, it draws local people, and it is interesting enough that people will travel from all over the world for it. It is a mix of strong talks and holding space for community at side events. The passion of the organizers matters a lot. So does location selection, because the best community events are in awesome places that have a lot going on outside the event itself.

What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned from the community?

The power of weak ties. These are people you do not know super well, maybe you only know each other on social media, on X or Facebook, or in a Slack community. It is really powerful when online communities have pop-up events and come together in person one percent of the time, when they are interacting online the other ninety-nine percent. That is what builds real human connection.

Who in the community inspires you?

There are so many people in the WordPress community who have inspired me in so many ways that it is hard to pick one. The people who inspire and humble me most are actually LifterLMS users who create real impact with an education platform powered by LifterLMS. It is so fulfilling to see people using your tool to send positive ripples into society through education. When I travel, I love meeting up with LifterLMS users in person and hearing their stories about how their learning platform has helped others.

What would you like to improve in the community?

The biggest opportunity is something already starting to happen: more niche events. The big WordCamps are awesome, but I really love the small, focused events. PressConf for WordPress entrepreneurs is cool. LoopConf was cool. CaboPress had a huge impact on my life. I would love to see some online-education-focused community events, and some genuinely remote ones. That is just me, I am a little different. I can enjoy a big city near a major airport, but I would personally love to see community events in rural locations with a lot of natural beauty, so the event comes with nature and cultural exploration built in, rather than always being in a city right next to an airport.

What advice do you have for new community members?

Try to give back, even right when you are getting started. Help somebody who has a question, or create something valuable. Teach what you know and build in public, because you never know who you are going to inspire.

What keeps you involved?

Lifting up others through online education. Having my mission and vision fully locked in, in total synergy, keeps me motivated. And my love for the community of people around WordPress, who are smart, creative, and incredibly helpful.

📈 WORK & PRODUCTIVITY

How do you approach your work and manage your day? This section explores your work habits, productivity, tools, and professional insights.

What does a typical workday look like?

Pretty much nine to six, Monday through Friday. I used to work long nights, but I am more standard now.

Where do you usually work from?

My home office, the little cabin in my backyard. Chris works from a small cabin in his backyard. He also shared an older office tour video for readers who would like a glimpse into his working environment.

Morning person or night owl?

Morning person now. My morning routine is sacred to me. It is mental health infrastructure, not a productivity hack.

What helps you stay productive?

Tons of systems, living by my calendar, and taking care of my mental and physical health. Exercise is a big part of that.

How do you handle stress and avoid burnout?

I focus on my own personal development, and I lean on exercise and time outdoors. Daily movement is how I regulate. I exercise the body to tame the mind.

What tools can you not live without?

I use so many it is hard to say, but some of the top ones are Slack, Wispr Flow, Zoom, my AI tools, and Descript. In the WordPress ecosystem, outside of our own products, I am a huge fan of WP Fusion and Popup Maker.

What does success mean to you today?

Waking up excited about the work you do.

What is the best career advice you received?

When you are in a manager role: hire the person, train the skills.

What work habit has helped you most?

My morning routine, and in particular picking the three most important things I need to get done that day.

🤖 AI & THE FUTURE

Explore how AI is changing the way we work, learn, and contribute

How has AI changed the way you work?

It has accelerated me probably by a factor of ten.

What AI tool do you use most often today?

Honestly, the tool I am in most is WordPress itself, with AI woven throughout the workflow.

What’s the most useful thing AI has helped you do?

Research, filling in holes in my thinking, and starting development tasks.

What excites you most about AI?

The ability to accelerate the human.

What concerns you most about AI?

That people’s attention spans keep shrinking and focus keeps fracturing, the same thing that happened with social media.

How do you think AI will impact WordPress over the next five years?

I think AI will democratize development even further, and WordPress has real advantages here: the open-source nature of the platform, especially the free open-source solution, means AI can integrate with it and build on top of it.

Has AI changed the way you create content, code, or support customers?

Yes, across all three. We create content, write code, and support customers with AI in the mix. We always keep a human in the loop, but it accelerates everyone on our team no matter their role.

What skill do you think will become more important in the AI era?

Product. Having taste, not just building features or doing marketing for marketing’s sake. Really understanding the human and the job the product does in whatever niche it serves.

If AI could completely automate one task for you, what would it be?

Keeping WordPress plugins up to date without ever breaking the site.

What advice would you give WordPress professionals adapting to AI?

Focus just as much on your learning as on the work you produce. If you get a ten-times improvement in output but you lose half your time learning AI, that is actually a good trade.

🚀 ENTREPRENEURSHIP & LEADERSHIP

Explore the ideas, risks, and lessons behind building products, businesses, teams, and communities.

Have you ever started a business, product, or side project?

Yes. I started and founded LifterLMS, along with a blog, a WordPress agency, and a course publishing business before it.

What inspired you to build it?

I was building solutions as a WordPress agency, and there was not a high-quality, customizable, affordable learning management system for WordPress. So I built it.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned from entrepreneurship?

That it is personal development. The business grows as you grow.

What was your biggest business mistake, and what did it teach you?

Not understanding all the different types of users I had on day one.

What advice would you give someone launching their first WordPress product or business?

Get really close to the customer and talk to them. Whoever is closest to the customer wins. Put your phone number on your website. Talk to real people. Try to meet them in person.

Do you prefer building products, managing teams, or creating communities?

I equally like all three: building products, managing teams, and creating community.

What is a failure or setback that taught you an important lesson?

The biggest one was stressing too much in the early days and not trusting the process of entrepreneurship. I created a lot of unnecessary stress for myself. The lesson: go easy on yourself. Even when your finances are tight, if you are genuinely putting in the work and making things happen, try to relax a little.

If you were starting from scratch, what would you do differently?

I would lean even harder on something I learned from Jason Cohen, the founder of WP Engine whoever is closest to the customer wins. From day one I would work really hard to talk to potential customers, put my phone number on the website, meet them in person, email them, reach out, get on Zoom with them, and deliver above-and-beyond customer support.

What opportunity in the WordPress ecosystem excites you most right now?

The intersection of AI and education. Helping education entrepreneurs use AI to build, teach, and serve better, on an open platform they own instead of renting their business from a closed SaaS silo.

What’s one thing every entrepreneur should learn early?

Go from idea to action as quickly as possible. The market is going to give you feedback. It is not about bouncing ideas around in your head and building in a vacuum.

Who are you mentoring or helping today?

I try to help and mentor as many people as I can. I have a few private people I mentor, and mostly I just take a helpful stance in everything I do.

🍽️ FOOD & DRINKS

Now for the fun part! Share your favorite foods, drinks, food memories, and the meals that bring you comfort, joy, or inspiration.

What is your favorite food?

Oysters

What is your favorite drink?

San Pellegrino Mineral water.

Tea or coffee?

Both, really: black coffee and green tea.

What food reminds you of childhood?

Key lime pie.

What is your comfort food?

Lasagna.

What is your favorite breakfast?

Omelets.

What is the best meal you’ve ever had?

A Michelin-star restaurant in Taiwan, during WordCamp Asia.

What do you usually eat while working?

A protein snack mid-morning, like some nuts. At lunch I am often eating leftovers from the night before. I do not really snack beyond protein.

What is your favorite snack?

Protein: pistachios, cashews, almonds, or sardines.

What local dish should visitors try?

In Maine, you have to try a lobster roll.

🔥 COOKING & KITCHEN

Whether you’re an experienced cook or just enjoy experimenting in the kitchen, we’d love to learn about your cooking experiences, favorite dishes, and kitchen stories.

Do you cook?

Yes. We almost always cook, and we barely go out to eat or get takeout.

What was the first thing you learned to cook?

Scrambled eggs.

What dish can you cook perfectly?

An omelet. In fact, my first online course was about how to make perfect omelets every time. It is called the P.O.E.T. Omelet Method (Perfect Omelets Every Time), and you can still get it on Udemy.

Who taught you to cook?

Lots of people, over the years.

What food would you like to learn to cook?

More Asian cuisine.

What ingredient do you always keep at home?

We often have our own vegetables that we grow.

What is the most challenging dish you have ever cooked?

Pad thai. It is all about the speed, the prep, and the timing.

What meal would best represent your personality and why?

Probably pad thai. There are a lot of layers to it, and a lot of variation in quality.

🏡 FAMILY, HOME & TRADITIONS

Discover the people, traditions, and memories that helped shape your journey.

What food instantly reminds you of home?

An egg and cheese biscuit.

Who has had the biggest influence on your life outside of WordPress?

Nature, more than any one person.

How do you balance family life with your work and community involvement?

Clear boundaries between when I am working and when I am not.

Who is the best cook in your family?

We all cook. My wife is a really good cook, and my daughters are good cooks too.

What meal brings your family together most often?

Dinner. We always sit down at the table together.

What’s your favorite childhood food memory?

Eating oysters at my grandfather’s house.

What does “home” mean to you?

Being present with the people you love. Safety, security, compassion, empathy, and an open mind.

😋 WORDPRESS & FOOD

Tell us about the meals, drinks, and food experiences connected to your WordPress journey.

What do you usually drink while contributing?

Seltzer water, regular water, or black coffee.

What food keeps you productive?

Black coffee keeps me going.

What is your favorite WordCamp food memory?

Exploring local flavors wherever the event is.

If contribution had a flavor, what would it taste like?

Umami.

😄 FUN & REFLECTION

A collection of lighthearted and thought-provoking questions designed to reveal more about your personality, perspectives, and interests beyond WordPress.

Pineapple on pizza: yes or no?

Yes.

Sweet or savory?

Both, but I am more of a savory guy.

What food do you love that surprises people?

High-quality sardines.

What food do most people love but you don’t?

Celery. I am not a big celery guy.

What hidden talent do you have?

I can actually do magic tricks.

What makes you laugh?

Good movies, and banter with friends.

If you had a superpower, what would it be?

Mind reading.

What is something on your bucket list?

More world travel and cultural experiences.

What life lesson took you the longest to learn?

To chill out.

What are you grateful for today?

That I am in good health and still doing the work I love.

🧐 LOOKING AHEAD

As we conclude, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the future of WordPress, your personal goals, and the impact you’d like to make in the years ahead.

What excites you about WordPress’s future?

Open source, the community around WordPress, and all the freely available code are going to be really powerful in the AI era.

What would you like to see improved in WordPress?

Making it easier to have a beginner mode and an advanced mode inside it.

What goals are you currently pursuing?

he same ones I have been on for a long time: to democratize education in the digital classroom, and to make the best learning management system possible.

What impact would you like to leave behind?

To have truly empowered millions of educators and learners all over the world.

What advice would you give new contributors?

Just start, even if it is not an official way of contributing.

What message would you share with the WordPress community?

Teach what you know. I would encourage more people to create content, build in public, and share what they are learning.

If you could share one meal with the whole WordPress community, what would it be and why?

Cooking over a campfire, potluck style. Everyone brings something, and we share it together.

How would you like to be remembered by the WordPress community?

As someone who gave more than he took, a positive influence and mentor who had a positive impact on as many people as possible.

BEYOND THE QUESTIONS

Every Talk Time interview includes five personal elements that make it different from traditional interviews. These simple details help readers connect with the person behind the WordPress profile and add a uniquely WPKitchen touch to every story.

📸 A fresh selfie or photo for the interview

A Message for WPKitchen

What you are building with Talk Time matters. The WordPress project is people first, and preserving their stories, the food, the kitchens, the human details, is a genuine contribution to our shared history. Thank you for the care you put into it, and for supporting WordPress contributors from Faisalabad out to the whole world. Keep going.

Guestbook Autograph

Until Our Next Tasty Conversation

Chris’s Talk Time interview adds adventure, purpose, and education to the heart of this series. His journey reminds us that contribution is not limited to official teams or code. It also lives in teaching, building, mentoring, supporting, and creating tools that help others move forward.

Thank you, Chris, for bringing adventure to Talk Time and for reminding us that the best kind of contribution is one that lifts others.