Moving from Nurse to Developer with Stephanie Wells and Formidable Forms

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to Season Three, episode two of the podcast. In today’s episode, I’ll be talking to Stephanie Wells of Formidable Forms and this is a very interesting interview for me for two reasons. She is somebody who went from client work to produce work which is a jump that I’m always interested in hearing about. But beyond that, she also started as a nurse which is what my wife does so she kind of made the switch from doing nursing which my wife does into the WordPress space which is what I do. So I’m very interested to talk to her and I was very excited to have this interview. Formidable Forms have also been a supporter of the show so you should definitely check them out. So we cover a whole wide range of topics in the interview including making the jump to the product space, scratching your own itch, learning from square 0, what it’s like to learn in your adult life, how to build products on top of WordPress, also to finish this stuff. I’m sure you’ll love it. I absolutely loved it. So without further ado, on with the show.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” Today, my guest is Steph Wells of Formidable Forms. Steph, thanks for joining me today.

Steph Wells: Oh, thank you, Joe. This is my first time.

Joe Casabona: All right. Well, I’m very excited to be your maiden podcast voyage. So I’m very excited to have Formidable Forms on the show ’cause they’ve been a supporter of the show, they were a sponsor in season 2. So Steph once again, thank you for being on the show. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you are and what you do and what Formidable Forms is?

Steph Wells: OK, I’m Stephanie Wells. I am the developer of Formidable Forms, started on my own and launched it on my own and now we’ve got that team of eight running it. So it started out though as client projects and so now it’s a form builder at its most basic. But it’s designed differently than other form builders that our main focus is on what happens after the fact. That’s with collecting data and in the reports, in the views, and finance editing, and interlinking entries, and interlinking forms using other forms to build up. Just all kinds of linking and interlinking with data and forms and all that jazz.

Joe Casabona: That sounds awesome. And so before we get into a little bit about why you came to build Formidable Forms ‘because there are lots of forms out there but it sounds like you touched a little bit about what makes you guys different. We were talking previously and you weren’t always in like the development field, is that right?

Steph Wells: That’s right, yeah. I started as a nurse, I don’t have any technical background. I had my first baby back in 2007 and then I was home and didn’t know what to do with myself. And right at that same point, Blair Williams came to my husband, he was looking for help with his client projects. He had too much work to go around and was looking for extra help to work on those projects and he was looking for anybody who had any interest at all whether they had experienced or not. And Steve had taken an HTML class in high school and so he was like, “Yeah, sure. I’ll take some training.” And again I was bored so I thought I would tag along even though I was sure it would be too hard. So Blair gave us, oh by the way Blair is the developer of MemberPress and Pretty Link Pro and he’s got several other premium plugins out there now too. Anyway, he gave us a little training session on Ruby on Rails and how to get set up just on your local computer. And I went home and set it up and started playing around with it and he gave us another session on this getting your first Ruby on Rails project setup. So I built my sister’s site to practice it and so we went through W3Schools and memorized all the tags in a day or two and then started with the CSS and downloaded an HTML template to just play around with it, make changes, see what happens. Then anyway went from there, at that point, I didn’t know anything about WordPress or how WordPress would have made things so much easier at that point. But, anyway… 

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s awesome. So well my wife as you know is in a very similar position right now. We just had our baby two months ago at the time of this recording and she’s also a nurse so maybe I can get her to maybe go on the same path and then we could start a Casabona Web Development firm of our own.

Steph Wells: Oh, for sure. And I didn’t think I’d be interested or have any or enjoy it especially, I especially didn’t think I would enjoy it. But I mean you never know without trying it and there’s no way to know. So yes, that could give her a little push to try it out.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely and so we’re just a few minutes in and you’ve already got great advice for the listeners which is excellent but let’s talk about Formidable Forms. So Formidable Forms is a WordPress plugin that helps you build forms. Maybe you know, and there’s a lot of competition up there, right? So I’m curious to know like what kind of research you did if any when deciding to build your own plugin and how you want to make it different and things like that?

Steph Wells: Well I guess the extent of my research was doing a few Google searches looking for the plugins I needed and I couldn’t find it and it wasn’t a form builder to begin with either. So to begin with, we had a client project that needed it. They wanted a team page and they wanted to be able to add and remove team members without dealing with the HTML and messing things up there. And this was before the days of custom post types too so there wasn’t, there weren’t a whole lot of options and I couldn’t find anything. So I wrote this, I started this plugin with all the forms, we’re entirely back in and then the views, so it had the views and the back end forms and then the views could be embedded on the page and that was kind of the first iteration. So in it, it went from there with client projects that client project that I just couldn’t sign a solution for and there was nothing there. So another client project built out the graphs for showing but whatever graph data needed was collected and front end editing and so just over time this got built out over the space of a couple of years. And then I kind of ended up with the product that wasn’t so bad and that was filling all of these needs for our projects.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s great. So the timeline for me I think the Gravity forms came out around I wanna say 2011 but I’m not 100% on that one. And I know like Ninja Forms came out around 2000…13 or maybe also 2011. I’m doing a terrible job of painting this timeline but I guess…

Steph Wells: We were one year behind Gravity.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha, gotcha. Cool, very cool. And so this came out of a need for projects that you were working on. It sounds like this project started like a lot of other projects of people who would have been on the show, which is you were scratching your own itch, is that right?

Steph Wells: Right, exactly.

Joe Casabona: So what made you decide to take that project and make it a premium plugin?

Steph Wells: Oh again, Blair Williams had a hand in that. So he had just launched Pretty Link Pro and again at that point, I didn’t know that premium plugin we’re really a thing. And I guess at that time they weren’t really and so he gave me a little push saying you know, do it, you know, just bring the form to the front end and you’ve got a product that you can sell and support. And he had written an auto-updating code for Pretty Link Pro and so he said, “Here, use this, do this, and release it and they said.” Oh, and you should name it Formidable because I wanted to build a form builder” and that’s what I would call it.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome. So Blair Williams had a big hand in you guys kind of going premium which is excellent. Now do you still talk to him or do you talk to other people within the space? Are you part of a mastermind group or anything that’s like bouncing ideas off of people?

Steph Wells: Not as much. I mean I like I talked to him so he’s actually married to my cousin that’s how we got started with him. But anyway and we just moved down to Southern Utah so we’re kind of a little more isolated but a set of even espresso is in the area too and so we’d like to get something going there. But we don’t do a whole lot of masterminds. I’m, we did for a little while but we had a mastermind group going with Chris Lema and the group of people from CaboPress, so that was awesome.

Joe Casabona: Nice, are you going to CaboPressing this year?

Steph Wells: [Inaudible 11.30.4] will cooperate. I don’t, I guess I haven’t signed up so this point is it’s not really an option.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. It’ll be my first one so I’m very excited.

Steph Wells: Oh, I didn’t know you were going, that’s awesome.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I’ve heard nothing but good things so I’m very excited. I will link CaboPress in the show notes for everybody. I also, so I saw a few weeks ago maybe a couple of months ago now, was there a picture of James Laws, you guys have changed laws, and was he wearing one of your T-shirts, was that Formidable?

Steph Wells: Oh yeah, that was a personal mix.

Joe Casabona: Nice, nice. So do you talk to the others like form builders in the space and like kind of bounce ideas off of them or see what they’re doing?

Steph Wells: Yeah, so the ninja guys, they were at CaboPress with us and so that’s where we kind of we became friends there in CaboPress and Blair Williams was there too and but the, you know, James and that was a good friendship building point for us with Cabo Press.

Joe Casabona: Nice, nice.

Steph Wells: And so in it at both the press nomics that we’ve been together we’ve spent more time with them than with anybody else which has been great, yeah, with bouncing ideas and for hearing things that they’ve tried that don’t work and things that we’ve tried, you know. And it’s been pretty cool having a relationship with somebody in the same space. And also I mean I’m a member of their affiliate program and I mean we kind of send people back and forth and we’ve talked about doing a global blacklist to make sure that when we send customers away they don’t…Anyway, we haven’t done that. But…

Joe Casabona: Oh man, that’s great. I think that’s one of the great things about the WordPress community, in particular, is that we have all these people kind of competing in the same space but we’re telling each other how we’re doing things to our competitors. You know, it’s more like I guess it’s more like a friendly intramural game than, you know, like some professional sports thing. I don’t know why I struggle with that analogy. I’m a big sports fan in general, so it’s not like the seventh game of the World Series, right? It’s not super correct. 

Cool, so let’s get to the title question. I’m especially curious because you are self taught it sounds like you started on Ruby on Rails for us. So, and you mentioned that you have a team of eight people. So how did you build Formidable Forms and maybe we can start at the beginning and then we can talk a little bit about what it’s like for a developer to be managing other developers ’cause that’s something that’s very interesting as well.

Steph Wells: Yeah, that’s very true. So I guess building it with the Ruby and Rails background coming into PHP and I just felt like it was all just a mess and I didn’t know how to organize things, I didn’t know I mean I just didn’t know what to do with it. And you know, again Blair coming back to him again, you know, he showed me how he architected Pretty Link Pro and he kind of used the Ruby on Rails model with the controller view and the controller model view controller, it’s not working for me. But anyway, I kind of architected it along the same lines and that helped me a lot to feel more comfortable with PHP. And just knowing, having an idea of where to put things and how to organize things and that, helped a lot. And Google with my friend, this anytime running it to any error just googled the error and was able to get past it and get through things that way too. Just, Google has everything. It’s actually knowing how to search that, then you’re covered.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely. I remembered my computer science teachers having like books upon books in their offices and I feel like the books upon books today has just been replaced with the Google search box, right? It’s just.

Steph Wells: Oh for sure. Books take way too hard to find, too long to find anything like…

Joe Casabona: I know, like go to the index and like look for the thing you’re looking for.

Steph Wells: Although it’s updated by the time we find it too.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, exactly, you know. But you know, I have, I put out a book in 2012 called ‘Building WordPress Team from Scratch’ and basically like a month after it came out there was a big movement to take custom post types and move them out of the theme directory and into their own plugin, right? So as I was writing that book that was not like a hard line that anybody took and a lot of people were kind of doing it that way. And then like a month after my book came out, people’s like “How could you do such a thing?” So like great, the printed word, out of date already. So I mean, it happens that way though and things change pretty quickly on the Internet. So Google is a friend to all of us coders, right?

Steph Wells: Oh, for sure. And that’s so sad that your book after a month was not helpful anywhere. Yeah, maybe it’s still helpful.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, I’m mostly helpful and then you know, I can put out a version two of the book, make a little bit extra money I think. So, hopefully.

Steph Wells: Right, good plan.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, so OK. So you made the transition ’cause Ruby on Rails is an MVC, PHP is not but that sounds like you had a tool to help you kind of mind map it that way and then Google of course being ever so helpful. As you evolve you’re up to 8 developers now, so what kind of tools are you using? I suspect you have support tickets and new features that you want to build. So how do you manage all of that?

Steph Wells:  We, for the support I get I have a custom plugin that we use for our support helpdesk and I’ve been planning on releasing it for years but just haven’t gotten that release because it just hasn’t felt like we’ve had the bandwidth and the desire I guess to shift focus. anyway so so we use our own helpdesk plugin there and we use GitHub for managing the tickets and a lot of the conversation around issues and to do’s

Joe Casabona: Nice. That’s something I want to parse out just a little bit, right? ‘Cause we are, we’ve still got some time left. You don’t want to shift focus, right? I feel like I’m certainly guilty of this. I feel like a lot of developers are guilty of this. We will build something and we’ll work on it and maybe half finish it or just release it. And then we’ll see a new shiny like I just got this great idea to do this, how do you stay focused on Formidable? Is it easy? Do you have a lot of things that you want to work on, or how do you stay focused on your main product?

Steph Wells: Well, we’ve got a huge huge list of features and enhancements that we’d like to work on still and we’ve got a whole. So Steve’s desire our UI design and so the first iteration was just me so I’d love to go back and compare but I have. Anyway, he’s done drawing out some designs for the form builder and argues, we have a whole new spin on the views and plans it with the hope that we’ll be able to get through by the new year. But I don’t, well we’ll see. And we would also like to launch some projects and some new products that are related to Formidable that would share the code base so I’m at, and would like to get at least one of those out this year as well. So there’s a ton going on and there’s always too much to do.

Joe Casabona: Amen to that. So it sounds like you have some new shinies that you want to release and you’ve got the long list of kinds of moving the chains to have another sports reference I guess for your main product. That’s cool, well we’ll definitely keep an eye out on all of that. And you started to allude to the next question. Lately, we have been combining these two questions into one, so what is maybe the biggest transformation that Formidable Forms has gone through since launch and what are your plans for the future?

Steph Wells: I think it gets transformed a ton. So from the beginning I mean it was just, it was just me, nobody else had any design work, or anyway it was just kind of what I thought up while I was developing and none of it went through Photoshop or any of that. So even just, yeah, a lot of transformation in the UI aspect of things that it’s gone through since I launched it solely. And it was kind of nice that I was able to launch it solely because I didn’t have my perfectionist husband saying no it’s not ready yet, it’s not ready yet, it’s not ready yet. So I was able to launch it at a point where he wouldn’t consider it ready. But he got his hands in that afterward.

Joe Casabona: Nice, nice. And how do you make the decision to refactor, right? Because I know that it’s hard, you gotta balance wanting to build more features with wanting to improve the current codebase. So at what point was it like “OK this is a thing that I just made, we are expanding it. The codebase needs to be refactored and redone.”

Steph Wells: Well I guess that’s been happening all along for several years is that like let’s pick this to refactor. Let’s, and so Jamie is our other main developer and should get in there and not understand any of my code and just said, “All right, I’m going to rewrite this whole section” and that helped a lot too. And even just returning to code that I’ve written, you know, as a fledgling developer not really having a whole lot of training or anything, going back and looking at it and reading a few books and the clean code book I can’t think of who the author is.

Joe Casabona: I’m drawing a blank but I know exactly what you’re talking about ’cause I also have that one.

Steph Wells: Anyway then that book was hugely helpful for changing the way that I’ve written my code since then and have refactored code. And anyway yes, there’s huge refactoring that needs to be done all the time and we usually split a few changes in there and it’s based on features that need to be done. And so we kind of refactored as well, we’re in there.

Joe Casabona: That makes a lot of sense, right? Instead of going through this daunting task of burning hours refactoring code that’s already there which you know, as you said, needs to be done. But it’s kind of hard to justify it if it’s not something new that you can kind of market, right? ‘Cause, that’s the other side of it, you’re going in as you add new features that you can market and refactor continually which is I think the right way to do it, right? ‘Cause your code is never, you never write code once and then never revisit it. I mean that’s so cool, very cool. And what’s on the road map for the near future?

Steph Wells: I guess some of the biggest things that we’re planning on this year are a less shiny thing is that our free and pro versions are right now the same plugin like the pro version is nested inside of the free version and that needs to be separated for various reasons, and not shiny, and things that I’ve been dreading and dragging my feet on that anything that needs to be done this year. And the UI overhaul and the view overhaul are kinds of the big shiny things that we’ve love to get done this year and I’m hoping we can squeeze it all in.

Joe Casabona: Awesome, awesome. Well, let’s see. We’re again at the time of this recording it’s May so you’ve got, you bet more than half the year still to get it all done so fingers crossed. And will definitely keep an eye out for it. So the last question before the Fast Five I always like to ask is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Steph Wells: Trade secrets, yeah. I guess just being a woman in a man’s world. I just want more women to try it out to see if you enjoy it. And it’s not really something that I feel like is encouraged a ton but I love it to be encouraged and I’d love for more women to get involved in. And I mean it’s an ideal job I guess for moms and my husband liked both just work at home and rarely spend time with the kids. And I mean it’s a fabulous setup for us and it’s ideal for moms I think and I’d love to see more.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. That’s, I love that ’cause I tried to get, you know, I’m trying to get a good mix of men and women on the podcast but it’s a lot easier. The male pool is a lot easier to pick from ’cause there’s a, it’s a lot bigger.

Steph Wells: Right, for sure.

Joe Casabona: So that’s excellent. And because of that tip I’m going to drop a link in the show notes to ‘Girl Develop It’ which is one of the organizations that I’m aware of that teaches girls how to code and hopefully encourages them to make a career out of it. So that’s great advice and definitely encouraged all around because even when I was a student like 10 years well more than 10 years ago it was I think there was one girl in our computer science classes and then she dropped the major and so it was just all guys. And I was sitting there scratching my head going, why is this just all guys? ‘Cause in the 70s it was about 50/50 according to some records at the University of Scranton. But cool, thank you very much for that. I love that piece of advice.

And now it’s time for the Fast Five. The Fast Five or five questions I like to ask that are not really related for the most Part products or businesses or anything like that. So for the first four, I would like your gut reaction, for the last one you can think about it a little bit more. Sounds OK?

Steph Wells: Sure.

Joe Casabona: All right, cool. Number one, what’s your favorite book?

Steph Wells: ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’

Joe Casabona: ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’, nice. And then follow up, that’s not one of the fast five is, what’s the last book you finished reading?

Steph Wells: I’m afraid I have not read in a while.

Joe Casabona: As a guy with a newborn I can empathize with that.

Steph Wells: Yeah, my baby’s nine months old and we just went through a move and anyway.

Joe Casabona: Man, yeah.

Steph Wells: So things have been going.

Joe Casabona: I understand completely. You swap out reading for napping.

Steph Wells: Right.

Joe Casabona: What kind of music do you like to listen to?

Steph Wells: Country and Broadway

Joe Casabona: All right, what Broadway show are you listening to a lot right now?

Steph Wells: My husband has had Hamilton on all the time but one of my favorites is Jekyll and Hyde.

Joe Casabona: Nice, very nice. Fun fact, I am, as of today, going to see Hamilton in two weeks, about two and a half.

Steph Wells: Oh wonderful, that’s exciting.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah. My wife and I are celebrating our anniversary. I managed to get tickets so I was very excited about that.

Steph Wells: Lucky! That’s awesome.

Joe Casabona: Thank you. What’s your favorite food?

Steph Wells: Is that too cliche to say ice cream?

Joe Casabona: not at all. it’s actually the encouraging answer on the show.

Steph Wells: Perfect

Joe Casabona: Any particular flavor?

Steph Wells: [inaudible 27.19.2]

Joe Casabona: Nice, all right.

Steph Wells: Chocolate on chocolate.

Joe Casabona: Love it, absolutely. Now I’m going to get ice cream after this. What is your favorite sports team or athlete? I’ve got a few just single athletes?

Steph Wells: Maybe that’s a guy question, maybe I’m too girly. I have to say I don’t really watch all sports so much. It’s…Steve watches football. Steve was watching BYU football all the time and I’m working while he’s watching football. So does that count?

Joe Casabona: Yeah I’d say. So yeah, absolutely. So I had Chris Badgett on the show and he was the first person I asked these set of questions too and his answer was a fellow who did the Iditarod. So we started off very non traditionally so that’s, I’m open to like any answer which is cool, very nice. And here’s the last question you can put thought into and it doesn’t have to be about web development or anything. I want you to pick something that you are good at and tell us how you learned that thing?

Steph Wells: I don’t know, I guess I’m good at photography and I don’t know how you learn photography, just doing it.

Joe Casabona: That’s the most popular answer I’ve gotten so far is learned by doing. So what do you like to shoot?

Steph Wells: Mostly kids. Mostly my kids, just a mommy photographer.

Joe Casabona: Nice and I’m sure like it will be pretty difficult, right? They’re like, I find my daughter is not mobile really yet, and taking pictures of her is still hard ’cause she’s squirming and moving a lot so she’s got the head’s way.

Steph Wells: Oh yeah.

Joe Casabona: So like getting a good shot of her is pretty difficult but I managed a couple.

Steph Wells: That’s awesome. Do you do photography too?

Joe Casabona: Yes, I’m probably not as good as I would like to be. My brother is a professional photographer so he gives me some pointers.

Steph Wells: Oh, awesome.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, so I say in a different life like if I wasn’t in the computers I might be a photographer or an animator so that’s a fun fact about me after five fun facts about you. So Stephanie, thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed having this conversation with you. I hope you had fun.

Steph Wells: Oh I did. Thanks so much for having me.

Joe Casabona: Awesome, awesome. And definitely check out Formidable Forms, check out Girl Development. And there is something else I saw on your home page that I want to call out here and it is that a portion of your sales goes to Operation Smile, is that right?

Steph Wells: That is right, yeah and we’ve been spreading things around in different charities and will be sponsoring school T-shirts at our kid’s school this year. And anyway just a few various things throughout the community and yeah, various charities.

Joe Casabona: awesome, very cool. So if you needed that little extra push to go check out Formidable Forms I think that is the extra push. Thank you Stephanie so much for joining us today. Definitely check out Formidable Forms.

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And again thank you everybody for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.