How I Built It

A Podcast Helping Small Business Owners Grow

saas

Stephanie Scapa And WEYV

April 16, 2019

Sponsored by:
  • Plesk: Get set up for free!
  • Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.

Stephanie Scapa is the Co-Founder and CEO of WEYV, a platform that aims to compete with Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon. They have a unique business model to help them do it! We discuss running a large-scale project, what deep product research looks like, and how they came up with the pricing plan.

[Read more…] about Stephanie Scapa And WEYV

View on separate page

Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Episode 119 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Stephanie Scapa of Weyv. I enjoyed this conversation because Stephanie is the co-founder and CEO of Weyv and they are backed by a large company. Which means that they conduct market research a little bit differently than myself or most of my guests, so I’m excited to share her story about that with you. She also talks about software development from a higher level with a larger team. She talks about things like the waterfall method and switching to agile. I like a lot of the insight that she’s able to provide for us today. We’ll get to her story in a minute, and if you do stick around till the end, you will hear the continued story of how I am building my podcast course and some insight into that. We’ll get into all of that in a minute. But first, a word from our sponsors.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Plesk. Do you spend too much time doing server admin work, and not enough time building websites? Plesk helps you manage servers, websites, and customers in one dashboard. Helping you do those tasks up to 10 times faster than manually coding everything. Let me tell you, I recently checked out their new and improved WordPress toolkit, and I was super impressed by how easy it was to spin up new WordPress sites, clone sites, and even manage multiple updates to themes and plugins. With the click of one button, I was able to update all of my WordPress sites. I was incredibly impressed by how great their WordPress toolkit is. You can learn more and try Plesk for free today at Plesk.com/build.

Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Stephanie Scapa, and she is the co-founder and CEO of Weyv. Stephanie, how are you today?

Stephanie Scapa: Good. How are you?

Joe: I am fantastic. Thanks so much for joining me. I’m excited to talk about Weyv and exactly what it is, and some of your plans and business models. I don’t feel like the show talks about business models a lot, so I’m excited to have you on the show.

Steph: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Joe: Absolutely. So why don’t we start off with a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Steph: Sure, absolutely. I have dual roles, and it’s a little bit about the history of Weyv. Weyv is a subsidiary of a parent company named Altair. For Weyv I’m one of the co-founders and I’m the CEO, but I also within the parent company Altair, I run the corporate development department for all of the software companies that we engage with. So I split my time, which can be a little bit tough, but Weyv is my passion.

Joe: Cool. Very cool. What exactly is Weyv?

Steph: Weyv is a digital entertainment app. If you think about it, it’s really in comparison to other streaming applications that offer offline accessibility– Right now we’ve got music we’ve got magazines, we’ve got e-books, and coming soon we’ll have podcasts as well. The idea for us is this multimedia platform using a unique business model for users to gain access to all their digital media needs.

Joe: Gotcha. So, it does– It sounds like it’s in competition with a few of the other platforms that we will talk about shortly, but how did you come up with the idea for Weyv? What about it– What’s that different piece that you’re like, “This is going to be better than everything else?”

Steph: Yes. So, how we came up with it relates back to the parent organization Altair. The whole concept for Weyv centers around this business model, and the business model is the same business model the parent company uses for all the B2B interactions that it has with other distributed software. The idea was to take this same business model that has been successful for Altair in the B2B world and apply it for digital consumer content. Now at the time we were looking at the marketplace and seeing free music was at the height with Napster and ripping CDs, and slowly streaming was being introduced. But it still has a little bit of a challenge, where you still have a lot of these freemium models where it’s ad subscription based for the payment out to the artists, and so forth. So you see companies like Spotify who are struggling to turn a profit because of that, and for us, that’s how the idea originated, was really around this business model. But it goes a bit further for us because we view it in our vision for Weyv is to transform the digital economy to a new and more equitable model for artists, creators, and consumers. We believe in that because we think that it’s important in market for everybody to be feeling like it’s a fair model. The consumers need to feel like it’s a good model for them, but so do the artists and creators. It’s got to be something great, and we think that we can transform the digital economy here around that. In the music industry, it’s starting to transform already with streaming and page streaming becoming more and more commonplace, but you still have other types of digital economies out there that haven’t given that shift over quite yet. If you think about news or even blogs, podcasts, there’s tons of free content that’s available that we think we can change the way people are thinking about it and make it a more equitable model for everybody.

Joe: That sounds fantastic. I’ve been having this same conversation in the online course space because it’s either you sell your online courses on your own platform and spend all this time marketing and trying to do your best to sell the $300-400 course. That’s fine, that works. You can also take advantage of a platform like Udemy, but they’re going to take advantage of you too. They are selling your courses for a song, and you get $2-3 per sale on a course that took you 20 to 30 hours to develop. So, I can totally level with what you’re saying here. It sounds awesome.

Steph: Great. It’s all around what we’re thinking. I mean for us, we pay artists and creators based on the usage of their content. When users are accessing, they’re able to make money off of that, and that’s pretty standard I would say. But what makes it different is that we have the flexibility side on the pricing, because not every piece of content, not every song is equivalent. The challenge right now with a lot of the streaming mechanisms that are out there is that it creates this stream effect across everything, where every song is effectively equal in value. For us, we allow with the units model the ability to have different prices in different content, and so forth.

Joe: That’s great. As we talk about moving from how you came up with the idea to researching this product, you mentioned that you’re taking a business model from your parent company Altair. Then you’re also looking at the status quo in other markets. In the preshow, we talked a little bit about how you plan to compete with Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit? What research did you do to figure out how to best compete and how to break into this market that’s seemingly getting more saturated?

Steph: Yeah, absolutely. For us, you have to do competitive research. Anytime you’re going into a new market, which Weyv is a very new market from Altair, it’s now we’re going– Altair is B2B, and now we’re B2C with Weyv. We spent a lot of time understanding the other platforms that were in market already. We did a lot of market research with the users in particular, so that we could better understand the right age range we’re targeting and what motivates users, what features they feel are most important, and pricing. For us the biggest differentiation is based on the units model because we give users more flexibility to have more of a bundled package, so the closest competitor on the bundling side that offers you the multi-content would be Amazon. But they withhold content because you can’t get the right price effect across all the content. So Amazon doesn’t give you a full catalog of music, they only give you a partial catalog, and then you can purchase an additional package to have the full music catalog. For us, what we’ve done is by allowing for these different pricing, we let everybody have access to everything. It’s a question of the moment you’re using it. It’s all about simultaneous access and what you’re using it for, then, in addition, you can have up to 25 people in your group to share your units. So there’s no restriction on family, and so forth,  it’s a very open mechanism. Again it’s totally based on simultaneous access.

Joe: Gotcha. So, for example, I have let’s say 100 units for easy math. I want to stream the new Taylor Swift album the moment it comes out, so do a bunch of people, so maybe it’s going to be ten units on the day it comes out as opposed to 5 units 6 or 12 months down the line.

Steph: That’s absolutely the idea. At the moment though one of the challenges that we’ve faced, being very open with your audience here, is that it’s a bit complicated to introduce within the single type of content the different pricings because users are used to music all being the same price. So, while that’s our vision as we keep going, at the moment all music is priced completely the same at 10 Weyv units whereas magazines we’ve had more flexibility in. You find magazines within the application that might be ten units, and some might be five units, there’s more flexibility in the number of units. The idea is that while you’re accessing the content units are pulled from your group’s pool, and they’re held out to run the content if you think about it. But then as soon as you pause your music or you close the reader, then your units go back into the group’s pool and can be used again by anybody in your group, up to 25 people across any of the different types of content.

Joe: That’s super interesting. So, it’s not like you’re spending Weyv units, you’re actually– It’s almost like borrowing a book from a library.

Steph: It’s exactly like that.

Joe: That’s really cool. I can see why you would struggle with the music side of things, but that does seem to make it a lot fairer to the artists as opposed to getting some percentage of one cent per stream. Right?

Steph: Yeah.

Joe: If a bunch, if you have math worked out to say “This many units are currently going to this latest song, then we know how much that translates to for the artist.”

Steph: Exactly. For us, we’re– Weyv, the advantage we have of having a parent company and not being VC funded is we’re in it for the long haul. We’re slow and steady in our approach and the fact that on the music side that’s not the approach we’re taking right now, that’s OK with us. We’ll get there. It takes time to get users to understand the model and see the value in it, but we believe that over time as we continue to add more content as we ramp and more users that we’ll be able to make the shifts occur.

Joe: Yeah. That makes sense too, because if you’re VC funded there’s pressure to– If I start a company in Silicon Valley and I get some exorbitant amount of money, there’s pressure for me to either sell it to someone like Spotify or to go public and then be beholden to the investors, but also the board members. There’s a lot of pressure to make things happen more quickly.

Steph: Exactly.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Pantheon. Starting a new project? Looking for a better hosting platform? Pantheon is an integrated set of tools to build, launch and run websites. Get high performance hosting for your WordPress sites, plus a comprehensive toolkit to supercharge your team and help you launch faster. On Pantheon, you get expert support from real developers, best in class security and the most innovative technology to host and manage your websites. You can sign up a new site in minutes with a free account, and you only pay when it goes live. That is my second favorite feature to Pantheon, only to the easy ability to create dev staging and live servers, and push to GitHub. It’s very easy to set those things up on Pantheon. You can head over to Pantheon.io today to set up a free account and pay only when it goes live. Thanks so much to Pantheon for their support of this episode and this season of How I Built It.

Joe: I’d love to get to the title question at this point, which is how did you build it? This is a subsidiary of a parent company, and you’re the co-founder and CEO, I assume there’s a development team and a marketing team and a research team. I’d be interested to see at whatever level of involvement you’re at, how you put this whole thing together.

Steph: Yeah. I will tell you it’s very much a how “We” built it. I don’t think there would be any possibility of building anything without the entire team. We’ve got a really strong team, so my role specifically started where I did all the negotiations with the labels, actually with the publishers, to onboard all of the different content into the platform and then slowly– We originally actually outsourced our development, and it was a big lesson learned for us. We changed pretty quickly and built our own in-house development team because we realized that there are so many things that are unique for this product and for the industry that we needed to build ourselves, and have our hands on in order to better control. You can imagine recommendation engines, all of those things we’ve built from the ground up. So we built up each team, and you’re absolutely right, we’ve got a marketing team. We just hired somebody that focuses on user engagement and can help us driving where our users are putting their time and energy, and better helping our users within the app. There’s a lot of lessons learned. We’ve been doing this for 5 or 6 years now, and easy ones to see are from a development methodology standpoint. We started more with waterfall, and then as we got more established in our development process, we switched over to agile. We’re constantly making changes and adjusting, but for me having been part of the beginning, it’s interesting to see some of the shifts. It’s not like Agile process would have been better for us in the beginning. It’s more just over time you have to be willing to adjust to what you need in that moment, because sometimes what you need now versus in the future is going to be different. You have to recognize when you need to change and make those changes. So, it’s been quite a big process for us.

Joe: Absolutely. Speaking specifically to the waterfall versus agile process for listeners who are not familiar, those are two development methodologies where with a waterfall things have to happen in a certain order for you to get to a finished product. Agile is more fluid, where you get the requirements but then you realize maybe later you should change it, and things theoretically can happen more quickly. But when you’re building out a platform as big as Weyv seems to be, it’s probably really important to lock down those requirements early on so that you’re not dealing with scope creep and failure to launch.

Steph: It is. What we’re at right now is a little bit of a hybrid. With waterfall, it’s usually feature based, as far as your sprints and your releases go. But right now we’re more on a time-based sprint release, and what that means is if a feature doesn’t get in and doesn’t make the cut for that sprint, it pushes to the next sprint. So we’ve come up with our own hybrid model between a little bit, where we’re striving to lock down more of the features especially when we add a new big type of content in, like podcasts, which are coming. Because for us, if you’re constantly changing things, you’ll never get anything out. But at the same time as you start to implement and you start to get more and more prototypes then finished product builds done, you realize that now that design you put in doesn’t quite work the way you wanted it to and you have to adjust. For us at least, what we found is having a little bit more flexibility gives us just what we need to get the right product out on time.

Joe: That’s great. It allows you to iterate quickly while also making sure that for some of the major features that things are done the right way, and they’re not just shoved out the door for the sake of shoving them out the door. Cool.

Steph: Yep.

Joe: There’s one more question I want to ask you in this section, and that’s about your– You have somebody who focuses on user engagement. Something that I’ve been experimenting a lot with lately is hot jar and some other analytics tools to figure out for my site where people are failing to purchase, like where do I lose the potential buyer for my courses? Or, how are users who have bought the course using it? What kind of tools are you using to figure out how your users are using your platform?

Steph: Sure. It’s a good topic because we’re in the middle of re-evaluating our toolset here too. Historically we’ve used amplitude for all the in-app tracking, and then Google Analytics. But we also do, because of our licensing model with the units, we’re checking in and out content and the plays and all of that, we’ve got quite a bit of back end data that we collect just naturally. So, for us, we’re trying to figure out the right way to pair that back end data with a lot of the in-app data which is more about what the users are clicking on, and where they’re looking at, and things like that. We’re really in the middle of evaluating some of the different tools, and there’s millions of tools out there. It’s a question of identifying the requirements that you are looking for and then seeing all the way through the process because I think that’s the biggest mistake we made originally when we implemented some of these tools. We thought, “OK. This tool will give us that piece of information we’re looking for, and that tool will give us this piece of information we’re looking for.” Now we’ve got the information we need,  but you have to be able to connect it for it to add value. So it’s something that you don’t really think about when you’re putting the whole process in place in the beginning often, but now that we’re knee deep in it we’re realizing it’s really critical for us to be able to have the continuity of exactly what the user is doing from download all the way through purchasing, and playing, and all the activity that they’re actually interacting with.

Joe: That’s great. I love that we need to have the– We have the information we need, and now we need to connect it to add value. That makes sense. Because if you, if I have a list of everybody who visited my course and everybody who purchased the course, but I don’t know why they purchased the course, I can’t then change my copy to attract more people to purchase the course.

Steph: Exactly.

Joe: That’s fantastic. As we come to the end, towards the end of this episode, I like to ask what transformations you’ve been to versus what your plans for the future are? We’ve touched on them a little bit, but I would love to hear the big– What was the one of your favorite evolutions from the time you launched until now?

Steph: My favorite evolution? I don’t know about favorite, but one of the bigger ones I would say is a shift that we’re in the middle of making at the moment. When we launched it, we liked this idea of connecting charities into our app. So the concept was that we allow an artist to choose their favorite charity and then the more users listened to that artist the more that artist charity would receive from Weyv, and we are donating a half percent of our revenue and over time what we’ve learned is that by listening to our partners and to customers that’s not adding enough value and actually isn’t meaningful enough. So, on the partner side, artists aren’t engaged. It ends up just automatically going to a default charity which sort of defeated the purpose a little bit. We’re hoping to build more artist-fan relationships and connections, and then on the customer side users aren’t as engaged on it and aren’t as interested. For us, it’s one of the transformations we’re going to make. We tried it, now we’re hearing from everybody out there that it’s really not working, and so we’re going to try something new and we’ll pull that and see what else we can do. Another way to get engaged in society and so forth. But it’s really, and I have to admit, it’s a disappointing one which is why it’s not my favorite. But you have to be honest about what works and what doesn’t work, and it sounded like such a cool idea in theory, but if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

Joe: Absolutely. I’m with you, and I would have thought that artists would have loved this, especially there are a lot of maybe politically active artists out there, and this would be an easy way for them to generate some extra donations to their charity of choice. Depending on what they like and what they want to promote.

Steph: Yep. But what we’ve learned is that really in the end, for the most part, we’re dealing more with the labels directly, and the artists aren’t as engaged on these platforms as you would imagine that they are. It was a big lesson learned for us, but we continue to make updates and improvements based on user and partner feedback and keep going.

Joe: Gotcha. That makes sense. If the labels aren’t telling their artists, they can do that or exactly how to do that, and the artists aren’t going to do that. Cool. With that in mind, what are your– You mentioned podcasts, but what are some of your other plans for the future as far as Weyv goes?

Steph: Within the app, you’ll notice we’ve got a videos tab. Certainly something top of mind for us on videos. We’re also thinking about news and other types of content that could be interesting for users, but to be honest, nothing is solidified. We’re still really constantly serving users to get feedback on what’s most interesting for them and making changes based on that, so we are surprised how popular podcasts were when we surveyed the last time. The time before that lyrics were the number one request, and so we’re slowly adding in the features that users are most interested in and keep moving.

Joe: Very cool. It makes me happy to hear that podcasts are very popular, naturally as I have my show.

Steph: Yeah.

Joe: I want more people to listen to it. So, that’s cool. I will say that one of my favorite features of Spotify that they took away at least from the desktop app was the lyrics or whatever song I happen to be listening to because I constantly go to Genius.com or whatever just to read the lyrics or the meaning of the lyric.

Steph: Well, you can get it in Weyv now. On all our platforms, mobile and web.

Joe: Very cool. I will ask you how people can get there in a second, but I do need to ask perhaps my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Steph: I would say the key is listening and hearing what other people are saying, especially your customers, and being willing to be agile and make changes quickly. Because if somebody is giving you feedback you need to understand why is that feedback coming. Is it relevant? Does it make sense? If the answer is yes, when you’re honest with yourself about it, you have to be able to move super fast because if you take six months to make changes or a year to make changes especially in a startup environment, it’s just not fast enough. You have to be willing to look at your favorite ideas like charities, and say, “Not working,” and move on and make that change super quick.

Joe: Yeah. That is great advice. As a software developer myself, I know there will be a feature or maybe even a plugin or an idea that I’m married to, I love that idea, and my mastermind group will tell me “This is not it, Joe. This is not a great idea. You should spend your time elsewhere.” I’ve listened to them in the past, and I haven’t listened to them in the past and turns out I should have listened to them when I haven’t.

Steph: It’s hard because not always is the feedback you’re going to be receiving the right feedback, and so it’s important to be able to recognize when to listen and when it’s OK to go against the grain. But it’s so important to be understanding where the feedback is coming from, and why they’re thinking the way they’re thinking because that can tell you and guide you “Should I be listening?” You have to be a little bit cut throat. If the answer is yes, then you got to move on.

Joe: Absolutely. On that, I had one more thought as you were saying that, and it’s because you mentioned the “Why.” It’s almost like when somebody recommends a TV show to you, and they’ll say “You know a TV show I think you’ll like?” And in most cases, it’s actually, “You know what TV show I like?” Unless it’s a close friend, who understands what I like. If they recommend a TV show, I’m more apt to listen to it.

Steph: Yep, absolutely.

Joe: Very cool. Stephanie, thank you so much for your time today. Where can people find you?

Steph: You can go to Weyv.com. We made a promo code for any of your users that would be interested in 2 months free. It’s HOWIBUILTIT. It’s as simple as that.

Joe: Awesome. If you are interested in trying out Wave.com for all sorts of content, magazines reached out to me– Jumped out to me, specifically. Two months free using the code HOWIBUILTIT. I’ll include that and everything that we talked about in the show notes today. Stephanie, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Steph: Thank you.

Outro: Thanks so much to Steph for joining me today. I appreciate her time and her advice on everything from deep market research to software development. Her trade secret rings true across several episodes of this show, which is keep listening to your customers, and hearing what they have to say. Be agile and make changes quickly. I like all of those things. If you want to try Weyv out, you can get two months free by using the code HOWIBUILTIT. You can get that by going to HowIBuilt.it/Weyv. Thanks so much to our sponsors, Plesk and Pantheon, their support makes this show possible and those are two tools and two services that I can highly speak to. I am a big fan of both of those. My question of the week for you is, how has Steph’s story changed your outlook? I know that she’s coming from a different perspective, being the CEO of a larger company, and I’m interested to see exactly what piece of advice you took away most from this. Let me know by emailing me Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona.

Miniseries: To continue my story of how I’m building out my podcast course, I told you a little bit so far about how I came up with the idea. I told you a little bit about the research or lack thereof, and in pivoting, I want to continue that story a little bit because I think it’s important in deciding to pivot the course. I realized that I need to look at the entire scope of podcasting, and the way I came to that conclusion– I want to make sure I’m answering the questions that people have, and my biggest hesitance in creating a full soup to nuts podcast course is that people much more popular than me are already doing that. Pat Flynn for example, John Lee Dumas is another person who’s already doing that, and they have a much bigger audience than me. Their courses come with a bigger price tag, and it’s because they’re giving their personal time. So as I’m pivoting my course, the way to garner feedback that’s worked best for me is with a lead gen for a podcast workbook. If you go to HowIBuilt.it/podcasts, you’ll be able to see the course. You’ll also be able to opt in for that free podcast workbook, and I give people who sign up to get that workbook a five day or seven-day sequence where the first question is, “What is your biggest struggle in podcasting?” A lot of people respond to that question, and I’m using those responses to build out the content for my course. Now over the next few days, they get more pointed advice that I’ll also integrate into the course, but those questions and hearing people’s struggles are the things that I know people are going to want the answer to and in depth. So, that’s been very helpful. The other thing and I ran this by a few of my friends in a mastermind group, is the idea of doing an air check. I want to provide some extra piece of value. My friend Ryan gave me this idea, and then I nearly simultaneously was reading a book about podcasting that talked about the idea of an air check, and as part of the value add for the course I want to physically help people improve their audio quality. I’m going to offer an air check which is where they’ll send me some piece of audio, and I’ll give them advice on how they can improve their audio quality. For the higher level bundle, I’ll listen to their podcast and give them advice on how to improve their podcast as well. That is part two of the research, the better research I’m doing to make my course better. Next week I will tell you in some detail how I’m building out the course, and that’ll probably take a couple of episodes because I want to try to keep it short at the end of these episodes. So, thanks so much for listening. If you want to learn more about my podcasting course, you can head over to How I Built.it/podcast. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Andre Gagnon and ProjectHuddle

March 26, 2019

Sponsored by:

Andre Gagnon has SaaS/Subscription fatigue and decided to do something about it. He helped create and launch ProjectHuddle, a WordPress/plugin-based competitor to the likes of InVision. At least, when it comes to getting design feedback. The tech in this episode is super interesting, and we get philosophical about owning your products and data!

[Read more…] about Andre Gagnon and ProjectHuddle

View on separate page

Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 116 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Andre Gagnon of Project Huddle. We’re going to talk about pretty traditional software development today, but a lot of what we talk about has more to do with the research process and getting an MVP out there. How he learned the skills that he needed to help develop this product. So he talks about how he has a bias towards action, how an MVP is better than something you write down. How an MVP is all, you need. Don’t make perfect software, but I don’t want to spoil this whole episode. So I’ll just let you get right to it. Of course, before we do that, we need to go to a word from our sponsors.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Plesk. Do you spend too much time doing server admin work, and not enough time building websites? Plesk helps you manage servers, websites, and customers in one dashboard. Helping you do those tasks up to 10 times faster than manually coding everything. Let me tell you, I recently checked out their new and improved WordPress toolkit, and I was super impressed by how easy it was to spin up new WordPress sites, clone sites, and even manage multiple updates to themes and plugins. With the click of one button, I was able to update all of my WordPress sites. I was incredibly impressed by how great their WordPress toolkit is. You can learn more and try Plesk for free today at Plesk.com/build. This episode is sponsored by our friends at Castos. Castos is a podcast hosting platform built specifically for WordPress. Their Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin lets you manage all of your episodes and podcast RSS from your WordPress site, but have your files hosted on a dedicated media hosting platform. If you use WordPress, this is by far the easiest platform that I have used for podcasting. I also really love how the Castos team takes a commonsense approach to their pricing. You can create as many episodes and podcasts as you want and you don’t have to worry about how much storage you’re using or bandwidth restrictions. If you’re like me and you already have a ton of episodes from an old host, they’ve got you covered. Castos will import all of your podcast content into their platform completely free of charge. It’s literally one click of a button in your WordPress dashboard. I could not believe my eyes when I saw this in action. It’s stuff like this which is why I built my own podcasting course on top of Castos. They have put together a really special opportunity for the show today. You can get 50% off your first three months with the code BUILTIT19. Just head over to Castos.com/HowIBuiltIt to learn more.

Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Andre Gagnon. He is the self-described abstract concepts coordinator of a very interesting looking WordPress plugin called Project Huddle. Andre, how are you today?

Andre Gagnon: I’m great, thanks.

Joe: Awesome. Thanks for being on the show and for– I finally got into the habit of asking people how to pronounce their last name. So, I’m glad I asked for you. I was able to write down the phonetic spelling. But that’s not what– We’re not talking about my adventures in mispronunciation. We are talking about your plugin. So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Andre: Currently I’m working full time on Project Huddle which is a WordPress plugin for getting design feedback from your clients. The best way I can describe it is it’s like sticky notes on your designs and web projects. Before that, I was doing a lot of WordPress themes on Theme Forest, and part of that was I had a freelancing business, which is how I decided to create Project Huddle. Like a lot of guests on your show, you end up creating things that scratch your own itch, and it seems to work out.

Joe: Yeah. That’s fantastic. Again it sounds really interesting, and I was checking it out a little bit before this show. You were a freelancer first, you were doing things on Theme Forest. So maybe, and I could probably guess a little bit, but how did you come up with the exact idea for this? You mentioned that you were scratching your own itch. A lot of people do that on the show, but what made you think “Sticky notes for my design projects?”

Andre: It’s a great question. There’s a lot of tools out there that already do this, I think people that are in the design realm are familiar with InVision is a big one for design, and there’s BugHerd and a few other ones for website feedback. But at the time, running my freelance business, I had what I like to call “SaaS fatigue.” I had all these micro-services I needed to subscribe to run my business, and if I decided I wanted to switch or customize, or I didn’t want to pay for one, all of my data was gone. Which was a huge bummer. I did a lot of research, and I couldn’t find anything self-host or white label that did something as simple as just point click feedback, so I decided to create something. I was heavily involved at WordPress at the time, and perfect timing is when WordPress came out with their REST API which made it more than just a blogging platform and started to become more of an application platform. That’s how it started, I could get more into the tech details, but maybe we will save that for later.

Joe: Yeah, we’ll definitely touch on that during the title question. Because that, again, sounds very interesting. I love what you said there, that you had “SaaS fatigue.” I think that’s something a lot of us are experiencing even more today. Because we’ve got all these services, all these SaaS products we’re paying for. A lot of them are integral to our business. We also have– I don’t know about you, but I subscribe to Netflix and Hulu, and Disney is launching their own within the next year or so.

Andre: No way.

Joe: I am 100% paying for that. There’s no way I’m not going to be able to pay for that one, I have a child, and I am a child. I love Disney. So, we’re just in a situation now where everything is subscription-based. Including WordPress plugins.

Andre: Exactly. Even researching a few these tools, there was a couple that just went down and never came back up. There was a very popular one that I forget the name of it. About a month ago, everybody lost everything, and they decided they were going to shut down the business. So, when you’re subscribing to these services not only are you locked in cost wise, but you’re partnering with a business that may not be there tomorrow or next month.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. And then you’re also subject to things that the platform host wants to do. Famously over the summer, or maybe over the spring, Medium decided that they were going to change how their paywall worked. There were people, maybe 25% of their income relied on that. Just on a whim.

Andre: Absolutely. That’s a prime example not to hinge your business on someone else’s proprietary platform. I think that’s why people love open source and self-hosting and doing that stuff. Because they’re limiting that risk and they’re in control of everything. That’s a really good example.

Joe: Yeah. Thank you very much. I remember that, and I was like “This is the reason that you should self-host. Or, you should at least be able to get things easily out of the platform.” That day I made a video, and I’ll link it in the show notes, on how to connect Medium and WordPress. So no matter where you posted, the two websites would sync up.

Andre: No way. That’s a really good solution.

Joe: Right? I was thinking that, too. It’s a pretty popular video. I hit the nail on the head sometimes. So, you started to mention researching, and you mentioned InVision and BugHerd, but that there was nothing for the self-hosted person. What was your research process like? Were you looking at and trying other things, were you talking to people?

Andre: I didn’t talk to anybody. That would have been a good idea. I talked to maybe a couple of friends. I have a bias towards action, and I think even an idea can sound great on paper but then executed it could be completely terrible. I’m like, “Just get an MVP up and see if we can get people to buy it, and that’s the only way you’ll know if it’s going to work.” So that’s exactly what I did. I built the first version of the plugin, which was only feedback on mockups, which are like static images and designs. Something very basic, just put it out for sale and see if people bought it. Sure enough, they did. So I knew that there was value in it enough to keep investing.

Joe: That’s incredible. “I have a bias towards action.” I like that because you can go up to anybody and be like “Do you think this is a good idea?” And they’ll be like “Yeah, sure.” This exact thing happened to me at a Word Camp recently where I was like “There should be a place where people can go and upload talks, like rejected talk ideas to Word Camps.” So, I propose a talk, and it doesn’t get accepted, but now I can record and put it up on this website. Maybe an annual subscription is $20 dollars a month. It took a couple of my friends to be like, “Why? How much are you paying the speaker for uploading this?” And stuff like that. So, I’m glad I didn’t put any work into it.

Andre: I can’t take credit for all that. I think Tim Ferriss has a quote that “You don’t ask people if they will buy it, ask them to buy it. And that’s how you’ll know.” Even if you don’t have a product yet, I think you can sell preorders or something like that, to know if there’s value.

Joe: Gotcha. I think that’s a really good point. Troy Dean talked about that too. He put up a pre-sale page for his first webinar, and if it got less than some amount of subscribers, or buyers, he wouldn’t do it. I think that’s a really good point. I like that. When you were trying to figure out the feature set, was it basically what you saw in these other products? Or was it stuff that you knew that you wanted?

Andre: That was an advantage I had. I can look at all these other products, and I was the customer, so that made it easy to pair off features based on the products I was working on. I could decide to add a new feature because it was so small, it was just me. And of course, it’s changed. My opinion on adding new features has changed, but I think at first you have to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. You end up cutting some stuff, and you end up adding things. But then the most valuable feedback I think you can get– And I learned this doing WordPress themes too, is you have an idea of how people are going to use something. But then when they download it and use it, there’s all these other ideas and use cases that you didn’t think about, and there might be some really large ones that just totally you didn’t even think about. So listening to customers and even anecdotal feedback right away is super valuable too.

Joe: Yeah, that’s a fantastic point, and you’re absolutely right there. “The way I would use it is maybe not the way most people would use it,” or something like that. I like that. That’s a lot of really good advice there. So, as we’re talking, let’s get to the title question. We have a good idea of how you researched this and where the idea came from, but in the pre-show, we were talking about getting technical. You mentioned the REST API. How did you build Project Huddle?

Andre: This is exciting for us. I never get to talk about the tech side of Project Huddle on a lot of these podcasts. So, first of all, I used WordPress in a white REST API, and the reason I chose WordPress is there’s a lot of developer familiarity, it’s easy to install things, and it has everything you need to build a web app. It has a lot of really neat JavaScript frameworks and tools that ship with WordPress. Project Huddle was built with Backbone, and the REST API has a– Or, WordPress has a Backbone client that automatically turns custom post types into models in your Backbone app. So all that configuration is done for you. Then there’s a few other tools that are used. There’s subview manager which Mark Jake was head of a Word Camp talk about the subview manager that was extremely helpful. I think all these things are bundled with WordPress and people don’t know about them, which I found interesting. I think there’s a lot of popularity for the newer frameworks, like React and Vue, and those are awesome frameworks, but I think Backbone is underrated. Because it’s so non-opinionated, you can do whatever you want, and then there’s some other scripts that didn’t ship with WordPress that it needed to make it happen. There’s one called X domain, which is needed. Project Huddle by default, you can use it on other WordPress– Or, other sites, not necessarily WordPress. You can use it on a Squarespace site or Shopify site, and it communicates across domain. X domain lets you do that through Post Message, which is neat. You don’t need to do any special server configurations or anything like that. I think there’s a lot of really nice open source software that lets you build this stuff, and it’s like we’re at the prime time of open source software. Anybody can build anything, and all these things are available, and people are just putting it out there for people to use, and I think it’s a cool time in tech.

Joe: That’s great. I love that you’re giving me a lot of really good pull quotes for this episode, “We’re at the prime time of open source software.” I’ve been saying this to my students a bit for a while because when I started, there was no CodePen, there was no GitHub. There was just looking at people’s websites and trying to figure out what they did.

Andre: Yeah, me too.

Joe: Nowadays it’s like, “Here’s CodePen. I could fork this and see what happens,” or, “Someone has a gist on GitHub that allows me to take a look at some generalized code.” So, I think you’re absolutely right. People are willing to share more and open source has– Microsoft is doubling down on it. They bought GitHub, which I think a lot of people forget.

Andre: I didn’t forget.

Joe: Yeah, I didn’t forget either. Well, I forgot for a little bit. I was talking to somebody, and they were like, “Sometimes I forget that Microsoft bought GitHub.” And I’m like, “Yeah. I forgot about that until just now.” It is a really good time for open source. So, you built this with Backbone? I have a technical question for you now because as we record this WordPress 5.0 isn’t out yet, but Gutenberg is heavily– Is all React.

Andre: Yeah.

Joe: Are you going to make any architectural changes because of that? Or are you going to stick with Backbone for the foreseeable future?

Andre: I don’t have any plans to change, I mean Backbone has worked well for me. Especially with the Backbone client, WordPress still has an investment in it. The Backbone client’s part of core. I can see the benefits of going to something like React, but what’s nice about Backbone– It takes a little bit longer for me to write, but to extend it, and there’s a child template system within Project Huddle that you can modify. Ease of use makes it super easy to do that stuff, rather than if you were to do something with React and you’d have to do it all in one file, and you’d have to write JavaScript. If you’re not familiar with JavaScript, it can get a little bit complicated. But PHP developers can extend Project Huddle without knowing hardly any JavaScript, just because of a Backbone setup. So, I rather like it, but I can see the benefit of being like “There’s going to be more React developers and more expertise there.”

Joe: But that’s a really good point because up until advanced custom fields announced that they were making it so you could define blocks in PHP, a lot of PHP developers who don’t know JavaScript were freaking out. I’m not a JavaScript expert, and I know enough to be dangerous. I can definitely break the front end with some JavaScript, and I don’t know React, and I was like “I need to learn React, and maybe now with advanced custom fields I can still do stuff, but maybe delay that.” So your point is a very good one. Backbone is relatively lightweight too, and it’s extensible for PHP developers. I think you’re making a good choice. As long as WordPress doesn’t announce that they are removing Backbone from core in the near future.

Andre: Yeah.

Joe: You’re good.

Andre: Yeah, exactly. Which I can still ship my own version.

Joe: Yeah.

Andre: In the end.

Joe: Yeah, exactly.

Andre: But it’s like a lot of these frameworks are, React is more opinionated, but Backbone is very similar. It just doesn’t have– If people are familiar with the two-way data binding, the models aren’t automatically updated with Backbone. You have to add listeners and update what you want, which gives you more control. But you have to write more code.

Joe: It sounds a little bit like Angular. I hitched my wagon to Angular–

Andre: Yeah.

Joe: A couple years ago, and now I’m like “Now I’ve got to unhitch it and move to React.”

Andre: You’re going to be moving that hitch around a lot in the next couple of years.

Joe: I know, that’s why I’m glad I didn’t hitch it to Vue earlier. I was like, “Vue seems easier. There’s also JavaScript, and I like that.” And then if I want to stay in the WordPress base or develop in the WordPress base, React is the one I should learn. So I have Wes Boss’ course, which I will link in the show notes. He is very good.

Andre: Yeah, that just came out, didn’t it?

Joe: He just updated it. I have his node one, and his React one, and–

Andre: Have you taken any of them, or done any of them?

Joe: I took his free JavaScript 30 course, and as a course developer myself I love his style. We have very similar styles. He is pretty relaxed. I think he does a good job of demoing code because it’s hard. Talking about code in a course, I’ve done it, and I think I’ve done it somewhat successfully, I’ve gotten good feedback, but that’s a hard thing to do, and he does it very well. So, I appreciate the work he’s doing, and I’m happy to support it.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Pantheon. Starting a new project? Looking for a better hosting platform? Pantheon is an integrated set of tools to build, launch and run websites. Get high performance hosting for your WordPress sites, plus a comprehensive toolkit to supercharge your team and help you launch faster. On Pantheon, you get expert support from real developers, best in class security and the most innovative technology to host and manage your websites. You can sign up a new site in minutes with a free account, and you only pay when it goes live. That is my second favorite feature to Pantheon, only to the easy ability to create dev staging and live servers, and push to GitHub. It’s very easy to set those things up on Pantheon. You can head over to Pantheon.io today to set up a free account and pay only when it goes live. Thanks so much to Pantheon for their support of this episode and this season of How I Built It.

Joe: So, that’s cool. Are there any other notes on how you built Project Huddle before we move on to the next set of questions? Because I know we touched on a couple of things, but I feel like we could go pretty deep if you want to.

Andre: Yeah, I guess there’s something there if people are interested in this, but I never get to talk about it, so I’m super excited.

Joe: Awesome.

Andre: With website commenting there is a huge challenge. If you’re commenting on an image, you can, “This is the x y coordinate with the image.” But if you’re on a website and it works responsively, sometimes things move around. They disappear. That was a huge challenge to figure out how to stick a pin on a website and have it stick. Even when content changes, because it’s a feedback tool. You put a pin-down, it’s likely that content is going to change. I used something called Levenshtein distance, which is like– It does a percentage match between two strings. How it works is it stores the HTML that was clicked when the comment was left, and then when it needs to find that again, it checks the original CSS selector and figures out if it’s a good match. It’s not continuous up the [inaudible] tree until a good match is found, so what’s nice about how that works is if you move sections around on a page, or content changes or you look at it in a different device. The pin will 99% of the time stay where it’s supposed to stay. That was super hard to figure out. That took probably six to eight months to figure that part of the equation, and the rest was pretty easy. It still has some bugs here and there that are working on fixing it.

Joe: Yeah, I mean that’s what they say. “The last 20% of the project takes 80% of the time to do.”

Andre: Totally true. Yeah.

Joe: I loved that. I’m glad I didn’t just lead you to that question, and you brought it up because I was curious about that. Because doing that is hard, and what you just described is a very academic computer science-y questions. We talked about that, and I have a masters in software engineering, so “How do you math nodes and things like that? And find points and process images?” It’s not something that you get to talk about in the WordPress space very often.

Andre: Not at all, no.

Joe: That’s cool. The thing you said you used was Levenshtein distance?

Andre: Yeah. It’s very basic. Just give it two strings, “How close of a match are they?” It fuzzy matches them.

Joe: Nice. So, that’s a library and not an algorithm? It’s a library–?

Andre: It’s an algorithm.

Joe: OK, cool.

Andre: Somebody made into it, again, more open source software. Somebody made it into a JavaScript function for everybody use.

Joe: Nice.

Andre: Didn’t have to do anything super tricky on my end, just had to figure out what pieces to put together. Like adult Legos in a way.

Joe: Yeah, without a doubt. I love that. I had a student working on mapping shapes with JavaScript canvas to musical notes, because he needed some assistive technology, and we were in a web design class. The things he was doing was super cool, and we got to a point where he’s like “I have a question about this.” I’m like, “I know. I have to research this. I don’t just know the answer to this one off the top of my head, but I’ll see if I can dig up that project too.” But it was very cool, and we were working completely in CodePen which is an incredible learning tool for the classroom. So awesome.

Andre: I think it’s a sign of a good teacher when the student stumps you, and you have to–

Joe: Thank you. That’s what I told myself. I’m like, “If they only know as much as I know, then I haven’t taught them how to learn, I just brain dumped on them.” So, yeah. Cool. Very cool. I love that, and I could talk about that all day but we are coming up on time, and I do want to talk to you about your plans for the future. Now I will say that I used to have a question like, “How has this evolved?” And we generally talk about that in the first half of the show, but we did not talk at all about pricing, and I’m always curious about that. So, maybe we could talk in your plans for the future, and how things evolved, how did you come up with the pricing? And what are your plans for the future?

Andre: The pricing– That’s going to be the hardest part of selling digital products. That was just a shot in the dark. Looking at other plugins that weren’t even in my space. Figuring out what people buy and then probably increasing a little bit, because I was probably a little low at the time. But the current plan is there’s a base version of Project Huddle, which is going to get a lot of the core features, and that’s it. $89 dollars. And then there’s going to be some add ons that are coming like right now there’s a file upload add on that lets you upload files right into the comments. It’s great if a client’s like, “Let’s swap out this image. Here it is.” And they can upload it right in the comment. So that’s the next pricing tier, which is currently at $109 but will go up when more add ons are added. And then there’s– So, those are all yearly fees. And of course, like with any WordPress plugin, if you decide you don’t want to pay or you can’t pay, or you don’t want to renew, the plugin will keep work. It’s not like you don’t have access to any of your data anymore, you renew when you want a feature update or support.

Joe: That’s probably the best part about things. It’s almost like every year screen flow, or Camtasia comes out with a new version that you have to pay for. But if I don’t want to pay for it–

Andre: Exactly. It’s like how software used to be. You’d buy it, and it would come in a box.

Joe: Yes.

Andre: With a bunch of CDs, or whatever. I don’t know how old people are. Maybe a floppy disk.

Joe: I remember CDs. I remember being baffled by Zip drives like I was familiar with floppies and CDs.

Andre: Yeah, I forgot about Zip.

Joe: I’m like, “Zip drive? How does that even work? It doesn’t fit into my floppy drive, and you need a whole separate thing.” The computers in the 90s were a crazy time. But that’s cool, and I like that because you’re absolutely right. Pricing digital products is so hard. There’s no manufacturing costs.

Andre: Nope.

Joe: It’s just my time. And how long does it take for me to get my time paid for? How many do I have to sell, and then when I sell that many, I’ve made that money back. I’ve been told simultaneously that my prices for my courses are too high and too low. It depends on who I want to cater to. Do I  want to cater to the person who’s only willing to pay $10 bucks for a course that’s going to make them thousands of dollars, or do I want to raise the prices and sell fewer? It’s a very interesting problem, and I like getting different perspectives on that.

Andre: I’m sure there’s people way more knowledgeable about this than maybe you and I, but when I first released it people were saying it was too expensive. And now they’re saying, “Wow, what a deal.” So it’s like, “Maybe it’s too cheap now, I don’t know.” As more features get added, there’s more value. I don’t know how it works.

Joe: Yeah. And it’s finding the right person, the right persona I guess. Because I was having this conversation with a few folks and basically catering to people specifically in the WordPress space is very hard. People in the WordPress space think that they should get a lot of things for free, and they don’t necessarily see the value of things. This is not a knock on everybody in the WordPress space, and I’m in the WordPress space. But it is harder. Maybe a better analogy would be Android versus iOS users. iOS users are willing to pay for apps way more often than Android users are, because of the open source mindset. It’s very tricky waters that we’re in.

Andre: That’s a good example. I was just about to mention that. I even think like WordPress is the new Android, Google Play store in a way. There’s so many themes, so many plugins, and it’s becoming such a commodity to a really weird different space than when I started.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I would agree with that. Sure, we both have now ten years of insight to work on, but it is easy to see the change. I’ll leave with one more anecdote before I ask you what trade secrets you have, but I was doing– I was writing an in-person course. A four-week in-person training that I was charging $200 bucks for. The people who came were people from the enterprise space who wanted to learn about WordPress because $200 dollars in the enterprise space is stupid cheap.

Andre: Yes.

Joe: Then there were people who were like “Why would I pay you $200 bucks when I can just go to YouTube?” I’m like, “These are not the people that I want to work with if they don’t see the value in being in the same room as me for four weeks for $50 bucks a week? That’s crazy.”

Andre: That’s cheaper than a gym membership in some places.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m teaching you how to use a thing that will absolutely make you money. I guess you’re a bodybuilder or a model a gym membership, but–

Andre: You can make more money on WordPress than being a bodybuilder.

Joe: Yeah, right. I don’t want to be winded when I walk up the stairs. All right, thank you for letting me rant about that. I do want to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Andre: I don’t know how people usually answer this question, but it’s maybe not a trade secret. It’s like a motto I live for, that done is better than perfect. When I used to– When I first started, it was always, “It’s not ready. It’s not perfect. This could be better. Everything works great, but I’d love if it could do this.” But you have to get it done. Release it and then iterate. So, Done is better than perfect is my trade secret.

Joe: “Done is better than perfect.” Remember those words, everybody. Those are very important words. I think this, everything you’ve said up until this point, harkens back to that. You said, “You have a bias towards action, an MVP is better than just writing it down.” If you spend so much time making sure it’s perfect and release it and nobody buys it, that’s a big blow. But if you get it out, and it’s not perfect, you get feedback and if people don’t buy it– If I do a course in a day and nobody buys it, that’s one day. If I spend a year developing a course and nobody buys it, I’m like “I just lost all of 2018. That’s it.”

Andre: Yeah, that’s huge.

Joe: So, done is better than perfect. I love that. Andre, thanks so much for your time. Where can people find you?

Andre: Find me on Twitter @ProjectHuddle is a good one or my personal one which is at @AJGagnon. It’s my name.

Joe: Nice. I will be sure to link both of those in the show notes, and then, of course, you can find Project Huddle at ProjectHuddle.io?

Andre: Yeah. Perfect.

Joe: All right, cool. I will link all of that and more in the show notes. Andre, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Andre: Thanks for having me, it was a pleasure.

Outro: Thanks so much to Andre for joining me today. I hope that you enjoyed the interview as much as I did. His trade secret, as I alluded to in the intro for this episode, was done is better than perfect. Something that I need to remember from time to time as I build software or a website or a new project. Get that first iteration out there and start getting feedback. So, thanks again so much to Andre. My question of the week for you is, “What is a project that you just need to launch?” Let me know by emailing me Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona. For all of the show notes for this episode, you can head over to HowIBuilt.it/116. Thanks again to this week’s sponsors, Plesk, Castos and Pantheon. This show would not happen without their support, and support from you the listener. If you liked this episode head over to Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. It helps people discover us. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Mike McDerment and FreshBooks

February 12, 2019

Sponsored by:

Mike McDerment is the founder of the incredibly popular accounting software FreshBooks. His story is an interesting one – where he started with an MVP and then built it up from there. His journey relatable, and I’m really excited to talk to him today.

[Read more…] about Mike McDerment and FreshBooks

View on separate page

Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Episode 110 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Mike McDermont of FreshBooks. I am so excited to talk to Mike because I have been using FreshBooks since 2008, or 2009. Something like that. Most of my adult freelance career outside of high school where I just used Excel. After a small journey away from FreshBooks to use QuickBooks online in 2018, like the prodigal son, I came back to FreshBooks missing what I once had. I am very excited to talk to Mike today about how he built up a company that I have been using for a third of my life, which is crazy. He offers of course fantastic advice on how he built the company, and how he is growing at a good pace with his customers now, trying not to grow too fast or anything like that. I just think that this is a fantastic conversation no matter what stage of business you’re at, because Mike has seen a lot of it at this point. I will get to the interview in a minute, but first of course we need to thank our sponsors.

Break: This season is brought to you by Plesk. Do you spend too much time doing server admin work, and not enough time building websites? Plesk helps you manage servers, websites, and customers in one dashboard. Helping you do those tasks up to 10 times faster than manually coding everything. As someone who just spent a bunch of time finding the right tools and automations to save myself time, I can tell you that Plesk is invaluable. You can try Plesk for free today at Plesk.com/build. This episode is also brought to you by our friends at Castos. Castos is a podcast hosting platform built specifically for WordPress. They’re a Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin that lets you manage all of your episodes and podcast RSS feeds from your WordPress site, but have your files hosted on a dedicated media hosting platform. I love how the Castos team takes a common sense approach to their pricing, too. You can create as many episodes and podcasts as you want. You don’t have to worry about how much storage you’re using or silly bandwidth restrictions. If you’re like me and already have a ton of episodes from an old host, they’ve got you covered there, too. Castos will import all of your podcast content into their platform completely free of charge. It is just one click of a button. The Castos team has put together a special opportunity for listeners of this show. They’re giving away their most popular package, the YouTube republishing tier where they automatically convert your audio files into a video format and publish them to YouTube completely free, for one listener. For a chance to win tweet at me @jcasabona, and [@castoshq], and tell us why you think you should win this free year of Castos hosting. On February 1st, 2019 they’ll pick one winner to get this $340 package completely for free. Thanks so much to the Castos team for sponsoring today’s episode.

Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Mike McDermont, founder and CEO of FreshBooks. Mike, how are you today?

Mike McDermont: I’m well. Thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me.

Joe: Thanks for coming on the show. I was saying in the preshow that I am a big fan of FreshBooks, I used you guys all the way back in like 2008 or 2009 or something like that. I’m excited to hear your story. Why don’t we start off with who you are and what you do?

Mike: I’m Mike McDermont, co-founder and CEO of FreshBooks. What we are is ridiculously easy to use invoicing and accounting software. 20 million people have used the software since we started, and what makes us different is we only build for folks who invoice their clients. We solve a whole bunch of billing problems in there, billing and accounting problems frankly. It’s available for desktop and cloud. If you invoice, you need FreshBooks.

Joe: Absolutely. I will say, I guess I’ll admit this to you on the air, but I used FreshBooks from like I said 2008 or something up until the beginning of this year, and I was like “I need something that can handle products,” because I’m moving mostly into the products business. So I moved to a competitor, and boy was that a mistake. I’m moving back to you guys at the beginning of next year and the next fiscal year. I’m just like, like you said, it’s ridiculously easy to use. Moving to your competitor I saw just how much easier FreshBooks is to use then what else is out there. So, I’ve seen the error of my ways and I’m moving back. I appreciate your software.

Mike: I am sorry for your trouble, but I am grateful for your support. We’ve actually done a lot in the last year that I think you’ll quite enjoy when you come back. So, we’re waiting for you. Thank you.

Joe: Awesome. I’m excited. This is fantastic. You have ridiculously easy invoicing software, and we were talking a little bit in the preshow so we’re going to talk about your accidental journey. Why is this called an “Accidental journey?”

Mike: The way we got started was I was running a small design agency helping small businesses build their websites and do internet marketing and logo design, all kinds of things. I was billing my clients using Word and Excel when I accidentally saved over an invoice, and I got super frustrated. I’d started building small web applications for my clients and figured maybe I should do that for myself. So, I built a simple thing and that became what is now FreshBooks.

Joe: Wow, that’s fantastic. We talk about this a lot on the show, for longtime listeners, I feel a lot of founders were solving a problem or scratching an itch that they had, and then it turns out that other people had this same problem. So you were using Word and Excel and you decided to build this for yourself, did you do any research into the feature set or what was out there? Can you give us a timeframe, we’re talking like 2006 or so, right?

Mike: Yeah, that’s that’s about right for time zones. A little over a decade ago. In terms of research, we took a very unassuming approach, so built the initial thing for myself, and then we did conduct structured research calling people up. You were in the basement, so I had surveys take people through “Why did you start looking for us? What would you call this thing?” Because we didn’t even know what to call it at that point, and then “If you had to describe it to someone else, how would you do that?” And then, “What else would you like?” That kind of thing. “What other pains can we help you solve?” Through a lot of customer service and through a lot of research we fleshed out what the product should be over time, and how to improve the offering we already had.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s great. So when you built this for yourself, were you immediately like, “This is something that I could charge for,” or what was the time between you built it, and started using it, and then you realized that this was a product that you could release?

Mike: About eight months after launch, about two years since we started it, we had like 10 paying customers. We started out, I think we had a business model applied to it, but I wouldn’t say we had things like pricing and packaging correct. The way we structured our packages basically meant a lot of people could use it for free. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It worked out well. But we were basically trying to figure out, “What is the product? What features are necessary? Where do people see value and what do they want to pay for?” All those things were, we were groping our way through the darkness trying to figure out how to find a sustainable path forward.

Joe: Gotcha. Again, just talking about my personal relationship with FreshBooks, like I said I think I got on it around 2008-2009. More likely 2009, my friend told me about it and I think she had an affiliate link. Did you have like an affiliate program at that time, to help you grow?

Mike: Yeah. It’s interesting. We had a referral program where people get links inside their own accounts, yes. It worked a lot like an affiliate program where you can share a link with somebody and that would be– Effectively, short answer, yes.

Joe: Nice. So you mostly conducted interviews, customer service, you said after two years you had 10 paying customers. You have like, 10 million plus now. I’m just curious to learn what the jump was. You had 10 paying customers, what would you say is the moment everything clicked for you and you started to grow?

Mike: I get that question a lot. The simple answer is, I’m still looking for it. I think success is doing a million little things right when nobody’s looking, and then all of a sudden it turns into a thing. Maybe those are occasions where there’s this major turning point, but I’d say we just kept going. The biggest thing we did was we just kept going, we kept trying to improve, we kept trying to get to know our customer better and serve them better. Over time there’d be like, “We’ve got a new– We worked on our pricing and packaging,” or “We added a feature.” But it’s hard to really see major changes in the curve even when those events happened. It’s really about the direction and the continued progress, and trying to get better all the time. That was our story, at least. I’m sure other people have this blinding moment that it all changes direction, but that was not us.

Joe: That makes perfect sense. People in the podcasting space, especially– I started off a lot in the WordPress space here. They’re like, “How did you grow your show and how do you get so many downloads a month?” And I’m like, “I don’t know the one thing I did to make that happen. It was just consistency.” Like you said, “Just keep going with it and keep working with it.”

Mike: Yeah. Then sometimes if you’re putting things out there, at least in a consumer product like ours, or maybe your show. I can think of times when people would point a link to us, like the folks at 37 Signals pointed a link to how we handled a challenge that we had that they liked. All of a sudden all this traffic comes over and more people learn about you, so those kinds of things do happen. But 100 of those things happen, so it’s not just 1 thing.

Joe: That’s really cool, and that’s really interesting. I think that’s good advice or maybe encouraging words for people who are starting a product and they’re not seeing the out of control overnight growth that you hear about. Back in Season 1 I talked about how– Or, we talked about how the Olympics were going on, and  my guests and I talked about how you see the gold medalist at the Olympics but you don’t see the years and years of practice that they put before that to get to that point.

Mike: Or the three Olympic Games where they didn’t even medal.

Joe: Right.

Mike: There are– I think this is a terrible thing that’s always happened with the media and these companies, like there are the odd company who’ve done it the first time, but a lot of the really big successes and most of the companies that happened really really fast are people who are repeat entrepreneurs. If I started all over again, could I do it better, faster and cheaper? Maybe. Almost certainly I’d either fail faster or I’d make something as big or bigger faster, but that would have been based on all this experience I’ve been getting doing this.

Joe: That makes perfect sense. My first, again, my first podcast was not great. I learned a lot of lessons, and then I launched this one and I was able to apply those lessons. Much like you are able to apply what you’ve learned over the last 10 or so years, which is fantastic. That’s what people need to hear, because they think– I still think that sometimes, “I’m going to launch a thing and it’s going to be a huge success, and that’s going to be my boatload of cash that I know I need, or deserve, or whatever.” You said that, before we get to the title question I do want to ask one more about the research and building up FreshBooks. You said that you were running a design agency and then you launched FreshBooks, at what point did you decide that this was the thing that you wanted to focus on full time? Or did you basically say, “I’m not going to do client work anymore. I’m going to focus completely on this accounting, invoicing software.”

Mike: Pretty quickly I was excited about the product and got about 80% of my time there, but it was years for that last 20%. I had some employees in that business so I couldn’t abandon them, but what I found was if I spent 20% of my time doing the other thing I could make enough money for them and me, so that I could focus on this other thing. So there was pragmatic reasons. But then there eventually, after probably two and a bit years, I started firing my clients which meant trying to find them good homes, like somebody else who could take good care of them. But that was a progress. That’s the one side that’s nice about a client service business is you can wind things down gracefully over a period of time, if you like.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Pantheon. Starting a new project? Looking for a better hosting platform? Pantheon is an integrated set of tools to build, launch and run websites. Get high performance hosting for your WordPress sites, plus a comprehensive toolkit to supercharge your team and help you launch faster. On Pantheon, you get expert support from real developers, best in class security and the most innovative technology to host and manage your websites. You can sign up a new site in minutes with a free account, and you only pay when it goes live. That is my second favorite feature to Pantheon, only to the easy ability to create dev staging and live servers, and push to GitHub. It’s very easy to set those things up on Pantheon. You can head over to Pantheon.io today to set up a free account and pay only when it goes live. Thanks so much to Pantheon for their support of this episode and this season of How I Built It.

Joe: For anybody who’s trying to move from client work to a product, do you think that’s maybe the the best piece of advice you can give? Or is there some other thing you took away from that experience?

Mike: Just know that it’s hard, and the learning curve is really steep. They’re very different kinds of businesses and business models, and things that make them go. I think client service is a great way– If you’ve built a successful client service business, it probably means you have great customer empathy and you understand being able to deliver and focus and execute. Organizing resources, and time. You need all that stuff to start a product company. But the thing about a product company is the way you market is different, and the way you build the product is different. The way you– Everything about it is is different. I think just recognizing that you’re carrying two– They’re just not the same, and being prepared for that learning curve. “I need to unlearn a bunch of stuff here because it’s just not the same game anymore.”

Joe: Yeah. I wish that we had this conversation a year ago, because over the last year I’ve learned that lesson. Though I don’t know if I would appreciate that advice as much as now that I’m on the other side of it, I say “I’m able to sell a $5,000 dollar or $10,000 dollar website to one person, but I can’t convince 50 people to buy my $100 dollar course,” because it is very different. That is for anybody who’s looking to– That’s just fantastic advice. Awesome. Thank you for that. Now I would love to get into the title question, and this is very exciting, because a lot of people that I’ve been talking to lately are the visionaries for the product and then they hired a development team. But in your case, you are the founder and you also built the product. So, how did you build version 1? Then when did you know, do you still do hands on code? Or when did you know it was time to start letting go of that?

Mike: The first thing I should do is come clean and say that makes me sound like I contributed more to the product than I probably did in the end. I did build the first version, I built a prototype to bill my clients. But it was pretty soon after that, like a couple months, that I met my co-founder and he has a doctorate in computer science. He started building things, and then I went to more of a design role. Product design, product management, and then I focused on also marketing and trying to get the business operational and organized, finding customers, all that stuff. There was a division there. I think that’s probably a little more in line with what you’re used to hearing, that visionary that’s more about what the product is and who the customer is, connecting those things to build the right stuff. That is ultimately the role I played. So, sorry. With that clarified the question was, what?

Joe: How did you build it?

Mike: With great customer empathy over a long period of time. Those are some of the key ingredients. I don’t know how technical you want to go when there’s so many ways to answer that question. Is it like, the awareness of your product in the market? Is it trying to figure out what to build? Is it– These are the technologies we chose to build on. How would you–? Sorry to break it down, but that’s a big question to me, I don’t know how to box it into something that I can answer.

Joe: Absolutely. Generally the answer I’ll give, because I’ve gotten this question before, is whatever you’re most comfortable with answering. But I am super curious with the prototype, what technologies specifically did you use? And then, as you grew, whatever you’re most comfortable answering there. Like, whatever you touched the most as FreshBooks became FreshBooks.

Mike: So, my role in growing it up. I think, for whatever it’s worth, [Lamp Stack] at the start. Ruby on Rails didn’t exist, so it was actually pre-2006 when we got started. We were building our own frameworks to do these things and then by the time that stuff came out we were pretty committed already, so Lamp Stack. I think it was MySQL, and I think they had just came out with version three. To back there. Anyway, with that my role again became product management, voice of the customer, and also marketing. Also we started, once we had a website up, and we generated a lot of traffic through SEO and online stuff, and we still do. That was my responsibility as well. But then as soon as we had people coming, then we started having people want to talk to us on the phone, so I did some of that. I did some customer service there and learned about our customers, asked them how they heard about us and constantly asking similar questions. Like, “How did you hear about us? What could be improved?” All that kind of thing to keep furthering my understanding of, “How do we improve? How do we win? How do we go further?” And then bringing that back to the rest the team, like “Here’s what we need to build.” I was pretty prescriptive about, “This is how I’d like it to be built,” as well. Those are always fun, and we had good healthy discussions about that stuff over the years.

Joe: Gotcha. This is really interesting to me, it’s something I’ve been hearing more and more lately, and I don’t know if it’s just because I’ve noticed it more or because it’s becoming more important advice. But having conversations with customers on the phone is something that I’ve been hearing a lot more lately. Maybe it’s that people around my age or younger have an aversion to phone calls, they would rather just do things with email, but it sounds like phone conversations were integral to understanding your product.

Mike: Yeah, our philosophy has always been about customer proximity. Like, “How do you get closer to the customer?” Not only email, not only phone, we were one of the first companies or maybe even the first to do customer service on Twitter.

Joe: Wow.

Mike: They said, “This is another channel to communicate with people, or Facebook, or what have you.” So that’s the orientation. It’s like, “I want to meet you where you live and serve you accordingly.” And all of them are good. Now what I will say is, if you went from email to phone to in-person, and we did do in-person we went to conferences and stuff too. I find that each medium has its own strengths and weaknesses as a research tool. E-mail you’re going to find out about a volume of problems, phone is good for getting some color on those problems, and if you meet people in person you’ll find out what it is that they want that goes beyond whatever you’re doing today. Those are harder. That gets harder. You just don’t get that in email, you might get a feature request but that’s not the same as “I think your platform should be doing this other–” just live face to face is a totally different ballgame. So, I’m a fan of all those mediums for appropriate reasons in each case.

Joe: That makes sense. I think, probably in person people are more likely to be like “You know you should do–” almost like it’s conversational. Did you find that people are less likely to complain to you? Like, not complain. But give negative feedback in-person?

Mike: Probably. But like, my whole thing is like, I’m always asking for what’s wrong. So let’s just take the drama out of that. Be like, “I know we can improve–” I’m always, if people say, one of the things I find frustrating and the thing about me is now I’ll go out and let’s say I give a talk somewhere. OK, we get off this podcast and you say “Mike, great job.” That’d be wonderful. Let’s hope we get there. And I’d say. “Thank you. Why was it great?” Because that’s when you’re live, people will tell you, and saying that. I’ll be like, “OK, great.” Now I can say, “Great. You told me something we did well. Next question is, what can we do better?” I’d do the same thing with this podcast. It’s like, “OK that’s great. That went well. Thank you for telling me that, but what could I have done better?” I think that’s the seeking to understand, and constantly improve. To me it’s a hallmark of– I’ve heard it of other entrepreneurs as well. There’s no, I’m not precious about this thing. I find that so long as we can have a civil dialogue, and you’re not yelling, then I think we can both learn a lot.

Joe: Yeah. That’s great to hear. Because especially as a creator, you get attached to the thing that you build, and if you want it to be the best version of what it is you you have to let go of that. You said, “I’m not precious about this.” I really like– Is that what you said? Precious? I really like that. Because it shows that you know it’s a tool that people use and you want it to be the best tool possible.

Mike: We talk about that a lot with even our design team here, it’s like a lot of designers will come from elsewhere and they’ll be like “This is how it’s done. It’s perfect.” We have a thing called critique, which is you cannot be precious in that room. The idea is, “Nobody’s trying to internalize feedback on work you’ve done as an attack, or as input to help you get to the next level and next better place,” and I’d much rather work with people who are oriented in the second way.

Joe: Yeah. That makes sense, because you’re not going to grow unless you learn how you can do things better. If you just think you make the best thing right out the gate, where are you going to go from there? So, cool. I love that. Let’s talk about, as we kind of wind down time here. It looks like we’re getting close to the half hour mark. I’ve personally seen FreshBooks evolve over the last ten or so years, so maybe we could talk about what are some of the big evolutions that you really liked in the product and what are your plans for the future?

Mike: OK. I think we’ve had a pretty consistent track record of improvement, and sometimes I’ll say the improvements are not as visible, but they are impactful. Because you get a lot of people using your software, sometimes a little workflow we can tune and improve things. My favorite days are when we’re launching stuff, like that’s just my favorite stuff. Favorite days in the office, and I think the big one for me would be “We’ve gone and built a new platform. We decided after all those years, I don’t know if you know this, we have a new version and new FreshBooks.” Seeing the rate at which that is changing and improving is very exciting to me. So we’re now benefiting from the first version was built on frameworks that we built at a time before standards for building companies like ours existed, and now we’re using ember and a bunch of other just more modern technologies. So we can move a lot quicker and deliver better experiences, and that’s been my experience, where we’re not only doing invoicing at this point. We now have, for those who don’t know, and sometimes we’ve had people say “You don’t do double ledger, or bank racks, we can’t use you for accounting. We’ve scaled beyond you.” And we say “Listen. You don’t need to know that stuff even exists in our software today, you don’t need to. But guess what? It’s there. And if you grow to the point where you actually care about that, it’s right there for you as opposed to imposing it on you.” So I’m excited about that too, because we’ve had a lot of customers over the years who are great customers who for one reason or another decided they needed to move on to the next thing. That’s a big thing that’s happened now, and I think what we want to do once we have that that bedrock, “We serve companies that invoice,” now by the way this is a positive development for you as you’re getting into more product stuff. We can help you track other payments and sources of income beyond just invoices, so that’s good. We’re really focused on solving billing problems in general, especially for businesses that send invoices, and we have this accounting bedrock that you can build on and grow. So I think the question is, “Now that accounting bedrock is there, how do we really help you focus on more of your billing issues?” That’ll be the direction of our efforts.

Joe: That’s really cool, and that’s something that especially freelancers or entrepreneurs or maybe solo entrepreneurs are your target audience, that’s something that a lot of people have problems with. Maybe they don’t think to bill on time, or they’re a little tepid about sending that reminder, like “You haven’t paid. It’s been 40 days and you haven’t paid the invoice.” Focusing on, and maybe I’ve misinterpreted what you said, but focusing on billing problems I think really helped your customer.

Mike: Absolutely. I just want everyone to know, what you just talked about is our bread and butter, and that’s that’s there and available today. If you use our product and you send an invoice, you can set things up in an automated way where 15 days later or 30 days later we will take care of you with a simple e-mail saying “This email is now 15 days since sent, will you please–?” We can even help you collect payment. So there’s a lot we do there, and we just see there’s a whole bunch of ways to make your life even better in and around issues pertaining to billing, and we’re excited about that.

Joe: That’s fantastic. Just to bring it back, that competitor that I’m on now does not do any of that. I looked for the automatic late fees, or the late payment reminders. They’re like, “You can do that through a third party.” And I’m like, “Why?” I don’t understand why I would have to pay extra for basic invoicing things, but in any caseb I’ll be happy when the calendar turns and I’m back on FreshBooks. I’m not just saying that because you are on the show, I literally said this to my wife like a couple of weeks ago. I just can’t wait. So, this has been great. I think there’s a lot of really good insight that folks can take away, especially moving from client services to products. We focused a lot there. But just also the customer empathy things that I think people need to hear more of. But I do need to ask you my favorite question, which is do you have any trade secrets for us?

Mike: Trade secrets. Here’s the thing, I think the way we do customer service. One thing I was thinking is “When you’re coming back don’t feel shy about phoning us.” I don’t know if you ever have, or e-mailing us, if that’s your preferred medium. We’re here to help and we even have some services we can help you with your bookkeeping, and move some data from one to the next, so you don’t have to take care of that if that’s interesting to you. Just FYI.

Joe: That is interesting to me.

Mike: Yeah, but then as trade secrets, I think the thing about FreshBooks that’s sort of uncanny and unparalleled is we really care about executing extraordinary experiences every day. That’s what we call it, that’s our mantra. We want to build simple user experiences that exceed people’s expectations, and we love helping people on the phone with a level of customer service that frankly most companies aspire to and talk about. But you know, they really don’t execute against. I think that is– I don’t know. But what I’ve come to realize is that’s a culture thing, and you don’t necessarily get it. You just don’t. That’s our, I don’t know if that’s our trade secret, I think our trade secret is that people really appreciate– Customer service just really matters, and it’s hard to do repeatedly over time at scale.

Joe: Absolutely. I think that is great. Especially because it’s a culture thing, because it does start within the company and making sure that the employees and the founders and everybody are on the same page, about how they feel about a certain thing. When they feel that they execute on it better, so if customer service is the most important thing within the company and the company culture, then you will have good customer service. Mike, thank you so much for your time I really appreciate it. Where can people find you?

Mike: Thanks, Joe. Great being here. If you want to learn a little more about us, or try FreshBooks for free, you can do that at FreshBooks.com.

Outro: Thanks so much again to Mike for joining us. I want to repeat his trade secret, which is the way they do customer service. Don’t be shy about phoning them. They put a premium on good customer service, and between the conversation with Nathalie last week and some books I’ve been reading I think that this is incredibly key at building your own business. Especially for smaller businesses or freelancers, offering that close customer service is the thing that separates you and differentiates you from the larger companies, or the airlines, of the world. Who, for the most part, make it seem like they don’t really care about their customer. I want to repeat that and double down on it. To that end, my question of the week for you is going to be similar to last week. Which is, what can you do to improve your customer service? Or, what do you want to do to improve your customer service? Do you want to implement a ticketing system or do you want to offer phone support? I know that is something that I don’t necessarily want to do, but if my customers ask for it I would do it. It’s me just being me, email is better. I don’t have a support team. But what are you going to do to improve customer support? Let me know via e-mail at Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona. I want to thank my sponsors once again, they are Plesk, Castos and Pantheon. You can find the show notes for this episode over at How I Built.it/110. If you liked this episode, be sure to leave us a rating and a review on Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcast, it really helps people discover the show. And until next time, get out there and build something.

Nathalie Lussier and AccessAlly

February 5, 2019

Sponsored by:
  • Plesk: Get set up for free!
  • Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.

Nathalie Lussier is has created a unique, powerful LMS plugin for WordPress that people seem to love. That’s because Nathalie, on top of using the product herself, listens to her customers. In this episode, she’ll give us lots of great advice for how to grow our business and improve customer relationships.

[Read more…] about Nathalie Lussier and AccessAlly

View on separate page

Transcript

Intro: Hello, and welcome to episode 109 of How I Built It. Today I have Nathalie Lussier from AccessAlly and we’re going to be talking about a lot of things. Nathalie started out making her own online courses. She built her own LMS basically from scratch, built on top of WordPress, and then people started asking her for it. They wanted to know what she was using, and like any enterprising young person, she decided to make it a product. But my favorite part of the conversation is actually when Nathalie and I started talking about talking to your customer, and getting the right features, and building the right message for your customers. I want you to pay extra attention to that part. There’s a little bit for everybody, and a lot if you are looking to improve your relationship with your customers. So, we’ll get into all that and more, but first I want to tell you about a new podcast I have, it’s a relatively new podcast called Creator toolkit. You can find it over at CreatorToolkit.com. It is around 15 minutes of me telling you about a particular toolkit to accomplish a specific job online. Recently, we talked about the toolkit you need to start your podcast. In another episode, we talked about the toolkit you need to build your mailing list and we looked at popular mailing list solutions. It comes out about every two weeks, and we’re about 10 episodes in now, so definitely check it out. It’s called Creator Toolkit and you can find it over at CreatorToolkit.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Now, I want to tell you a little bit about our sponsors.

Break: This season is brought to you by Plesk. Do you spend too much time doing server admin work, and not enough time building websites? Plesk helps you manage servers, websites, and customers in one dashboard. Helping you do those tasks up to 10 times faster than manually coding everything. As someone who just spent a bunch of time finding the right tools and automations to save myself time, I can tell you that Plesk is invaluable. You can try Plesk for free today at Plesk.com/build.

Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Nathalie Lussier, the founder of AccessAlly. Nathalie, how are you today.

Nathalie Lussier: I am awesome, Joe. Thanks for having me on the show.

Joe: Thank you for joining me. Nathalie and I met at CaboPress 2018 and she builds a tool, I’ll let you talk about it of course, but it was of great interest to me as I sell online courses. I feel like this is going to be a very helpful conversation for me, personally. But Nathalie, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what to do?

Nathalie: Absolutely. I am a software engineer. I started making websites when I was twelve years old, and when I graduated from college after I got my degree I had this job offer on Wall Street that I turned down to start my first business. Obviously my parents were like, “What are you doing?” And my friends were like, “Are you sure?” The first business I started was not a software company, it was actually a business where I started selling online courses, and that’s  how I got started in the online courses space. At the time there were just a couple of tools– This is almost 10 years ago. To build courses on WordPress over time I kept upgrading as I found new things and integrating different ideas together, and then I ran into a roadblock at some point where the two I was using integrated with my CRM, which was Infusionsoft, but it kept crashing my host because we were trying to do a free course or free challenge and we had a lot of people visiting the site. That’s basically when I realized, “OK. We have a problem and there doesn’t seem to be a tool that does what I want to do on the market, so why don’t we build it?” And when I say “We,” I mean my husband and I. Because we are both software people. So, that is the beginning of what has become AccessAlly. AccessAlly does membership, it does online courses, LMS, as well as taking payments and running affiliate systems. All of that is integrated with high powered CRMs, like Infusionsoft, ONTRAPORT, ConvertKit, Drip and ActiveCampaign.

Joe: Wow.

Nathalie: Yeah.

Joe: It does like, the whole kit and caboodle. If somebody is looking for a one-stop shop for everything related to online courses and memberships, they should check out AccessAlly. Is that about right?

Nathalie: Yeah, exactly. The way I think about it is, when you’re starting your business AccessAlly might not be the right tool for you. But if you have  tried a bunch of different things and you’re ready for your forever solution, if you will, I think AccessAlly does everything you might need. And also does it in a way so that you can really scale as well, so I think that’s been big for our clients too.

Joe: I really like that saying, it sounds like you really know your audience. Because a lot of people just starting out probably aren’t too keen on shelling out the money they need to shell out to do things right. You said, “Forever solution.” I’m in the process of buying my wife and I our first house, and we’re looking for our starter home. We don’t quite have the equity to buy the “Forever home.” So when you said that, I drew that parallel there.

Nathalie: That’s a great analogy. It’s like when you’re starting your business, you need to hit the ground running and make some revenue. Sell some courses or some programs and then you can reinvest, and then you’ll have the capital to build something that’s a little bit more long-term that you’ll really grow into as your business grows. I think that’s a great analogy, I love that.

Joe: That’s fantastic. You built this tool essentially out of a need, and you said that you were using things and evolving your process over the course of a couple of years. When it came to doing the research it sounds like  what you needed. What did you do to figure out nothing like this exists?

Nathalie: I had been around the block, I had used a bunch of plugins and I just kept running into different issues. A lot of times what I wanted to do required a lot of custom coding, and obviously I was fine with that, but then I felt like “I have to maintain this, and what if something changes?” Whether it’s in WordPress or other plugins or integrations that I have going on, I just felt like it was a little bit risky thing to do. I also realized that if we were going to create something ourselves, why not create something that was ready off the shelf for other people who are not capable of doing custom coding, or integrations, and stuff like that? So that was a big pain point that we saw in our marketplace, that people would ask us “What tools are you using to do this?” And my answer was always, “I coded that.” I didn’t have a solution for them, and so I knew that there was demand for it and I knew that if I could make it easy enough for them to use it if they were not developers and coders, and it would be a really good option for them and they could hit the ground, customize it, and not have to get their hands dirty with too much coding.

Joe: That’s great. I feel like that’s a programmer’s dilemma, or maybe missed opportunities. Because people ask me that, “How did you do that?” “I built a plugin.” “Is it available?” “No. It’s not really ready for primetime. It’s very me-oriented.” So, that was really good foresight on your part to make something that was sellable.

Nathalie: We knew that we wanted to do that, but we also realized, we were like “OK. Wait. Can we actually be good at selling software, supporting it and  support tickets, and all that stuff?” We actually did a smaller product first that we released before AccessAlly, and that’s called PopupAlly. We released a free version on the WordPress directory and we got, I think, 10,000 people to download it fairly quickly and we were like “OK. There’s demand for this. People like it.” Then people started asking us for additional features, so we’re like “All right. Let’s make a pro version, sell that, and then see how we handle the support on that, and selling it, and making sure that we have all our ducks in a row.” Because we knew that AccessAlly would be a higher priced offering and we knew it would be a bigger beast to support, so we wanted to bootstrap our way there. I think that worked out really well. So we released PopupAlly in 2014, and then AccessAlly in 2015. That gave us a little bit of time, a little bit of money to reinvest into the product and the marketing of it.

Joe: That’s really cool. I was actually going to ask you, were there challenges moving from selling courses to selling plugins? Or selling a digital product? Because I moved from the services industry. I’m sure you are probably familiar with the story, I’ve moved from the services industry to trying to sell courses and that was way different than what I was expecting.

Nathalie: Yeah, absolutely. Each pivot required digging in and learning a new different way to sell. So, courses. I was also in the services industry too, and I used to sell one on one. That was very easy for me because you could just get on the phone, talk to someone, you know exactly what they want and what they need and whether you can do it for them. When you switch to an online model where you’re doing one to many, like a course or program, you don’t speak to each person individually so you don’t know if you’re speaking to them exactly the way that makes sense, or if your course is going to be the right fit for them. So you have to communicate that, usually in a video or written format. Then when we switched to plugins I was still very focused on the benefits and the copywriting that I used to have for courses and programs, like “Are you going to wake up tomorrow with more opt-ins?” Or that kind of thing. So I had to reorient towards features a little bit, because people do want to know “Can this do this kind of quiz? Can this do this kind of certificate?” People have very specific needs that they’re looking for software, that for a course  they don’t have a checklist that they’re comparing against. There’s definitely some differences and some readjustments each time that we’ve changed what we’re offering.

Joe: That’s so funny, because I am experiencing the exact opposite of that right now. I’m focused on features of the course and the checklist of what you’ll learn, and nobody– People taking the cause aren’t like “I’m going to spend all these hours trying to learn this,” They’re like, “This course is going to solve my problem.”

Nathalie: Exactly.

Joe: That switch has helped me change my copy for the better, hopefully. We’ll see. Awesome. I want to dig in on a feature that you mentioned in the pre-call, which is the concept of the log in opt-in. Right. You have at this point a lot of experience selling both plugins and courses, and I feel like that is something insanely helpful for your customers.

Nathalie: Absolutely. We started off, and what necessitated creating AccessAlly was this free challenge that we did called The 30 Day List Building Challenge. It was the first time we did what I call the log in opt-in strategy, so people would opt-in by putting in their name and email and they would get a log in to our members area. Then every day they would get a video, for 30 days, walking them through how to build their email list and how to increase their reach and their exposure online. So that was a big project, and at first it was literally just emails. I didn’t have videos and the membership site area. But once we added that the whole thing really took off. A lot of people were sharing it on social media with their friends, even at conferences, saying “You should check out this 30 day list building challenge.” So far we’ve had I think about 60,000 people go through that and it has just been transformational for our business. But the interesting thing is that when we put it inside of our members area, people could log in and on the dashboard they could basically see “OK, 30 Day List Building Challenge. I have access to this,” and then they could also see our paid courses, and then eventually our paid plugins alongside that. That taps into this, “Got to collect them all,” Pokémon thing, where we want to like unlock the stuff that we don’t have access to. So we started seeing people buying things like immediately within an hour or two after they opted into the challenge, and we were like “Wow. This is actually working.” Being that it was like, “That’ll look good,” but I didn’t expect to actually see sales from it. So it was really cool because it’s not pushy, you’re not doing a big launch, you’re not sending a ton of emails. You’re just showing the menu of what’s available, and if people want it, they can take you up on that.

Joe: That’s fantastic. That’s a little bit of a spin on conventional pre-selling courses wisdom, which is get people on your list and drip them out a lesson for a free course every day, and then hit them with the pitch at the end of the last video and say “By the way, in a week this course is going to go on sale. Just for you, you get $100 off,” or whatever.

Nathalie: Absolutely. What we found, especially with the 30 day challenge, is that it’s a long time to keep people engaged. If you’re doing a free course, even if it’s 7 days or 10 days, by the time we get to the end they may or may not have consumed everything in the free course. So they might not feel ready to invest in the paid version or the next step with you. If you give them the option ahead of time, some people are super keen. They just want to dive into the real meat of whatever it is you’re teaching so they’re willing to invest right away, and they’re willing to fast track into the paid program. Just giving them the option so that they don’t have to wait is really important, and then also what you mentioned about giving them a special price. You can definitely do that within the membership site. After they opt-in you could say, “This person just joined. Have a special coupon that expires within X number of days,” and then you can still show that within the member’s area too.

Joe: That’s great. It’s so funny that we’re talking about this, because yesterday I was listening to an episode of Smart Passive Income by Pat Flynn and it was an older one about doing a three day course like we’ve just been talking about. I was like, “How am I going to do this? Am I just going to send people videos via email? It would make way more sense for them to sign up on my WordPress log in page, and then they have access to a course that’s dripped out.” I mean, what you’re talking about reinforces some of those ideas and then reinforces the implementation that I was thinking of. For those keeping track at home, this episode has already been way more valuable to me than a lot of conversations I’ve had. Or, just thoughts in my head. Thank you for that, I really appreciate your thoughts. So, let’s get to the title question. We’ve got AccessAlly, and then we’ve got specifically this feature called the log in opt-in. That sounds like it’s a pretty in-depth feature. Maybe we could just talk about how you built that, and some of the features that you knew you wanted?

Nathalie: Yes. There’s a couple of different ways you can implement it with AccessAlly, and that’s the thing with WordPress usually is that you might want to do it one way, but maybe there is a slightly different way you might want to consider too. One way that people do is that they’ll just create a regular opt-in form on their CRM, whether that’s ActiveCampaign or Drip, or whatever you’re using, so you can put that on your website and style it however you want it to be. It’s just like a regular opt-in, and then it can just be where people opt-in and then you send them an email right after they confirm their email address for example. Then from there it’s an auto log in that immediately takes them to the logged in members area, so they don’t have to remember their password or fiddle around, or any of that kind of thing. That makes it a really smooth user experience. But they’ll still realize that they’re in a logged in area, and then also you could have them reset their password if you want to do that as well. That’s one implementation, the other implementation is what we have called an on-demand log in. Basically, a similar concept, you create your opt-in form. But then instead of taking them to a regular thank you page, we basically take them to an AccessAlly page that redirects to any page you want. But by doing that, it’ll automatically create them and then log them in right after they opt-in. You don’t have to even wait for that welcome email, you’re basically logged in as soon as you put in your name and email. That’s another interesting way to do it. So you’re taken to the first video or taken to the first piece of content right away, and that’s also very flexible for tracking affiliate opt-ins as well. If you are using an affiliate link, we can basically say “OK. This person came from an affiliate. Let’s add that information to their contact inside of the CRM or inside of AccessAlly so that when they make a purchase down the line we’ll be able to track that back to the person who referred them.”

Joe: That is fantastic. Because again, the thing that I was thinking through in doing this was having them use an auto generated password or having– That creates friction, and you want to create as much of a frictionless process as possible, because the more steps there are– There’s the theory that people will feel the need to complete something they start. But if something is too many steps they’ll give up. The number of steps has to be relative to the reward you’re getting, so I love that. I’m going to see if there’s something that I can get now for my LMS that’ll just automatically log in users through a link that I email them, because that is so much smoother than the alternative.

Nathalie: That came from us doing it the other way, where we would send people a password and say “Good luck,” and then we would get a lot of support requests saying, “My password is not working. How do I reset my password?” And we’re like, “There must be a better way.” That’s why we built that.

Joe: That’s great. That’s the number one support request that I get from my students. It’s not like, “This isn’t working,” it’s like, “I forgot my password,” or, “The password I thought I set isn’t working.” So I love that. When somebody gets into the log in screen, is this a custom design–? If I’m the user, let’s say. The AccessAlly user. Do I have a lot of flexibility in how I can design that? Do you make recommendations for the way the content should be laid out?

Nathalie: We do have some short codes that pre-style things. You basically can just pick a couple different colors, maybe change some wording. What we’ve seen that works really well too is on a log in page, for people who are returning. Maybe they do know their password. We’ll have on one side the log in area, and then on the other side a little bit more information about what’s behind the log in screen if they’re not a member, and if you do have a free log in opt-in how they can sign up for that. Basically, if you get to the log in page you can just go right away yourself, or register if you’re not a member yet. That has also helped increase conversions and opt-ins for people who may be heard about it and maybe clicked through, or just landed there. It gives them another option to join.

Joe: That makes sense. People might just see this course, copy the link to that and send it to someone who’s not logged in and they’re not going to be able to see that content. That’s really cool.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Pantheon. Starting a new project? Looking for a better hosting platform? Pantheon is an integrated set of tools to build, launch and run websites. Get high performance hosting for your WordPress sites, plus a comprehensive toolkit to supercharge your team and help you launch faster. On Pantheon, you get expert support from real developers, best in class security and the most innovative technology to host and manage your websites. You can sign up a new site in minutes with a free account, and you only pay when it goes live. That is my second favorite feature to Pantheon, only to the easy ability to create dev staging and live servers, and push to GitHub. It’s very easy to set those things up on Pantheon. You can head over to Pantheon.io today to set up a free account and pay only when it goes live. Thanks so much to Pantheon for their support of this episode and this season of How I Built It.

Joe: You said that for you specifically, you had this 30 day challenge where each day a new piece of it was dripped out over 30 days. Is that right?

Nathalie: Yes, that’s right.

Joe: And is that something that– Do you find that dripping out content works a bit better than just giving it to them all Netflix-style?

Nathalie: That’s a great question. I think it really depends on the content and also on the audience. For the way that we had done the challenge, it was like one small action step per day for 30 days. We didn’t want to overwhelm them with, “Here’s 50 things you can do to grow your list.” We just wanted it to be like, “OK. First start with your bio, then maybe think about a couple places to guest post, then maybe come up with a couple of topics.” We really wanted to make it doable, and I think that has worked really well for the 30 day challenge. Then also the way that we set it up was with progress tracking, so people can check things off. Even if they are ahead or behind, they at least know when they come back where they left off. That’s really good for something that’s a little bit longer like that. So that also gives us interesting stats about where people get stuck and  where the more difficult aspects of the course, or of the challenge, are. But I think it also depends. If somebody is super eager, we actually had people ask us if they could just pay a little extra, because it was free. So, could they pay to just get everything unlocked immediately, because they were ready to go. I do feel like there is definitely that “Got to have it now, I’m excited right now, I need to get moving.” I think it really depends, and then also there’s another alternative, which is sort of progress tracking related. You could basically have things unlock as people finish. That’s the other way to do it, too. It’s another interesting way. We actually did test that with a different offering that we had, and we actually found that having people have to complete something before they move on to the next thing actually slowed down their progress. I think doing dripped, or giving them everything, tends to work a little bit better. That’s just from our small tests with that.

Joe: Interesting. I’m actually going to anecdotally say that I found the same thing, I’ve gotten requests that– Because I always designed my courses in such a way that you need to know lesson one before you move on to lesson two, so it makes sense that you can’t get to listen two until you finish lesson one. And I have people who want to just jump around the course and say, “I want to know exactly how this works right now.” I think that makes a lot of sense. I used to lock down my courses so that it was progress based. Now, for me, it’s all open Netflix-style. But again, I like what you said about depending on the content. You’re not going to go into a college classroom on day one and you’ll get the syllabus and you’ll see what’s coming, but it’s not like the teacher is going to say, “Here’s all the homework that you’re going to get. Complete it whenever you can.”

Nathalie: There are also studies, and I think it depends on the topic like you said, but there are studies that show that if you learn material over time you actually retain it better. Depending on what you’re trying to learn, like maybe you’re trying to learn a new language or you’re trying to learn a musical instrument or something, in that case those courses might be better dripped over time. Versus something where it’s technical, or something where you want to just be able to figure it out and get it going. Which might be a little bit of a different topic.

Joe: Yeah, right. Just-in-time learning, I think is what Christ Badgett from Lifter has talked about.

Nathalie: Absolutely.

Joe: You need something now, versus– Because again, if you– Just to talk  education for a little bit, I love this. If you do drip things out over time you can now reinforce previous lessons over time, and that’s going to be really important because students retain 5% of what they learn just hearing it once, versus maybe hearing it over time, versus actually doing it where they retain like 95% of what they’ve learned. So again, I really like your approach. I think it’s very helpful and it’s definitely something that I’m going to be able to apply to my own courses.

Nathalie: Awesome.

Joe: Cool. So, we talked a little bit about– First of all, I’m sorry if I missed this. Is this built on top of WordPress, or is this–?

Nathalie: Yes, it is.

Joe: OK, cool. So actually let’s talk about that for a minute, because this is a seemingly pretty big platform, and WordPress gets knocked for things like performance and feature bloat. Can you talk about some of the things that you did to make sure that users have a snappy experience?

Nathalie: Absolutely. We have a very– I think part of it is because we are using it ourselves, so because we were using it ourselves and we had a lot of people visiting the website it had to be fast. Some of the things that we did that we saw other plugins were, they would check the CRM every time the page loaded to check if they had permissions. With AccessAlly we basically store all of the tags that this person has locally on WordPress. We know exactly what they have permissions for, we know exactly all of the information that we need that’s relevant from the CRM. Then we also pass it back to the CRM only when required. So when there is an update, then we’ll send it back, but we don’t basically try to maintain this always-on connection between the CRM and WordPress. That definitely reduced any issues that we had with site loading and speed, and then the other thing is a lot of it happens under the hood. We do have some interface elements and some beautiful things that load code, but for the most part it is underpinning everything so that we can optimize and make sure that’s running smoothly, for sure.

Joe: Awesome. I love that. Making sure that you’re only making outside requests when you need to, because that does slow things down a bit. So, very cool. You were able to build this really– For the listeners, I’m not saying that WordPress is inefficient, I’m saying this is a common critique of WordPress. AccessAlly is proving that it’s not necessarily the case that it’s WordPress’ fault.

Nathalie: I think another thing about that too is if you are installing a lot of different plugins and themes and things, sometimes developers might load different libraries and different things when they don’t need to across different pages or even on the back end of WordPress. With AccessAlly we try to stay within our box and within our little area, so that we’re not  calling a bunch of things or loading extra code that we don’t need to. Sometimes we do see those issues with other plugins and things, so we try to keep our code as clean as we can.

Joe: That’s great, and that’s a big benefit of coding it yourself. Because with Creator Courses decided I wasn’t going to write– I was going to write as little code as possible. I wanted to focus on the content. I did a performance test last week, as we record this, last week. I got an F. I’m like, “What in the world is happening here?” on GT metrics, so not just Google page speed, like this other one. I got an outside opinion, or a second opinion. I looked and it was making over 100 HTTP requests for different libraries, the image sizes were too big. I thought they were being optimized. I know it’s not my host, because I use Liquid Web. So I did some digging and I was like, “All of these plugins are calling things when they shouldn’t, loading stuff when they shouldn’t.” I was able to do a couple of things to get it down to a B, and now my my weekend “side project” is going to be building a plugin to basically DQ scripts on pages where I don’t need those scripts.

Nathalie: Sounds awesome.

Joe: I have the ability to do that, because I’m a programmer, but it’s frustrating like you said that other plugins maybe won’t stay in their lane or won’t check to see if jQuery is a loaded first before they load their own version of jQuery. Like that’s–

Nathalie: Exactly, yeah.

Joe: So, cool. That’s Joe’s lament for today. So, we talked a little bit about how AccessAlly started. You have a lot of great features for that person who needs the all in one platform. What are your plans for the future?

Nathalie: We have some very specific upcoming releases that are just adding more internationalization, so we have a lot more global customers than we expected. We have to have tax compliance for different countries, like the EU, and so that’s coming out really soon. Then also just translation options as well, that’s coming on the horizon. Then we’re just working to continuously improve the UI and UX, especially when it comes to the checkout experience. Because I think that is the point where people make money, so we want to make sure that it’s optimized, that it’s beautiful, that people have different options for that. Especially using what we’ve learned as the last couple of years have evolved to keep improving the product. Those are the big things I would say, and then we are actually growing the team too. So there’s a lot just behind the scenes, and not just software, but as the team continues to grow too.

Joe: That’s great. Congratulations on growing the team, that’s always a hard thing to do.

Nathalie: Thank you.

Joe: And more internationalization, I want to touch on this. Because I also didn’t really prepare my website for any international customers. Then someone was like, “I need this for VAT tax.” And I’m like, “Oh my God. Should I be doing something for VAT? I don’t understand.” So, that’s just another reason to go to a platform where you have the experts working on that stuff and handling it for you. I should ask about– Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but I will anyway, about GDPR. Is that something that was or that is of concern for you? Assuming that both of us are not lawyers, and so nobody should take what we’re saying as legal advice.

Nathalie: Absolutely. That was a really big thing when it first started to bubble up in our space, and I think that there’s definitely a lot of different ways to handle it. I think it comes down to some different CRMs. Basically the way that AccessAlly works, especially around passwords, is that the passwords are stored obviously on WordPress so you can log in, but then also in the CRM so you could do those auto log in links and stuff like that. Some CRMs have more GDPR friendly encryption for passwords, whereas others don’t. So that tended to be where we saw a big change in people. Like, “OK. Maybe ActiveCampaign was better, and vice versa,” different companies reacted differently to the GDPR. That was interesting. Then we try to store as little data as we can about  customers and clients, and obviously people can delete users, they can remove information that we’re storing so that’s not a problem. But yeah, obviously we think about GDPR and we want to make sure that people have a good experience. Then along that, we do have payment processing, and people can come in and update their credit card on file. If somebody logs into their account, we always say “They can update a credit card but they can’t see past– Like they can’t actually see the full number and credit card details, so they can just update but not view all the information that might be private.” We thought about some of that ahead of time, too.

Joe: Awesome. So that brings me to another question then that I’m pretty interested about. You’re doing the credit card processing on your side, are you– Did you have to go through PCI compliance for that? Or are you using a third party that is PCI compliant?

Nathalie: Yeah. We integrate with Stripe and PayPal, and then also with CRMs like Infusionsoft and ONTRAPORT, we basically integrate with their CRM e-commerce systems. Basically, if you have authorized.net or something integrated with those tools, we would basically process it through the API but using the Infusionsoft system. We’re not actually running the payment, so that keeps our hands clean and in another way too.

Joe: That’s great. Because I will, especially new web developers out there. That’s a cautionary tale. I’ve had clients who were like, “Just email us the credit card information.” And I’m like, “That makes all of us liable. And also, that’s an insane thing.” If you’re going to be working with payments, definitely use something like Stripe or PayPal, or make sure that the thing that you are using has what’s called PCI compliance to make sure that they are doing everything the right way.

Nathalie: Absolutely.

Joe: Cool. One more note on the GDPR thing, what you were saying about the CRMs is so right. ConvertKit, comparing ConvertKit to MailChimp. MailChimp was like per month, “Here’s everything we’re doing for GDPR.” With ConvertKit the day before GDPR like went into effect they were like, “We talked to two lawyers, and I don’t know. It’s pretty like–“

Nathalie: It’ll be fine.

Joe: “So here’s a way that you could tag EU people. Have at.” and then I’m like, “I guess. If they’re–” I don’t know. It’s all very confusing. I suspect that the EU is probably not going to sue me, but again, not a lawyer. We have covered a lot. I have a lot of notes here. A lot of really good stuff. But I still need to ask, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Nathalie: I was trying to think of what my trade secrets would be. I would say,  really listening to our people has been probably the way that we’ve grown. Then also listening to directly to our customers, and then also not listening to people who might not be as connected to our markets. We’ve had a lot of people tell us that our pricing is too high, that we should lower our pricing. Or, especially in the beginning, we had a lot of pink on the website and it was not very male friendly, so we had that  feedback as well. Some of that, we definitely listened and made sure that it landed. We were like, “OK. There was too much pink.” So now we have more blue. But at the same time, we realized our pricing was fair for what we provide and we knew that we are continuing to improve the product, and our customers who are the right fit absolutely love it and appreciate it. So, just sticking to your guns and then listening to the customers themselves when they have a concern or when they have a feature request, that has been huge for us too.

Joe: That’s great. So you’re listening to the people who are putting their money where their mouth is, and not the people who just like to give out their opinions like candy.

Nathalie: Exactly.

Joe: I like that. We’re recording on Halloween, everybody. So that’s top of mind for me. I will say that I couldn’t wear pink, like I’ve got a darker– I’ve got that Southern Italian complexion. But I’ve been seeing more pink on websites and I’ve been digging it. I think it’s a nice color. That said, you clearly know you’re doing, but most people who said that pink is not masculine enough. I don’t buy that. And again, what you said reminded me of how I go to Disney World a lot and I will hear people who are like, “You know what Disney should do?” And then just like whatever is good for them at the time. And I’m like, “Disney probably thought about this for more than like the two minutes that you just thought about it.” I always I always find that funny, people are like “I’m immediately the expert in the situation.”

Nathalie: Right.

Joe: Awesome. Well Nathalie, thank you so much for your time. This was great. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?

Nathalie: Absolutely. Come over to AccessAlly.com, or if you want to go check out the 30 Day List Building Challenge, that’s still available at 30DayListBuildingChallenge.com. You’ll actually experience AccessAlly, because it’s built on the platform, so you can play with it and see what it looks like. Obviously, if you have a business and you want to build your e-mail list, that’s perfect too.

Joe: That’s awesome. I’m going to link both of those in the show notes, but I’m just saying. 30DayListBuildingChallenge.com, you learn how to build your list and also you get to trial this product. Brilliant. Nathalie, thanks so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.

Nathalie: Yeah, this was great. Thank you, Joe.

Outro: Thanks so much Nathalie for joining me today. I really appreciate her taking the time and offering her fantastic advice about building out a product, and listening to your customer. My question of the week for you is how are you going to connect better with your customers? I for one am going to actually reach out to them and make phone calls, and talk to them voice to voice, person to person, and get the temperature of the courses that I’m offering so that I can offer a better product to them. Let me know, how are you going to connect your customers? You can e-mail me Joe@HowIBuilt.it or you can find me over on Twitter @jcasabona. All of the show notes for this episode will be over at HowIBuilt.it/109. I again want to thank our sponsors for this week, Pantheon and Plesk. Make sure to check both of them out. They are fantastic and great supporters of the show. If you want to support the show, and you liked this episode, head over to Apple podcast and leave us a rating and review. It really helps people discover the show. Until next time, get out there and build something.

PJ Taei and Uscreen

October 2, 2018

Sponsored by:
  • Backblaze: Get a free 15 day trial!
  • Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.

PJ Taei is the founder of Uscreen, a video on demand service for people who are serious about selling videos. Whether it’s your online course or a video series, they have you covered. In this episode, PJ and I talk about controlling your platform and making videos as easy as possible.

Show Notes

View on separate page

Transcript

Intro:
Hey everybody. Welcome to episode 96 of How I Built It. Today my guest is
PJ Taei, founder of UScreen. That’s UScreen.tv. It’s an online video
website where you can create your courses, sell your videos, things like
that. Now I am all about services like this because I’m big into online
education and making that process as easy as possible is super important to
me.

PJ understands this market and everything that needs to be done to make
creating your own online courses, or even your own online TV series, really
simple while still maintaining complete control. We’re going to get to all
of that in a minute, but first I want to tell you that this episode is
brought to you by Pantheon, our season-long sponsor and Backblaze, a brand
new sponsor I’m excited to have this week.

Break:
This episode is brought to you by Backblaze. As someone who works online
all the time from home, I know how important offsite backups are. That’s
why I use Backblaze. For just $5 a month you can fully back up your Mac or
PC no matter how much space you need. It’s all unlimited. They make it
super easy to do it, too. Just install their app on your computer, and they
take care of the rest. That’s why they’ve already backed up over 600
petabytes of data. You’ll learn more about them later in this episode, but
do yourself a favor, and start the backup process now for just $5 a month.
Go to Backblaze.com/buildsomething.

Joe Casabona
: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast
that asks, “How did you build that?” Today, my guest is PJ Taei of UScreen.
PJ, how are you today?

PJ Taei
: All right, I’m doing well, Joe. I’m happy to be here.

Joe:
Thanks for joining me. You reached out, and your platform looks very
interesting, so I am excited to talk to you about it. Why don’t you tell us
a little bit about who you are, and how you came up with the idea for
UScreen?

PJ:
Absolutely. As you said, my name is PJ. I’m located in Washington DC, we
work out of Washington DC, and two of our head people– myself and two
other developers are here. Everyone else is remote. We’re a remote team,
and we started UScreen about four years ago when I saw a need for an
easy-to-use, all-inclusive video-on-demand platform. And that’s what
UScreen is. It allows you to launch your own streaming service, make money
selling your own videos, or build your own Netflix-type service. Whenever I
say that everyone gets it pretty quickly. We started the idea conception
about three and a half, four years ago tops.

Joe:
Very cool. So, a common use case might be that I have an idea for a series
that might be a good YouTube channel idea, but I’m owning much more of the
experience than I would on YouTube. Is that right?

PJ:
Sort of. A lot of our customers have very solid, good followings on
YouTube. But YouTube you’ll make money on ad revenue, so if you have lots
and lots of views, you’ll make some money. The percentage payouts are very
low on YouTube. UScreen is for someone who wants to sell video directly to
their audience. Make a sale, and then you can view the content. Think of it
as a fitness company who will charge $50 a month, or $30 or $10 a month to
gain access to view their content. Any fitness videos service, educational
content like if you’re teaching English, then you might charge $9.95 to
gain access to all your content and teach everyone a series of content. To
teach them how to dance, English, fitness, ballet, Zumba uses us. The
content is all over the place, any vertical works.

Joe:
Very cool. I have my own online courses, I host the videos over on Vimeo,
and then the entire platform is built on top of WordPress and WooCommerce.
Maybe you could give a good list of the differences between that and
UScreen? I’m seeing on your features you have customization and hosting,
learning tools, marketing payments. Is this an all-in-one platform for
somebody who might want to have a series of online courses?

PJ:
Absolutely. I’m happy you brought that up. Definitely WordPress, Vimeo
plugin, and then a membership plugin like WooCommerce or Memberful. Those
three pieced together, and then maybe you might need an analytics tool as
well. All those on WordPress is an alternative to UScreen. One software
versus four plugins is one way you can look at it. The difference is we do
everything under one roof for a small monthly fee and no rev share, where
you are building multiple pieces of the same concept with multiple
different plugins. Because WordPress is a CMS system, but it’s made for
everything. Hosting a website, blog, everything. You have to plug in a
bunch of tools to make it a membership subscription video platform.

We give you all of those tools under one roof, and on top of that, we give
you analytics. Lots of subscription analytics. You can see your lifetime
value share and all that good stuff, and then we also give you a branded
app. One thing you would have to do is go and spend $5, $10, $20,000 per
platform and build yourself an iOS app, publish that app to the app store,
and then go to your audience and your friends and family and say, “Do you
want to watch my podcast, or my show and videos and all that good stuff?
Download this app,” and then whether it’s free or pay a service fee to gain
access to my content.

For a small monthly fee, we give you access to your iOS and Android apps,
and then you can also have TV apps as well. We do everything from the app
publishing all the way to the video hosting, and we give you the CMS
system, we give you themes that are ready to go that are perfect for
subscription video services. You can use them for fitness, and you can use
them for education, all that good stuff under one roof. It’s pretty much
comparing a plugin of multiple tools, vs. one, “I’m ready to go.” I always
say, “You bring your content. We do everything else.” That’s all you have
to do on UScreen.

Joe:
Great. And that’s fantastic because I’m a developer by trade and I have
know-how and experience to do something like set up an educational platform
quickly using WordPress. But there’s a decision that you need to make how
you want to run your business. Do you want to focus on content, or do you
want to focus on content and also be the technical support person? If your
site goes down, you have to fix it. If a plugin breaks, you have to fix it.
It depends on what you want to focus on as the business owner.

PJ:
Absolutely, that’s correct. A lot of time, as you said you’re a developer,
a lot of time is put into just setting up WordPress. Imagine getting
multiple plugins, then you’ve got to update WordPress to keep it going, and
still, it’s not optimum performance for a video core service. It’s pieced
together, so you have to research and see what plugin does what, and what
doesn’t and all that good stuff. It is a time-to-value type thing.

Joe:
Right. And looking at your pricing here, the cost of the pro package for
one year is going to be less than what you would pay a developer to do that
if you didn’t have the know-how. I love WordPress, I love the whole
ecosystem and doing things, but there’s the developer side of me and then
the business side of me. It’s like, “How do I want to spend my time, and
how do I want to spend my money?”

PJ:
Correct. And remember, a Vimeo business package is still $30 or $40 a
month. We host all your videos unlimited, unlimited streaming bandwidth, on
any other middle to higher packages with the apps. You still get a lot of
savings there, as far as streaming resources and server resources. You
don’t need your own server. WordPress, you’ve got to host your own server.
You could pay anywhere between $30, $40, $50 or $100 a month depending on
the number of traffic because Vimeo videos are resource intensive. We host
the complete server and videos for you.

Joe:
Yeah. That’s a great point too. There’s a lot to think about. I’m not
weighing in one way or the other. I do things one way, and I’m seeing this
other way. But a lot can go into the decision-making process, and
Ustream.tv looks like a way for you to focus on the thing that you want to
do best. As we talk about that you said about four years ago, you found a
need, and you saw a need for a service like this. What research did you do,
what led you to that conclusion?

PJ:
Absolutely. What led me to the conclusion of seeing a need and launching
the platform was, in my case, almost accidental. Because of my previous web
hosting company which I ran and operated for 12 years, WebNet Hosting,
which I sold in October 2016 to a Canadian corporation called
EntirelyDigital. I hosted a lot of sites and servers throughout my life in
the hosting company. The last few years of the hosting company’s life I saw
a lot of companies wanting to host video. Video is growing and booming, and
they were trying to host it, but sell it and monetize it. Some of the only
ways that they were able to do that because they would come to us as the
host provider asking questions, “Do you have a simple way to– Can you guys
host video? How can I sell it, can I set a price?”

The only real way to do that was Vimeo on Demand, for example, which takes
10%. It’s a marketplace. Vimeo has turned its back on it. It’s a pretty
clunky platform. There was data available, and there was putting it on
Wistia and then building your complete WordPress site. And doing all the
plugins and stuff, which we discussed. And then there’s the hosting of the
actual media server, which is very complicated, which would be like Wowza
media server. So I didn’t see too many good solutions in 2013, ’14 for
something like that. There were bits and pieces that you had to put
together. I did some preliminary research with looking at our current
customers on hosting, and seeing if they’re willing to pay for that type of
service. “What’s out there?” Market research, even if it’s just from
Google.

Just doing some basic searches and seeing what comes up and what’s
available. It’s good to see the competition. You do want to see that, and
you want to see that there is competition and that they have customers,
your competition has customers. Then you’ll quickly figure out that there
are better ways of doing things. For example, for us was, “Vimeo is taking
a rev share. So we shouldn’t charge a rev share. How can we make it work,
and not charge a rev share?” Believe it or not, if you’re starting out rev
share is good. Because you’re like, “I can pay nothing and start out, and
pay 10, 20, 30% percent.”

But our average customer, and we have about 1,100 paying customers now,
makes about $3,300 a month. On a 10% rev share, and some of our competitors
take up to 30%, that’s a lot. That’s $3, $400 a month, and they’re going to
charge you for video and bandwidth and all that. No app. It gets expensive
very quickly. So, there are some value points that you will find that you
can do right off the bat. But again, basic market research. Looking at
Google and seeing who’s out there. “Hey, I have competitors. Do they have
customers?” That’s always one great way to start.

Joe:
That’s a great point. There’s going to be two reasons why there’s no
competition, either somebody hasn’t thought of this yet, or the much more
likely, people have thought of it, but it’s not necessarily a viable
business option.

PJ:
Absolutely. That’s correct.

Break:
Today’s episode is brought to you by Pantheon. WordPress 5.0 and the new
editor Gutenberg are coming. Are you prepared? Do you want to learn about
the changes in advance? Pantheon has gathered resources to help you
prepare, including webinars and tutorials. Pantheon also has made it easy
and free to try Gutenberg with your site before the official launch. Visit
Pantheon.io/Gutenberg. Let them know that How I Built, It sent you. Now,
back to the show.

Joe:
You saw the need, you did the research to see what competition was out
there, and then you adjusted your business model. I’m part of a mastermind
group. I go to conferences and network a lot, and I talk to people and
bounce ideas off of other people. Did you talk to anybody about maybe the
initial feature set, or pricing, business advice? Anything like that?

PJ:
Yeah, initially I did. And it would be a series of people. When I started
out knowing that I want to start this VOD platform, I joined an incubator
which is called 1776 and it’s local and in Washington DC. So that helps. If
you have any startup advising incubator, I would say if you have a startup
incubator near some metropolitan area near you, they offer good advising.
You can get help for free, and that helps a lot. That was one way I started
out, just getting to better understand how I can go to market, and so
forth. I experimented with pricing initially, and then I spoke to
customers, that helps a lot.

You want to make sure that you as the founder, owner starting out, you call
your customers and you get the feedback. Because if a salesperson does it,
which I had my hosting sales person do it initially, they’re going to sell
it. You do want to sell it, but you don’t have a product. So when a
salesperson sells something they hype it up, “Would you pay for a video
service that had lots of features and an app, and you could stream it on
TV? And then you could even buy in-app purchases, and you’re going to make
more revenue? You can compete with Netflix,” You tell that to the average
person they’re going to get very excited, so you’re going to almost get
false feedback.

Rather you want to be the owner of the company calling and saying, “Listen
I know you’re selling and already streaming videos, and individually on
your website, it’s broken. Would you pay for a service rather than selling
your DVDs, would you pay for a service on the web and pay a monthly fee to
get additional apps?” You get a different vibe from the customers, and
that’s how you want to validate your concept. You want to be the one
getting out of the building, as they say, to get your initial feedback.

Joe:
That’s interesting because people might view the founder, the owner, the
first employee number one as not only the mastermind behind the product but
also the salesperson. But what you’re saying makes a lot of sense, because
“Do you think this is a good idea?” Versus, “Would you pay money for this?”
They’re two very different questions. And like you said, you’ll get a false
positive from the first one.

PJ:
Absolutely. That’s correct. And you want to call a series of customers, and
you want to make sure you’re not selling it to them. You’re almost getting
advice.

Joe:
Great. Then along with that advice you have the feature set or at least the
things that people might be disappointed in with their current solution.
The things that might make them jump ship for a new product.

PJ:
Absolutely. That’s correct.

Joe:
Fantastic. We are about at the halfway mark, which is when I like to ask
the title question. How did you build it? You’re the founder of this
company, and it sounds like you have a bit of a technical aspect, technical
background to you. Did you put down any code, were you the architect of the
feature set? What was your role in building UScreen?

PJ:
Yeah. I did not code. I’m not a developer, but I had a technical
background. I was initially in IT, and I was a Microsoft Certified systems
engineer. I have background as far as computers go and networking and Cisco
stuff, but I’ve never been a coder. I can read and understand HTML. That’s
the extent of it. It was a huge learning curve to learn how to build a
software, I had never built a software, and I will say that’s one of the
hardest things I’ve done. Not so much building the code, developers can do
that, but building the right product for the right audience with the right
set of features. Because if you build all the features, it’s not going to
work. Guaranteed.

The features that you build need to be right for your audience, and they
need to be easy to use, if you build too fast they’ll have bugs. If they’re
hard to use, then people won’t use it. So figuring out exactly the right
formula to build the right features for the right audience, is probably for
me, the hardest part. Because you’re going to have to figure out your
product market fit early on so you can build for them. Because if you find
that out too late, or later down the line which is what we did, then, in
that case, you’re building tools for customers or a potential audience that
doesn’t need those tools.

Initially, when starting out if your marketing is good– because I had a
hosting background and I had launched an online company before, so my
online marketing and all that stuff, I was up to par. I knew what I needed
to do. It was quick for me to get off the ground, launch a website, get it
SEO-optimized, start writing content, optimize it, get ranked. Build your
conversion funnel, all that stuff. Landing pages. I got all that down very
quickly, and I already knew how to do it. It was just a matter of
executing. What happens initially is you’re going to get a lot of
customers. And I’m not saying “A lot” of customers, you’re going to get a
“wide variety” of customers.

Joe:
Ah.

PJ:
You’re going to get ten customers, and they’re all wanting different
things, but your marketing looks cool, and you sold it to them, so they’re
going to sign up. But they want to do different things, so who are you
going to build for? You’re going to have to say “no” to a certain group of
customers, and “yes” to the other group of customers. You have to figure
that out early on. So, how I built it initially was I started contracting
different companies. I initially looked in Poland because I knew they did a
lot of Rails. I did know I wanted to build on Rails, just because it was up
and coming. It’s clean, and it was still affordable rather than PHP for
example.

PHP is more affordable, but I just wanted to specifically write on rails
because I knew it was the future. It’s a cleaner framework. I looked for
contracting companies in Poland, and I shopped for rates, I shopped for
personality, I shopped for expertise, and I went through two, three
companies within the first six months. Just writing code, playing with
concepts, and stuff like that. And I spent money doing that. It’s not cheap
to hire developers. Until they really build and get out there, you’re going
to spend some money doing that. Then what we did was we hired started
hiring our developers, bringing them in under that same umbrella of the
outsourcing companies, and then eventually phasing them out.

We phased them out from the day we launched, about 15, 16, 18 months later
max. We had our team. Because it’s the only way to build properly, is to
stay away from development companies unless you know exactly what you’re
going to do. Which 99% of newly-found founders probably don’t. That’s just
my opinion. You know exactly what you’re going to do, you’re always going
to pivot, if you know exactly what you’re going to do then maybe you can
find a contracting company and say, “Build this exactly like this in this
framework,” but if you have any deviations in any way you’re going to spend
a lot of money with people that don’t work for you, which are not fully
vested, building proof of concept. It can get expensive quickly.

Joe:
Gotcha. That’s another very interesting perspective, as somebody who has
come from the agency world we got hired by people to build websites for
them. But this wasn’t their product, and this was something to help promote
their business or their product. It sounds like having your own team if you
have a digital product, is super important for the things that you just
mentioned. First of all, you have a group of people who understand the code
base and how the product works well. And then you have people who are
vested in the project, it’s not just a job for them., it’s their career. As
opposed to hiring out a contractor that is not sure if they’ll have that
contract in six months, or whatever. Does that sound about right?

PJ:
Absolutely, that’s correct. Contractors, especially with designing a
product, you want to be vested in there. You want to own up to it. There’s
challenges, like one day you’re going to be like, “Build this,” literally
seven days later you’re going to be like, “No.” People get de-motivated
pretty quickly. You’re going to have the same challenges with an internal
team. Too. It takes a lot to hire a developer, and you don’t know much
about development. And then be able to motivate that person and let
everybody know that this is going to succeed. There’s a lot of challenges
outside of– What I mean is, there’s a lot of challenges to making the
company work.

And it’s not just getting customers. Getting your team to perform and build
a software is a huge challenge, marketing and getting customers is another
challenge. Just having a platform is not going to get your business. You’re
going to have to market it. But if you can build a platform or a software
or an app that works a specific way for an audience, I think it’s an
advantage, because it’s not easy to build software for the average founder,
for example. That’s why they say if you have any technical background it
helps. I’m technical but I’m not a technical developer, so it doesn’t help
me too much. I had to learn my way in and out.

Joe:
Absolutely. Especially since today, I’m a developer, but I’m a front-end
developer. If I were to go off and build some big platform, I would need
somebody who understands server architecture, and somebody who understands
caching and stuff a little bit better than I do. Even as a developer with
technical knowledge I can’t confidently build a good product on my own. I
need other people who have different areas of expertise.

PJ:
That’s correct. You said that right, you’re front end and you don’t know
back end, but still, you have a good understanding. Just being a developer
would help a lot, rather than me I was fully green on– I knew what the
difference between front end and back and was, but I was still pretty green
as far as architecture, plugging everything in together, proof of concept,
and all that good stuff. Any development background helps.

Joe:
Absolutely. There’s one more thing I want to touch on here, and that’s the
idea of building a company culture, which is something that you can more
easily do with your own employees. You talk about how you want people to be
vested in the product, can you talk a little bit about what that’s like?
Having a company culture, I imagine, allows everybody to rally around this
thing and make them feel like they’re part of something.

PJ:
Absolutely, that’s correct. See, we’re a remote team. There’s twelve of us
now. Me and my head developer are in DC because he lives here, but everyone
else is remote. Being remote seems cool, but it’s harder. It is. Being a
remote business, it’s harder to do business, and the reason is one, time
management. You don’t know what people are doing and how efficient you are
working from home. Now there’s tools and stuff to help with that, and
obviously, you’re going to learn project management better, which is what I
did, and then I learned to manage them better. But the upside is that it’s
more affordable. That’s why we started out remote, because we’re a
bootstrap company and we’re self-funded, and I’m the only funder.

So hiring a developer at $8, $10,000 a month in DC, needing three of them
and app developers was not even feasible. That’s $50,000 a month in
development fees which is at a time when you don’t even know what you’re
building. Spend that for a year, or until you figure it out. Remote helps
that. Building a company culture with a remote team is not easy. It’s
harder. We were lucky that one of my traits is, I’m able to just from
experience, I can immediately within a few interviews of a few different
candidates I could tell which one will probably be a fit for us. Just from
experience of hiring and firing I’ve learned that. We luckily, knock on
wood, have a really good team now. The culture, you can feel it, that
everybody’s hard working and they want to succeed, they want the app to
work.

Then we obviously have had some growing pains with certain people in our
company that have left, and just not matched and so forth. It’s easy to
tell. But the core of the group sticks together, and it’s a really solid
team. Building a culture around that you get with experience, you do. You
start to hire different skill sets and different types of people, but they
have similarity in where they want to go. They want the company to succeed,
and they know you are a bootstrap. They like the product, and they like
what’s going on. That gets a little bit easier as you go along and as the
product matures because you’re going to hire people and you’re going to be
like, “We have 1,000 customers. Here they are, here’s what they’re doing,
here’s how much money they make. Here’s their challengers. This is the
bugs. These are the things we want to do,” so people are like, “Wow. All
right, stuff is happening.”

Rather than at the beginning, you’re like, “Listen. We want this, and the
market is big, we want to acquire customers. It’s possible for us to get to
this MRR. Here’s all the stuff they want, and we want to do.” And then as
you’re going through that process, there’s a lot of doubts, and there’s a
lot of failures, and there’s a lot of features you’re going to motivate the
heck out of your team, and then the feature is going to get trashed. People
get de-motivated, that happens. That’s something that I learned with
developers is, I don’t understand this, I’ve always learned how to work
hard, and there’s good times and bad times and if something doesn’t work
you trash it and you move on. But developers tend to say, “I’m burned out.
I’m de-motivated.”

That means they put their heart into building a feature that you motivated
them for three months, and they built it for another three months. So six
months was spent and then all of a sudden it’s not used anymore. And that
happened a lot with us, and we kept trashing features. That’s de-motivating
for a team, and you do lose that culture eventually, but obviously, you
have to stay on top of it. It is a full-time job to keep people happy.
That’s why now I understand as I’m getting older and running businesses,
you need project managers. You got to get people to be on top of things.

Break:
This episode is brought to you by Backblaze. Earlier I mentioned the
importance of offsite backups, and how for just $5 a month Backblaze can
get you unlimited space on their servers. You may be wondering, how easy
are restores? Not only can you access backups from their mobile apps, use
their desktop app to initiate restores, and share backup files through
links, but you can even do a restore by mail. You can buy a backup on a
flash key or a hard drive, and they will mail it to you. Send the hard
drive back, and get a full refund. Don’t get caught without a backup. For
just $5 a month you can get unlimited backups with Backblaze. That’s like,
one drink at Starbucks. Visit Backblaze.com/buildsomething to get started
today. That’s Backblaze.com/buildsomething.

Joe:
I like to equate development with artwork, in a sense. Because it’ like you
said, you have these developers pouring their heart and soul into making
something that is good and then it gets trashed. Or maybe someone finds a
lot of bugs, or someone says it’s not very well built, and you take that
hard. I suspect that’s why developers don’t like testing their own code,
because you’re actively trying to break your own code. And that’s not
something you want to do because you just put all this time into it. That’s
very interesting.

And as somebody who works from home, self-employed and came from a remote
team, I understand the difficulty of having a remote team and still trying
to build that culture. Or even just somebody working from home all the
time, I’m an extrovert, and I like having face time with people, and going
out there in a co-working space helps. But you see the challenges of
building a culture with people who are all over the world, different time
zones, different countries and stuff like that.

PJ:
That’s true, that’s a great way to put it.

Joe:
Great. We are coming up on time, so I want to ask you these last two
questions. We know where UScreen is today, what transformations has it gone
through since the first launch and what are your plans for the future?

PJ:
Yeah. It’s gone through a lot of transformations. Initially, we thought our
product was for anyone with any video, that’s trying to monetize videos.
Even an individual with one video that’s just trying to sell a course. Our
platform works perfectly for someone like that, but you’re more likely to
succeed if you have a few hours of content so you can build a video
business around it. It’s transformed a lot, the platform has gone from lots
of features, to still having a lot of features but they work well, they’re
tweaked, and they’re easy to use. We’ve made a lot of transformations on
the look and feel the back end, and we’re completely updating our themes
and adding a lot of beautiful themes that allow you to build your site just
like Netflix. It’s pretty crazy. We have a lot of good stuff coming, and
we’ve gone through some transformations.

Joe:
Very cool. That sounds great, especially because with my theme I had to
make some customizations to make sure that video was prioritized, as
somebody who has video courses I want to make sure that the videos are nice
and big on a desktop, and then look good on mobile too. Maybe you can speak
to this a little bit, and I find a lot more people are consuming my content
on mobile devices.

PJ:
Absolutely, yeah. It’s crazy. It’s 60% of our average users watching
content on mobile. It’s 60%. There’s no doubt. So that’s why the apps do
well. You have a Netflix app on your phone? We give you the same thing
under your name, so How I Built, It would be an app.

Joe:
That sounds good. I should have a How I Built It app. That sounds
fantastic. And then I always like to end with this question, which is, do
you have any trade secrets for us?

PJ:
Trade secrets? Yeah. One trade secrets could be hire people smarter than
you. An investor in San Francisco told me that once, and I was like, “Why
would you want to do that though?” I thought to myself as soon as he said
it to me, “Why would you want to do that? They’ll take over your business.”
But no, that’s the wrong way to think. The world is moving so fast, and
technology is moving so fast. SaaS is so complex, and building software
still is very hard, but it’s getting easier by the day. You want really
smart people on your team. It’s not easy to do business online, and it
isn’t. That’s why so many companies fail. I every night think about ways
that we don’t want to fail, like what I can do to succeed, constantly. I
keep motivating the team. And I don’t let people get too comfortable.
That’s probably another trade secret, don’t get too comfortable. As soon as
companies make money, and I did this in my previous company, everybody gets
comfortable. That’s a downside because business is war, and the other
competitor that you don’t know about is coming for you. That’s one thing
that I would recommend, is not to get too comfortable too quickly.

Joe:
Wow, that’s two great pieces of advice. Hire people smarter than you
reminds me of why I left one of my previous jobs from years ago, I realized
that I was the– not to sound conceited or anything, but I realized I was
the best developer in the office. And I didn’t want to be that because I
realized that I wouldn’t be able to learn from anybody. I left, and then I
went to work at the agency that I was previously at, where everybody was
way smarter than me, and I learned a ton. Then don’t get too comfortable,
which is great. People see their businesses doing well, and they assume
their business will continue to do well and they can coast. But I say this
with the people who develop online courses all the time, specifically
online courses, this is not passive income. It’s maybe more passive, or
passive for short amounts of time. But if you run a business, it’s not
truly passive income if you want to do it right.

PJ:
That’s correct. It’s hard work, and it’s not easy, it’s not anything like
they make it sound like, where you’re self-employed, and you work your own
hours. It’s nothing like that. If you’re trying to build a company, it is
absolutely the opposite of that. But if you want to build an individual
consulting business, then yeah, it’s different.

Joe:
Awesome. PJ, thanks so much for taking the time and joining me today. I
appreciate it.

PJ:
Absolutely. It’s been a pleasure, Joe. Thank you very much.

Joe:
Where can people find you?

PJ:
Our website is UScreen.tv, and my e-mail is PJ@UScreen.tv, and I look
forward to hearing from anyone that wants to reach out to me. Happy to
speak to you.

Joe:
Awesome. I will link those in the show notes. Thank you PJ, thanks to our
sponsors, and thank you for listening. Until next time, get out there and
build something.

Outro:
Thanks so much to PJ for his time today. I appreciate the conversation that
we had. I love the UScreen service. It’s really interesting, and he gave us
a lot of really good advice. Be sure to check out everything he does in the
show notes. And thanks again to our sponsors, Backblaze and Pantheon. Both
of them offer fantastic resources, and you should check them out.

The question of the week for you is, are you thinking about starting an
online course? And if so, what is stopping you? Let me know on Twitter
@jcasabona, or e-mail me Joe@HowIBuilt.it. You can also join the Facebook
community over at HowIBuilt.it/Facebook. I’ll ask the question over there
too, and you’ll have the opportunity to discuss it with other listeners. I
want to build a strong community for this podcast and Facebook is the place
to do it.

Don’t forget to check out our new t-shirts and mugs over at the
HowIBuilt.it/shop. And as always, for all of the show notes head over to
HowIBuilt.it/96. If you liked the show, give it a rating review on Apple
podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people discover us,
and I’ve been seeing a lot of really great growth in the show over the last
few months. I appreciate your support. Thanks so much, and until next time,
get out there and build something.

Zach Tirrell and Loxi

August 14, 2018

Sponsored by:
  • Traitware: A faster, more secure way to login with WordPress
  • Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.

Today we’re talking to Zach Tirrell from Modern Tribe. We talk all about how they re-imagined that plug-in as Software as a Service called Loxi. We go over how they decided on which features to support, the importance of good design, and the tech stack, like using React. Speaking of React, We also talk a bit about Gutenberg.

Show Notes

View on separate page

Transcript

Pre-Intro: Hey everybody – before we get into today’s episode I want to tell you about my new podcast, Creator Toolkit, It’s a show where I take you through building specific projects on the web, or help you make important decisions. The current episode is about self-hosted vs. hosted. I’d love if you checked it out at creatortoolkit.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Intro: Hey everybody and welcome to episode 89 of How I Built It. Today we’re talking to Zach Tirrell from Modern Tribe. Modern Tribe is a supporter of this show through their WordPress plugin, The Events calendar. In this episode we talk all about how they reimagined that plug as Software as a Service called Loxi. We go over how they decided on which features to support, the importance of good design, and the tech stack, like using React. Speaking of React, We also talk a bit about Gutenberg.

Sponsors: This week’s episode is brought to you by Traitware and Pantheon. We’ll hear about them a little later on, so for now…on with the show.

 

Joe Casabona: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Zach Tirrell, director of product for Modern Tribe. Zach, how are you?

Zach Tirrell: I’m doing great. How are you?

Joe: I am fantastic. It is the end of June as we record this, so summer is going by a little bit fast. But I’m enjoying the nice weather and I got to enjoy a Yankee game yesterday. So I’m all excited.

Zach: Wow, that’s fantastic.

Joe: Yes. So I’m very excited to talk to you today. Modern Tribe has been a supporter of the show, but aside from that they are doing some very cool things. Zach, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Zach: I oversee all the products work for Modern Tribe on that side of our business. That means primarily The Events Calendar plugin and the various add-ons that folks are familiar with there. We have a few other smaller plugins, like Image Widget, for example. But mostly it’s events based, The Events Calendar event tickets, a lot of event based plugin work. And our newest offering which is a SaaS based solution called Loxi.

Joe: Nice. And Loxi is going to be primarily what we’re talking about today, but just to touch on something that you mentioned. Modern Tribe does both product and service work. Is that right? You guys do agency work?

Zach: That’s right. We have a we have a very large agency business here, that’s about 70% of our business and then our product side is about 30%. Almost 40%.

Joe: Nice. Very nice. So let’s jump right into it then. Why don’t you tell us about Loxi?

Zach: Sure. Loxi is a SaaS based calendar, like the WuFoo Form equivalent for calendars. Where you don’t have to have any infrastructure to set it up, you create an account you get an embed code and you can drop it on any site. A no-fuss based calendar. For this particular audience, it’s interesting to know that we built Loxi on top of The Events Calendar and the WordPress REST API.

It’s a product that leans into our existing codebase and experience in WordPress, but has an entirely brand-new fresh user interface, and no need for folks to worry about their own scaling or uptime or plugin updates or any of those things. Suddenly they go away and you just get a nice, easy, beautiful calendar to work with and put on any website. It’s not limited only to WordPress. You can put it anywhere.

Joe: That’s fantastic. Because essentially The Events Calendar is a WordPress only plugin.

Zach: Correct. The Events Calendar is a WordPress plugin. We’ve got a lot of reach there with 600,000 active installs, but Loxi opens up the ability for us to take that into a whole lot more corners of the internet.

Joe: Nice. When did this idea come into fruition? Where you’re like, “Let’s take The Events Calendar and turn it into a stat so we can reach that wider audience.”

Zach: we were talking about that right on day one when I joined Modern Tribe. Which was just over three years ago. That was the vision when I joined the team.we really wanted to take The Events Calendar and move it to a broader audience and to pivot it into SaaS.

And not entirely pivot, because we totally still plan to enhance and release The Events Calendar. It is the underlying core here of the SaaS. So both benefit at the same time. But the goal was definitely, from day one as far back as three years ago, to get us there. There was a lot of work we had to do first. But one of the interesting things that happened is just over a year ago, Jeff Graham who ran our support team here, was looking for a new opportunity.

He said, “I love managing support, my passion is support. But I want the opportunity to maybe build something. Like run it, do the strategy on it. Coordinate, design,” all those sorts of things. So Jeff came to us with that and then simultaneously we were thinking, “It’s finally opportunity for us to add another team to the product side, and have them build something new.

Some completely new solution. And we said, “The stars are lining up.” We had three options on the table. Jeff with his passion for support and our customer audience, one of the things he looked at was he said the opportunity to rebuild The Events Calendar Calendar’s user interface and also serve this need of expanding beyond WordPress sounded like an exciting journey for him.

So he took a lot of his customer experience and knowledge about what they wanted out of a solution, and brought that into this new role for himself. And he’s been the strategic leader on this. I clear a lot of hurdles for him and try to keep him protected, But Jeff very much was the strategy leader on Loxi and was able to come at it.

And I think anybody who uses that product can see that customer centric vision there. The interface is as minimal as we could make it, it tries to be really easy. We want it to be quick to create an event and also beautiful to do that, and to experience that. Versus WordPress, which we all love, But the WordPress admin UI is not the pinnacle of user interface design.

Joe: Absolutely. So there’s a couple of things that I want to mention there. First is, you’re absolutely right. People say that WordPress is very easy but it’s mostly people within the WordPress community. And we’re hoping that Gutenberg will make that better, and we’ll touch on maybe Gutenberg development a little bit later.

But the WordPress interface is rightfully going through some changes right now, which is good. The other thing that I want to mention is that it’s something that I hear more frequently on this show than is the perception. But you basically used your customer support knowledge to build a better product.

Zach: Absolutely.

Joe: That’s great. We touched on that a little bit with the GiveWP or the Give guys, GiveWP.com when they were on the show. And it’s been a reoccurring theme, “Listen to your customers. Listen to your customer support. Make sure the customer support guys are talking to the developer folks and you’ll end up with a better product.” I’m very glad to hear that echoed again here with Loxi.

Zach: Yeah absolutely. I think it’s expensive honestly to do a bunch of user testing and detailed UI work with groups and audiences, and do all of those kinds of usability tests. And we’ve certainly done some of that stuff. But being able to take someone who has been on the frontlines and has heard about all the rough edges, and have them come in and be like, “Here. Try to build this thing from scratch with all of that in mind.” it gives you a lot more implicit understanding about what customers want.

Joe: That’s fantastic. Very cool. Aside from that was there other research that you guys did? Did you guys look that competition, or you said that this was the plan basically from the day you came on. So what was that process like?

Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by Pantheon. WordPress 5.0 and the new editor, Gutenberg, are coming. Are you prepared? Do you want to learn about the changes in advance? Pantheon has gathered resources to help you prepare including webinars and tutorials. Pantheon has also made it easy and free to try Gutenberg with your site before the official launch. Visit pantheon.io/gutenberg. Let them how How I Built It sent you!

Zach: We did. Yeah. We’ve been we’ve been looking at this for a long time. The SaaS based calendar space is not empty. There’s plenty of folks who exist in there and there are people doing some really great stuff. And honestly one of the things we did early on was we reached out to a bunch of the existing players and said, “Is anybody tired? Does anybody just want to want to move to an acquisition?” which honestly wasn’t exactly what we wanted to do, because we wanted to leverage The Events Calendar. We wanted to take our plugin and put a new UI on top of that.

But if we could have taken a shortcut and snatch somebody up We would’ve. We talked to a half dozen different folks in the space to see if anybody was interested in going that route. Nothing really emerged from that, but honestly I had a lot of great conversations with a lot of players in the space.

So we’ve been thinking about it. One of the other things we did way back, and if You look back at our road map you can see some of this stuff. Where we’ve said, “If we’re eventually going to build this SaaS we need full support for the WordPress REST API. We’ve got to do that.” So we added REST API support into the plugin and we released that publicly, and there was a handful of other things we did.

We have actually not yet released this in our plugins, but we rewrote the whole way our backend recurring events infrastructure works. Which is a deceptively complicated feature. And Loxi is actually running on a new iteration of that backend. We haven’t yet released it publicly, we’re intending to but we’re just trying to work out all the backwards compatibility bugs, and make sure that everybody gets a smooth migration there. So that was fun.

But honestly, one of the things that I think is really interesting about what we did here, is since we were able to build a completely parallel team to support and build Loxi, we had this opportunity to hand pick a group and say, “These are the particular skills we want to build this thing from the ground up.” I don’t know if you’re familiar with Scott Kingsley Clark, who is famous for Pods?

We brought him in full time. He’s been working on Loxi for the past year. So we had some pretty strong technical chops that were able to come in and help us do a lot of the infrastructure, and keep contributing back to our core plugin. So he was constantly trying to think about, “How do we scale it? How do we build many, many calendars on top of this plugin?” So that was really fun to have him join the team and lend his expertise.

The other one is David Hickox who is a really great designer. He had been working on our agency side for a long time, and was also really interested in this challenge. Jeff and I got him real excited about it. So he was able to come in with almost a blue sky, thinking about, “How would I design the interface for a plugin?” He and Jeff just went back and forth on it for many months. Lots of prototypes. Lots and lots of prep work before we ever started writing a lot of a lot of code directly related to Loxi, but there was lots of infrastructural stuff we were working through.

Joe: That sounds fantastic. And this perfectly moves us into the title question, which is, “How did you build it?” You’ve assembled a great team of talent, you are working off of a preexisting codebase with The Events Calendar and working with the WordPress REST API.

How did you put that all together? How much of The Events Calendar needed to be rebuilt in order for this to work properly? You alluded to that, but just the overall process of converting a plugin to a SaaS.

Zach: The big things with the existing Events Calendar plugin that we needed to address was first getting it base-compatible fully with the REST API for updates, edits, deletes. The whole gamut. And while we were doing it, we knew we were going to be moving into a SaaS and we wanted to be able to move quickly. So we added a lot of testing. There’s lots and lots of testing that was added through this process.

We’re not at a point where we’ve got full coverage or anything like that. As far as The Events Calendar goes. But as part of this effort we did add a lot of testing to the base plugging. The bigger thing we had to do around The Events Calendar was address how to handle what we perceive eventually as reality, which is large data sets.

We knew that it needs to be very fast. The Events Calendar itself is always optimized for the absolute fastest way to retrieve data. Now we’re using the WordPress data structures with custom post types and all this, and post meta. So it’s not always the fastest. So we have to figure out, “How are we going to scale that aspect of it? How are we going to be able to do that?”

And Scott wrote an Events Calendar integration for ElasticSearch. I think we call it Elastic Events, which we wrote as an ElasticSearch, ElasticPress plugin. That was a big piece we had to build to make sure that this was all going to be fast. We actually just released that plugin for free last week. And we were excited about that. It was another piece where we were like, “Well we had to build this for ourselves. But anybody else doing this at scale should benefit from the work we did.” So we released that.

The piece where we had to do a lot of full rebuild work was around the interface. Loxi, the application is entirely React based. So we had to we had to rewrite everything. We brought on a React dev who’s crazy ridiculously good at his job. He pretty much all by himself rewrote all of these interfaces and views and stuff, purely in React.

We’ve got this snappy interface that’s real tight and feels modern, and it was a nice chance to reimagine that stuff. That was also a very costly endeavor, it took a lot of time and it took a lot of effort. We probably could have built things a lot cheaper if we hadn’t gone that route. But it’s what we wanted to do. It was our vision of what of what the product was going to be.

Something where that interface felt like it was getting out of your way, instead of getting in your way. And then it was very easy, and friendly and light to use, airy almost. And React gives us much more of that experience. Where you don’t have full page reloads happening. The interface just clicks right along.

Joe: that’s very interesting to me. I’m just getting into React development now, because I’m very late to every party. There’s a million JavaScript frameworks out there so I try to see which one is going to be the winner before I sink a lot of time into it. And it looks like you, maybe clairvoyantly, picked the winner. When you chose to use React, had Gutenberg been announced yet? Did you know? Or were you just like, “This is something backed by Facebook. It’s probably going to be around awhile.”

Sponsor: Are you as frustrated with usernames and passwords as I am? We believe you are and we created TraitWare Secure Login as the solution for all of us. TraitWare enables you, your staff and your customers and members a secure way to sign in that replaces usernames and passwords. With a simple, mobile-app or PC login, you can provide a better experience, increased security and reduce the risk of lost or stolen passwords.   TraitWare is the Secure Login you have been looking for. Check out a quick video on how to sign in with TraitWare and register to receive a How I built it coupon code at: https://www.secureloginapp.com/wordpress. Say Goodbye to Usernames and Passwords. Say goodbye to Phishing, Man In the Middle or Brute Force attacks. Never again create, forget, share, or lose a password for your WordPress site.

Zach: No, it had not been announced yet. If we go a little bit further back in our history. We, Modern Tribe, not the product side but the agency side. We decided that we were going to add React to our tool belt about two years ago now, and we relaunched our Try.b, our Modern Tribe company website, as a fully React based website on top of WordPress.

And one of our very strong JavaScript developers, Sam, wrote a fantastic article that got us a bunch of attention Two years ago about how we built that, and all of the details. And that’s a pretty great article. So that got us a bunch of attention and It also gave us some internal skills around it. We’ve then worked on a couple of agency projects that were really heavily React based, and so internal to Modern Tribe, that was the toolset we’d started to build.

We weren’t doing anything necessarily on the product side with it yet, but we said, “That’s what agency is doing. Those are the skill sets we have. If we hire somebody we actually know how to evaluate the skills. We could bring this guy in, and if he needs mentorship or starts to go off the reservation, we’ve got somebody who can help.” thankfully that wasn’t the case. Neale’s just ridiculously good.

He actually has helped even move some of the agency thinking forward in ways that are just a fun giving back, and that’s a common thing for our organization to do. They make an innovation and we grab a hold of it, and then we go a little further, and then shoot it back over the fence. There’s some give and take there.

But yes. So all that happened and then Gutenberg got announced and we were like, “It looks like we chose the right technology,” which was helpful. And then that’s helped us to start getting into some of that work. And honestly I feel like we are in a position to jump on that maybe a little bit more with both feet than some of the other folks in the space.

Joe: And another thing that you mentioned is that you wanted to make your plugin REST API ready, fully. And that’s also something that you need to do in order to support Gutenberg. You need to have that turned on when you define your custom post types, for example. So did you guys just jump feet first into Gutenberg development as soon as you thought it was stable enough to do so?

Zach: Yes. So what we did with Gutenberg is actually we had mostly held off. We were talking about it a lot, holding and circling it, but not 100% sure what we were going to do. And then I went to WordCamp US last December, and while I was there I was like, “This thing’s actually ready to go now. It’s still moving, there’s still a lot to be done here, but I can I can see it.” And so when I came back from WordCamp US I met with our strategists on the plugin side.

Her name is Leah. And actually, maybe not coincidentally, maybe it’s company structure. She also worked on our support team for a long time. She was in support, did a lot of company swag work and some of those kinds of things. But also had this passion for the user experience within our plugins, because she really understood that that user mindset. And so she quickly grew into the strategist role and has done a bang up job doing strategy for our plugins overall.

But I came back and met with Leah and I was like, “This Gutenberg thing has become real. I need you to go into a cave and figure out how we’re going to do this.” And actually our first real decision point there was, “Gutenberg’s a big deal. We’re going to have to invest a lot to really become compatible with it.” We had to decide, “Are we going to just survive the Gutenberg transition? Do the absolute minimum that we can do in order to have a functional product after it releases?” Which would have been a fine approach, and would have allowed us to continue to focus on a regular roadmap and some of the things that our customers are actively asking for.

Or do we say, “Gutenberg’s the future of WordPress. If we’re going to be on this train, not only do we need to participate in the discussions from here to release on what’s actually happening, but we need to push the edges of this and make our plugin a cornerstone of what that experience is going to be.” And I was right on the fence between these two options. There was lots of stuff on the roadmap that was really exciting.

And we had just built Loxi. We’d just spent a year building a new interface to a calendar. And so I went to the team and I said, “What do you guys want to do? Which way do you feel like you want to go on this? Are you up for this journey?” And it was a different team. Gustavo, who was our lead plugins developer, and Leah and the partners at Modern Tribe, Shane and Peter and Reed. I went to all of them individually and said, “These are the options. What do you want to do?”

And every single person said, “We want to invest in the in the future here. We want to do the big thing. We know it’s harder and we know it’s going to take a lot of attention.” But every single person said, “We want to do the big thing because this is only going to happen once.” So what we actually did to help take advantage of some of the work we did, was we grabbed David who was the designer on Loxi.

And we said, “David you just spent a year designing an interface that’s React based and highly responsive and is very user centric. Want to do it again? Want to take another shot at that pal?” And so him and another designer, Rachel, we actually added a second designer because there are so many details for Gutenberg. The two of them jumped off of Loxi and came over to The Events Calendar and they’ve been every week iterating on these designs and these prototypes, and doing a bang up job with it.

Joe: I realized that I say, “Man. That’s great,” a lot. Especially in this interview. But I like everything you’re saying. Everything you’re saying is fantastic. After WordCamp US is when I talked to Zack Gordon and we decided to release our Gutenberg courses. His developer course and my user course, like super early in January. Even though it meant that we were probably going to have to iterate on that course a lot.

We just wanted to get the educational components out there because, like you said. It’s not going away. It’s going to become a bigger part of WordPress moving forward.

Zach: we immediately purchased that Zack Gordon course for Gustavo. We were like, “Here you go, man. Here’s what you’re going to do. Go read this, go dig into code.”

 

Joe: And it’s great. I mean I’m working through the course, learning React. And so I think that’s a very forward thinking approach. There are a lot of different opinions on that, and it’s whatever works best for your team, or yourself, or your organization. But it’s very cool to see you guys jumping on top of that.

So with the last few minutes I always like to ask these three rapid fire questions. The first is changes since launch, and you just recently launched. So maybe we can go right to, what are your plans for the future of Loxi?

Zach: Yeah. We launched to a very small audience, so it’s not it’s not like a public or big global launch. We haven’t started doing any real serious marketing outside the WordPress space, or doing any ad-buys or any of that stuff. It’s mostly quiet. We’ve been marketing to our internal audience. So we’ve got a lot of stuff still to do.

What we’ve been doing is just listening to customers and making small iterative changes. We’re trying to get to the point where a single user can have multiple calendars. We’ve worked to improve the embed, what we thought was fast in our labs Still doesn’t feel fast to us on customer websites, so we’re try to speed it up. And we’re going to continue to do some of that work. More scaling and performance and really make this thing roar. But it’s mostly that kind of stuff. There’s going to be tons and tons of little features coming every two week cycle right now.

Joe: Wow. Impressive and very cool to see you’re focusing on customer centric stuff. It seems to be the overarching theme of this episode, and a lot of other folks that I’ve talked to. So like I said I’m very glad to see that, being in the education space I try to think about the customers. I’m a front end developer too, so I try to focus on user experience. But the easier something is to use, the easier it is for me to educate on that.

Zach: yeah. The one challenge we do have there though is, and my marketing director keeps reminding me of this, is we can’t just build everything that The Events Calendar customers ask us for, because we’re not trying to recreate The Events Calendar. There is a slightly different experience. And if we just gum up the UI with all of the robust features that are built into The Events Calendar, that’s not actually the mission of Loxi. So there’s that temptation. We have to listen to our customers but also be sure not to take everything they say as gospel. That is an interesting bit of this to walk.

Joe: Totally. There’s the balancing act between somebody who wants all the features and everything, and then making that jive with your mission, the “Why you started” Loxi. I know that Jason Fried at Basecamp always says, “It’s okay to say no,” and that they “Try to say no as often as possible, except when it makes sense.” Definitely the takeaway here is listen to your customers, but don’t just take everything they say as gospel.

Zach: Yeah. Exactly.

Joe: The last question I always like to ask is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Zach: Trade secrets. I don’t know if there is any, other than one of the things I think we have done really well is just continue to lean into the things we’re good at. With Loxi it’s basing it on The Events Calendar and making sure that even if Loxi ends up being a complete failure, the journey of building it has strengthened the core products.

Even at that point it’s not a failure because the core product has benefitted. And things like learning React and then reusing it, or building designs and then reusing them. It’s not to throw that stuff away. Build on top of the things that you have as skills and that kind of thing.

Joe: Awesome. “Continue to lean into the things we’re good at.” Love that. Zach, thanks so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?

Zach: You can find me on Twitter at my handle is @Tirrell. Just my last name. I apparently got in there early enough. Or you certainly can hit me up through The Events Calendar Twitter as well, which is @TheEventsCal.

Joe: I will link all that and more, everything we talked about, including that great React article that Sam wrote two years ago in the show notes. So be sure to keep an eye out for that over at HowIBuilt.It. Zach, thanks again for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Zach: Thanks Joe, this was great.

Outro: Lots of great stuff here, especially if you want to get into Software as a Service. I want to thank Zach again for his time, and Modern Tribe for their support of this show.

And be sure to check out this week’s sponsors, Traitware and Pantheon.

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/89/. If you like the show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It helps people discover us! You can also join the Facebook community over at howibuilt.it/facebook/. I want to build a strong community for this podcast, and Facebook is the place to do it. You’ll even find a link this week to a giveaway I’m doing where you can win my 4 favorite business books.

Finally, if you haven’t heard it yet, I’d love if you checked out my new podcast, Creator Toolkit, where we put together all the tools you need to build great things on the web. It’s on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts now.

Thanks for joining me and until next time, get out there and build something.

Bryce Adams and Metorik

August 7, 2018

Sponsored by:
  • Creator Courses: Access every course, now and in the future, with a membership. Plus, get 15% off for listening.
  • Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.

Bryce Adams is creator of one of my favorite tools, Metorik. Bryce tells us about the path the led him to making Metorik, his view on e-commerce, GDPR, and how he’s using some cutting edge tools. We also talk engagement and stats. Be sure to stick around until the end of the episode – I have a new show I want to tell you about!

Show Notes

And be sure to check out my new show, Creator Toolkit, on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

View on separate page

Transcript

Intro: Hey everybody and welcome to episode 88 of How I Built It. Today we’re talking to Bryce Adams, creator of one of my favorite tools, Metorik. Bryce tells us about the path the led him to making Metorik, his view on ecommerce, GDPR, and how he’s using some cutting edge tools. We’ll get to all of that and more, but first…

I have a new podcast coming out this week called Creator Toolkit. If this is the show where we talk to the carpenters of the world, Creator Toolkit is the show that tells you what hammer you should us. We’ll talk all about how to build specific types of projects and how to make certain decisions when building on the web. The first episode drops Thursday, August 9th and covers hosted vs. self-hosted. If you stick around until the end of the show, I’ve included a short preview.

Sponsors: This week’s episode is brought to you by Creator Courses and Pantheon. We’ll hear about Pantheon a little bit later.

Creator Courses is a website dedicated to teaching you how to build on the web. Their catalog of courses is continually growing and it’s becoming the best place to learn how to build specific projects with task-based objectives. You will always learn by doing. Currently, you can learn how the new WordPress editor with their Introduction to Gutenberg course. You may have seen the notification to try it in the latest WordPress update. This course will teach you everything you need to take full advantage. Head over to buildpodcast.net/gutenberg, and use BUILDIT at checkout for 40%.

Joe Casabona:  Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today, coming all the way from Melbourne, Australia– am I saying that right? It’s Bryce Adams of Metorik.

Bryce Adams:  Perfect.

Joe:  Bryce, how are you today?

Bryce:  Hello, hello. I am really good. I feel very spoiled to get to do a podcasting to you at 11:00AM my time. Thank you for meeting me late on your end.

Joe:  Oh, no problem. My wife is a night shift nurse, so once the baby goes to bed I’ll get an hour or so of extra work in around that time. But it’s my pleasure, I’m glad we were able to sync up.

Bryce:  Yeah, me too.

Joe:  I’m always careful to say “Melbourne” the right way, because my brother lived in Melbourne, Florida.

Bryce:  I think everyone in Melbourne, Australia knows Melbourne, Florida. Especially when we talk to anyone from America. You just say, “I’m from Melbourne,” if they don’t hear your accent, maybe you’re typing or something like that. They’re like, “Melbourne, Florida? I’m close!” Or, “I went there once.” It’s so strange to me because I’ve never been. I don’t even know what’s going on there. “I know it so well.”

Joe:  There’s a college that’s younger than my dad and that’s about it.

Bryce:  That sounds like a great place.

Joe:  It’s nice. It’s about an hour from Disneyworld. That’s interesting, because when he said, “I’m going to Melbourne,” I’m like “You’re going to Australia for college?”

Bryce:  Not quite.

Joe:  He became friends with somebody from Australia and they corrected our pronunciation. So I am always mindful to say it the right away.

Bryce:  You did it perfectly. It would be quite challenging, as someone from Melbourne, to go and study at that college in Melbourne, Florida. Just thinking of the conversations I’d have. It would be like, “It’s nice to meet you, where are you from?” “I’m from Melbourne!” “You don’t sound like it.”

Joe:  The closest thing we have near me is there’s a Moscow, Pennsylvania.

Bryce:  Oh, wow.

Joe:  Not nearly as cool as Moscow, Russia. That’s everybody’s geography lesson for the day. Today we’re going to be talking about a tool that I’ve been using for a while that I’m a huge fan of, called Metorik. But Bryce, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Bryce:  Sure. I’m Bryce. My background is that I was traveling for a while, I was nomadic. Then I got into the WordPress world and made some plugins. A lot of them were free. Eventually I made a couple that were paid ones on CodeCanyon. That was my first foray into making money from coding. That was really cool and challenging.

And then I ended up getting a job over at Woo. This is back in probably 2014, and I was doing support for WooCommerce. Really challenging but valuable experience for me. It was my first time doing WordPress and working with WordPress and coding as a career. I really enjoyed that time. Eventually we joined Automattic, did the same thing there.

But I ended up leaving back in 2016 and started to build this product, Metorik. I always struggle to describe it, which is awful. Because it’s changed so much from what in my head I would describe it as before. But these days I describe it as a co-pilot for WooCommerce stores and anyone running WooCommerce e-commerce stores.

It’s there to help them with all the things that they can’t do through WooCommerce itself, and also, a lot of things that maybe they never thought to do with WooCommerce. It starts with things like reports, but then goes further and lets you segment your data. Finding customers that haven’t ordered in a while, or trying to figure out what your highest selling products are.

And then I kept taking it further than I originally planned, and started doing things like integrations. I had an integration with Zendesk and then HelpScout, and a few other support platforms. And then Google Analytics. More recently a big focus of mine has been on something I’m calling Metorik Engage, which you might have played with yourself, Joe. It’s like e-mail automation for WooCommerce stores. Made really simple, but still really, really powerful.

My advantage there is that I’ve leveraged this segmenting system I built for Metorik, that I described as an infinite segmenting system. The idea is you have all your data, your orders, your customers. And then in Metorik you can say, “Show me all the orders from one of these cities, and was for this amount, and had these products,” and you can stack as many rules as you want.

With Engage the idea is, “Now that you’ve segmented those orders, or those customers, or even those WooCommerce subscriptions. Let’s e-mail those customers automatically.” For me that’s a pretty exciting direction I’m heading in now.

Joe:  That sounds great. We’ll totally dive into that. It sounds super interesting, I think the way you described it is naturally really good. You’re the founder, so–

Bryce:  Thanks. You’d hope so.

Joe:  What drew me to it was WooCommerce is free, it’s a free e-commerce platform.

Bryce:  Yeah.

Joe:  But I think one of the big things it’s lacking as a big boy e-commerce platform is reporting. There’s not a whole lot built into it. I heard of this from Brian Krogsgard, who says that he raves about it. I signed up a little while ago and I wasn’t doing that well with sales, so I’m like, “I can’t really justify reports for the 5 customers I have.” But this year it’s a lot better for me.

Bryce:  Awesome! Congrats to you for that.

Joe:  Thank you.

Bryce:  Yeah.

Joe:  One day I was just bouncing around WooCommerce, and I was like, “I need to figure out how many people from Pennsylvania have bought my product.” Because in Pennsylvania you still need to pay the sales tax on digital products.

Bryce:  Exactly.

Joe:  And I couldn’t do it. I’m like, “All right. I’m just going to go ahead and use Metorik. I’m just going to do that now. Pay for the year.” Totally worth it.

Bryce:  I appreciate it. I think it’s interesting you mention that because that’s the idea. I love when people say to me, “What do I do with it?” And I’m like, “Either that means you’re just getting started and your store doesn’t have that much data, and that’s totally okay.” I don’t feel like Metorik’s a product every single WooCommerce store should have.

A lot of my customers feel like that, and I appreciate that. But then of course when you’re doing a few orders a month there just isn’t as much value you can get out of it. Perhaps you can get a little bit, but I can’t guarantee to them they’re going to get the price of the subscription out of it.

And I don’t do anything for free. Just because– we can talk about that later. But it’s something that I’ve struggled to accept since it compromises the sustainability of the product. I always say to people, “I don’t want you to pay for it if it’s not worth it for you.” I’m not trying to be the winner here and make more money to get the better end of the deal.

I want our customer to feel like it’s a win-win situation. Of course I’m winning because I’m getting a customer and revenue, but they’re winning because they’re saving so much of their time. Like, you ran into that issue. If it saves you even an hour of time that’s probably worth it, at least just for the month. So that’s my approach to it.

Joe:  Without a doubt. That’s exactly how I justified it. I’m like, “I could either dig through or find some less than reputable plugin to do this one thing for me this one time, or I can pay for the year and save myself time now and around tax time.” And just saving my time around tax time is going to be clutch for me. I can send this to my accountant and be like, “Run whatever reports you want.”

Bryce:  Yeah. And that’s it. Everyone wants to do things differently. Someone might struggle at first using Metorik because it might be a little overwhelming for them, and I say, “I could just make all those decisions for you.” I’ve even done talks at WordCamps about making decisions, not options for customers. I’m a big believer in that.

But I think running an e-commerce store, an actual business online, is so much different to a simple plugin that I install on someone’s site for adding a contact form or something like that. For me an e-commerce store, your store is the heart of your business. So I don’t want to make all these decisions for you and pretend I know exactly what you want, and how you want to get it.

I want to give you that flexibility while still guiding you there and saying, “These are numbers that I think are important, but if you feel otherwise, that’s okay. You can figure out whatever numbers you want. You can segment your data however you want. It’s your data. That’s totally okay.” That’s my approach there.

Joe:  That’s fantastic. You totally mentioned decisions and options, that’s part of the WordPress development mantra. Their development principles. But you’re right, you’re running somebody like me that’s only digital products. Or there’s people who are selling physical stuff that might need more information.

Bryce:  They need different data, and it’s not like I can just make decisions for you guys separately. It’s not just the digital products and the physical ones, but then the physical ones might have subscriptions. And then some of those physical ones that have subscriptions also have a digital element to it.

But that’s the beauty of WooCommerce and WordPress and why we all use it. It’s not because WordPress makes these decisions for us. It’s the complete opposite. It gives us that freedom. So I wanted to take a leaf out of WordPress’ book and WooCommerce’s book there, and give people the freedom to get the numbers that matter to them.

Joe:  I think that’s incredible. So, you left Automattic in 2016. What gave you the idea for this product, or this service?

Bryce:  Yeah well my advantage was that I was talking to not even hundreds, but thousands of WooCommerce stores every month. Especially because my job was WooCommerce support. I didn’t start in development, I grew into that. But I started by talking to customers and them telling me the problems they were having.

Back in end of 2014-2015, this was way before Automattic. I had that idea and I was still in support but I’d been learning to program on the side, and been making a few plugins here and there. I felt confident enough to take a crack at it and make something really simple but that solves the problem I was trying to solve.

Which was a lack of reports and KPIs, just knowing “What’s your average order value?” That wasn’t something that you could easily find at the time. And so I built something, a really rough beta back then. I pitched it to the Woo team but it wasn’t a really a good fit at the time, and it kept getting delayed, and then I started doing development there as my job. My spare time I didn’t really want to spend doing more development.

So I just forgot about it. But slowly over time as we joined Automattic and I realized no one, at least from outside, was interested in doing it. I just thought, “OK. This is something I really want to do. I’ve got the idea, that’s pretty much it. But I’m confident that I can build something that could create value for me and for customers.” Definitely really, really tough decision.

A lot easier to look at in hindsight and say, “It was the right decision.” At the time I really wasn’t sure. Especially in the WordPress world, working at Automattic is considered the best job you can have by a lot of people.

Joe:  Right, yeah. “You’ve made it.”

Bryce:  Yeah. Of course there are so many other amazing companies that I would in a second be happy to work for in the WordPress world. Like Human Made, and even what Pippin’s doing, Easy Digital Downloads, Sandhills. So there are so many of these great companies to work for. But at least for me, working at Automattic, I wasn’t wishing for another company to work for. I wasn’t thinking about that.

It was really tough to do. But I just said, “I want to do this. I’m fortunate that I’m young, I don’t have kids.” I have a dog, it’s a little responsibility there. But I did feel like I was in a position where it was possible. So I said, “How long will it take me to build it? How long will it take me to get that first customer? How long will it take me–?” Importantly, to not replace my salary at Automattic. That was not the goal at the start.

But, “How long will it take me to break even, to live the life I’m living right now without dipping into my savings?” I set a budget and timeline and said, “If it doesn’t work out,” I left around August-September 2016. I said, “I’ve got until March or April 2017 to get to the point of just breaking even.”

I didn’t mind if I was breaking even for another year after that. But at least get to that point where I can breathe. I think anyone in that situation is thinking of the same thing. Like, “How can I get to the point where this is a sustainable activity?” And then I can worry about making a business and making money and benefiting from it.

Joe:  Absolutely. I maybe picked self employment at the exact wrong time from that perspective. I had a 3 month old at home.

Bryce:  That’s hard. But it’s also like, “When is the right time? When they’re six months, when they’re a year?” It’s just going to keep getting harder. So you take that risk. And I think, at least, the sooner the better. At least for me, I was just thinking, “I’ve got the money there just to support me building this for a while. I’ll just do it. And if it doesn’t work out I’ll get a job.” I’m not giving up that much. And it’s not that I’m really struggling in that situation.

Joe:  Yeah, absolutely. And my wife was incredible she was very supportive. I said, “I’ve got basically six months to make it so that we’re not dipping into our savings. Otherwise I’ll find a job.”

Bryce:  Yeah. It’s not the end of the world. It doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t have to be like that “Make it or break it,” thing. It can be just like, “OK, I tried this. It doesn’t work. I’ll try a different job. And then I can try this again in a few years if I still want to do it.”

Joe:  I always like to ask about the research, but it sounds like you had a pretty nice gig built into your full-time job doing research, talking to customers about their frustrations.

Bryce:  Yeah, definitely. Probably the biggest disadvantage I had was that at Automattic it wasn’t really possible to do side projects like that. So it’s not like I could work on it in that time when I was there. But ideas are something you can have, and understanding the problems that people are having and thinking of ways to solve it definitely helped.

As I was touching on before, it’s funny how it worked out. Metorik is so far from that beta I built back in 2014-15. It’s so far from that now, just because, as you start it turns into something else based on customer feedback and everything like that. It’s funny because I don’t think I’ve ever researched what it is now, but I definitely felt like I had some understanding going in of what I was starting to build.

Joe:  That’s great. I mean it’s cool that you’re flexible enough to change it in ways that add a lot of value for your customers, too. So let’s get into the title question, “How did you build it?” I’m very keen on this question because it sounds like– I made my first web site 15 years ago, I was in high school, I learned how to program. I’ve been programming for about that time too. And it sounds like you, within the last five years learned how to write code. Is that accurate?

Bryce:  To some extent, yeah. I had my first WordPress site a long time ago. I don’t know, 10 years. It was a Mac news website. It was called It’s All Mac. That was pretty fun. I don’t know even what version of WordPress it was. But back then I had to dabble with changing the color of something, basic CSS. Never really got further.

I remember 2011, or 2012 I was starting University here and I really, really hated it. It was my first week and I had this idea, “How great would it be for a stack overflow app, but for Universities. Where you could join the community of your University and ask questions, and answers.” So I was like, “I’ll build that since I’m already here at Uni. I’m in the right environment.”

I remember even back then it was PHP, I was using some framework. Can’t remember what it was called. Definitely not WordPress. Something else. But I had no idea what I was doing, I remember being so overwhelmed and so scared of the concept of how to change things and writing PHP and just how it all worked.

I think I had a little bit of background definitely with CSS and basic stuff and understanding how the web works. But I definitely wasn’t a very good programmer back then. I ended up leaving University after that week. It didn’t go very well. I just couldn’t do it.

I tried and I was like, “No, I’ll go travel for a bit.” Came back, tried again. I think I lasted another week that time and then I was just like, “This is not working.” That was 2012 and I ended up trying to learn more about WordPress and coding and that’s where I started that journey.

Joe:  Awesome. That’s a very cool story. I totally did the traditional four years of University and then I got my Masters degree in software engineering. I was very, “Academics, academics.” And that was the right way for me.

Bryce:  Yeah. I don’t think there’s any right or wrong way to do it. That worked for you. Maybe I’d be a much better programmer if I’d also done it that way. I think it’s just the person who’s doing it and like, “What works for them? What’s the best way for them to learn and for them to grow in other ways?” Not even just with programming but as a person.

Joe:  Absolutely. I mean I think if I maintain the same mindset that I have now in 17 years I’ll tell my daughter, “Go to college or don’t. As long as you can do what you love, or do what you want to do and support yourself. That’s fine.”

Bryce:  Exactly. It’s also the world we’re in. Especially 10 years ago, I’m thinking back to when I was going to Uni, I definitely felt a lot of pressure to go. It wasn’t optional where people were like, “You can go if you want.” I remember back in school, meeting with the career counselors and they’re trying to help you figure that out.

It was never an option not to go to University. No one ever said, “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to. You can just figure things out, or travel.” Of course they can’t recommend you that in their position, but maybe in a few years, or maybe already now that’s starting to change. I hope so.

Joe:  Here in the States I think that the next big bubble to burst is going to be higher education because it’s so expensive. Now people are leading the charge for trade schools.

Bryce:  The student loans, and stuff.

Joe:  Right. I’ll say that, “Yes. Getting a formal education in software engineering has made me maybe a better software architect than a lot of my contemporaries starting out.” But lots of people are self-taught, and if you find the right resources to self-teach, then that’s fine too.

We’re covering a lot of different life topics here. So how did you build Metorik? It’s very nice looking, I mean it looks really nice. It seems very powerful. I’m very curious about your development stack.

Bryce:  That’s a great question. Well it’s Laravel behind the scenes, which is pretty familiar now to a lot of WordPress people because it’s the biggest PHP framework in the world right now. It’s amazing, the community is amazing. It’s all open source so it’s a very similar feeling to what you get working in the WordPress world. I do feel like one thing I am missing out is that I haven’t really gone to many Laravel conferences or communicated a lot with the community there.

Definitely my fault, because I’m building this product and I really don’t have as much time as I used to when I was an employee at a company where I was involved in the community. But I definitely see a lot of it just from building it and being on the outside. It definitely has a lot of similarities to WordPress. So Laravel is behind the scenes, it’s the PHP framework.

For the actual front end I don’t really do anything with Laravel there. I’ve got an API that Metorik will talk to. So it’ll say to the WordPress API, “Give me all the orders. Give me all the customers.” On the front end it’s all Vue.js, which may be familiar. But it’s very, very similar to React in that sense where it’s a complete UI framework that gives you complete control of the reactivity of your app, and building these really amazing experiences.

And the stuff I’m building now I never even thought would be possible. It wasn’t even a matter of, “Is it possible for me to build this?” But I didn’t even think technically it was possible. And yet I’m doing it now, and it’s honestly easy with Vue.js. I’m not trying to be humble with that, I’m just being honest. It is really, really simple. I’ve taught it even to a few people around me, where they’ll ask about that. And I’ll try to explain the concept to them, and in doing that I even see again how simple yet powerful it really is.

Joe:  It’s funny, I outline the things I want to learn this year, and Laravel and Vue are both on my list of things to learn.

Bryce:  Perfect. I’m very happy to hear that.

Joe:  Another question I’d like to ask the developers is what’s your environment? Are you a Sublime guy? Or VSCode?

Bryce:  VSCode, for sure.

Joe:  That seems to be the popular answer.

Bryce:  I think I’ve gone through a few different ones while I built Metorik. I’m thinking about it now and it feels like there’s nothing before VSCode, but I definitely only started with VSCode 6-9 months ago, something like that. Before that I used to use PhpStorm, but then everyone wants to go simple and use Sublime sometimes.

I definitely switched between them. But these days I can’t even think of using anything but VSCode. Just an amazing product. So many great plugins for it. It’s such a pleasure to work with.

Joe:  It’s so pretty and works really well. I was using Atom before that and Atom was good, but it got bogged down a little bit too easily for me. So, cool. VSCode.

Bryce:  Yeah, love it.

Joe:  What about your local development environment? I think the most common answer probably is “Local by Flywheel,” among WordPress people. But this is not a WordPress powered app. Are you doing local development?

Bryce:  Technically I have used Flywheel. It really came in handy for testing. There is a component of Metorik which is a WordPress plugin, the Metorik Helper plugin. Really lightweight, it’s really there to improve the syncing of data, and also to do some things like track where customers come from, how long they’re spending on the site before checking out. Those kinds of things.

So I did use Flywheel Local recently, just to test that plugin with different PHP environments. With 5.2, 5.4. Amazing for that, to be able to spin up those environments so quickly and run it all at the same time. I’m running 5.2 and I’m running 7 and everything, so that was really cool.

Joe:  And you can change it on the fly, too. If you set up a custom environment you can just change the version, right there, on the fly.

Bryce:  It’s amazing. I wish I had that when I was doing WordPress plugins every day back then. But that’s all right. Before it used to be HomeSit which was a VirtualBox favoring thing. But these days I’m using Laravel Valet. It’s really, really great because what it does is you don’t actually create a virtual environment or VirtualBox on your computer.

But rather it’s running the stuff needed to power the app, just on your computer. So you have MariaDB or whatever using my sequel, you’re just running that on the Mac. Normally using Homebrew. It’s so easy to set up and the best thing is I don’t have to tweak it at all. I never even think about it.

When you asked me I had to stop and think for a second, just because it’s honestly not something that’s part of my day-to-day anymore. While with Vagrant stuff I felt like every week I was searching how to fix some problem and waiting an hour for something to happen. Nightmare.

It’s a really, really nice experience. Don’t get me wrong, I do run into issues occasionally. It’s normally when there’s a big OS X update, there’ll be something that messes up the configuration for it or how nginx handle things. Normally you can solve it by reinstalling it. And because it’s so quick, there’s no setting up a virtual environment, you can try a whole bunch of solutions really, really quickly.

Joe:  Awesome. So, I’m going to ask this because it’s timely as we record this. People will probably be well sick of it by the time this episode comes out but you mentioned you have the Helper plugin and it’s sending data to your app. How have you been affected by GDPR–?

Bryce:  GDPR. Sorry, I can’t help it.

Joe:  You totally telegraphed that question.

Bryce:  Well, it’s a great question. Definitely something really relevant to Metorik, and something that I did have to invest quite a lot of time into like everyone else. But also something that I didn’t have to invest as much time into because I’ve always built Metorik from the start as being privacy-centric, privacy focused and really trying to respect not just my users’ privacy but their customers’.

Because an interesting thing is that I’m not just what typically every store is, which is a data controller. I’m also a data processor in that I’m processing your data and the data of anyone using Metorik. So there are different responsibilities there, and different ways to handle things. Fortunately it’s not as much work as you think because– I’m trying to think of a good example.

It’s not like I’m a quoting app or an invoicing app where I’ve got all your data that’s sensitive to your store, what’s your business, and everything like that. Metorik doesn’t have too much data about individuals. Like, about you. It’s just your name and your e-mail and things like that. The general stuff.

Most of the data is your actual store’s data which I process, don’t control. A lot of things are taken care of through how WooCommerce handles the data. Especially with the WooCommerce 3.4 latest release that added that GDPR compliance. Little things like removing customers details, no problem. It’ll remove them in Metorik. Delete a customer, they get deleted in Metorik.

It hasn’t been that difficult to comply. But it’s been really insightful to see the impact it’s having on the industry. For me, I really got a lot out of it, because I’ve improved my privacy policy. That’s been completely revamped. Which everyone’s doing. Sending the e-mail to everyone, “I got a new privacy policy update.” It is something that I think everyone knows that feeling.

When you’re starting a product, especially on your own and you’re bootstrapping it, you’re not going to go spend $10 thousand dollars on lawyers. Or invest all this time in worrying about your terms of service, how the words are formed and if you’re using the right grammar and things like that. That’s not how you build a sustainable bootstrapped company at the start. It was really nice to have a chance to revisit that now, where I had the resources, and try to improve it.

Joe:  That’s a really great point. It did make me revisit a few things. Luckily I use mostly WordPress tools and they’ve made it easy to be at least as GDPR-compliant as I’m willing to be as a stubborn American.

Bryce:  Fair enough.

Joe:  At least, outside of the EU.

Bryce:  Nice save.

Joe:  You know, you made it into my privacy policy. I said, “I send data to Metorik.”

Bryce:  Exactly. And that’s the extent of it. One of the things that I found really helpful, and I saw a lot of similar products do the same, is to make a GDPR help doc or page. Where it says, “These are how we’re tackling all the things.” I’ve answered a lot of frequently asked questions. Of course, I’m not really getting asked by American stores. But I’ve got a lot of European customers, so I was getting asked everyday.

I just said, “Yeah, no worries. Don’t worry. I’m compliant, I’m on board. Here are some of the answers that you’re looking for.” Basically everyone wants to know the sub-processor who I’m sharing data with, and it’s really easy for me because I don’t share with anyone. There’s no reason. I don’t need to, and I won’t.

For example, I’ve got something you’ve probably seen with Metorik where it’s a global search and then there’s just general searching where you can just type in a name and find all the orders or costumers or products that match it. It could be a lot faster if I use something like Aloglia. I’d love to. It would be really, really fast.

Besides the cost reasons, I don’t feel comfortable with the idea of sending not just my customers data, but my customer’s customers’ data to these third parties. So I’ve tried to build everything in-house. I don’t even back-up or store actual customer data to external services. Of course I’ve got a bunch of backups and stuff in place, but my focus is more on backing up the Metorik data. I can always get the data from your store again.

I can always sync with your store and get everything, if you’re a small store, in a couple minutes. If you’re a big store maybe a few hours. I’m willing to save you, “I’m sorry, you have to wait a few hours for that data to come in.” If it was a catastrophic failure and I have to now go and get it from your store again. I’m okay doing that if it means that your data doesn’t touch a third party. For me that’s a priority. It’s made GDPR easy.

Joe:  That’s fantastic. As a store owner it gives me peace of mind, because you’re not taking my data and then selling it off to somebody else or giving it to somebody else.

Bryce:  No. That’s my nightmare. Of course, if Metorik was free, I don’t know how else you’d make it sustainable. “If you’re not free, you’re the product.”

Joe:  Exactly, right.

Bryce:  “If you’re not paying, you’re the product,” Right?

Joe:  “If you’re not paying, you’re the product.” Right. That’s for sure. When all that Cambridge Analytica stuff came out about Facebook, I was shocked more at how shocked people were.

Bryce:  Yeah.

Joe:  I’m like, “What did you think? Facebook is a billion dollar company. How do you think they’re making money? Well, we’re at the end of the conversation. I try to keep these episodes about a half hour long and this one has been a lot of fun talking about all sorts of different stuff.

Bryce:  Yeah, I’ve had fun.

Joe:  We’ve talked about where you’ve been, so I’ll end with the two questions I always end with. The first one is, what are your plans for the future?

Kind of trying to figure that out now. A big part of the last few months has been worrying about getting Engage, which is that e-mail automation product, live. Especially because it’s an add-on product. Before Metorik was just one price depending on how many orders you had, but now there’s two. It’s a little bit extra if you want to send unlimited emails through Engage.

And a lot people are using it now, and that’s been an amazing feeling just to ship that and get people paying for it. Now I’m starting to think OK, what do I do next? I don’t have an amazing answer for you. But in general I just have the longest to-do list in the world. Of ideas and feedback from customers, and things I need to work on.

Some of the things I’m going to be adding soon, specifically to Engage, like cart recovery e-mails. Everyone’s asking for. Some of those things. I want to keep leveraging the platform I’m building with Metorik. Well, I don’t know if you’d call it platform, but the product. And take it further and keep making it easier for my customers to run their stores and make money, and to grow their businesses.

Joe:  That’s awesome. Actually, talking about Engage real quick. Let’s make that distinction. Because you said you have the Engage e-mails and then you’re working on the cart abandonment e-mails. Would Engage be more akin to the WooCommerce follow up e-mails plugin that’s there? Someone places an order, and they get the four e-mails that WooCommerce generates, but you can customize it and say, “Hey thanks for buying this product, this and that,” and stuff like that.

Bryce:  Very similar to that one for sure. But more so in that it’s also just saying, “I want to contact customers when they haven’t ordered in a while,” or with subscriptions I want to e-mail them a week before their next payment. I’ve got a lot of customers that use WooCommerce subscriptions and charge their customers a large amount, a few hundred dollars, every year.

They don’t want to just charge them, they want to e-mail a week before. But also if the customer cancels they want to follow up and say, “Can we get you back? Here’s a coupon.” It’s hard to describe it as doing one thing because the approach I’ve taken with leveraging this infinite segmenting system I have is, people are coming up with these crazy approaches to using it.

And it’s making them money, and I didn’t even think of it. Some people will use it for getting reviews, but then some people are just using it for telling people about relevant products. I just had never really thought of all the ways that they would use it. And so for me, it’s really amazing to see what people come up with.

I’m trying to do more on my end to write about the different ways to use it, because I only know what I can think of, but customers are thinking of all these different ways. I want to make it easy for other customers to use those similar methods.

The cart stuff and anything else I do is all going to fall under this umbrella of Engage, where it’s about engaging with your customers or potential customers and trying to provide them with your product and your service and grow your store with them. I don’t think it’s just going to be that. There’s other things I want to do under that umbrella, for sure.

Joe:  For those of you who are listening to this episode, but have not listened to the most recent Chris Lemmer episode on managed WooCommerce hosting. He talks about the importance of segmentation and connecting with your customers. The example he gives, which sounds like a perfect use case for Metorik’s Engage, is you have customers and you have repeat customers.

Maybe they buy a new product every 127 days. That’s the number that he gave. You don’t want to hit that customer with, “You bought this, why don’t you also buy this?” A week later, you’re using a dumb segmentation system there. But if you know that every 127 days they buy something, on day 127 or day 126 you could say, “Here’s a little coupon. Go buy something else in the store.”

Bryce:  For sure. Or you can even take that and try to think, “If I know it’s 120 days, how can I lower that to 100?” Maybe I e-mail a month before, but give them a coupon. So now I’m giving up a little value with the small 10 percent or whatever discount, but they’re ordering more frequently. That’s how it started with Metorik because I had that data. It’s so easy to see, “What’s your average time between orders?”

And you can segment and say, “What’s my average time between orders just for customers from Pennsylvania?” Or, “For customers that bought this product as their first product?” So you can see all that, but then people kept saying, “I’ve got that data, but now I need to use it. I want to contact them.” That’s how Engage happened.

Joe:  Very cool. Very cool and awesome. I took a cursory look at it, but now I actually understand. I have a lot more context of why it’s important for me. I’m definitely going to take a look at it now. And I want to ask you my favorite question which is, do you have any secrets for us?

Bryce:  I’m figuring it out. I’ve got one bit of advice, I guess. And it’s just something I say having gone from starting this and being in that early stage, to now, I feel like I’ve built something I’m quite proud of and is successful in that sense. I’m always hesitant to give advice because I don’t like the idea of telling people what they should do, like I know better. But it’s just one thing I do see a lot, especially in the software as a service world.

Don’t take things too seriously at the start. Don’t worry so much about perfecting things that don’t matter. When you’re starting, at least the software as a service, or any kind of software product. Just ship it and get revenue, and then iterate and talk to customers. I see so many people that are working on products for a year before they’re selling it, and I’m sorry, that’s just way too long.

When I launched Metorik, of course it was far worse than it is now. It didn’t do like a quarter of the things it does now. It had bugs, it had all these problems. But I still got customers because they noticed and recognized the value in it, and a lot of them were just supporting me because it was of value to them but also they wanted to see what it would become.

So they were happy to support me in those early days. If I hadn’t launched maybe it would have all failed, so I can’t stress that enough. Just put something live and get feedback. You can always improve something but you can’t recover that time you’ve lost if you wait too long.

Joe:  Absolutely. If you’re starting something out I think the thing that I always got stuck on was like, “Is it scalable? Can it scale to a million people?” I don’t have a million people yet.

Bryce:  Doesn’t matter, exactly.

Joe:  I mean, “Let’s scale it to 5 people and then 10 people.”

Bryce:  For sure. And also you’ve got to think, “What’s relevant?” For your business you’re trying to build. And with Metorik I knew my average customer would be paying $50 to $100 US a month. There’s some a little bit lower and there’s some a lot higher. Some people pay me $600. So I knew, “If I’m making between $50 and $100, how many customers do I need to be at the point where I’m breaking even? How many customers do I need to have my old salary? How many customers do I need to be making more money than I know what to do with?”.

You can have those numbers and I promise you those numbers are going to be lower than you planned to build the app for. For me that number is anywhere from 50 to a couple hundred customers. Anywhere in that area is amazing. If I get to 1,000 or 2,000, that’s great.

But again it’s not millions of customers, so there’s no point of planning to scale to millions. Because if I have a million customers, that means I’m doing a billion dollars in revenue a year. I don’t think so. I’m not planning to get to that point. I don’t expect I will ever–

Joe:  And if you do get to that point, you can afford to scale.

Bryce:  Exactly, yeah. When you’ve got a billion dollars in recurring revenue I think you can figure something out.

Joe:  Well, Bryce. Thanks so much for your time today. Where can people find you?

Bryce:  My pleasure. Best is probably Twitter. Twitter.com/BryceAdams. And then check out Metorik. If you want to run a WooCommerce store and you haven’t heard of Metorik, please come and try it out. Because I want to know what you think, and I want to know how you survived this long without something like it. Because I really feel like it can make your life easier. Give me the chance to do that, I suppose.

Joe:  The reason I had you on the show is because I’m such a big fan of the product. Definitely everybody will be linked to a bunch of stuff that we talked about, including Metorik, in the show notes. Which you can find over at HowIBuilt.it. Once again Bryce, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Bryce:  My pleasure, thank you.

Outro: What a great guy to talk to, and the creator of a fantastic and very useful tool. I use Metorik every day to track sales, trends, and run reports. And Bryce’s advice about engagement and stats are top notch.

And Thanks again to our sponsors Pantheon and Creator Courses. Definitely check them out. Both are teaching you all about Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0.

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/86/. If you like the show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It helps people discover us! You can also join the Facebook community over at howibuilt.it/facebook/. I want to build a strong community for this podcast, and Facebook is the place to do it.

Thanks for joining me. Before you get out there and build something, I’d love if you stuck around and listened to this preview of Creator Toolkit, a new podcast by me, starting Thurday, August 9th.

Craig Hewitt and Castos

April 17, 2018

Sponsored by:

Craig Hewitt is a guy who knows podcasting, so I was super excited to talk to him about his acquisition of Seriously Simple Podcasting. He took a relatively focused WordPress plugin and turned it into a SaaS, and that’s what we talk about in this episode. Lots of great advice here!

Show Notes

View on separate page

Transcript

Intro: Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of How I Built It! Today I get to talk about one of my favorite topics: podcasting! Craig Hewitt has been in the podcasting game for a long time and we spoke shortly after he acquired Seriously Simple Podcasting – a plugin for WordPress. We talk about the acquisition process and how he’s transformed SSP into a new service, Castos. All that and more next, but first, a word from our sponsors.

Sponsors: This season of How I Built It is brought to you by two fantastic sponsors. The first is Liquid Web. If you’re running a membership site, an eonline course, or even a real estate site on word press, you’ve likely already discovered many hosts that have optimized their platforms for a logged out experience, where they cash everything. Sites on their hardware are great for your sales and landing pages, but struggle when your users start logging in. At that point, your site is as slow as if you were on three dollar hosting. Liquid Web built their managed word press platform optimized for sites that want speed and performance, regardless of whether a customer is logged in or logged out. Trust me on this, I’ve tried it out and it’s fast, seriously fast. Now, with their single site plan, Liquid Web is a no-brainer for anyone whose site is actually part of their business, and not just a site promoting their business. Check out the rest of the features on their platform by visiting them at buildpodcast.net/liquid web. That’s buildpodcast.net/liquid web.

It’s also brought to you by Jilt. Jilt is the easiest way to recover abandoned shopping carts on woo commerce, easy digital downloads and Shopify. Your e-commerce clients could be leaving literally thousands of dollars on the table and here’s why. 70% of all shopping carts are abandoned prior to checkout. Yes, you heard that right, 70% of shoppers never make it to checkout. That’s why you need to introduce your clients to Jilt. Jilt uses proven recovery tactics to rescue that lost revenue. It’s an easy win that let’s you boost your clients revenue by as much as 15% and it only takes 15 minutes of your time to set up. Jilt fully integrates with woo commerce, EDD and Shopify. You can completely customize the recovery emails that Jilt sends, to match your clients branding using it’s powerful dragon drop editor. Or by digging into the HTML and CSS. Even better, Jilt’s fair pricing means your clients pay only for the customers they actually engage. You get to earn a cut of that through Jilt’s partner program. Whether you have clients that process one sale per month or 10,000 sales per month, be the hero and help them supercharge their revenue with Jilt. Check them out at builtpodcast.net/jilt. That’s builtpodcast.net/J-I-L-T.

And now…on with the show!

Joe: Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of How I Built It. The podcast that asks how did you build that.Today my guest is Craig Hewitt of Seriously Simple Podcasting. Craig how are you today?

Craig: Doing great Joe. How are you doing?

Joe: I am fantastic. So we are trying out a new … I’m trying out a new system for recording the podcast. I’m excited to see how well that goes. Hopefully to you, the listener, that will have no effect on how you listen to the show. It’s just stuff on the back end, that I’m pretty excited to try out.

But today we’re talking about Seriously Simple Podcasting, which is a product that, Craig correct if I’m wrong, you purchased this a while back. Is that right?

Craig: Yeah that’s right. It’s coming up on a year, I guess, since I purchased the plugin from Hugh Lashbrooke. So most folks in the WordPress world know Hugh. He works at Automatic now. And like a lot of other folks that listen to the show, probably know that Automatic has a kind of rule that people who work for Automatic can’t monetize their own products in the WordPress space.

So he had this really fantastic WordPress plugin for podcasting, and couldn’t really take it anywhere because of his employment situation. And I was already in the podcasting world from another business that I run, called Podcast Motor. Which does like concierge, audio editing, and show note production for podcasters. So yeah, it was a pretty good fit. And the opportunity kind of was right in a lot of ways.

Joe: That’s awesome. So I’d love to get into, kind of, the acquisition process for that. But first why don’t you tell us little bit about who you are, and what the product exactly does.

Craig: Yeah, yeah. So my name is Craig Hewitt. And specifically for Seriously Simple Podcasting, it is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to create and manage your podcast feed, and your podcast contents, right from WordPress. So instead of using a podcast hosting platform like Libsyn, or Simplecast, or SoundCloud to create your podcast feed and manage your episodes, you can do it all right from WordPress.

So a lot of people like this because rightfully, they want to kind of manage all of their own domain, and not be relying on any third party tools or anything like that. So when we purchased the plugin, that’s pretty much what it did. And it had a couple of add-on modules that went along with it, that kind of extended the core plugin. And since I purchased the plugin, we built a hosting platform on the back of it. So if you’re familiar with the WordPress space, or the podcasting space, you can think of the analogy of how PowerPress is the plugin that folks who use Blubrry would use in their WordPress site, and then Blubrry is the hosting platform. We did the similar kind of thing and built Seriously Simple Hosting, which is a hosting platform, just for WordPress users, to host their podcast episodes, if they’re using Seriously Simple Podcasting.

Joe: Nice, nice. So you kind of have an all-in-one solution there. Which is, I can vouch for the value of that cause I don’t have that now. I use Blubrry, but I also use Libsyn. And my own add-on for the Blubrry plugin. It’s a lot of work, you know. Certainly something to consider as I move into my off season switching platforms, because you gotta upload it in one place, and then add everything in another place. And then, ’til you have things all over. So it’s nice that you offer a kind of this all-in-one easy solution for WordPress users who might want to do podcasts.

Craig: Yeah, yeah. I think it’s really turned out to be a great product. Definitely Hugh had built a fantastic plugin for us to build on top of. Otherwise, it just wouldn’t have been possible. But you know, a lot of really happy users from the core plugin, that we were able to kind of share this with. And the adoption’s been pretty good. Yeah, we’re really happy with it.

Joe: That’s fantastic. So I always like to ask what kind of research, if any, you did. Right that’s always my second question. And I think there’s kind of a two-fold answer you can give here, which is, what kind of research did you do when you decided to buy the plugin? And what kind of research did you do in order to add the feature set that you have now? I suspect that your background at Podcast Motor probably helps with that, but let’s start with what made you want to buy the plugin.

Craig: Yeah, so I mean … So Podcast Motor is a productized service. It’s kind of the term you would use to describe it. So we do as much of the same thing for every customer as we can. We do audio editing, we do show note writing, we do transcription, and then we publish your podcast for you. So it’s kind of like an all, like a one stop shop for everything you need for getting your podcast out the door.

And through that, we had exposure to every type of setup possible, right. In terms of how people run and manage their podcast. So it gave us a lot of breadth of knowledge, as to what a podcast looks like from a customer perspective. I’m a podcaster myself too. But I think it didn’t quite give me the exposure to the broader market. But we saw the ability to buy Seriously Simple Podcasting as a ways to diversify our business exposure a little bit. But also take advantage of kind of the name that we had built for ourselves in the podcasting space. And transition it into kind of a more product instead of a service type business.

So at this point, Podcast Motor as a service is pretty stable. We were coming up on 3 years old at this point. And kind of saw a way to fork a little bit of our interest and time and energy into a product which, you know might have a better opportunity to scale and things like that, as we move forward.

Joe: Gotcha. That sounds great.

Craig: And to answer your questions, I’m sorry I guess I didn’t quite answer your question of what kind of research we did as we were looking to buy it.

So yeah, I mean a lot of … As you know, a lot of the WordPress stuff is like word of mouth and reviews, so just talked to some people who had used the plugin, looked at the reviews and the dot org repository. I used the plugin a couple of times, but I really dug into it some more. And then from there, I think that the knowledge that we had from working in the podcasting space so much kind of let us make it make sense pretty easily, if you know what I mean. That we knew the market pretty well to understand what a good product is and isn’t at that point.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. So doing a bunch of client work, essentially, through your service gave you a lot of insight right. You talked to people who probably have a bunch of different setups like you said. Or do things differently and so you probably feel like you can streamline that a little bit with the Seriously Simple Podcasting, and Seriously Simple Hosting.

Now as far as … I know I was involved just a little bit in this, but did you talk to people about like the features, business advice, direction for Seriously Simple Podcasting after you bought it, or did you have like a pretty clear vision before you made the purchase?

Craig: Yeah, I definitely fell in the trap of thinking I knew what all of our customers would want. But no, going into it, I definitely said, you know the market has been proven, that a strong integration with WordPress and a hosting platform makes sense with the model that Blubrry has kind of proven. So going into acquiring the plugin, I knew that was the road we were gonna take.

The other road that we’re currently taking is statistics, and better statistics for podcasters. It’s something that everyone will tell you is lacking in one way or the other. So I think that we knew a lot of the things that paying podcasters, specific to Seriously Simple Podcasting, there were definitely some things that we knew needed to be improved on the core plugin. And we’re in the process of rolling some of those out now, like an updated media player. That just looks really great, and functions beautifully on anybody’s site. So we knew that was a place we needed to up our game a little bit. And we’re in the process of doing that now, which is really cool.

Joe: Nice, very nice. And so, actually this transitions nicely because I have a bunch of questions about, kind of the technical side of things. I’m gonna say I’ve been professionally podcasting for a year and a half. And that’s profession in a sense that I’ve got sponsors, the audience has been very good, I’ve hit some pretty good metrics. And I podcasted a little bit before that, but it was just kind of a disaster. It was like a Google Hangout with like 5 of my friends. The audio quality was not good, nor was the content, cause we were all talking over each other.

So I feel like I’m a little bit keyed into now, the things that at least me as a podcaster, I’m interested in. And so, when we talk about how did you build it, right, you inherited a lot of code and then you started making improvements on top of that right. And so I’m gonna ask you kind of 3 facets that you can think about here. What did you do once you inherited the code? Like how did you build on top of that? What does hosting look like? Because having reliable audio hosting is very important. And what does measuring statistics look like for podcasts? Right cause I know there’s like some guidelines, and Libsyn might do it a little bit differently from Blubrry. And I’m very curious about that. So it’s a three-fold question, if you need me to repeat any of it, I’d be happy to.

But we’ll start with, what was it like inheriting the code base and building on top of it?

Craig: Yeah, so I think that one of the … Going back a little bit to the decision to purchase the plugin. A big part of that was knowing that the core plugin was really solidly built. And Hugh had done a great job of building what we had already. So that gave me a lot of comfort in knowing that things aren’t gonna to break, most likely. Which in the WordPress world you know, is difficult to say with any confidence. So we knew we were building on top of like a strong foundation.

And then look kind of forward to how we built it, I guess we should use the caveat here, that I am not a developer. I pretend to be a developer with our team sometimes, and do some front-end things. But, we hired a developer who was actually a friend of Hugh’s in South Africa. And he’s been the one to architect and build, almost the entire hosting platform, up until this point.

Yeah, so Jonathan has been really instrumental in helping us build things. But I mean in terms of kind our tech stack, we built the podcasting platform on Laravel. So Jonathan is able to do both the WordPress side and the Laravel side, since it’s both PHP, which is pretty cool. We host all of our files and kind of a app on Amazon AWS. So S3 and EC2, and then we use a CDN called StackPath, to deliver files. And that was something that we didn’t start out that way. We used Amazon’s own CloudFront CDN. And it just wasn’t the right technical fit for us, in terms of cost, and scaling capacity to their CDN. So we made the switch to a different CDN provider about 2 months after we launched. So we launched the hosting platform in May.

And about 2 months later, we realized that Amazon’s CloudFront CDN was just not a good fit for us. So we moved to something with a little more flat cost structure. Cause the CloudFront is a lot, dependent on where files are delivered, geographically. And so StackPath, used to be MaxCDN, is kind of just gigabytes or megabytes, or however they measure it for you. And they kind of have tiers too. So as we move up in tiers, it’s not an incremental increase, but it’s just kind of different levels.

Yeah, so starting out with development, I knew that we needed to build a hosting platform. We used a lot of the bests, and kind of best in class technology. So AWS, Laravel, Stripe for billing, and yeah. I just try to take a lot of the fancy guesswork out of it, if you will. Just trying to say like, what’s the absolute best decisions we can make? And we made a lot of those. And it took 5 months to build, and we launched with something that was very complete, I think, for a first version. And have iterated quite a bit since then. And our … By the time this goes live, we’ll have made kind of a big update to the app. So it’s cool to see it evolve as it goes.

Joe: Nice. That’s fantastic. And that’s really cool to hear.

That’s really interesting that Amazon solution is based on where the files are delivered to, right. It’s like paying per mile. So, cool.

So that’s cool that you were able to kind of iterate pretty quickly. Like you saw the writing on the wall, and decided like hey this is … we need to change this quickly. So that’s pretty cool.

Craig: Yeah, so I know I answered one of the questions. Did I get into the last two?

Joe: I would say you answered two, right. Cause you talked about hosting the audio. And then the third question, which I am probably most interested in, is statistics surround podcasts. Cause as a podcaster who looks for sponsors, statistics are very important to me and I … Like you said, I feel like they’re lacking a little bit. Not in the sense of like, well number of downloads doesn’t really tell me how far along the user listened, but I also don’t get a lot of demographic information outside of most of my audience uses iTunes, and most of my audience is from the United States.

So how do you measure? Is there a guideline for measuring statistics in podcasts? And how do you guys go about doing it?

Craig: Yeah, so there is a guideline. It’s called IAB. And I can’t remember off the top of my head what IAB stands for, but we can look it up and put it in the show notes. And yeah, so our podcast statistics do conform to the IAB standards. And so the tough thing as you’re getting at with podcast statistics is for a person who listens to a podcast on their iPhone or Android phone, once the file leaves wherever it’s hosted and lands on your iPhone, we don’t have any visibility. We as a provider of statistics don’t have any visibility to what happened. So, do they listen at all? What time of day do they listen? How long do they listen? What speed do they listen at? Did they skip the part where there’s a commercial segment?

Right, so this is a big thing for you, as a content creator, and owner of a show. But it’s even a bigger deal for your advertisers, right. So not to make you have like sweaty palms or anything, but imagine if you had podcast statistics that said that only 30% of your listeners made it to like that mid-roll segment, where you have your advertisement. Your advertiser probably will come back and say, Joe, your payment just went down by 70% right, cause only 30% of your listeners are making it to the spot that I’m paying for on your show.

Joe: Right, right. Exactly. Yeah.

Craig: So I think this is a potentially really big paradigm shift in podcast advertising because when this kind of data becomes available, it will give advertisers more confidence to enter the space. Which is a really good thing. I think it’ll change CPMs a fair amount after we get some more data about what is quote good in terms of this kind of number.

But Apple announced last year at their big conference that they’re gonna start giving some of this information through iTunes Connect. They didn’t give any sort of timeline on that. And you might know more than I do about when is that expected. But it’s definitely supposed to be coming, and sort of like, on aggregate for an episode, they’re gonna give like a percentage list or something like that. Through the Apple Podcasting app.

Joe: Yeah, and not to interrupt, but the word on the street is that by the time this show is out, the target, I think, was December 2017. So by the time this episode comes out, hopefully we’ll have that. Cause right now, like the information that Apple Podcasts gives podcasters is abysmal. As in, it’s nothing. Your podcast is live and on iTunes. And if you go on iTunes, you can see ratings. And you can see relative popularity, which is like, well it’s more popular than your other shows this week.

So I’m very very excited for that because I would say most … If I’m looking at my statistics at least, most people are using Apple Podcasts to listen to podcasts. So their statistics should be really good. And like you said, advertisers will have … I’ll have more confidence in offering certain advertisers spots on my show. I could say reasonably, I think your show will do well cause my audience is this. But advertisers will have better numbers to back that stuff up.

Craig: Yeah, and as a provider, we’re offering some of this information from our hosting platform. So again, by the time this show goes live, the hosting platform around Seriously Simple Podcasting is gonna be rebranded, and we’re calling it Castos. So C-A-S-T-O-S. So if anybody wants to kind of check out this, they could go to castos.com But the reason we’re rebranding the hosting platform, is we’re gonna be rolling in play back duration statistics for your podcasts that are hosted on our platform. So anyone hosts their podcast on Castos will get play back duration data for anybody who listens to your podcast in the browser, where we have our embedded player. So our player will track how long someone listens. And then give you analytics on that.

So Joe, you’re talking about most people listen to the podcast on the Apple podcasting app. That’s very true of most podcasters, I think. We just don’t have control of that. So the thing we do have control of is, if people are using our hosting platform, we’re gonna give them analytics on when the listeners are using our player to play an episode. And we see that distribution be anywhere between 5% and 10% of listeners. So, we think it could be kind of a representative sampling of your broader audience. So that depending on what Apple ends up giving you, we’re gonna maybe give you something complementary, or slightly different for a different part of your demographic.

Joe: Yeah, and I mean, that sounds excellent. Obviously the more information that I as a podcaster have, the better. And that sounds about right. I think about 5% of my audience listens on the website. Hopefully with the redesign for Season 4, that increases a little bit. And that’s something I’m very excited to see more of because just like having kind of one-off conversations with some listeners, I’ve realized that I need to start adding, which I have for Season 4, like a sponsor spot in the end-roll. Like having the top of the show sponsor spot is nice, but having it at the end is probably a little bit better, gives my sponsors more visibility. And that’s one of my big goals for this season, is to become a partner for my sponsors, without alienating the listeners. That’s always the dance that you have to do, right?

Craig: For sure. For sure. How are you using the statistics you have now to communicate with your sponsors? I always think this is interesting.

Joe: Yeah, oh man flipping the script a little bit.

Craig: Sorry, no I don’t mean to. Sorry.

Joe: No, no, no. This is great. Cause this is an episode about podcasting, and I’m very happy to share that information. So the information that I have over on howibuilt.it/sponsor is most of the stuff that I share with my potential sponsors, right. So downloads is the big metric I have, which is, I’ll do the aggregate, the total amount of downloads I’ve had all time, and then I’ll like a 3 month running average. I think that’s probably most representative of my current audience, right. As well as downloads per episode in the first week, which has been very nice. I find like things teeter off a little bit.

I also try include as many demographics as I can, based on what I know, and what my popular shows are. So, I’ve got mostly iTunes users, primarily in the United States, followed by the U.K. and Australia. Those are things that Libsyn tells me. What I can glean from episode popularity is most of my listeners are probably WordPress developers, or business owners within the WordPress space.

You know, my most popular episodes as of today have been about like building a WordPress community, and then some of the pretty heavy dev episodes with like Pippin Williamson, or JJJ John Jacoby, which are, we get pretty dev heavy. So I’m actually bringing this up now as we speak, my most popular 3 episodes, oh wow, Episode 1 with Jason Coleman, and that was pretty dev heavy. Episode 2 or the second most popular episode, is actually Mike Rohde from Sketchnotes. So I suspect that that one’s popular because he’s a popular person. And then number 3 is Gravity Forms, which is one of the more recent episodes at the time of this records. I think it went live in October. And it’s already the third most popular episode downloaded.

So I think that’s pretty indicative of my audience. So that’s kind of the thing. I’m doing a little bit of guesswork based on what I have. I’ve also recently installed the Facebook Pixel, so hopefully for Season 4, I will have better statistics for demographics. Last night I learned that 28% of my listeners who visit the website like Gary Vaynerchuck. So that’s probably information that I could use somehow, right?

Craig: Sure. Yeah, there you go. Interesting.

Joe: Yeah, I think I answered your questions there. I talked a lot. I think that was …

Craig: Yeah, no it’s good … it’s always just fascinating. I think it’s tough, and I think a lot of us are using a lot of the tools the best we can to infer a little bit about our audiences as podcasters. And yeah, like you said before, there’s just a ton of work that we all can do there. And especially us as like a content or service provider, to help folks understand their audiences better.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, like you said, it is tough. I had a survey … I tried putting out a survey, but I didn’t really incentivize it very much. So I only got a few responses back. I was hoping to really understand the core audience through that survey. But I think the Facebook Pixel is probably … Between the Facebook Pixel, posting statistics and hopefully when Apple Podcasts rolls out, I can get a really good picture of my audience. And you know, I know that this was fairly sponsor specific as far as what we’re talking about, but knowing my audience means I can deliver better content for my audience, right? I can say, oh alright well, mostly developers probably aren’t gonna wanna hear about, I don’t know, you know kittens or something.

Craig: Who doesn’t wanna hear about kittens though? Come on.

Joe: Yeah. That’s I know, that’s a good point. That was a really bad example.

Awesome, well we are coming up on time here. I know we kind of hit both the transformations and plans for the future right. But is there anything any other big things you wanna talk about, as far as your plans for the future go? As you’re rolling out really cool statistics, you’re rebranding to Castos. So are those the big things we can look for on the horizon?

Craig: Yeah, and I think the other thing about that, and kind of why we’re rebranding to Castos.com is we’re opening up our hosting platform to not necessarily be WordPress, I’ll say, dependent. So right now, the only way to use Seriously Simple Hosting is through the WordPress plugin. By the time this goes live, you’ll be able to sign up at Castos for using hosting platform like you would Libsyn or Simplecast. Or, use it right from WordPress like you do now with Seriously Simple Hosting, where you’re using the plugin to kind of manage your content and feed. And then we’re hosting the files for you. So we’re opening it up to where everyone can use our platform. And I think with the statistics capabilities we’re rolling out, it should be pretty fun to see how it resonates with folks.

Joe: Nice, that sounds fantastic. Everything that we’ve talked about today, I will link in the show notes. And before we wrap up, I wanna ask my favorite question. Which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Craig: So I don’t know if it’s a trade secret, but it’s been a big kind of change in my work lately. I have a standing desk, which is definitely not a new thing, but I was a skeptic of it for a long time. And it’s really been great just for my happiness at work, and my longevity. It really changed, kind of how I feel after I get done with work at the end of the day. Yeah, it’s really wonderful.

Joe: That’s awesome. That is a trade secret that I can also vouch for. I am currently standing at my standing desk. So I agree with you wholeheartedly. I feel a lot better at the end of the day. Like I’m not just hunched over. I had some lower back pair for a while that I feel is going away because I’m standing a lot more.

So, what standing desk do you have?

Craig: It’s just the new automatic one from IKEA. I don’t know the name, but yeah, it’s great. Couple hundred bucks. Good investment.

Joe: Yeah, not bad. I like got the Jarvis standing desk because that’s what Wirecutter recommended. And basically, whatever they say I should buy, I’ll buy.

Craig: There you go. That’s gospel, right?

Joe: Yeah, exactly. So awesome. Well Craig, thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?

Craig: Yeah so if you wanna check out Seriously Simple Podcasting by the time this goes live, you can go to castos.com. We’ll have a link in the top, in the nav there. Or you can follow me on Twitter, I’m @TheCraigHewitt on Twitter. I would love to chat.

Joe: Awesome, sounds great. Well thank you so much. Thanks to everybody listening. Thanks to our sponsors. And until next time, get out there and build something.

Outro: Fantastic. Thanks again to Craig for joining me. Castos is now live and there’s a link in the show notes – you should definitely check it out if you’re interested in podcasting. It’s a great service

And Thanks again to our sponsors – make sure to check out Liquid Web for managed WordPress hosting. I use them on all of my important sites – they are that good! They are at buildpodcast.net/liquid. They’ll give you 50% off your first 2 months just for being a listener! If you want to save your clients (or yourself) money through recovering abandoned carts, check out jilt. They are over at buildpodcast.net/jilt.

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/75/. If you like the show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It helps people discover us! Finally, last week I published my brand-new Patreon page. It offers a lot better rewards, and great goals, and I’m really doubling down on it. So if you like the show and what to support it directly, head over to patreon.com/howibuiltit/. You can support the show for as little as $1/month.

And until next week, get out there and build something.