woocommerce

Lindsey Miller and Partnership Programs

May 14, 2019

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If you’ve ever wondered what goes into creating a fantastic affiliate program, Lindsey Miller from Liquid Web has the answers for you, starting with one simple rule: your affiliates are partners. We talk about lots of stuff like content creation and working with your partners to help them help you. We also discuss how to come up with rates. Don’t miss this episode!

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Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 123 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Lindsey Miller, the partner marketing manager of LiquidWeb. In this episode, I’m excited to get into the nitty-gritty of LiquidWeb’s partnership program. As somebody who’s part of a lot of affiliate programs and somebody who runs his own affiliate program, Lindsey’s insight is incredible, because a lot of affiliate marketing managers will say that they have a partner program. But I take a pretty hard line in that if you’re giving me a link to share, and I’m doing all the work, that is not a partnership program. You’re just paying me a commission. You are doing no work, I am doing all the work, and you’re paying me a small fee to do that work. But it is different in the case of Lindsey Miller and LiquidWeb. As a member of their partnership program, I can tell you that they work directly with their partners to write content for them, to do webinars with them, and to, in general, help them increase sales. It’s what I really like to see out of a partnership program, and if I continue my affiliate program in earnest moving forward, I am definitely going to take a lot from this episode. Lindsey has a lot of really great information for us, and I think that you will enjoy this whether you are part of a partner program or an affiliate program, or if you run your own. There’s lots of stuff to glean here. Be sure to stay until the end of the episode as I’ll be talking about the part two of how I built my tech stack from my podcast course. I’ll be talking about WooCommerce, something that LiquidWeb does very well. Without further ado, let’s get to the interview with Lindsey. Of course, that’s after a word from our sponsors.

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 Lindsey Miller, a good friend, and the partner marketing manager at LiquidWeb. Lindsey, how are you today?

Lindsey Miller: I’m great. Thanks for having me on, Joe.

Joe: Thanks for coming on the show. We met once, but we have seen each other several times. Most memorable for me, I think is CaboPress a couple of years ago, because I feel like we had good bonding time there.

Lindsey: Yeah, absolutely. It’s easy to bond with you, though. Who couldn’t just fall in love with you immediately?

Joe: You are going to make me blush, but it’s the same for you. You are a fantastic person. I’m very excited to have you on the show talking about affiliate programs. Why don’t we start there? With a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Lindsey: I have been around WordPress for a few years now. I was laughing, because I was at WordCamp Phoenix this last weekend, and that was my very first WordCamp in 2010. I’ve been on the periphery of WordPress for a while, and then officially as far as getting paid directly, I started two years ago making money in hosting at LiquidWeb and with WordPress. I took a much deeper dive into it than just hanging out with a bunch of cool WordPress people.

Joe: That’s fantastic. So, when you joined– Actually because I already know this and I think it’s interesting, what did you do before you got professionally into the WordPress space?

Lindsey: Thinking way back in the day, I was a political consultant mostly focused on political fundraising in the state of Oklahoma. I liked it. I didn’t set out to do that, but you know how you fall backwards into things. I think a lot of people in politics, that’s what they do, and they don’t choose that it just happens. But I did that for several years, and then I did a little bit of a stint in the nonprofit space, where we created something called The Div, teaching kids to code in Oklahoma. Then I went more into work over at iThemes and LiquidWeb. But I’ve said this– Especially the last several months as more of my past work history has come up, it was that time in politics that set me up for success in roles that I do now.

Joe: Nice. That’s perfect because I was going to ask you that. First, your primary responsibilities over at LiquidWeb is to manage affiliates or work with LiquidWeb partners?

Lindsey: It’s changed a little bit over the last couple of years. I first came on to start building our influencer network of WordPress and people working in WordPress, bring them on board, let them take our products for a spin, see what they thought and then go from there. You know how we do in WordPress. Creating some feel-good relationships and telling them a little bit about LiquidWeb. LiquidWeb has been around for over 20 years, so they are almost as old as I am, and they have been around for a long time. They’re the new people to the managed WordPress hosting space and managed WooCommerce hosting at that. So we had a lot of work to do, and we wanted to create good relationships and not put a lot of pressure on people to say “You have to like this, or you can’t be our friends anymore.” So I started doing that, and then in the fall, I moved over to our strategic alliances and partner team. I was on the product team, and now I’m over here working in this more streamlined role of “What are some strategic alliances and the WordPress space that we can go after and work towards to promote everybody?” Partners and affiliates are also part of that role. So, “How can I build up, not just within WordPress influencers, but people just working in the WordPress space and help both sides of that?” That’s what– A long answer, a long answer, but that’s what I do.

Joe: That’s great. That makes a lot of sense. Full disclosure, I am part of that influencer network. LiquidWeb is one of the few affiliate programs where I actively participate in because I’m not admittedly the best at affiliate marketing. Maybe that’s some stuff that we could talk about today. As we move into how you’re managing these strategic partnerships and this influencer network, how did your background in politics and working in the nonprofit space help you become better at that position?

Lindsey: When I think of affiliate marketing in my head, I always think of people using coupons and optimizing their content page and just trying to make sure that their page is at the top of Google. That’s what we think of, and I think combining more– Not nonprofit, but more my politics and then also just my knowledge of WordPress, has been why we’ve been able to be successful. Because in politics, you pay attention to a lot of people, not just the one on the stage. It’s all very relational, and you go, “OK. You may not be the one speaking today, and you may not be the one the fundraiser is for, you’re just coming here to hear that person. But oh my gosh, I just found out that you also have a very influential business and you like my candidate, therefore I’m going to pay attention to you and get to know you better.” That’s how you’re successful in politics, especially in fundraising for politics, is knowing everyone, not just a few people. Then on top of that, in WordPress, what do we do best? We help people, we’re just nice, and we’re just good, and we help them build their business. Full disclosure, and Joe, you know this, your listeners may not, but I’m married to Cory Miller, and literally, the motto of his company is “Make people’s lives awesome.” Cory and I have been together for almost ten years now. That’s my WordPress background, just being helpful, and then my politics background says, “You want to be helpful to everybody, not just to the quote unquote most important people.” So that’s how I’ve applied that to what I do now, and why I think LiquidWeb is becoming very successful in that space in WordPress.

Joe: That’s fantastic. Absolutely. I will link to Cory Miller’s episode of How I Built It. He very graciously came on in the super early days, I was like, “You want to be on my show?” He was like, “Absolutely.” I’m like, “I have no listeners.” I feel like he helped me get my start, a little bit. He was, I think, the third or fourth guest or something like that.

Lindsey: That’s awesome.

Joe: Yeah. I’ll be sure to link to that. But I think you’re absolutely right, it all comes down to good relationships. Especially today, I just finished reading Seth Godin’s “This is Marketing,” and he talks about how people want to be able to trust the products and the companies, and how just blasting ads out there is not going to develop trust. Relationships are going to develop trust.

Lindsey: Absolutely. Following through on that too, you can say this from a role of actually working with me, and it’s like I don’t want to be self-serving. I talk to someone, and I go, “What can we do together? Is there something we can do together to build up both of us? Is there some content sharing that we can do?” Good quality content, not just “Joe, please continue writing blog posts, but how amazing LiquidWeb is.” No, let’s not do that. Let’s talk about how to speed up your WooCommerce store and if part of that happens to include LiquidWeb, then fabulous. But in other ways, too. Like, “What can I do to help you meet your goals, even if they’re not directly related to mine?” Just being a good person and doing those things to help out the people who are also helping you, even if that means in different ways. I don’t know, and it always comes back to you in the end. It just all works out, I think.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. People ask me how I tie return on investment to going to WordCamps. Basically, if I meet somebody and I form a good relationship with them, and then we can help each other, that’s a return on that investment. Because I met somebody at a WordCamp that I never would have met and we were able to work together, like you said, to help each other. I think that’s fantastic. I think you characterized the WordPress community, especially very well there.

Lindsey: Absolutely. Even talking to some friends at other hosting companies, LiquidWeb just came on as a global sponsor for WordPress this year. Super big deal, we’re so happy to finally be able to get back to the WordPress community in that way, but the first thing I did was reach out to a couple friends who work for different hosting companies and say “I know you’re traveling a lot and you happen for WordCamps, and we’re going to start, like how do you do it? Do you have a system or best practices that you would give me?” There was no hesitation. They helped me out, and they gave me some tips and advice for how to succeed and how to answer those ROI questions that they knew I was going to get from our leadership. I have definitely, even in my own role from direct competitors, been more successful in the last month just because of who we are and who we are at WordPress.

Joe: That’s fantastic. I love that. As we start to talk about this a little bit more, forging the right relationship and building out a network of influencers, what research did you do when you came onto LiquidWeb to figure out “Who should I reach out to? What should I be doing with these people? What’s an affiliate program that works for them?”

Lindsey: Have you ever heard of The Kolbe or The Kolbe A? Kolbe with a K, and it’s one of those personality tests. Have you done this before?

Joe: I have not done it, but I’ve heard of it when you put it that way. I’ll find a link and put it in the show notes.

Lindsey: Please do. It’s such an incredibly enlightening test– I shouldn’t say test. Assessment? I don’t know, what are we supposed to say, Joe? Whatever. I took it several years ago and one of the things I learned about myself which should have been obvious looking back, is on a scale of 1 to 10– Not 0 to 10, but on a scale of 1 to 10 there’s four categories, and one of those is fact finder. I am a 9 out of 10 on fact finder, which means within my personality no matter what it is– We’re choosing a new vet for our dog, or I’m picking out a pair of shoes, or I’m going into a new affiliate role at LiquidWeb. I fact find first, and my decision making has to come from research. Then I use my other skills or qualities to come up with the answer, but I lead with fact finding. If I went into all of the research that I did we would not have enough time, and you’d kick me off your podcast, but in general, I looked at other affiliates or affiliate programs in the WordPress space that I thought from my perspective were successful. I went, “What are they doing? What are they providing? What do I think would be of value if I was an affiliate?” Then I also leaned on some of my team members. We have a really– I don’t know, what would the word be? Experienced WordPress team at LiquidWeb, some quote unquote famous or infamous names, if you will. So I asked them, I said “What have you guys heard? What do you think would work? We’re talking to our friends, and I’m going to be asking them to do this, what should we provide?” I did all of those things, and I just started keeping spreadsheets and moving things over to the columns that I liked or I thought would be helpful. Then I also leaned on iThemes experience and their training programs that they’ve done, and went “Huh. What if I could apply that to not only our affiliate program but our partner program? Just say, ‘The affiliates aren’t just affiliates for the most part. They have other jobs, and affiliates are the icing on the cake of how they pay their bills.’ So, what are they doing during the day, and how can I help that business?” I talked to Joe Casabona, and I said, “Joe, what are you doing? I want you to come on board as an affiliate, but tell me about your core business.” You say, “I have this podcast that millions of people listen to, and that’s my core business, but I do some affiliate things on the side.” I can go, “OK. So how can I help you build up your listeners? What can I do to help promote the podcast?” I don’t lead with that other conversation, so those were all the types of research I did. I just started coming up with ideas for webinars, blog posts, e-books, and then they’ll talk about the marketing collateral. So, “Can I create things that you can share on social media that you don’t have to create, you like it and can do it? But it’s different enough from somebody else who is sharing it, so people don’t know that it’s coming from me.” I just started building up this huge library and researching and asking people questions, and I wish I had a definitive place where I went and took this course on affiliate marketing to give you, because wouldn’t it be nice? But I don’t, it was just leaning into friends and relationships and Google. Just looking at what was out there and picking and choosing what I liked.

Joe: First of all, I would never kick you off the podcast. I had to call back on that. We would break it into as many parts as we need to, but I love what you said about “Affiliates aren’t just affiliates,” that’s a little bit extra. There are professional affiliate marketers out there, but by and large–

Lindsey: Absolutely.

Joe: Most people aren’t. I’m certainly not. If I just relied on affiliate marketing, we would not be living anywhere. So, I like what you said about “Tell me about your core business,” because nine times out of 10 somebody’ll reach out to me and they’ll say “Hi Joe, I read your blog. I think you’d be great for our affiliate program.” And then just a link to their affiliate program. I’m like, “I need to use your product if I’m going to be an affiliate. So, tell me about your core business.” Of course, you and LiquidWeb have been very helpful in getting this podcast off the ground and launching it, and I appreciate the places where you featured me on your blog. I’m happy to talk about your product because not only have you helped me, but when I’ve had feedback you were very quick in assessing and answering that feedback too. I think everything you said is great, and I think that’s what makes me continue to want to be an affiliate. Because I’ve signed up for a million affiliate programs and I barely promote any of them, because it’s too much time. I don’t have the collateral, I don’t know what to do, and I think you’ve done a lot of the legwork for me and you make it easier for me to promote your stuff.

Lindsey: Thank you. I think you hit it on something too that we did, and I wish I could take credit for this, but it was not me. It was Chris Lema. When I started, he goes, “I want you to make a list of every single person you know in WordPress, and then whenever you get done, I’m going to add to it. If you know them personally,” that was that the caveat, “If you know them personally reach out to them and offer them a year of free hosting. Just let them try it.” I was like, “Yeah, that’s such a good thing.” We give out a lot of free hosting. I still do to let people try the products. I’m like “How can you promote it if you don’t like it”? If it’s not a good fit for that audience, it just doesn’t make any sense. From a partner standpoint or even a strategic alliance. If we’re going together with your plugin or your own business and doing something together, I wouldn’t enter that if I didn’t know you had a good quality product that worked for the people that I would be introducing you to. So, I’m glad you said that. I think that’s another key component of bringing anyone on board, no matter what role that is. Partner affiliate or alliance. It’s just to make sure they like what we’re doing, and it’s okay not to. They have to try it.

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Joe: We’ve talked about a lot of things that can funnel us into the title question, which is how did you build it? We talked about relationships and the research you did to provide content. If you feel like you might rehash a lot of the stuff you just talked about in how did you build the specific affiliate program that you have now, maybe you could also provide us some advice on if I were to start an affiliate program today. What are the things you would recommend?

Lindsey: Absolutely. I will say I am very lucky in the fact that LiquidWeb already had quite a robust program. I just got to come on board way after the fact with other people who have been doing affiliate and partner marketing for a lot longer than I have and say “You guys did a great job. Let me see how I can tweak it and make Lindsey-type improvements.” My own little special brand, if you will. If I were to talk to you about building a brand new affiliate– I don’t even like calling it “affiliate,” can be perfectly honest with you? I don’t like calling it “affiliate” at all. I would counsel you, if you will, or give the advice to never use the word “affiliate” and to use the word “partner” because that’s really what it is. Instead, you think of affiliate as you take all the things and you send money my way. I think to do it the WordPress way, quote unquote, the WordPress way is to do it like that– Partnership. It should be more of a partner community, and it should be reciprocal. So it’s not just “Here’s the links, here’s a coupon. Now go out and talk about me a whole bunch.” It really should be this, we build each other up and create something even better. Like you said, you have feedback. Can you be an affiliate for ModCloth? ModCloth has affiliates, the clothing. It’s an online clothing thing. They have affiliates. If I didn’t like the shirt I bought from them, do you think they’re going to take that feedback and change the styling of their shirts? If you built a program– If you, Joe, build a program where you have partners, and they come back to you with feedback, and then you go “You’re right, I should have done that differently on my dashboard,” and then you do it. Then they feel heard, and now it’s better for their people, and now they even get to promote that. It’s there’s no other better way of doing it. First, change what you call it. Think of it entirely differently. Change your entire mindset around what an affiliate is and look at those partnerships. Then, think about ways that you can help them. Get to know the people that come into your network. Get to know their businesses and then think of creative ways that you can help them. It’s beyond a partner directory. I’m going to ruffle some feathers, and this is when I get crazy. We do this at LiquidWeb too, and we’re like “If you become a partner, we’re going to put you in our directory” and you’re like “With the other 450 partners you have, all building WordPress?” It’s great, and there’s a link back there. There are some nice benefits, and your name is there. Don’t quote me too hard if my leadership of LiquidWeb is listening. There are more benefits to think about than just saying, “We’re going to put you on our website.” It is saying, “What are you doing? Can you come on and do a webinar?” I do one or two webinars a month, and anyone in my partner network can say “I have an idea for a webinar” and I’ll talk to them about it, and we’ll do a webinar. It works perfectly, and it helps build their business too, and not just ours. That’s my advice. Start it over and think about it different.

Joe: I think that’s great. First of all, I’m going to change the title of this episode when it publishes from “Building a good affiliate program” to “Building a good partnership program,” because I think you’re absolutely right. I think that the two things that have bothered me most about affiliate programs is people will e-mail me, and they’ll be like “We want a partner” and I’ll say “How?” They’ll say, “Join our affiliate program” and I’ll say “How is that a partnership? ‘Here’s a link, now promote us’ is not a partnership.” The other thing that’s always bothered me about people using the affiliate program as an out or a crutch is I’ll reach out, and I’ll say “I’m having this event,” or “I am looking for sponsors for the show, and I think you would be a really good fit.” When people come back, and they say, “I think you can make more money in our affiliate program,” I always say, “Then it would behoove you to sponsor me outright. Because now you’re saving money.”

Lindsey: That does make more sense.

Joe: Don’t get me wrong, I have a partnership program myself, but I generally don’t use it as a crutch. I try to be communicative and let them know I’ve promised them that they’ll be the first people to know what I’m working on before anybody else. If they need me, if they want to have me on for an interview or want me to provide quotes or graphics, I’m happy to do that. A lot of that is– I’ve stolen it from you. Because I see what you do and I find that super helpful, and I think my partners might find it helpful as well. I think that’s fantastic. As far as techniques or exclusivity, I’m not sure how I want to word that. But you did mention coupon codes. I say “coupon,” and I’m told I’m wrong. You offer coupon codes, and I’ve noticed landing pages. Do you find that those things are helpful to help your partners convert?

Lindsey: That’s an excellent question. I think this is where some of the traditional affiliate marketers might have a different opinion than someone like me who, to be very frank, is making it up as I go. They would say, “Absolutely. You put the coupons out there, and you create the specific landing pages that’s maximized for conversions.” There’s definitely a place for that. There is a lot of revenue that comes to LiquidWeb in these very traditional affiliate marketing roles where– Here’s a good best practice. A landing page for an affiliate should never have a chat box or a phone number listed. I know, it blew my mind too. I did not know this. Because if you think about that, you’ve now discounted the coupon for that affiliate to use, so their person’s coming. Plus, you’re paying them X amount. That’s a percentage, or it’s a flat rate, hopefully, it’s a very generous type of thing. But then also now if they’re going to chat to a salesperson, or if they call in and talk to a salesperson, that’s not only paying or taking up their time with that now double-paid person because they’re getting a discount plus an affiliate commission. But then if that salesperson closes the sale, especially in our company, they’re also allowed to get a percentage on that sale. Because that’s their job is to close sales. So if we did landing pages with chats and phone numbers, you’re almost in a way paying four different ways, and on a $99 a month plan. You have to think through some of those promotions in regards to landing pages and coupons. You can also inadvertently saturate your market with too many coupons or too many steep discounts. I like to offer them to anyone who works with me for a couple of reasons. Especially in WordPress, we feel uncomfortable with affiliate links. Because we think people believe if they’re clicking an affiliate link that maybe we have a different reason for promoting that product, rather than just liking it. I think WordPress in general, we aren’t like that. We do believe in the things that we talk about, but not everybody thinks that and we don’t want to have our motivations questioned. If I give you a coupon that says “Joe, anyone you send gets a month off, and they don’t have to click the link, they can just put in your coupon code.” You still get that affiliate commission because that’s how our system works, without you having to say “Thanks for listening to the podcast, now go click this link if you’re interested in LiquidWeb.” They can use your coupon, and it just feels a little bit cleaner. I also pretty much, straight across the board, anyone on my partner network gets the same coupon, and then we do specials. If we do an end of the year sale or a summer sale, we’ll say “All partners are getting the exact same discount to their coupon, or they get a special coupon that they can use.” That’s a nuance that has to be considered. The question was about landing pages, so I will create landing pages for anyone who feels like that is useful for their audience. Or help them create a blog post on their own site. Sometimes people will create a blog post, and I’ll help provide content where it’s appropriate, and then I help them go through and audit it and say “OK. You should put a call to action here, or you should add a link here” and try to provide value that way.

Joe: Nice. Again, that goes back to how you are partnering with them. You’re not just saying, “Here, just build a page, here’s your link, whatever.” It’s “Here’s how you can make this better. I want to help you make money, and I’ll make money, and everything will be good.” That’s interesting about not having a chat bar or phone number, and it makes sense because the affiliate, or the partner, should be the person who has sold that person on the hosting. They should be the salesperson in that regard. That’s why they’re getting– I’m not just going to tweet your link and hope for the best. I’m going to write a blog post, or one of my recent episodes of Creator Toolkit talks about how you’re a good solution for e-commerce, so I’ll link that in the show notes as well. Before we move on to the plans for the future, I do want to touch on, and you mentioned a generous rate. Have you found that there’s a good rule of thumb for picking a affiliate commission that motivates your partners to go out and promote your product?

Lindsey: Yeah. I think that it’s still in flux. We had a meeting last week on iThemes hosting. We just released an iThemes hosting product last year, and we’re still trying to dial in the pricing on it. I’m learning a lot from the leadership at LiquidWeb because they’ve been around for a long time. You go “OK, so you have a $7 a month product and how much is that a year– You’re wanting to pay out $150 on that.” They’re going, “We don’t make that back until year three.” “OK, that may not be a good fit.” It’s a lot of doing the math. We say “OK, at $7 a month or maybe it’s a $12 a month product, so at $12 a month that gets closer to $150. Maybe that’s $100 for affiliates.” So some of that is just doing the math on it, some of it is looking at what your competitors do. WP Engine is– They’re friends of all of ours. I have nothing at all bad to say about them, and they set the standard. They started doing affiliate stuff a really long time ago, and they let the WordPress community know how it works. They didn’t do some of the benefits we do on the partnership side, and we can touch on that a little bit to talk about those differences. Because pretty much everything with them, as I understand it, is just straight up affiliates. We had to follow that model, and we didn’t have another choice except they’re the leader in the space. They’re still the leader in this space, and we just tried to mimic that. Our managed WordPress, our managed WooCommerce plans get a $250 flat rate. I don’t mind telling people that because anyone can find what that rate is, and then when we get into some of our smaller plans, we lower that. If it’s a $39 a month plan, it’s not as high. I find that that feels good, it makes people feel like their effort was worth it. If they write a blog post or send out one tweet and they get one commission off of that, it makes their time that they spent writing that or promoting it worth it. I love celebrating when those come in with the people who get those commissions, and it’s a really fun part of my job is to send an e-mail. Go “You got five commissions this month,” and all of us be excited about that.

Joe: That’s fantastic. Again, I’ll say that “Do the math,” that makes sense. It already sounds like for your affiliate program, and there’s some assumption that people who sign up for hosting will stay with the hosting company at least X amount of years. I’m sure that math goes into it as well, whereas, for somebody like me who’s selling an online course for maybe $100 one time, $100 dollar commission is not going to make any sense. I’ll make no money.

Lindsey: Exactly. iThemes for years on their products– Just because apparently I’m so good at telling all the things, did 25%. 25% of the sale was their commission rate. That also felt good, if people were talking about products that did cost significantly lower and weren’t necessarily a multi-year point of revenue for them, that makes sense. In our partner side, we have a couple of different benefits. I’m going to keep some of it because it’s plans for the future, but just on that financial aspect, we share– I’m going to use a hosting term, so I sound smart, but the MRR, the monthly recurring revenue. As some of our agency partners, let’s say they have 50 sites or 100, or sometimes more. They bring those over, and they add so many. I think it’s– I don’t remember, it’s some percentage. They can get upwards of 15% a month back, and it’s literally just cutting a check and sending it back to them. That’s a financial incentive. We offer a lot of other perks as well, but that’s to compare that. Whereas other hosting companies in our space do the affiliate thing. You have a couple of choices, and you’re like “OK, do I get paid one time at $250? Or do I keep my clients there and over the life of LiquidWeb making money, I also do? If I get 15% back a month on what we’re paying for hosting, then OK.” That’s a no brainer in a lot of cases.

Joe: Absolutely. To that point, when you think, “We might move hosts,” now you have to think, “I’m going to lose that 15% commission and time to migrate.”

Lindsey: Yeah, absolutely.

Joe: Again, it makes sense. For a while, I would always sign up my own clients on their hosting account with my affiliate link. I would let them know too, and it wasn’t just hand wavy stuff. I was always forthcoming with that, but it was an added benefit. I was bringing a new client to a platform I was familiar with. As we wind down our interview here, what are your plans for the future of the partnership program at LiquidWeb?

Lindsey: One of the things I think I’m most excited about and able to bring in my perspective on is this partnership network, and how can we continue to be helpful. That’s what LiquidWeb said, “We’re the most helpful humans [in our scene],” is our little tagline. It works well with my personality because ultimately, that’s what I want to do. Thankfully I don’t have sales numbers stamped on my forehead, so because I don’t I’m able to say, “What can I do for our partners? What can I do for our network to help them?” One of those is– I’m not the leader of this at all, but I’m on the team that is bringing a brand new partner portal to LiquidWeb, and it’s a WordPress multi-site install. I don’t know who has built it, but I can’t believe that they’re not a super big deal on WordPress because as soon as they showed me this dashboard I was like “This is literally built in WordPress,” and it is. It’s an incredible tool, and we are so excited about it. Basically, anyone who comes into our partner network or is already there now gets access to this quote unquote partner portal. But it has webinars, training, co-branded content. It lets you sign up for the webinar that you want to go to straight from the dashboard because they’re using Gravity Forms. It’s so cool, and then we’re getting– We’re going to load that up, so you can request time with me as the partner marketing person, and we can talk about co-branding opportunities. You can request to present a webinar to the LiquidWeb community, and you can imagine how many emails that goes to, and then that recording then gets turned around and put back in the partner portal. So the possibilities with that in and of itself are so endless, and it’s incredibly well built. It’s going to be awesome, and we’re having several meetings a week on that right now as we’re fleshing out the content and the possibilities for it. I would venture to say even beyond the revenue share that we do, in and of itself, is worth looking at LiquidWeb for a partnership just because it is a very direct way to help people build their businesses.

Joe: That sounds exciting. I will definitely keep an eye out for that because it sounds– An easy one stop shop to make a partner’s job easier is always good. That’s fantastic. We’ll definitely keep an eye out for that.

Lindsey: Thank you.

Joe: As we come to the end here, I do want to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Lindsey: Any trade secrets? I think I already gave them out. I told you how much we pay for an affiliate commission, and I told you what iThemes pays for an affiliate commission, I told you about the chat box and the phone number. Apparently, I’m just an open book when I talk to you is the answer to that question. So just like any other normal conversation, if you want to know any secrets, ask Lindsey, and she tells you. You know, I don’t think so. I will say this, and I don’t think it’s too much of a trade secret, but WordPress and WooCommerce are for sure the way of the future. It is how LiquidWeb sees the future. We’re investing a lot of time and a lot of money with the global sponsorship to say “WordPress, we’re here, and we’re here to stay.” We’ve done an incredible amount of development onto WooCommerce hosting. That’s very exciting for us, and I think is an exciting time for our WordPress ecosystem. Just because we were able to come late to the game and manage WordPress in and of itself, but with the backing of this hosting company that is known around the world that has some of the highest NPS scores and definitely no hosting company comes close to where we are on customer service. We say, “OK. We get to be creative and inventive.” Not only did Chris Lema and the team on the product side say that, but our leadership, all of the most important and smartest people at LiquidWeb said, “This is it. It’s WordPress and WooCommerce.” So, I feel like that’s a little bit of a trade secret. Not only is LiquidWeb leaning into it, I think a lot of other people are too. Those of us that have been around for a long time knew it would happen, so now it’s WordPress’ time to shine if you will.

Joe: Nice. What a great trade secret, I love that. I’ll add onto that, I believe it too. Even if you asked me six months ago what one should do to set up an e-commerce store, I would have said, “If you want easy, go to Shopify. If you want custom and can pay a developer, go to WooCommerce.” Now I’m like, “Go to managed WooCommerce hosting. You’ll have a site. You’ll pay, and you’ll have a site, and you’ll be ready to go.” So that’s fantastic. Lindsey Miller, thanks so much for your time today. Where can people find you?

Lindsey: I talk the most on Twitter @lindseymillerwp. You can learn more about LiquidWeb at LiquidWeb.com. There’s a ton of things, so go [slash me as WordPress], and LinkedIn. I’ve been doing a lot on LinkedIn as well. You can find me, and I’m [LinkedIn/LindseyAnnMiller]. Those are my places.

Joe: All right, I will be sure to link those and everything we talked about in the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it, hosted by LiquidWeb. Lindsey, thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it.

Lindsey: It was so much fun. Anytime you need me to come on and tell more secrets, and I’m happy to.

Outro: Thanks so much to Lindsey for joining me today. I always enjoy talking to her. I consider her a very good friend, as well as a wonderful person to get insight from on marketing and affiliate programs. Her background is super interesting, as you heard, and her trade secret about WordPress and WooCommerce for sure being the future– LiquidWeb is putting their money where their mouth is there. Of course, they put a lot of effort into their customer service, which shows, absolutely. My question of the week for you is, “How has Lindsey’s advice affected the way that you approach either your partnership program or the way that you’re going to approach joining partnership programs in the future?” Let me know by e-mailing me, Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona. I want to thank my sponsors for this episode, Plesk and Pantheon. They have both sponsored the entire season, and without their support, I wouldn’t be able to put forth such a quality show with amazing guests. So, thanks again to them. Definitely check them out. If you liked this episode, be sure to share it with a friend. Maybe you know somebody who’s struggling with affiliate programs, and this is the stuff that they need to hear. Go ahead and share this episode with them. The link directly to this episode is HowIBuilt.it/123, so you could share that URL with them. You’ll also find all of the show notes we talked about over there.

Miniseries: So, let’s continue the conversation about how I built my podcasting course. Specifically for these last two episodes, I’ve talked about how I’ve built the tech stack of Creator Courses. I got deep into the LMS, the learning management system, last week. This week I want to talk specifically about WooCommerce because WooCommerce provides a huge part of the functionality. I chose WooCommerce because I wanted to have a full on e-commerce platform with a shop and a shopping cart. LearnDash does support the ability to sell courses one off and even group registrations with some extensions, but I liked WooCommerce because it gave me the flexibility beyond selling just courses. Maybe I want to sell e-books or other educational material, and maybe I want to have tiered plans where there’s a basic course, an advanced course, and a master course. Instead of creating three separate products, I can create one product. It also integrates fully with LearnDash, so I don’t need to worry about trying to bridge the gap and making them work. But aside from the LearnDash integration, it integrates with so many other tools, and some of the tools that I’m using require LearnDash. Things like [Metoric], which is fantastic for reporting. It’s absolutely incredible reporting, much better than what you get in stock WooCommerce, so I use that around tax time, and I use that to see the lifelong value of my customers, and so much more. I also use Gilt for abandoned cart emails. Gilt will see when somebody adds a product to their cart, if they know the email address– Which they’ll try to capture as early as possible– If the person does not finish the transaction I can send a series of emails to those people to try to get them to come back and make the purchase. Abandoned cart emails can recover up to 25% of abandoned carts, so that’s a considerable amount of income depending on what you’re selling. Finally, I’m using AffiliateWP For my own affiliate program, we just spent the whole episode listening and learning about affiliate programs and partnership programs, and I’m using AffiliateWP For my affiliate program. That integrates nicely with WooCommerce. It helps me make fans out of my students. I’ve since created a new policy where you have to be a student to join the affiliate program because you need to be able to vouch for the quality of the course. I don’t just want you signing up to make money off of my courses and adding it in a big long list of courses you should take, and I want people to vouch for my product. AffiliateWP works well with WooCommerce for that. So, that’s the whole tech stack. I forget if I mentioned the theme last week now, but I’m using Academy Pro, which is a Genesis child theme. It gives me some flexibility over that, and I recently did a whole talk on this so I will include a link to that talk, the slides, and some of the resources over in the show notes at HowIBuilt.it/123. But that is it for the tech stack, so next week I’m going to talk a little bit about my plans for the future, both of the website and of this course. If you’re thinking “You’ve dispersed this story over a series of weeks and I don’t have a clear picture,” like maybe you want to hear it all together, don’t worry. After the season ends, I’ll be releasing a bonus episode where I tell this story all together. So, these are just maybe little teasers for that bonus episode. Anyway, I want to sincerely thank you for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.

James Kemp and Iconic

April 23, 2019

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James Kemp is the founder and lead developer of Iconic, a popular WooCommerce extension shop. James has managed to do well in an increasingly saturated space. His approach to solving problems and determining if there’s a market for his new ideas is an interesting one. He offers lots of great advice on everything from research to development, and launching.

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Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 120 of How I Built It. Today my guest is James Kemp of Iconic. James has built a fantastic plugins business selling WooCommerce extensions, and he’s doing incredibly well. He offers us a ton of great advice in this episode. We talk about all sorts of things, like how he comes up with ideas, and he even gives us a fantastic tip on how to validate those ideas relatively easily. We looked at his research into choosing Freemius to sell his plugins, and we got pretty deep into some development territory for how he builds his plugins. He also has some great plans for the future. He talks about live chat and a whole bunch of other stuff that I don’t want to spoil, so I think we should get into the interview. Of course, that is after 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 Freemius today at Plesk.com/build. This episode is also sponsored 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. If you use WordPress, this is by far the easiest platform that I have used for podcasting. I also really love how the castoffs team takes a common sense 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 Freemius 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, and 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 James Kemp of Iconic WP. James, how are you?

James Kemp: I’m great. Thanks, Joe. How are you?

Joe: I am fantastic. Though it has been raining a lot here on the East Coast of the United States as we enter the fall, but that’s OK. At least it’s not oppressively hot.

James: It’s not much different here, to be honest. You’re not missing out.

Joe: Awesome. Before the show started, I asked if you’re based in the UK. What part specifically of the UK you based in?

James: I’m in the Midlands. Pretty much as far from any coast as you could be in the UK. Right in the middle.

Joe: Cool. I’m going to ask you one question that is totally unrelated to anything, but for my own edification I think, and I think it’s a fun thing that Americans mess up a whole lot. The United Kingdom is made up of Britain, Great Britain, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Is that right?

James: Yeah. I believe so.

Joe: Britain and Great Britain are two different things, right?

James: Yeah. I believe Britton is– No, I think you mean England in Great Britain.

Joe: England in Great Britain.

James: Yes, England is just England. Great Britain is England and Scotland, and then the UK is England, Scotland, and part of Ireland.

Joe: OK, gotcha. I always– I watched a seven minute long video on that a while ago that I will link in the show notes, that I–

James: You probably know more than me, though.

Joe: That’s good to know. For fairness. Like, I barely know about anything that’s like west of New York and Pennsylvania, because that’s where I’ve lived. Everything is just the Midwest to me here in the United States. But we’re not here to talk about geography, and we are here to talk about Iconic WP. So, just for some backstory, James and I were connected thanks to Vova Feldman and the Freemius Slack for people who use Freemius. He mentioned that I was looking for people for the show, James kindly reached out and volunteered. Why don’t you tell us, James, a little bit about who you are and what you do?

James: As we mentioned, I’m James Kemp, based in the UK. Currently, I build a lot of e-commerce plugins under the name of Iconic. I’ve got eleven or twelve premium e-commerce plugins that I sell on my website. As you mentioned, use Freemius to fulfill those payments, and also the licensing and subscriptions, and things like that. Currently, that’s what I do full time. Before that, I was working with clients building websites, building e-commerce sites using WooCommerce. That lured me down this path of using WordPress and building plugins and software for WordPress.

Joe: Nice, very nice. I feel like that’s maybe a good common path. People start doing freelance work and then try to move into the product space, and it sounds like you’ve done it successfully. Just looking at your website, you have a couple of really good testimonials from friend of the show and personal friend of mine Chris Lema, and it sounds like you dig in on specializing with WooCommerce. Are you a one man band, or do you have a team of people that you work with?

James: It varies depending on workload, but in terms of building the core plugins and releasing new plugins, that’s all me. I do have a couple of support people, I’ve got a guy who handles front line support, and I’ve recently started working with another Freemius user called Jose, who is in the Slack group as well. He’s helping out with a bit more of the technical support that I get through. But in terms of actually building the plugins, and coming up with the ideas, and releasing the plugins, that’s all on my shoulders.

Joe: Cool. Very cool. When we’re talking about some of the plugins that you have, I’ll mention some of the featured plugins on your website, WooCommerce, Show Single Variations, WooThumbs for WooCommerce, WooCommerce Delivery Slots. How did you come up with the ideas? Were these based on needs that you had for clients or customer requests, or just ideas that you had?

James: Yeah, that’s exactly it. It started– WooThumbs that you mentioned there was my first plugin for WooCommerce. It used to be under a different name, which was “Multiple Images per Variation,” which was a bit of a mouthful, so I decided to change it. It evolved from that initial concept, but the concept was that you could have the ability to add more than one image to a product variation, which you can’t do by default in WooCommerce. That came about as a request from a customer. I believe I was doing some web work for them, or at least freelancing at that time doing web work, and they approached me with this request. So that initial plugin came from that, and as well Delivery Slots that you mentioned was something that I built for one of our clients when we had a web agency. They’ve all evolved from client ideas, or the customer comes to me and says “We need a plugin that does this.” If I feel like it’s got legs, then it’s something that I would do.

Joe: Nice, very nice. That’s a great follow up question I had, was how do you determine if it has legs? Do you do some research to figure out if it’s something already out there, or something close, or is this something that other people need?

James: Yeah, exactly. I do some research, and there’s a few ways you can go about it. One great thing about WooCommerce is that they have an ideas board, so people will go there and post ideas of stuff that they’re looking for, and you can gauge how popular that idea is by how many votes it’s got. So, that’s a good initial way to validate an idea. Another thing is just based on the number of people to ask me for the same thing, and you get that quite a lot where people ask for the same thing in slightly different ways. You can build up this idea of a product from that. I have a massive list of stuff that I could build and don’t have the time to, and there’s plenty of stuff that I don’t build out. My next product is going to be a wish list, which obviously has quite a bit of competition. But through my experience I know the customers quite often like to have all of their software from the same company, and if they know that they can trust that company and they get good support from that company, then they’re going to come back and they’re going to want more products that might already exist.

Joe: Gotcha. Two great pieces of advice there. The WooCommerce ideas board, something I had no idea existed, I will make sure to link that in the show notes. Because as you said, James, that is a great way to validate an idea initially. People are probably posting there and asking for it, and it’s definitely not going to be in WooCommerce if it’s got some amount of votes.

James: Exactly. You can also see if the people at WooCommerce are planning to implement that into WooCommerce, to avoid wasting a load of time working on something that is then going to be added anyway.

Joe: Totally. We’ve all seen at least situations where there’s some market place plugin or app in the Apple App Store, for example. It basically gets implemented into iOS or into whatever the core version they’re working with. Jetpack maybe introduces features that were once a standalone plugin, or iOS has a new sharing feature that kills an app or something like that.

James: Exactly. It has happened to me a few times. I had a free plugin that added pagination to the WooCommerce short codes. So, if you display like five products, you can add pagination to that. WooCommerce recently actually added a pagination attribute for the short code, so you can turn it on now. Fortunately, that was a free plugin, so it’s not a massive deal breaker for me, but there has been some scares. Like WooThumbs for example. WooCommerce released, I think it was earlier this year, maybe late last year they released an updated image gallery which used a lot of the stuff that WooThumbs used. But it was still kind of restricted, so, fortunately, WooThumbs still has a pretty solid place in the market.

Joe: Nice. Have you thought about what you would do if one of your premium plugins just wholesale got built into native WooCommerce? Would you shut it down, or tell people “We’re not going to support this anymore because it’s native.” Or would you keep supporting it?

James: It depends. If I feel like it still adds some value to people, to the customers that use it, then I would continue to support it of course. If whatever WooCommerce implement is pretty much exactly the same or better than what I’m offering, then it feels right to stop working on that plugin and leave it at that. The customers that have used it will have got their use from it anyway, and you’d hope that they’d see the value in what they’ve already used. But you’d have to do it based on how they implement it, I guess. Hopefully, that doesn’t happen.

Joe: Absolutely. Last question around this topic is– I thought about this, and I should make clear that there’s no evidence that this happened. But there are features that get released into the core of open source projects that are strikingly similar to plugins. Do you ever worry about that? Since we live and work in an open source world, the core plugin or the core product– I won’t name names, to avoid drama, but it could just take that and put that code right into core.

James: It is a bit of a worry. It did feel like that when the WooThumbs update came out because I used exactly the same full screen galleries that I was using in WooThumbs and had been using for a while. They definitely didn’t take my code, but I feel like they might have got a bit of inspiration from it. Which is flattering, in a way. I don’t believe that they would take my code and drop it straight into core. I speak to Mike jolly sometimes, he runs the show, and I also contribute to core myself. I feel like if they did think this plugin would be great and cool, that they would approach me. I think they would.

Joe: Absolutely, and any–

James: [It’s probably a good start as a fork in something else, so you never know.]

Joe: Yeah, right. That is their track record. Again, this is just some deep seeded fear in the back of my mind, because I want to get into premium plugin land. But traditionally, with Automattic, WordPress, WooCommerce, when they’ve seen something they like they generally have gone out and bought– If there’s something that works exactly like it, they’ll buy it. They’ll try to buy that first.

James: Yeah. I think they would do that, and I think they would respect the open source nature of it all. I think the thing to worry about, or maybe not worry about, but to think about is because it’s a derivative product of WordPress that it also has to have the GPL license. So, someone could legally take the plugin and redistribute it, and they do. There is places where you can download it for free. But I think the value that I add and that my team adds is the level of support that you can receive, the continuous updates that you’re going to get. Just knowing how the product works and how it can benefit people from its inception. Give me the one up on those worries.

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 mentioned that specifically with your new product that you’re working on, customers like to have software from a company that they trust, so they try to buy software from the same company. I thought that was great insight. I sell online courses, and I think, “Why should I make this course if somebody else has already made it? If it exists on Udemy or on [Linda.com]?” Or whatever. But if people like my teaching style they’re going to want to get that course from me, because of the way I approach and present the topic.

James: Exactly. That’s one thing that you have that no one else has, is that you’re you.

Joe: Absolutely. We’re halfway through the show and already two fantastic pieces of advice, and because we’re halfway through the show, I need to ask the title question. So, you have a shop full of plugins. Maybe we can focus in on WooThumbs or some other plugin that you’re working on right now as I ask, how did you build it? And, what’s your developer workflow like? Stuff like that.

James: We can talk about them as a whole. Because I’ve built it in a way, especially recently within the last week, I’ve built out libraries that I can implement into all of the plugins. To start with I would build them one by one, and over time I’ve realized that in order to optimize my processes I need to have a process in place. So, all of my plugins are heavily reliant on package managers, they all use Composer which is a PHP package manager. That pulls in– For example, it pulls in the Freemius code that I need to install in the plugin, and I’ve just built out what I call “Core classes.” So I’ve got classes in all of my plugins that handle the settings pages, the license activation, just some helper methods that all of the plugins use like checking if a plugin is active or not, that kind of thing. So I’ve got this Composer task that pulls in those libraries from my GitHub account, or my BitBucket account I should say. Because you can host private BitBucket repos on BitBucket, whereas I think you have to pay on GitHub.

Joe: Yeah. I think it’s a prohibitively expensive amount now for private repos on GitHub.

James: Yeah, I can imagine. I have always tried to reduce costs where I can. So, BitBucket is good. Although I do pay for BitBucket as well, for the pipelines.

Joe: Nice.

James: So, I’ve got a Composer task that pulls in those files that I need, and then I use Gulp. Gulp is probably an even bigger component to my plugins than Composer. It does so much stuff that would take way too much time if I didn’t use it. So, Gulp. I run a task called Gulp deps, short for “Dependencies,” and that will copy the files from the Composer folder, and it will rename the classes as I use an order plugins so that they’re specific for that plugin. It will move these files into a nice tidy folder so I don’t have to commit or I don’t have to release all of the Composer files, because you often get a lot of stuff that you don’t need. By doing that it means that each plugin is sharing these libraries, but they’re also independent because they’re all renamed. If I release an update for WooThumbs, for example, and someone is using Delivery Slots as well, I don’t need to do any checking to see that they’re both using the latest version of the library. I can know that independently they run as well as they should be by themselves. So, Gulp is a massive part, and I also have Gulp tasks that watch the SCSS and compile the JavaScript. They create the final plugins zip and push it to Freemius via Gulp, so I can just run Gulp compile and Gulp deploy. You can imagine, this is probably like a year ago I was doing most of this manually for every plugin, and you can imagine that it takes a lot of time.

Joe: Absolutely. Because even renaming the classes for each plugin, like generally when I start a plugin I get the WordPress plugin boilerplate that Tom McFarlane originally released. Part of that is making sure that everything is renamed properly, not having to do a find and replace to do that and then essentially waiting for it to error out in case you have a collision. Even creating the final zip and pushing it to Freemius automatically, like a big step in my podcast process is exporting from Audacity and then having to manually upload it to Lipson, which is my audio host. That takes– It’s like a couple of minutes, but it’s a couple of minutes here and there to do this and a couple of minutes here and there to do that. It sounds like you’re saving a huge amount of time by using just Gulp.

James: Yeah, 100%. Also something for your show notes, that Freemius deployment via Gulp is on the MPM repository so anyone can use it.

Joe: Nice.

James: But that saves a ridiculous amount of time.

Joe: Awesome. We didn’t touch on Freemius, which I would have liked to ask in the research phase. What made you use Freemius? Did you look at other options? You’re a WooCommerce developer, so naturally, I would imagine you looked at WooCommerce, but–?

James: I did. I looked at a few options. Like you say, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Paddle. I think I looked at [Fospring] for a little while and Freemius. The issue I was facing is being in the EU, basically. I don’t know what it’s like over there, but if we sell a digital product to a European country we have to pay their tax or charge their tax, and then pay it to that country using a system called [VAT] [inaudible], which is a massive headache to manage. Primarily I was looking for a system that would handle that [VAT] stuff for me, even down to just charging [VAT]. I’m not [VAT] registered, so at the time when I was looking, I was making $4,000 dollars a month which isn’t enough to be registered for [VAT] anyway. So it wasn’t worth me doing that, and going through the hassle of doing that. I was looking for a system that would do that for me, which WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads don’t, which is why they were rolled out. If I went with them, I would have to basically have a good accountant, because I don’t want to be doing that stuff myself. So, I looked to Freemius and Paddle my last two options, and Freemius just seemed to make sense because of how intertwined with WordPress it is. On top of handling the [VAT] stuff for me, they would offer me subscription payments and actual deployment processes, managing customer licenses and things like that. It was all contained within this one package that I wouldn’t have had if I used Paddle, for example.

Joe: Gotcha. So, with Freemius, basically you sign up for Freemius, and they take a cut of your sales, that’s on essentially a degrading scale. The more sales you make, the smaller percentage they end up taking. You deploy to Freemius, and they handle the software licenses. If you upload an updated version of the plugin, do they push it out automatically as well?

James: My deployment process, when you run it will upload it to them and then it gives you a link in the terminal that you click, and it takes you to the Freemius dashboard where you can then publish it. When you publish, it pushes it through to the WordPress update mechanism, so it’d just be the same as updating any plugin in WordPress.

Joe: Awesome. So you don’t have to be like, “Plugin’s updated. Come download the new version here,” or whatever. It just gets pushed out.

James: Which I was using Code Canyon before this, and that was the mechanism for Code Canyon. Where they send out an email saying “There’s an update available.”

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. That’s fantastic. Freemius is probably the lead contender for me as I get into this, because there are certain things I want to focus on, and building the infrastructure to sell premium plugins is not part of that.

James: Exactly.

Joe: As well as, I’m not an accountant. I sell online courses, and I’ve definitely sold to countries that require a [VAT], and I don’t know. I haven’t charged extra for it so I might get– I don’t know if I’m going to get hit. I have to talk to my accountant about that. But something that handles all of that for me sounds fantastic.

James: Exactly. You’ve got the Freemius team behind you as well. If you feel there’s something missing, drop them a message, and if they feel like it’s a good idea, they’ll implement it. They’re very responsive as well.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. In a previous episode, I talked to Vova Feldman who is the founder of Freemius, so I will link to that episode in the show notes as well. You can hear all about how Freemius was built.

James: Great.

Joe: Cool. So, as we approach time here, I know that you mentioned that you’re working on a few things. What are your plans for the future as far as Iconic WP goes?

James: What I’d like to do is expand the plugin collection. Like I said, I’m building out a wish list plugin, and I’ve got– Like I said before as well, a big list of plugins that I want to build. I want to expand the collection, I want to keep bringing value to the customers that use me currently, and that might use me in the future, and then on top of that I want to have another developer or two that work with me on the plugins. More outside of a support role, but as part of the core team that build out these plugins and comes up with ideas and releases them. So that eventually as a WooCommerce store and you could cover off most bases by just using Iconic.

Joe: Nice. That sounds awesome. I have a couple of follow up questions on that because again, these are things that I think about. They’re these mental hurdles for me because I am a developer, I have a bunch of plugins, and I could probably make premium. But as you expand your plugin collection, what does support look like? Do you find that there’s like, “If I add X plugin support, requests will increase by Y,” or something like that?

James: I don’t have any particular equation that works out how much support I’m going to get, but yet it will naturally increase as the plugins increase. But so will sales, which gives me more money to pay a technical support person. Up until a few weeks ago, I was doing all of the technical support, and it was taking up pretty much all of my time, which was good and bad. It was good because I was able to see which bugs were there and you could constantly be fixing these bugs in the plugins and pushing out updates. But you do start to focus on the top selling plugins, and the ones that aren’t selling as much or don’t have as many support requests fall behind. I had some that hadn’t been updated for ten month that I’ve just updated now. So, it was– It came to the point where I needed to have someone else on technical support in order for me to make sure that everything’s working as well as it should be. That the company is running as well as it should be, and that I’ve got time to push out more plugins. I think it is something that’s going to come naturally as I release more plugins, I’ll need more technical support, and over time I should hopefully need another developer on it full time rather than just support. At the moment it’s just a “Do it and see.”

Joe: Cool. I wish you a lot of luck with that. Do you use some tool, like Help Scout, to manage support requests?

James: Yes. Help Scout.

Joe: Nice. Help Scout was top of mind because that’s the one that– It’s very popular in the WordPress community, I think.

James: Yeah, it is.

Joe: It’s the one I hear about the most.

James: Help Scout is great. Also, Freemius integrates with it, so you can see the status of the license in the sidebar.

Joe: Wow.

James: I also use Drift for live chat on my product pages, which is pretty good as a pre-sales tool. You do get people that come on asking for support, which is OK, but it’s just me on Drift at the moment. So it can be quite distracting, I find.

Joe: Sure.

James: I also use Help Scout Docs for all of my documentation.

Joe: Awesome. Cool. So, last question on here before I get to my favorite question. I’ve been hearing a lot that live chat can help increase sales. Have you found that to be– Have you found Drift to be a good–? You mentioned it’s good for pre-sale, but have you noticed an uptick in sales because of it?

James: Yeah, 100%. I don’t have any stats to back it up, but I know from the conversations I’ve had, if there wasn’t a live chat there I think a lot of the people I speak to would think “This plugin doesn’t do what I need. I’ll go find another one.” Whereas if you’ve got live chat there they can ask the question and you can give them an answer straight away, and a lot of the time the plugin might do something that they didn’t realize that it did based on your landing page. That gives you actionable things to do based on that because you can you can convince them that it does do what they need, and then you also know that you maybe need to update your landing page to include that information.

Joe: That’s another great tip. I think right after this I’m going to go install Drift on my website. Awesome. You’ve given us tons of great advice already, but I do want to ask, do you have any trade secrets for us?

James: Any trade secrets. For me, it’s all about persistence. I started my first ecommerce plugin, WooThumbs was built in 2011. So, it’s been around a long time. It’s the first of its kind, and in my opinion, still the best. But it’s taken a while to get to where I am now. Now I’m running this business full time, my wife is on maternity, so it’s our only income, and it’s good. It gives me the freedom to do what I want, to work when I want, to not work when I want. It’s all been about persistence. We’ve been– Those years I’ve had other jobs, I’ve run a web agency, and this has always been a side project for me until the beginning of 2016 where I started to focus on it full time. I think if you can get to the stage where you can focus on it full time, keep pushing, keep iterating and trying different things. Using Google optimized to run A/B tests and things like that, really push what you’re doing with the product and try and increase conversions. I think most importantly, listen to your customers, speak to customers and communicate with customers, and find out what they need and how they found you, and what you can do to make your offerings better for them. That’s probably quite a lot of stuff.

Joe: Yeah, but lots of really great advice. Definitely, everybody heed that advice. Keep pushing. I think a lot of people feel like, “I’ll start my own business. It’s online, so it’s easier,” But it’s not easy by any stretch. Listening to your customers, what they need and how they found you, that’s something I’ve been hearing a lot lately. Talk to your customers. Maybe even have real phone conversations, or person to person conversations with them when you can, because it will unlock a goldmine of information for you to help you with your business.

James: Definitely. If you can get on the phone, you can get a lot more information than you can via e-mail, so that is that is a great way to do it.

Joe: That’s great.

James: I think another thing is as well, I think you’re never going to feel like you’re finished. There’s always more to do, and I think you’re always going to think “I should be doing better than I’m doing now.” There’s always going to be people that– One offs in the industry that are just doing amazingly, and you don’t have to be them. You have to be as good as you can be and know that what you’re doing is working.

Joe: Those are words to live by. I don’t think they need– I think you said it the best way possible. So, James, thanks so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?

James: You can find my website at IconicWP.com. I’ve also got Twitter, @iconicwp or my personal one is @jamesckemp. Just Google my name, and there should be some stuff.

Joe: Nice. I will include all of that in the show notes. James, thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate your time.

James: Thanks, Joe. It was great.

Outro: Thanks so much to James for joining me today. I loved his advice about using the WooCommerce ideas board as a great way to initially validate your idea. He talked a bit about Drift and how he saw an uptick in sales after integrating live chat. This is something that I’ve thought about doing for a while, and I just– For whatever reason, either I wasn’t convinced, or I’m suspect of the performance hit my website will take, I just haven’t done it yet. Perhaps I will do it now with James’ advice. I also love that he has a bunch of trade secrets from persistence to A/B testing, but I like what he said about how you’re never going to feel like you’ve finished. I think that is great advice for you to go and launch because if you wait until you feel like you’re finished, you’re never going to launch. My question of the week for you is, do you use live chat on your website? Or, did this episode convince you to use live chat on your website? Let me know by sending me an email, Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter, @jcasabona.

Miniseries: Now, I want to continue my story my little miniseries on how I built my podcasting course. Over the last two weeks we talked about research, and the research I did or didn’t do, and how I evolved the process and how I’m evolving the course. Over the next few weeks, I want to tell you about how I built it. I want to answer the title question, “How did I build this course?” I’m breaking it up into how I built the course itself, and how I built the tech stack on top of which the course is made. So, let’s start with how I built the course. As you know from listening in previous episodes, the first iteration of the course I made a very cognizant decision to only focus on building the podcast website. Because of that, and how that shaped my outline, I created an outline for the course, and I decided to build out a full website step by step. All of my courses are learn by doing, so in that first iteration of the course, we don’t go over things like recording or choosing gear. I’ve assumed that you’ve done those things already and now you’re ready to put your website online. We start with things like choosing a domain and choosing website hosting, installing WordPress. Each section of the course has a specific goal in mind that builds towards the overall goal of the course, which is to launch a website and submit your podcast to iTunes. My general course building process is to write an outline, refine that outline, and then come up with a goal for each lesson that builds towards the overall goal of the course. I wanted to do some value-adds in this course. Anybody– I shouldn’t say anybody can figure out, but there’s a lot of resources out there on how to set up just a simple WordPress website. I wanted to deliver a bunch of value in this course, like “Why do we need a separate website for our podcast?” I answer that question. “How do I evaluate audio hosts? How do I know what plugin to use for podcasts? What theme should I use, and how do I submit my podcast to Apple Podcasts?” That’s a that’s a common question, and I want to show you exactly how we do it with the website we just built. I also show people who take the course how to submit it to other directories as well. Apple Podcasts gets the lion’s share of the publicity, but there are several other directories out there that are worth submitting to, and in this course, we submit to all of them. So, that’s where I want to leave this conversation. But I will say that in my research and feedback I made a pretty bad decision in not showing the entire podcast process, so next week we’ll talk about how I’m revamping the course and how I’m rebuilding the course to build around the website but give users or students a more full picture of starting a new podcast from scratch. So, that’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, please give me a rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people discover the show. If you have any questions, feel free to write in, Joe@HowIBuilt.it or @jcasabona. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Daniel Espinoza and Wearing Many Hats

November 20, 2018

Sponsored by:

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Daniel Espinoza is a man who wears many hats: agency owner, product seller, family man, and more. In the episode we get into how he manages keeping everything running smoothly. This is a fantastic conversation for anyone who wants to diversify what they do, without getting too overwhelmed.

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Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 103 of How I Built It. Today I’m talking to Daniel Espinoza, and he does a whole lot of stuff. He creates in depth and big e-commerce websites for clients, he sells his own plugins, and a lot more. He’s also a family man, which we’ll talk about. I appreciate all of the advice that Daniel was able to give us in this episode. He talks about things like building a lifestyle business, which is something that I’m trying to do. I want to balance life and family and running my own business, and I don’t want to be married to my job. I’m trying to build a business that supports the life I want to lead, and he talks a lot about that too. He also offers good advice about launching and a whole bunch of other things, so again I’m excited about this episode. I’m glad that Daniel was able to give me some of his time and advice because we are in– He’s maybe a couple of years ahead of the current situation that I’m in, and to look into the future a little bit was valuable for me.

We’ll get into all of that in a minute, and I do want to tell you that this episode is sponsored by Pantheon and by Creator Courses. On the day this episode comes out, we are looking at about a week until WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg, so maybe it’s already out as you listen to this. There’s a lot of concern around what that means for developers and for our clients, and how we need to handle upgrades. I have a lot of courses available around that subject. I have a course that shows you how to use Gutenberg if you’re a user and you’re curious how the interface is going to change, and that’s very affordable. If you’re a freelancer I include that course in my Gutenberg for Freelancers course, but you will also learn how to work with your clients and create an upgrade plan and communicate these changes to them, so there’s that too. If you’re a theme developer, there’s a theming for Gutenberg course that I developed with my friend Zach Gordon. You can find all of those over at CreatorCourses.com/Gutenberg, and you can get a special discount by using the coupon code BUILDIT at checkout. Go ahead and check those out over at CreatorCourses.com/Gutenberg. You’ll hear about Pantheon later on in the show. For now, let’s get started.

Joe Casabona: Daniel, how are you today?

Daniel Espinoza: I’m doing a great, Joe. I’m doing great. Thanks for asking.

Joe: Awesome. Thanks for coming on the show. Daniel and I, we hung out around each other. We have similar circles, and we got in touch because I was checking out one of his plugins, and then we got to talking about building a lifestyle business. That’s what we’re talking about today.

Daniel: Definitely.

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

Daniel: Great. My name is Daniel Espinoza, and I work online mostly in the WooCommerce space. I have two businesses, and one is Grow Development which is a WooCommerce agency that focuses on mostly recently subscription sites. I help large subscription sites fine-tune their business, making sure that the subscriptions happen correctly and on time. They can do reporting, and they can add functionality, the wheels keep turning on these large subscription businesses. I also support all of ConvertKit’s WordPress plugins, so they’re another big client. I also have a more traditional WordPress plugin marketplace that came out of a previous life of being a WooThemes employee, and a plugin developer since before WooCommerce was WooCommerce.

I built for Jigoshop back in the day, and we went through that transition of becoming WooCommerce, and building plugins, and when AD had his Summer of Code where they wanted to get as many plugins written for a fledgling WooCommerce as possible, I helped, and I built like four or five payment gateways that summer. So from that, now I’m focusing on store owners who do subscriptions and helping them with their challenges. But the many hats is a real thing, and I have an inside joke with some Slack buddies of mine that I’m constantly switching hats throughout the day. From support tickets to a client meeting to writing code to figuring out what’s next for the agency, to doing marketing and making videos and blog posts. It’s fun. All of it is interesting work, and I do it from a spare bedroom in my house. It’s stuff that I’ve chosen to do, and I like doing.

Joe: That’s fantastic. We were talking a little bit before we started recording about the reasons why you decided to get into this line of work, and you mentioned Start with Why, which is one of my favorite books. It’s excellent, and I’ll link it in the show notes. It’s one I often recommend. Can you maybe talk about how reading that book changed your perspective on running a business? I know that’s a very Terry Gross NPR question, but it’s a good one to ask.

Daniel: Definitely. I read the book in 2014 or 2015, and I started my business– Before working online, I worked at a bank in an IT department. Khakis and business casual and cubicles. Then my wife had our first child, and she started staying home to care for our daughter, and that’s around the time in the late 2000s when Freelance Switch was going on and the four-hour work week came out, and ThemeForest was getting started. A lot of talk was happening about becoming a freelancer, so I thought “I can code. I can do this,” and I threw a couple of opportune meetings. I got a first client and then I quit my job, full of stars and dollar signs in my eyes and this was 2018. What else happened in 2018? Excuse me, in 2008.

That was the market crash of real estate and stuff. But I survived that, it was fine. When I read Start with Why it fine-tuned the reason and brought back the reason that I had started working for myself, and it was that I didn’t want to be stuck at a code deployment for a bank over a weekend. Literally staying there 24 hours, because these are ATMs that you’re deploying code to. I didn’t want to be stuck there if it wasn’t my choice just because I was an ancillary part of this large team, and I wanted to be with my family. I wanted to be with people I love and doing things that I like, so enabling this lifestyle of freedom of location and freedom of choice, just freedom of choosing things that I want to do as opposed to having them put on me.

That’s what it was all about and my why, I succinctly put into a sentence in a blog post was, “My Why is to run a business that allows me to spend as much time with my family, traveling the world, and doing work that I love.” I’ve reached that point and gotten to do cool things online, hang out with my family, my kids are, and that’s a decision that came from wanting to travel. We haven’t traveled a lot in the last couple of years, but we’ve kept that decision because it fits the Why also. We don’t want to wake up at 6 AM to an alarm clock to get the kids to school. We love teaching them and doing homeschool-type stuff. The businesses are what help that to happen. They pay the checks, and they write the checks for our lifestyle.

Joe: That’s fantastic. You and I have similar reasoning, because I was working in an agency before I went out on my own about a year or so ago and the birth of my daughter was the impetus of that. The agency life was a good single lifestyle because I loved staying up super late and writing code and things like that. But now I want to spend time with my kid.

Daniel: They’re cute, right? You don’t want to leave them.

Joe: Exactly. I’m fortunate, much like you, that we have a babysitter who is here. I work from home so at lunchtime or if I’m not doing anything I’ll go downstairs and say hi to the kiddo and spend a few minutes with her. Very fortunate in that sense. But I also that reasoning because a lot of people start a business thinking, “This is the best way to get rich.” Perhaps it is. We talk about the hockey stick growth, where it’s low, low, low, and then high but I don’t have any delusions of grandeur that I’m going to be a multimillionaire because I’m not working sixteen hours. I’m not doing the Gary V lifestyle. I’m working the eight to ten hours a day and then spending as much time as I can with my family. So I love that, and I just wanted you to say it on the show.

Daniel: Yeah, totally.

Joe: You also mentioned you’ve niched down to subscription sites, and you manage these plugins.

Daniel: Right.

Joe: I always like to ask, what research did you do in either developing a plugin or making the decision? I want to target that at your decision to do subscription sites because I know that there’s a lot of moving parts to subscription sites and it’s incredibly important to have somebody who understands them well. So, what was your decision-making process with that?

Daniel: The four year ago time, when you and I were networking around each other. I haven’t been to a WordCamp in over a year. The last one was local San Antonio, maybe 18 months ago I went to Atlanta. But I’ve stopped doing that, previously I was traveling for a lot of WordCamps and going to events that– What was it? The WooConferences and–

Joe: WooCon, PressNomics–

Daniel: PressNomics, thank you. Gosh. Totally blanked out on that. Through that, I met a lot of great people, and I don’t look down on doing that. It’s a great way to build your network and connect with people that are fun and building this WordPress economy. But I backed off on that, so through that, I got a lot of referrals for WordPress work and for WooCommerce work, for building plugins and for building sites. I don’t do themes because I’m not a front-end guy, and I’m okay with that in my soul. I have come to terms with that. But the projects, they chose me. The projects that kept coming back were these subscription sites. Understanding the ins and outs of the WooCommerce subscriptions plugin built by ProsPress. That code base is a level of difficulty or a level of challenge that is above and beyond a normal WooCommerce site. It’s a whole ecosystem unto itself, on top of WooCommerce on top of WordPress.

So being able to say, “I can do what you’re looking for, doing custom scheduling or whatever the business is wanting. I can do that fairly quickly for a good price.” People like that, and subscriptions folks, they have the holy grail of recurring revenue, and they can forecast out months of what their money will be. They have more money and more wiggle room to keep someone, a developer like myself or an agency on staff to handle the problems that they’re having. It’s not a one and done type project. I liked that aspect, and I like building the relationship with the store owner because they get to go off and focus on their product, they get to focus on their marketing, and we keep the site running smoothly. When they come to us, and they’re like, “OK. We’re ready to add a wish list functionality,” or, “We’re ready to add a refer a friend functionality.” I can say, “OK here’s our options on the pre-built plugin landscape, and then here’s if we put some custom code in. This is what it will look like.” Then they make their choice and boom we’re off. It’s a different dynamic than someone coming in the door and saying, “I want this site built.” And they have a price built in their head that they’re looking for, that $10 an hour type of thing.

Then educating that person into a project, and then serving them through the project and then trying to do a follow-up. It’s a whole different thing. We have we have a weekly call with the site owner, and we have ongoing conversations. They mentioned something we take note of, and a month later we’ll bring it back, and they’ll say, “I did want to work on that. We have a lull in other things, let’s work on that project now.” It’s an ongoing relationship, and it suits my personality well to have those instead of the revolving door of projects, and so when I said “It chose me,” it was just that I had a couple of these and now this is what I look for. We have several sites that we serve, and I know who they are and what their business model looks like, so if somebody comes in looking for a theme, I say, “I’m glad you came. It’s nice to meet you, but you’re going to be better served going over here.”

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: Something you said about the $10 an hour website, people running subscription sites can immediately see the value in your work.

Daniel: Definitely.

Joe: If I’m making a brochure site for somebody, it’s hard to attach direct dollars to a brochure site. Because how many people are going to use the contact form, and then how many of those people are going to become paying customers? “You built me a subscription thing, and now I’m making even $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Great. I now know how valuable you are to me. You’re at least $12,000 a year valuable.”

Daniel: If our fees are a percentage of that, we can say “With a current site we have, our fees I can see are less than 10% of their monthly revenues. So I can say, “For the same fee structure we can grow your monthly revenue so that we can become an even smaller percentage and a smaller expense for your company, and build on top of that. We know we know how we built your site. We know where the problem points are. We can optimize your checkout, and we can speed up certain pages, we can fix your subscription renewals to run faster and take up less processing. Doing all of these things comes from an intimate knowledge of the site and the code, and how it’s built.

Joe: That’s brilliant. On that same token, mentioning percentages and stuff like that. I’ve quoted out e-commerce website, and somebody was like “We’re going to have thirty thousand products on the website.” It was just pulling stuff from various APIs, and I quoted him at $20,000 or something. And he was like, “That’s a lot of money,” and I’m like, “That’s less than $1 a product. That’s like $1.50, or $0.75 a product or something like that.”

Daniel: What’s funny about that, I was going through my email from a decade ago when I started out, and I started out building e-commerce sites. My email had hit the threshold. It was at 80%, so I was like “This is ridiculous. Let me remove– What is taking up this space?” I did a search for anything over five meg and back in 2008, 2009, 2010 I was getting emailed these Photoshop files for these e-commerce sites that I was building out a theme for. I had this string of emails of this site’s PSD, this site PSD. I was talking to my wife, and I was like, “I have so many of these files.” And she said, “Are any of those sites still online?” And I said, “I don’t think they are.”

And I searched for a couple, and they’re definitely online. So that’s also the difference, I felt bad. So much money and effort was put into the design of this site before it launched, and then it launched. Then how much effort was put into the building the customer base? The marketing, the long-term sustainability of the business? I grieved a little bit for that. I am sorry that they didn’t make it. But my customers now have revenue, they have a marketing plan, they have product-market fit, and they have all those buzzwords. They’re making money. I’m glad to be a part of that and help push that along and make it even bigger for them.

Joe: That’s fantastic. I’m enjoying this line of thinking. I didn’t prep you for this, but for the title question of how did you build it, maybe we could talk about things that you need to think about when building a subscription site. Would that be cool?

Daniel: Definitely.

Joe: Awesome. Let’s take a random subscription site. How did you build it?

Daniel: The stack that I mentioned, the WordPress WooCommerce, WooCommerce Subscriptions. The cost is only for WooCommerce Subscriptions on the plugin inside, just straight out of the box you can set that up. WooCommerce Subscriptions is maybe $199 for a year license. You can set that up, put a product on there that will recur monthly for whatever cost. $25, $50, $49 or whatever, and then start marketing that day one. If it’s access to a membership site or to a newsletter or something like that, that’s all it takes, and you’re in the door. After that then you can start, if you’re shipping a product then you have costs with fulfillment and actual production and cost of goods, then that goes from there. But having a website that will handle subscriptions for you, it’s a low barrier to entry.

Joe: Nice. Are there any particular themes that you like to work with, or are they generally custom developed themes?

Daniel: They are usually a child theme of Storefront which is built by the WooCommerce team. I have a couple of custom built themes, I would advise against custom built themes because they’re pain for future developers to maintain. On my sites, I use Array Themes, and then Storefront for other stuff. Shop Plugins, we’re switching. We started with a ThemeForest theme from Astoundify, and then we’re switching over to Array Themes checkout because it works well, the EDD. Yes, we are a WooCommerce plugin developer selling on EDD, which may sound funny but when we started Shop Plugins in 2014, it was the best solution for handling software licenses and a lot of the stuff that freemium and Freemius and some of the other solutions that exist now that didn’t exist back then. EDD’s still going strong, so we’re glad to be– And we sold EDD plugins previously in a previous life, but it is still going strong, and that’s what we built that site with.

Joe: Nice. I’m a big fan of the folks over at EDD, and I just interviewed Vova Feldman recently about Freemius.

Daniel: It’s a great product. I built it into a plugin for a client, and it works well, and all the features. He can focus on adding features to that integration, and it’s taking off.

Joe: Absolutely. I’m thinking about selling a few of my own plugins, and I’m seriously considering Freemius because that’s not the main focus of my business, building online courses is. I would much rather– I’m happy to give them a higher percentage if I don’t have to worry about anything.

Daniel: That’s true.

Joe: Developers can easily fall into the trap of, “I can build this, so I’m going to build it myself.” But I’ve matured in the last few years, maybe having a kid has helped. I don’t have time to do all of this stuff all the time.

Daniel: That’s right.

Joe: The other question I wanted to ask about the subscriptions, and this is a question that I personally get a lot when I’m coaching freelancers or something like that, is who pays for the WooCommerce subscriptions plugin? Do you have your client do that, or do you pay for it and then pass on the cost to them?

Daniel: The client pays for everything. They handle it, and it’s just a business expense for them. WooCommerce.com has a great feature where you can add another email address as a developer or an advocate or something, so when I log into WooCommerce.com, I have a little dropdown that has all my clients in there. I can switch over to their account and pull new versions because we don’t do automatic updates on sites, we have a workflow for pushing updates. I can pull new versions of code there as that customer. That’s a great feature for managing multiple client’s downloads. They pay for the license, but I get access.

Joe: That’s truly fantastic because I’ve certainly run into that. I had a client recently who was the designer for the site. So I was two people removed from the client, and he’s like “Can’t I just use your license?” I’m like, “No you cannot.”

Daniel: Because you’re going to forget it’s out there, and then following up. I inherited this site, or I had a customer come to me who was, but they were hurting, several of the things didn’t work on the site. It was a digital downloads type marketplace, and they’re still with me. In September I rebuilt their whole Amazon AWS site in Elastic Beanstalk, and it’s humming now. It’s running great. But we had to track down all of the licenses that the developer had, and they weren’t on a great relationship because there is outstanding payment and promises that weren’t kept, and all that. They ended up– They didn’t care. They wanted to move forward, they just cut clean, and then I had them repurchase what we needed through WooCommerce and give me access. I always tell them, “You own everything. It’s your AWS account. It’s your licenses. It’s your MailChimp account,” or whatever. I’m integrating, and then I leave. I have a document that lists what integrations are on it, but you have all the keys to the kingdom. It’s your site.

Joe: Absolutely. That’s why I said, “My God if I disappear one day then you’re out of luck. What if the client decides they don’t want this anymore but don’t tell anybody?” It’s better for the client to own things. On that same token, I want to get philosophical again, which is not characteristic of me on the show. But you mentioned that we’re talking about having the clients buy all of the licenses, and generally they’re going to have one site, but a lot of the licensing for plugins and you sell plugins maybe your licensing is the same way. It’s based on the number of sites used, where it’s one site, five site, unlimited sites. How do you feel about that pricing? Do you think we’re evolving out of that type of pricing because more people are encouraging the clients? Or do you think that the developer license is still a valuable thing for a lot of people?

Daniel: A developer license is valuable. On Shop Plugins I don’t have the feature of sharing licenses with your developer. If someone bought a plugin on Shop Plugins and they wanted to share it with a developer, they’d have to share credentials, login information. We don’t get a lot of requests for that feature, so we’re not going to build it. But we get a lot of purchases for, we have a one site license which might be $49, and then we have a two to five site license that is made possible through the software licenses plugin from EDD. We implemented it, which it’s a certain percentage higher than like 89. Maybe it’s not twice as much, but it’s a little bit less and incentivizes buying the higher price point and getting the extra licenses. A lot of clients, or excuse me, a lot of customers buying plugins who are agencies.

I don’t know what the numbers are off the top of my head, but they are using it on multiple sites. There definitely is a use case for that, and they’re matching that plugin on multiple projects. It’s up to them. It’s on them to maintain those licenses. I have had some support requests come in saying “I inherited this site. We think we have a license, but we’re not sure.” And I’ll do some searching and find the site and find the old invoice and say, “It was this person. Can you tell me their name?” And they’re like, “Yeah. It’s this person, this designer who previously worked on it.” I can line it up, and I’m small enough to where I can do that type of legwork and then grant them the rest of that license. Or they buy another one, and they’re OK with that.

Joe: As we’re approaching the end of the show here, I do want to ask about the line that you’re straddling. We mentioned that you wear a lot of hats, and one thing that– The biggest barrier for me personally entering into the plugin product market is the fear of, “I’m just going to get slammed with support requests all the time.” How do you how do you manage that? You do seemingly very high level, and you have some high profile clients here. How do you manage that with managing your Shop Plugins website?

Daniel: Lately I’ve come to grips. Again, a little bit of reflection time. Come to grips with Shop Plugins is a side business. Just straight up revenue, Grow Development is the main focus with time. Dave Ramsey or other money people have talked about, “If you want to know where your priorities are look at your checkbook.” My priority with what’s paying me and what’s supporting our family is Grow Development. Shop Plugins is doing OK. It still makes money every month, and it’s still growing, but it gets a little a small percentage of my time because it is a side business. Having said that, this past couple months I’ve integrated my contractor team of developers into building stuff for Shop Plugins. One of the plugins we just launched was built 90% by one of my contractors. He would write code, and I’d review, we’d have a workflow going. I’d do design, and he would integrate that, and then we launched.

That has been different in that it’s a Shop Plugin plugin, but it’s built by a team, instead of one person. The original question of, how to straddle that, it gets the time it needs. If you launch a plugin and you’re inundated by support requests, that’s a good thing. Because what’s the worst thing that is going to happen? They want a refund. I just gave a refund right before we got on air. It’s not that big of a deal. Get over it. There will be another customer. And if you refund somebody, things don’t work out, and you’re in your– We have a 14-day return policy. We used to have 30 for the longest time, but 14 days is enough time to install it and see if it works for you. I don’t have people usually request after the window. They were inside of the window. They’ve tried it, and it didn’t work. It was our PDF watermark plugin. They were trying to do some type of secure PDF that our plugin couldn’t watermark. I was like, “No problem. You’re on a tight deadline. I don’t have time to look into this today. I’m going to go ahead and refund you. Thanks for being a customer, hope to see you again.” They might come back, and they might not. It’s not that big of a deal. But I’m not going to sink in a lot of time looking into this specific secure PDF format because it’s the only person that has asked me about it. If I get ten more, then that’s a big blinking light that maybe we should fix.

But mostly we don’t get slammed with support requests. Maybe a couple a day. Those are enough to be handled in the Slack time after because I have one client that takes up pretty much all of my daytime hours. Like you were mentioning working eight to ten hours, they take all of my time. Then after that is when I do project management, code reviews, support requests and that type of stuff. It’s on a lesser, and it’s on a tired brain when some of these support requests get looked at. Some of them I can fix and build in or add a feature to help support them, like supporting the PDF invoices plugin, doing something that’s eventually going to help the plugin sell better if it has a better integration. But those one-off, “Does it work with this?” “No.” “Then I want a refund.” “That’s fine. Go about your day. It’s fine.” But yes, being if you do launch your plugins Joe, and you do get inundated with support requests, that’s a good thing because it means you’ve got a lot of sales. That’s a good place to be.

Joe: That’s awesome. That’s the pull quote for this episode. I love it. Cool. With the last few minutes we have, I do want to ask you two questions. What are your plans for the future? And, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Daniel: Plans for the future, continue serving subscriptions clients for Grow Development. Ship a couple more plugins at Shop Plugins. We have three in the queue that are waiting on me to review and to do the marketing copy for it to get them launched. The trade secret is actually related to that. The trade secret is just freaking launch. Get your stuff out there because there’s two things that are going to happen that you need. One is Google’s going to index it, and that indexing will pay off. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but maybe in 12 months. We saw that with Shop Plugins we would launch a plugin, and we launched in February 2015, and we saw when plugins got indexed. Then we saw a six-month window to when after we launched them that we started getting more organic traffic and sales to that plugin.

It was there. You could see when we put the landing page up and when traffic started flowing because we dialed in the marketing copy or whatever to get sales. That’s not going to happen, that process isn’t going to start until you hit publish, so hit publish. The other thing related to that is you’ll get feedback from people to ask questions on, “It does that, but does it do this?” And if you start stacking up that customer feedback from people who are actually looking to spend money on your product, then that’s valuable. That’s gold. You can assimilate that into your process, maybe change your features, maybe tweak your marketing copy. Then it doubles down on itself. It compounds on more people looking for the same thing and finding your product, and they’re buying it. So, publish your stuff and get it out there. Start talking about it and having a dialogue, don’t do it in a vacuum.

Joe: That’s great. I have come into some extra time this week, so maybe I will launch my first plugin this week. Awesome. Daniel, thank you so much for your time. Where can people find you?

Daniel: Awesome. You’re welcome, Joe. I’m glad to be here. You can find me online at my website, Daniel.gd and everyone tries to add a dot com or dot something onto it. It’s top-level domain for Grenada, but whatever, it was the shortest Daniel domain I could find. Then most places I’m @growdev, short for Grow Development. But Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube I’m @growdev.

Joe: Awesome. I will be sure to link all of that in the show notes. Once again Daniel, thank you so much for your time. Awesome advice and thanks for getting a little bit philosophical with me today.

Daniel: Any time, Joe. Thanks for having me.

Outro: Thanks so much to Daniel for joining me today. I appreciate everything that he offered from the [just freaking launched] to the advice that, if you are inundated with support requests, that’s a good thing. It means that people are buying your plugin and that’s rarely a bad thing. Thank you again to Daniel, and thank you to our sponsors Creator Courses and Pantheon. They are both putting out great resources for Gutenberg and the impending WordPress 5.0 launch. My question of the week for you is, why haven’t you launched your plugin yet? Are you thinking about selling a plugin, and what are the stumbling blocks? I have a bunch that I haven’t sold yet. Maybe because of this episode I will, once I have a little bit of downtime to build up the shop or create a simple checkout process.

But anyway, what is keeping you from launching your first premium plugin? Let me know at Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona. You can also head over to the How I Built It Facebook group and discuss these things with other listeners. You can find that over at HowIBuilt.it/Facebook. If you liked this episode and are enjoying the show, you can go over to Apple podcasts and leave a rating and review. It helps people discover the show, and the show has seen great growth over this last year. I want to see that continued now and into 2019. For all of the show notes you can go to HowIBuilt.it/103. Once again, thank you so much for joining me. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Chris Lema and Managed WooCommerce Hosting

November 6, 2018

Sponsored by:

Loxi: Get your first 3 months free with code GETLOXINOW
Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.

Chris Lema is a man who knows how to build a good product. And in this episode, he’s going to tell us all about how he helped build Liquid Web’s Managed WooCommerce Hosting. We’ll talk about what eCommerce shops need, the importance of performance, and he’ll give us lots of great tips.

Show Notes

Chris Lema | Twitter
Liquid Web
CaboPress
Bryce Adams and Metorik
Brian Richards and WooSesh
PerfMatters
WP Rocket
Jilt
Beka Rice and Jilt
Glew
Astra Pro
Beaver Builder
Email Chris: chris@liquidweb.com
How to Speed Up Your WooCommerce Store | Part 2

View on separate page

Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Episode 101 of How I Built It. Today I’m talking to my good friend and second repeat guest Chris Lema. Chris is going to tell us all about how he and his team at LiquidWeb built the Managed WooCommerce forum over there. Their goal was to make WooCommerce and e-commerce in general more accessible to people. He’s going to talk through his whole process as well as some important information you need to keep in mind if you’re building an e-commerce website with WooCommerce, or any platform, but we’re going to focus on WooCommerce today.

That is the episode that we’re going to talk about today. Before we get started I do want to tell you about our sponsors. Pantheon, who you’ll hear about a little bit later on in the show, and a new one, Loxi. Today is brought to you by Loxi, from the team behind The Events Calendar, the most popular events plugin on WordPress. Loxi is the online events calendar that makes it easy to display and publish your events on any website. It was built with design in mind to easily fit your website no matter where it’s built. Squarespace, Shopify and beyond. You’ll hear a little bit more about Loxi later on in the show. For now, let’s get to it.

Joe Casabona: Chris, how are you today?

Chris Lema: I’m doing great. Good to see you.

Joe: Good to see you too. I’m excited for this episode. I’m also excited because we are recording this before we both leave for CaboPress, which is a fantastic event that I’m deeply looking forward to.

Chris: It is the best business conference in Cabo. It may also be the only business conference in Cabo, but it’s the best business conference in Cabo.

Joe: See I was about to agree with you, assuming you were stopping at best business conference. So, with the qualifier it’s 100% true. Today we’re going to talk about your Managed WooCommerce hosting from LiquidWeb, but first for those for those who don’t know, why don’t you let us know who you are and what you do.

Chris: Sure. Like you said, my name is Chris Lema. I am the VP of products over at LiquidWeb. The majority of what I spend my time doing is doing product development and managing product. That often ends up being focused in WordPress and WooCommerce. We spent the first year that I was here working on WooCommerce, and then from there building out on top of that starting with WordPress, and then building on top of that the Managed WooCommerce offering. The dynamic is that most people know what Managed WordPress is because it’s been around for nine years. People have experienced that difference. If you go back in time, you remember back when if you were running WordPress on a regular shared host, or someone at Rackspace, a managed host.

If you called in and you had a problem their answer was, “Do I need to give you more RAM or do I need to give you more disks?” That was it. And you’re like, “No. But I’m talking about the application.” And they said, “No. We don’t pay attention to the application.” Nine years later, everybody has had an experience with a Managed WordPress host where you call and you have a question, they know WordPress so they can help you and that’s awesome. But if you put a plugin on top of WordPress and you’re like, “I use this classifieds plugin,” they’re like “No. I don’t get into the applications that you run on WordPress. I just go up to WordPress.” What’s amazing is, with more than 3 million WooCommerce sites on top of WordPress, that was still the state of affairs.

You would have a WooCommerce store and something would be slow, and you would call, and they’d be like “Here’s what we see at the WordPress level.” And you’re like, “What are you seeing at the WooCommerce level?” “No. We don’t get into plugins. It’s too complicated. There’s too many of them. It’s too complicated.” So we said, “Let’s build a dedicated solution that much like Managed WordPress was differentiated from managed hosting, let’s differentiate Managed WooCommerce from Managed WordPress and bring a lot of expertise, performance optimization, thinking about it differently for WooCommerce stores into the market.

Joe: Nice. That’s fantastic. Because those who have been around a while, like you said, will remember calling your hosting company. The answer that I got more often than not was “WordPress is inefficient, so it’s probably something in WordPress.” And I’m like, “That’s probably not the case.” Then they would ask, “Do you need more RAM or more processing?” But the Managed WooCommerce platform is the first of its kind. Especially the way that you guys offer it, which comes with a ton of great tools. As we get into the research question here, the first thing I want to hit is you mentioned that you had to build out Managed WordPress hosting first. When you came to LiquidWeb there was no Managed WordPress hosting, and you couldn’t make the jump to Managed WooCommerce hosting. Why is that?

Chris: A lot of what happens when you start, if you’re building a managed application in a managed hosting company, the managed hosting company pays attention to network and operating system, and disk and RAM. The monitors are set for that. But what you do after that, like if I went into my into our ops team and said, “Tell me which of our customers on our cloud VPS are getting a ton of traffic.” Meaning, look at the ingress routes for HTTP or HTTPS. If I said, “Show me the ones that are getting high traffic that are still HTTP, because I would like to offer them a migration over to HTTPS.”

They would be like, “We don’t look at that. Why would we look at the ingress player for HTTP versus HTTPS traffic for sites that are running on their own boxes? We’re the cloud service provider.” When you shift into applications, you have to go, “I need to monitor different things. I need to interact with it differently, I need my support to be different.” Thankfully LiquidWeb is already clear they were doing this. They were like, “We’re going to do Managed WordPress,” because they had done a scan of all their accounts and all their services and then gone, “We have 30% of our customers– 30% of our servers are hosting WordPress. We should do this.” What I added to the equation was, “Yeah. You should. But after that, we should do something dedicated to WooCommerce.”

That’s when people started scratching their heads going, “That sounds interesting. What does that mean? How big could it be, and what could we do, and how would we do it?” And to your earlier point, it is different. It’s different. There is a ton of hosts, really good hosts, hosts that I have no problem recommending who will allow you to deploy WooCommerce like any other plugin. At one point when Bluehost and our friends at Bluehost launched, they said, “One touch deployment for WooCommerce.” And you’re like, “It’s one touch for every plugin. You click a button and it downloads it. There’s a lot of hosts and good hosts that can deploy WooCommerce. That’s not different.” Our competition never in my mind, it never was Kinsta, [Doty Engine], Flywheel, SiteGround, Bluehost, DreamHost, Pagely. Those were not my competition. My competition was Shopify and big commerce.

Hosted e-commerce platforms. When you compete at that level you realize that those people are optimizing their system for high traffic load. Whereas, imagine if you go to a regular WordPress shop and you install WooCommerce. A normative WordPress environment, when we talk about how you build it and you start looking in the details. A normal WordPress environment, if you’re a host, you’re going to want it highly cachable . The default over at Kinsta is that you get two PHP workers. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Two PHP workers, in order to understand what a PHP worker is, you’d think of it as a cashier at McDonald’s or Burger King. You walk in the door, there’s a line of people, and you go “How many cashiers do they have?” Two PHP workers is two cashiers. You go, “OK. Why only two?” It turns out if you’re running WordPress a lot you’re going to put a caching layer so that most of the requests never hit PHP. Whether you’re talking about full page cache, that’s normally that we’re talking about. Something like a varnish or a cache plugin, you want that hit ratio to be 90-95%.

Which means only 5% is coming through to your PHP workers. You can be highly scalable and have two PHP workers. But try and go to any of these places and run WooCommerce and you’re going to quickly go, “Wait. This platform wasn’t really designed for WooCommerce, it was designed for WordPress. It was designed for high cache utilization and low PHP workers.” In our world we go, “No. I need 100 PHP workers. I need 300 PHP workers.” If you want 100 PHP workers and you go to one of those other places you might be paying $1,000-2,000 a month, if they even let you have it. Ours is obviously much lower. When we were building this out we had to go, “OK. First let’s get everything right for WordPress.” But now, “How do you layer on top of that and still tweak it differently so that you can get high optimization, high performance, on a platform that– Yes, you’ll use some cache. We offer varnish and we offer [Retis] for object storage, and there’s ways to do that. But most importantly, I need everything to be super-fast.” So then I got to pay attention to my infrastructure and shape it for e-commerce logged in transactions, not just non-logged in page views.

Joe: That’s the big difference. On WordPress I publish a post, it’s highly unlikely that I’m going to change that post for a long time. You can reasonably assume that people will view the same copy. But if I’m buying something, I’m going to be logged in, the experience is going to be different from another person who could be buying another thing, and you can’t reasonably cache that information.

Chris: You start getting nuances. Let’s say I want to cache the product page. You’re like, “It’s the product page. Everyone is going to see the same.” You go, “Yeah. But the product page has variations and variations are changing in inventory. I don’t want you to pick a blue shirt that’s size large when that large blue is no longer an inventory.” So now I’m dynamically changing that and you’re like, “This is going to be more complicated than just a regular blog post.”

Joe: Or if you’re split testing prices or something like that, there’s a lot of things that are moving parts with an e-commerce store. You went pretty deep there talking about PHP workers and stuff like that, but you also include a lot of extra services for WooCommerce shop owners. Can you talk about what the decision making was there? I see you include Jilt, you include Glew, and things like that.

Chris: Here’s the thing. Again, if you get to the point of saying “My customer, the competition I have for that customer is buying Shopify right now, or they’re buying big commerce right now. If you are– Let’s say you go to Google and you Google “WooCommerce versus Shopify,” or “WooCommerce versus Shopify review.” If you pull up the top ten links, top ten articles, you’re going to read those, and you’re going to hear a story that goes something like this. “WooCommerce has these features. Shopify has these features. WooCommerce has this interaction, Shopify has this interaction. WooCommerce is free but you have to buy a theme, and you have to pay for a couple of feature plugins. Shopify is cheap, but you have to pay for features. You also got to pay transaction fees.”

You get to the almost end, the penultimate of the article. They’re about to tell you, and they go, “Through 90% of this article, it’s a tie.” Then you get the final paragraph, and it says something like, “But with WooCommerce you have to figure out your own hosting, you’ve got to become your own dev ops, or you got to hire people to manage it. You’ve got to support it, especially in high traffic, you’re going to have your own engineering team that has to do this and that. So unless you’re a developer, we recommend that you choose Shopify.” We looked at that and went, “OK. What we have to do is take that last paragraph out of the reviews.” How do we build a product, how do we design a product where people no longer say, “But also I have this worry about managing it, hosting it, configuring it, getting it optimized for traffic and performance? What if I didn’t have to do that?” And you go, “That’s managed WooCommerce.”

But then when you do that you then end up with– Hold on a second. We know some things. We know that there is no native cart abandonment with WooCommerce, which means Shopify is going to do it and you’re not going to do it? That’s not right. Or we know that Shopify, even though you have to pay, you got to go up the chain to get their advanced reporting. You’re not going to get it for $29. But eventually when you go up, like let’s say you’re paying $299, you’re going to get their advanced reporting, but their advanced reporting is not going to impact the performance of your store. We all know if you’re running advanced reports in WooCommerce you’re going to be using the same resources and doing the same stuff that your store uses to deliver value to customers, and that’s going to kill you too. So we went out and did the deal with Glew so that we could have a best in class analytics and reporting solution that didn’t have performance impact on the store.

At Jilt, abandon cart is also a SaaS, so it doesn’t affect the performance of the store. A lot of people are like, “It is cheaper if I just go buy this plugin.” And you go, “Right. But if that plugin does all the work on the same server, and it’s pulling data and running queries, then your site slows down.” So we started looking at some SaaS partners to integrate so that we could keep your site going fast. Speed and performance being the most important thing for an e-commerce store. So, we did that. We turned around and went, “OK. What else do we want to give these guys? What else should be in this package? We tested 50 different WooCommerce themes and found the fastest. Inched out in front of a couple others by barely a little, but Astra was the fastest performing theme for WooCommerce. You go, “OK. Astra is free which is awesome, but Astra has a pro edition which is a little plugin that goes with it and that opens up a lot of configurations for WooCommerce.”

And we went, “Let’s go do a deal and get Astra pro here for everybody.” Everybody who signs up to our business plans which is the $250 and up, they get that. They get Beaver Builder too because Astra is great with page builders, and of the page builders Beaver Builder is the one that is not only incredibly powerful but also really good with caching. So you go, “OK. Let’s get these together.” And we said, “OK. We’ll get you the page builder, especially for your landing pages or product pages where you’re doing something custom. We’ll get you Astra for your overall theme to be fast. We’ll get you reporting through Glew, again if you’re on the business plan, and we’ll get you Jilt to do this stuff. We’ll get you a high amount of PHP workers and give you a good amount of RAM.” When you go look at the chart, and you see what you get for that price, nobody who’s running a real store has ever called me up and said, “Can I get a discount? Because this is expensive.” In fact, a majority of our customers who have come from other hosts have lowered their fees. They were paying $1,200 and now $750, and they were paying $600 and now $250.

Because we increased their RAM or we increased their PHP workers, or we increased their feature set, and they didn’t have to pay for some of those other plugins. They go, “You’re building the whole solution.” And you go, “That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m building you a solution. I’m not just saying, ‘This is about WooCommerce.’ Most companies would say, ‘Yeah you can install WooCommerce here.’ They’re like, ‘Yes you can install the plugin.’ Our goal was to build a total solution.” So for all our business plans, which is the standard, the plus, the pro, and the enterprise. We’ve created a solution that comes with a whole bunch. Then of course as we launched in the last 30 days, we said, “Not everybody has an existing store. Not everybody is spending $1,000–” Yesterday I was on call with a guy who was spending up to $100,000 a month in hosting who had just shifted over to an AWS plus Rackspace combo which brought it down to $30,000, and my quote going out to him is going to be something like $6,000. We’ve looked at all the data, and what they’re paying for is not always just the hosting.

They’re paying for the support, or they’re paying for the knowledge that can help them with this, or they’re paying for the ability to extend their servers when they need to do stuff. Dynamic adjustments. But they’re paying a lot, and almost everyone that comes over starts paying less. That’s because they’re serious. 400-500 concurrent users on the site at any given moment in time, you’re like “Yeah. All of us would love to have stores that are that are running 400-500 people at the same time. Hitting that store and trying to buy stuff.” There’s a lot more people that are that are looking for starter plans, so over the last three days, we rolled out three of our four starter plans. The beginner plan, now we have the basic plan, and we have a marketplace plan.

The one that will come out in the next couple of weeks is our drop shipping plan, and those are all for people who are just getting started. The beginner plan starts down at $39, and then the others are $99, $125 and $149. The dynamic there is people who want to get started, you tell me you want to get started with drop shipping, I’m going to get you started with drop shipping. You’re going to be ready to go. You want to start with a marketplace? I’m going to give you the marketplace Dokan plugin, and we’re going to help you get started with Dokan so that you can run a marketplace.

If you’re a beginner, we wrote some additional code that locks in either how many SKUs you have, so you can say “I have only 15 SKUs but I want unlimited orders,” or you can say, “I have way more than 15 SKUs, but I’m going to tap it out at 150 orders.” That lets us constrain it which allows us to shape how many resources we put against that, but you get started for $39. At any point, if you’re like, “I want to take off the constraint.” Our basic plan is that we run one command and we’ll take the constraints off, and you shift into the basic plan at $99. If you are making enough sales at $39 to say, “I’m ready to take off the constraints,” then $99 is not a problem. So we started with the serious plans because we started with serious stores and customers that were running serious stores. Then we said, “Let’s back up and fill in the bottom part of this to make sure that people who are just getting started had an easy way to do that.”

Joe: You mentioned a lot of things here that boil down to this. You are helping people make money. I’ve always said to people, “It’s a little easier to sell the price of an e-commerce store or a website that is directly making money,” because you could say, “Right now you’re spending this to make this. I can help you make this if you increase your spending a little bit.” For the beginner, if they’re spending $39 bucks a month they are– If they make 2, 3, five sales or whatever, that’s justified. They’re able to go to the next level where they are getting more resources and more tools. When you get into Jilt, Jilt’s pricing model is incredible. Because the first 25 recovered carts are free, or something like that. By that point, you’re like, “They’ve already recovered x amount of dollars for me, so it’s worth paying for. You are helping people get started with online and with e-commerce. You’re making them customers for life because you offer the best service.

Chris: That is exactly right. Our goal is to eventually to make sure that people think of WooCommerce in the same way they think about Shopify. Today people go, “Shopify? I don’t have to think about it at all, and WooCommerce, there’s so much to figure out.” And we go, “We can mitigate that so that there’s not a lot for you to think about.’ But once people start working with it, you start realizing, “I have some constraints in Shopify or big commerce world that I don’t have in WooCommerce. The flexibility, the open source, the speed of customizing something is dramatically different.”

You get customers who are saying, “By the way, I have this one-off inventory system.” And you’re like, “There’s a plugin for that.” And they’re like, “That’s great. Shopify couldn’t do it.” Or they go, “There’s a plugin that is part of that but doesn’t do all the rest of it, but it’s open source.” Your development team can take it and layer on top, and they go “This is amazing. That just took two months out of our development time.” And you go, “Right.” The flexibility of WooCommerce allows us to compete better with Shopify if we can do the rest of our part right.

If we can get rid of the headaches around the hosting and everything else, then we can do all that. Then where we spend time is helping people speed up their stores, optimizing it, making it go faster so that they make more money. We had a customer who was using WooCommerce on AWS, and they crashed. They just straight up fell over minutes after a launch. I got a call about 7:00 PM that said, “Can you get on a phone call with these guys because they want some help.” I’m like, “Yeah.” So we started the call at 8:00, just like this on a Zoom call, and I told him “I won’t get off this call until we have a plan.”

We were on the phone with him until 2:00 in the morning. By that point I pulled all their code down, we had done a scan over a bunch of stuff so I could figure out what was going on, and I went “This is a problem. “This is a problem. This is a problem,” and the development agency was on the call too, and they were like “We’re out of our league. We didn’t know. We don’t know what to do.” And it was fine. There was nothing wrong. They just admitted they designed the entire theme using ACF as their page builder and they hardcoded things, so if you hard code something part of what that means is that the full page won’t load unless each component loads, but that component was tied to a plugin that was poor performing.

So when you turn off the poor performing plugin, then the panel doesn’t load, and if the panel doesn’t load, the rest of page doesn’t load. You’re white screen, and you’re like, “Guys. There’s a bigger problem.” We said, “You have a whole audience that is ready for this launch. Let’s go spin up a new store, a little pop-up store for this one product, and we’ll get you making money, and then we’ll turn around, and we’ll integrate back in.” In two hours they generated– We did that. We helped them spin up the new site, get everything configured, get it running. Bring their product inventory over for that product line. We launched within 48 hours. I don’t know. There’s not a lot of agencies that would be like, “If you call me on Sunday I can have a brand new site for that product line launched Tuesday night.”

Because most of them are like, “If you call me on Sunday we can have meetings this next week, and then we can get on a deal, and then we can put out a broad plan and maybe in three months–” But these guys had an audience that was queued up ready to buy product, so we did a pop up store, got it up and the first two hours. They did more revenue in two hours than they had done in their best month of the year last year at Christmas time. What we focused on was the engineering, the infrastructure and at the low level, the code that would make sure that their page could load fast. When we first started working with their pages, they were loading in 28 seconds. I’m like, “It doesn’t matter if it goes down because even when it’s up, it’s not up.” Then we got him down to 1.7 seconds, and it was fantastic.

Even as we were doing it, and I don’t recommend this to anyone, but while we were doing it there seemed to be some problem with the payment gateway. People were queuing up and getting stuck. You could watch it in the Google Analytics real time. We’re watching it and seeing there’s this choke point, people are sitting at the checkout, and there’s too many people at the checkout concurrently, there’s a problem there. We started looking at the API calls to PayPal and going, “There is a problem. But it’s not on our side, and it’s on PayPal.” So we say, “Let’s switch the payment gateway to PayPal’s standard where we route them to PayPal, and they can check out there. We’re not going to use their API.” I’m not joking. We did the change in real time.

So I got a developer who’s on the phone with me, and I’m like, “OK. Install the standard. OK, get it configured. OK, leave it inactive. OK, I have it here. Now, product guy on their side, you look at the numbers. Where are we at? Let’s get to a point where this goes down for just a second. OK, we went for 800 down to 200 people concurrently on the checkout. OK. Now, swap. I’m going to turn this off, you turn it on, and everyone will move on with their cart active straight to PayPal.” Not only did they not lose a thing, all of a sudden you saw in real time, “People are no longer choking up here. The checkout page is not aggregating all these concurrent users. But also, look at PayPal now just bringing in money. One order after another, after another, after another.”

And we were like, “OK. We’re good.” And the CEO of the company is like, “Do you always do that? Do you have to do that? I’ve never seen that happen.” And I’m like, “I don’t recommend changing payment gateway in the middle of a product launch, but you had a problem, and we had to solve the problem.” Because what you don’t want is everyone to look back later and go, “That was a mistake, and we couldn’t get that done. But lesson learned. I guess we’ll learn for six months later for our next product launch.” And you’re like, “No. There’s money on the table right now.”

Joe: Right. That’s an expensive lesson to learn.

Chris: That’s right.

Joe: Especially one that you could fix in the moment, if you can. That was– This is not a video podcast, but if you could see what I looked like while he was telling that story it was the same look I had when watching The Last Jedi. During the fight scene with Ray and Kylo Ren. So, that’s an incredible story. I haven’t even gotten to the title question yet. We’re coming up on time, but for the title question I want to ask you something a little bit different. Because we got a lot of the details for how you put together this hosting, but if I want to build a fast site, how would you build that? What would you recommend I need for that?

Chris: To build a fast WooCommerce site?

Joe: Yeah.

Chris: There are several dynamics that are at play here. First of all, you need image caching in CDN, you need image compression. People will upload images that are way too big that they don’t need. They’re only going to show 600 pixels wide and they upload a 5MB image, and you go “No.” So you want to compress your images, you want to use a CDN for the non-image files, whether you’re talking about your JavaScript files or if you have PDF files or anything else. You want to be able to get those in the broadest and most distributed dynamic so that anyone anywhere in the world who pulls this up is getting it from the edge, rather than running all the way to your server, which allows you to have more transactions permanent on a server because they’re not worried about doing other things.

That’s another piece you want to do. You want to do something we call “Ruthless prioritization,” which is look over every single plugin and figure out if you need it or don’t. There’s a lot of plugins on sites that you just go, “No. You don’t need that, you don’t need that, you don’t need that.” What you want to do is evaluate the performance impact of any site. Which means you need to get good at testing, but you want to understand the performance impact of any plugin on a site and you also want to understand the revenue implications on a site. If you have a pop up that is not super-fast, has a couple of issues etc. but it generates 30% lift on your revenue, you keep that baby there.

But if you have some that you like because you think it’s super cool, there’s a little video of me that slides up into the transparent background and I’m talking to my customer. And you’re like, “Not only is it poor performing but no one’s ever clicked it.” You’ve been like, “Come here. Click here to go to my–” And you’re like, “No one has ever. You have zero clicks. Turn this off.” “But I like it, and it’s me talking, and it feels good.” You’re like, “Turn it off.” The ruthless prioritization gets gone a lot, and another thing we see in there is that sometimes you have plugins and you’re using one feature on a plugin that has 48 features. Yet you’ve got to load a bunch of JavaScript every time that page loads, you’ve got to load a bunch of images and other scripts, and you’re like “No. This is bad. Let’s just take the one feature you really need and load it into something like code snippets so that it does that one feature.”

That’s again, a lot of mistakes that happen when a store is built by someone who may not know how to write that line of code, so they just keep grabbing plugins off the shelf. And you’re like, “No. That’s suboptimal. Because you’re causing PHP engines of your server to do work. To parse and process stuff that you don’t even need, because it’s not a feature you’re using.” Then I’d say there’s a whole bunch of– Either it’s in WordPress or WooCommerce, there are settings and features that you can turn off. Perf Matters is a plugin that I use often. Perf Matters will let me quickly turn a bunch of these things off . Windows used to have a writer, Windows Writer which let you write blog posts from their desktop.

There’s codebase in WordPress to let you hook into that. If you don’t have a Windows computer at all, you’re not likely to be writing your blog from there and if that’s not part of what you do, turn that off. Part of what happens is you use something like Perf Matters to close it off. But Perf Matters also has features like pre-calling and pre-fetching sites and resources. Pre-fetching and working with DNS pre-fetching that’s connecting to servers or other places, other domain names. There’s a lot you can optimize there so that things move a little faster, and then having a lightweight theme which we talked about already. From there you’re in a pretty good place to do the last step, which is performance test over and over again. Because as you performance test you’re going to find little things that you go, “What’s going on here?” And that’s when you realize you need to optimize X, Y or Z.

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Joe: You mentioned Perf Matters, that’s a WordPress plugin. I just picked up WP Rocket, which maybe does something similar. Do you have a preference, one over the other?

Chris: I like WP Rocket a lot. On our particular platform, because we’re offering [Retis] and because we’re offering varnish, and because we roll in a couple of other things. Some people go, “I don’t think I need WP Rocket to do that.” But if you’re not on our platform and if you’re just trying to get a site fast, WP Rocket can be an incredibly useful product to help you navigate through a couple of these different things. Not just one thing. You’d want to look at a couple of these different tools to see what’s right, but it does some optimizations and it also provides some cache, and it lets you connect to other solutions if you need to. There’s a lot in there that’s very powerful.

Joe: Gotcha. Cool. I was between the two, and I saw your testimonial on the WP Rocket page. Because I do have LiquidWeb Managed WordPress hosting, but I don’t have Managed WooCommerce hosting yet.

Chris: We can work on that.

Joe: Cool, so there’ll be a bonus episode after this where we talk about that. But there’s a lot of really great information in there, so if you are not on LiquidWeb hosting then these are definitely some really good takeaways. We also talked a bit about your plans for the future. You mentioned that you’re rolling out a drop shipping tier, or level. I just spoke recently to Anton Crowley from Drop Ship Lifestyle. That episode is coming out after this one launches, but drop shipping is an interesting topic to me. Maybe in the last few minutes, your plans for the future? Why did you choose drop shipping as a specific level?

Chris: Because when we talk about people who are getting started in e-commerce, the two that are the hottest in 2018 predicted to also be hot in 2019, are drop shipping and marketplace. It doesn’t mean that people aren’t going to do courses, it doesn’t mean people aren’t going to do membership sites, it doesn’t mean they’re not going to do lots of other things. But the hot ones, the ones that are tracking and people are searching for in Google trends and the ones that people are looking at in other platforms like Shopify.

You look at these things, and you go, “People want this.” One of the things that they have in common, drop shipping and marketplace is that people don’t have products. When you don’t have products, but you want to get into e-commerce, what do you do? You let other people supply the products, or you let other people create their stores in your store and let them sell their products. Either way, a drop shipper marketplace is there. So our drop shipping integration is a SaaS product called Shop Master, and most people I talk to have never heard of Shop Master. But again, the people I’m talking to are WooCommerce people, so they’re always talking about, “I did a Google search for WooCommerce and drop shipping,” or “WooCommerce and ali express, what are the plugins there?” And there’s “ali drop ship,” and there’s “Woo drop ship.” And there’s a couple of those, but none of them were doing what I wanted out of this.

That’s where I went, “OK. Let’s go figure out what happens if I don’t just want to be with ali express, what if I want to be with Amazon too? Or what if I want to be with other pieces? What if I have more than one website?” You start getting into these nuances, and you realize, “No. I need a better one.” Of course, as you know I’m a big SaaS fan, it’s why we do so much of what we do the way we do it. So we went looking for a drop shipping SaaS that we could integrate with, and that’s Shop Master. We’re excited roll that out in the next couple of weeks.

Joe: Cool. I’ll be sure to try to pair the drop shipping episode closely with this one, so that you get a one-two punch.

Chris: That’s right.

Joe: For your 2019 plan you can get the LiquidWeb drop shipping tier, learn how drop shipping works and maybe have a lucrative 2019. It’s always a pleasure talking to you, but I do need to ask my favorite question. You provided a very good answer to this last time, which is do you have any trade secrets for us?

Chris: Yeah. I can give you something interesting. One of the things we know when it comes to e-commerce is that speed is everything, performance is everything. In that space one of the things we know is that when your store takes more than 2 to 2.7 seconds to load between pages, people’s session length drops off by 50%, which means people will leave. That’s our experience too.

When you go to a website and you click and you have to wait a few seconds, and you click and you have to wait a few seconds, eventually you’re like, “Forget this.” Speed is a big deal, performance is a big deal, it has direct impact on session length which has a direct impact on revenue. What you really want to do is performance test your store. People go, “Yeah. But I don’t know how to do that, and I don’t even know what test to create.” What we’ve told people forever is, “Heads up. LiquidWeb will do that for you. If you come over here and you get, especially with our business plans, we have a whole bunch of different tests we’ve created and we can run your stuff through tests and tell you where there are things that are poor performing. That’s it.”

My little insider secret is not that. It’s not a pitch for “Come to LiquidWeb.” My insider secret is that those tests are public somewhere. All those tests that you can potentially load up at load impact and run on your own, they all exist somewhere publicly. So, A. You can look around for them. Or B. You can email me at Chris@LiquidWeb.com and I can send you a link to the repo. If you’re one of those people who goes, “I want to tell my customers that I performance test their store,” or “I want to know how to do this for my store,” that’s our secret. They’re public already. We can help you get access to them so that you can run your own.

Joe: That is a great call to action, and a great piece of advice. You already told us, but where can people find you?

Chris: I’m over at LiquidWeb. You can find me at Chris@LiquidWeb.com, you can also find me blogging over at LiquidWeb.com. I also have a blog over at ChrisLema.com. The easiest way to reach me is on Twitter, which is @chrislema.

Joe: All right. Chris, it’s always a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining me today, I really appreciate it.

Chris: All right. Take care, buddy.

Joe: Thanks out there to everybody listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Outro: Thanks so much to Chris for joining me today. It is an absolute pleasure talking to him whenever I have the opportunity to do so. I appreciate everything he talked about, not just from a building a platform standpoint, but good advice for any e-commerce store. Talking about the importance of performance and how you can improve performance. He let us in on a little secret that drop shipping is very popular. In 2019, I’m going to have a guest talking all about drop shipping. Definitely look for that in the future. Once again, thanks to our sponsors Pantheon and Loxi. This show would not be possible without them.

The question of the week for you is, what are some ways you can improve the performance of your e-commerce site? I just went through this myself by working my way through some performance issues over on Creator Courses. I’m curious, what are some ways that you can improve the performance of your e-commerce site? Let me know on Twitter @jcasabona or email me Joe@HowIBuilt.it. If you want to join the conversation with other listeners, you can head over to HowIBuilt.it/Facebook and join the community over there.

You can find all of the show notes and everything that we talked about at HowIBuilt.it/101, and then head over to Apple podcasts and leave us a rating and a review. It helps people discover us. That’s everything. Thank you, Chris, thanks to the sponsors, and thank you for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Brian Richards and WooSesh

October 16, 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.

Brian Richards is officially the first repeat guest on the show, and this time around he’s talking about his online conferences, WordSesh and WooSesh. Brian talks logistics, speaker selection, and of-course, the tech stack. It’s a super interesting conversation. Plus, if you’re interested, WooSesh is October 18-19, 2018, and it totally free!

Show Notes

Also check out: My new Podcast Website course | Facebook Community

Question of the week: What are you doing with eCommerce? Let me know on Twitter (@jcasabona) or at joe@howibuilt.it

View on separate page

Transcript

Intro:
Hey everybody. Welcome to episode 98 of How I Built It. Today, my guest is
my good friend and the very first repeat guest, Brian Richards. Now, I need
to apologize to Chris Lema. He’s coming up in this season as well. I told
him he was the first repeat guest, but I moved Brian’s episode up because
he is talking about how he built WordSesh and a new conference called
WooSesh that is happening this week, October 18th and 19th. You’re going to
learn all about how he put together this website with former guest Patrick
Rauland, how they set up their tech stack, and overall how to have a good
Online Conference. If you want to attend WooSesh, it is completely free,
and you can go to WooSesh.com and sign up.

Again the sessions start on Thursday, October 18th and they go through
Friday, October 19th. We’ll learn all about that from Brian in a second,
but first, I want to tell you about a brand new course over at Creator
Courses called Build Your Podcast Platform in 3 Days. I have been
podcasting for a few years now, and my show has grown to over 40,000
downloads per month. Thank you! Thank you so much. My website has been an
integral part of that, so I understand that making a podcast website can be
hard. This course shows you exactly how to do that.

We go from having nothing, we register the domain, we buy the hosting, and
we go all the way until we have a published episode and we can submit our
feed to Apple podcasts. We do all of that with no steps skipped, and at the
end of the course, you will have your very own podcast website. If you want
to take this course, Build Your Podcast Platform in 3 Days, head over to
HowIBuilt.it/course. As an added bonus you can get 25% off with the code
“buildit.” That is HowIBuilt.it/course, and use the code “buildit” for 25%
off. This episode is also brought to you by Pantheon which you’ll hear
about later, but for now, let’s talk to Brian. 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, another return guest. Chris
Lema was the first, here is the second. My good friend Brian Richards from
WPSessions. Brian, how are you today?

Brian Richards:
I am swell, Joe. I’m honored to be your second second-time guest. That’s
very fitting.

Joe:
Absolutely. I try not to have a lot of repeat guests, but today we’re going
to be talking about something I’m personally interested in. I’m glad to
have you on the show again. We’re going to be talking about WooSesh and
WordSesh, your two online WordPress-based conferences. Is that right?

Brian:
Yeah, that’s a pretty good summary of what they are.

Joe:
Cool. I will recommend that people listen to your first episode, which I’ll
link in the show notes. But for those who might not know you, why don’t you
tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Brian:
Sure. As you know, my name is Brian Richards, and anybody listening to this
knows because it’s there in the title of the episode. I run WPSessions
which provides training for developers, primarily people who use WordPress,
although my training isn’t strictly WordPress-based. But anybody who works
with WordPress is likely to benefit from it. I do virtual sessions, and I
do onsite team training, onboarding, corporate consultations, things like
that. Anything that involves teaching people how to do more, better work
with WordPress.

Joe:
Very nice. That’s a fantastic summary. We’re both in the WordPress
education space, and I like this setup that we have. I have the people that
are maybe not quite ready for you to educate yet. They maybe are taking the
undergrad classes, and then they move on to you, which I would say are the
graduate classes.

Brian:
Yeah, that’s a pretty good summary. Or analogy, rather.

Joe:
Today we’re going to be talking about two fantastic online conferences,
WooSesh and WordSesh. Let’s start with WordSesh because that was around
first, and then maybe we can move on to WooSesh. From what I understand,
you’re using the same engine to power both of these websites and
conferences, right?

Brian:
Bingo. Yep. WooSesh was a pretty natural extension of WordSesh, so it does
make sense to start there and move ahead.

Joe:
Excellent. Why don’t you tell us about WordSesh?

Brian:
Cool. WordSesh has been around for just over five years. This year was the
fifth iteration of WordSesh, but it missed a few years in between. It was
started by Scott Baasgard, and he’s an awesome guy who did some amazing
things creating WordSesh. In one small part, it was inspiration and impetus
for me to start WPSessions. I was thrilled after year 1 to be able to help
him co-organize and help out wherever I could when he did the second one,
and then again with the third one. Then I was completely out of commission
for the fourth one, that was right about the time that one of my sons was
born.

Then it had always been too much of a burden, and now he has his own
children, and it wasn’t going to happen again. So I reached out to him and
said, “How can I take the reins? Can I help make this happen again?” He
said, “How about you just take the torch and run with it.” So I said, “OK.
That would be quite the honor because I’ve been thinking about hosting a
conference since I started WPSessions. Originally I was thinking about
doing a physical one, and then I shied away from that recognizing that it
costs just an enormous sum of money to even get a venue, let alone all of
the costs that attendees and speakers would have to pay.

Or, that I’d have to pay for speakers to get everybody to the same location
to host something, even something small.” So I thought, “What if I did a
virtual event?” Which then brought me back to a WordSesh, “I don’t want to
make my own when WordSesh is around, how about I just try and find a way to
do WordSesh more?” that’s when Scott and I start talking again, and he
said, “Here. You take the torch and run with it.” So, that’s how it came to
be under the WPSessions umbrella.

Joe:
Nice. Two points here, as we move, because I do want to ask you about this
specific decision. WordSesh was free originally, right?

Brian:
Yup.

Joe:
And it was also 24 hours.

Brian:
Yes.

Joe:
I know this very intimately because I was selected to speak one year that
coincided with my one year dating anniversary of who is now my wife, and we
were in the city to see a Broadway play. New York City, to see a Broadway
play. In order for me to be able to speak at WordSesh but also be a good
boyfriend, I asked if I could speak at 4:00 in the morning. I did my
WordSesh talk at 4:00 in the morning from a hotel in Manhattan.

Brian:
You’re a crazy man.

Joe:
I was, yeah.

Brian:
Scott was as well. The event used to be completely free and 24 hours long,
which is why it became too burdensome for Scott to keep running for free
and very difficult for any person to watch the whole thing. Some people
tried. Scott tried every year and would nod off at some point in the middle
of the night while it was going on, but then came back too, read a couple
of sessions later. It takes a large number of volunteers to make something
like that work. I wanted to get something up and running quickly that I
could do myself, so I could compress the timeline.

I decided to make it a 12-hour event for this run, and then I also started
charging for it so that I could pay all of the speakers because everybody
was a volunteer for the first four WordSeshes. All of the speakers,
everybody helping out, and I wanted to be able to pay them for their time.
I also wanted to do something that hadn’t been done in any prior WordSesh
which was to transcribe everything in real time, so that every attendee who
is not a native English speaker or who is hard of hearing would still be
able to participate and get something from the event.

Both of those endeavors, both paying the speakers and paying for a
real-time transcriber to come in and caption everything are not inexpensive
independently, and together it was like, “OK. I need to put some of this
burden on the attendees if they really want this to happen.”

Joe:
And to add on to that real quick, it’s nice that WordSesh was a free event
all this time, but I can certainly vouch that– nothing against previous
iterations of WordSesh, but that the quality and the topics were a bit more
refined this time around.

Brian:
Thank you. Yeah. There were a lot of good talks in all of the previous four
years, but it takes a lot of work to fill 24 hours. In one year. They had
two separate tracks running for the entire 24 hours. There were 48 hours of
content that came from that one, which means lots of panel discussions,
which are interesting and useful in the moment but don’t have a lot of
shelf life or repeat viewability. I wanted to make something that was a
little more curated from beginning to end, so I tried to pick, and I
surveyed all of my customers beforehand to figure out what sort of things
they were interested in learning about in the next four to six months.

Then I sought out speakers who could talk about those things and came up
with a schedule that I thought flowed pretty well together, so of the 12
talks, there was usually a pair between the two. I had one where Carrie
Dils was talking about 10 Keys to Freelancing Success, and the one right
after that, Nathan Allotey talked about what clients want and how to get to
the business needs behind the ask, and then be able to deliver the services
they want. Other ones paired together nicely like those.

That was a lot of fun to do, to figure out the topics that people wanted to
hear about and find the people who I thought were the best to cover those
topics, and then to arrange them in the schedule in such a way that they
built upon each other. But would still allow somebody, if they could pop in
for just a couple hours, let’s say, to watch something that was relevant
and useful and then be able to come back and watch the recordings later to
complete the experience.

Joe:
Nice. That’s fantastic, and it flows well into, what research did you do?
You answered how you came up with the right topics, but I noticed that you
didn’t have a call for speakers, for example. So choosing the speakers was
probably part of your research, and then what tools you decided to use. For
example, transcribing in real time. I didn’t know that you did that until
just now.

Brian:
Surprise!

Joe:
What kind of research did you do to figure out who should speak and what
kind of tools you would use?

Brian:
The research I did, I surveyed my customers and my existing audience. I was
like, “What do you want to learn?” I probably could have done more to
survey a broader audience, but I determined from the hundred responses that
I got from just my own audience that I had enough. Like, “This is what I
figured people wanted to hear about. How do I do better work with my
clients? How do I work more efficiently? How do I get better performance
out of the stuff that I’m doing?” That survey was enough for me to go on,
like, “OK. Here are the topics that I need, and in terms of researching
speakers, I looked at several other conferences both in the WordPress world
and out of the WordPress world, to see who is talking about different
things.

Most of the speakers that I recruited I already had a personal relationship
with, so I already knew Chris Lema is the VP of product at Liquid Web who
has spent a ton of time investing in hosted e-commerce solutions. Pretty
sure he is going to be a smart match for this e-commerce talk that I need,
and then others I had heard about and had seen some of their slide decks
and read some of their articles. Like Andrea Goulet, I’m like “This is a
talk that I need to bring to the WordPress community.” She spoke about the
makers and menders. “How do you self-identify? Are you the person who likes
to make new things and solve new problems? Or are you a person who likes to
pick up where someone left off and make it better? To fix problems, to
improve performance,” and things like that.

That was a very illuminating talk. Many attendees, particularly people who
didn’t know who she was or what she was talking about, took a lot away from
that one. So, speaker research was pretty easy. I didn’t have an open call
for speakers. I got some flak for doing it that way, like, “Where was the
call for speakers? Because this used to be a very open community event, and
you close the doors, and you’re charging money, you’ve changed everything.”
I said, “You’re right. That’s a very astute observation. I did all of this
so that I could get one out the door quickly.

I knew that if I’d opened a call for speakers, I would probably get more
than 100 applications because it’s open to everyone around the world, and
even though it’s only 12 hours instead of 24 hours that does still bridge
the world pretty well. Someone you should be able to tune in for an hour.
So I would get way too many speaker applications to go through to only be
able to pick 12 people. The next one will have an open speaker call because
I’ll have a longer runway of planning in front of me. But I wanted to keep
this one tight and moving quickly.

Joe:
Not for nothing, but there are enough events in the WordPress community
especially that have open calls for speakers, and very low barriers for
speakers. It’s not like our community is lacking that, we maybe have an
overabundance of that.

Brian:
It’s true.

Joe:
I’m curious about this. How did you approach Andrea Goulet who you don’t
have a personal relationship with, and say, “I want you to speak at this
conference.” What did the pitch look like for that?

Brian:
I started following her on Twitter more than a year ago when I started
seeing some of the interesting things she was sharing come into my feed
from somebody else. I was like, “This is really smart. Everything that her
company Corgibytes is doing resonates with me because I have this mender
mindset. They call themselves the Joyful Janitors of The Internet, which is
just great.

Joe:
Awesome.

Brian:
Because we have this mindset of, “Maintaining legacy code is awful, and
it’s just so much better to rebuild or complete, rather than refactor.” And
she’s like, “No. It’s easier to refactor than to rebuild and make many
micro improvements leading to a major advancement than to throw out
something and start over. Because you’ll spend so much time building the
thing where you start over, that by the time you’re done with it, it now is
its own legacy piece of software by the time you launch it. I started
following her a year ago, and we interacted briefly on Twitter now and
again.

She’d already seen my name by the time I reached out, and I knew that she
spoke at many different conferences and started pitching herself as a
keynote speaker available for hire. So I said, “Perfect. I had a virtual
event, and you already have a talk that is exactly for my audience. Maybe
with a couple of minor tweaks here in the middle, would you be interested
in giving it?” And she said, “Yes. This sounds amazing. Can you please work
with my assistant to coordinate and make sure that I’m not double booking
myself and we get everything straightened away?” That was it. It was super
easy.

Joe:
Wow, that’s great. I’m sure it probably didn’t help that you did decide to
pay your speakers, which I would also like to ask you about that. Because I
know again, in the WordPress community and WordCamps, it is all volunteer
for speakers. I speak a WordCamps every year, and it’s a nice way for us to
give back, but it’d also be nice to get paid for a speaking gig. What was
your decision behind that?

Brian:
I didn’t want to ask anybody to work for free, particularly if my event was
going to be making me money. My goal with the tickets was to at least break
even, hopefully, make some money. In the end, I did. I came out a few
hundred dollars ahead of my expenses, so it doesn’t cover my time, but it
covered all of my expenses, and I felt pretty good about that. My sponsors
helped cover my time, so I was pretty well covered there. I didn’t feel
good saying, “Do you want to come and speak at this thing? I can’t pay you,
but I might be making some money off of your back if you say yes.” That
didn’t feel good to me. I knew right off the bat that I wanted to pay them.
It felt like peanuts relative to what I’m sure they could bill their time
for, so I hope to be able to increase that for the next one. But at no
point was I thinking I was going to let anybody speak for free.

Gotcha, gotcha. And this will be the last question here, right before we
get into the title question because I’m curious about this too. I suppose
that will factor in heavily to the open call for speakers if you have one
for next year, right? You’ll want to take into account, “Is this person
experienced and skilled enough to earn what I’m paying them?” Maybe that’s
not the right way to put it. I’m sure you can word it more eloquently than
I can, but you’re likely going to pick people who are worth their salt for
speaking.

That’s the tricky thing. Because I do want to create a platform where
anybody could have their breakout moment, which is why WordCamps are
designed to be open calls for speakers. We don’t want to exclude someone
just because they don’t yet have an audience or a lot of experience under
their belt, but you also don’t want to put someone on stage who isn’t going
to be able to deliver the material. Because that’s not very useful for the
attendees, it doesn’t make them feel great if they’re nervous the whole
time. I’ve been pondering hiring a speaking coach to help people who have
less experience. This idea was handed to me by Patrick Rauland who is
co-organizing WooSesh with me, which we’ll talk about in a minute with the
title question.

And I thought, “That’s a good idea, to find someone who shows an aptitude
for the material, they understand material well enough, but they don’t have
any way to demonstrate that they can present it. Maybe I can work with
them, either myself or an experienced professional speaker coach, to give
them pointers and help them make the most of the 30 to 40 minutes that
they’ll be presenting. Because you’re right, I don’t want to just pick
someone blindly and pay them and then realize, “You didn’t actually know
this material,” Or, “What you said you were going to deliver was X, but you
delivered an intro to X which everybody already knew, or could easily read
themselves just from a quick google search.”

Break:
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Joe:
I remember Patrick. I know Patrick, and we were talking about coaching
speakers. WordCamp DC in 2017 had a mentorship program that I thought was
excellent, and they asked me and a few other experienced speakers who were
going to be speaking at WordCamp DC if we wanted to mentor a new speaker. I
thought that was great. I jumped all over that. I thought that was great.
So I attended my mentees talk, and it was two ladies. They did a great job.
I don’t know if they really needed my coaching, I’m not going to say they
did a great job because of me, but I thought it was fantastic and very
helpful and unique. That’s a very cool idea. Cool. So, let’s move into the
title question. We have a lot of good background information. We didn’t
touch on why WooSesh– maybe as we talk about how you built WordSesh, we
can transition into moving that over and using the same engine for WooSesh.
If that makes sense?

Brian:
Yeah. I can answer why WooSesh came to be in about a sentence. WordSesh was
so popular, and I had so many requests for more e-commerce content that it
was a natural extension to say, “Let’s make another session event dedicated
wholly to WooCommerce because so many people were asking for that.” Ta-da,
now WooSesh is a thing.

Joe:
Very nice. Cool. With both of these sites, let’s talk. How did you build
them?

Brian:
They are both powered by WordPress, which makes sense because they are for
WordPress-based conferences. WooSesh is slightly different because of a
cool opportunity we have where WooCommerce is sponsoring the event and
therefore underwriting the cost for every attendee, which is awesome.

Joe:
Wow, yeah.

Brian:
That’s a much simpler stack, it’s just a nice clean WordPress site with a
simple, single registration form where you provide your name and your
e-mail, and you’re in. So long as someone attends the event live, any part
of it, they will have links and access to all of it. If you can only come
to one session, you can still get all 16 from both days for free, because
you took the time to participate live for one. Then afterward once it’s all
done, we’ll switch it over to the system that’s powering WordSesh where it
will be $200 bucks a ticket. Which is still a steal for the speakers that
we have and the topics that they’re covering, and the freebies that you get
for attending. Going back to WordSesh, it is WordPress with WooCommerce,
with the memberships add-on and then the teams from memberships add-on on
top of that.

Then the MailChimp for WooCommerce extension to push everybody over to
MailChimp, that’s the stack for the site itself, and the reason I went with
memberships and teams for memberships is because I didn’t strictly need
tickets for what I was doing. I was selling tickets, or “tickets,” but I’m
just selling access. I wanted a nice simple UI where someone on a team
could say, “I’ve got 16 people who want to watch this thing.” They register
and then I wanted to make it dead simple for them to get everybody else on
the team in, and maybe at 16 people because they are say the office manager
and they’re not going to watch, maybe it’s 15 people plus them because
they’re the CTO and they are going to watch. The teams add-on for the
memberships add-on for WooCommerce does this beautifully, where you can set
it up a bunch of different ways. The way that I needed it, that I just
described, it handles flawlessly.

A person can buy the product and type in the number of seats that they want
to buy, and then once their order is complete, they are shown a link that
they can use– A page, rather. With a link that they can share internally
via slack or e-mail. Say, “Click this and register yourself.” Or, right
beneath that is a form that they can use where they could type in the
e-mail address for each person they want to invite, and each of those
people get an e-mail with that link that says, “Click here to register.” It
also gives them the opportunity to track, “Of the people that I invited,
who has not yet filled this in?” Then they can eject people, like if they
invited somebody but they no longer belonged, or to regenerate the link. If
they shared it but it accidentally got out, and other people not on their
team were using it, they can eject those people, generate a new link and it
makes it easier for them to self-manage.

Joe:
That’s great. This is by the folks at SkyVerge, right?

Brian:
Correct.

Joe:
They do brilliant work anyway.

Brian:
Yeah, they know what’s up. It also made it easy for me to register people
in the admin area because I did local viewing parties this year. I made
that an official, not really sanction, but I promoted local viewing parties
from the website this year. Anybody who was hosting a viewing party needed
to have free access. So I just created a team that was, “Viewing party
hosts,” and invited all of my hosts to that team in no time at all. It was
super-duper simple. So that’s what’s powering the WordPress side of things,
and then for the event itself, I used Crowdcast which has been around since
the beginning of WordSesh but has improved leaps and bounds every single
year since.

What started as a wrapper for YouTube videos with chat on one side and the
audience polls and survey below, now they do their own embedded streaming
video service, and they have a lot of nice features for organizing an event
like this. I was able to create an event for WordSesh, create multiple
sessions in the schedule for each of the different presentations that were
going to happen. Then as I moved from one to the other, and just before I’m
about to go live, I can summon everybody to the room that I’m in. If
somebody were to linger behind, which I encourage so they could keep
chatting, I could bring them to the live room once it was time for the
broadcast to start so they wouldn’t miss anything. Crowdcast is a fantastic
service.

Then when it was all over I was able to archive it, extract and export all
of the video, upload it to Vimeo. Put it right back on the site so that
people who bought a ticket after the fact can come back and easily watch
the recordings without having to bounce around that UI, and then also
upload it over WPSessions. Because one of the perks of being a member at
WPSessions is that you would get access to all of this conference content
for free, without any extra effort on your behalf. All of that just tied
together nicely. The only thing that I was missing, I felt, was a way to
automatically bridge members on WPSessions.com to WordSesh.com and I got
around that pretty easily. I just exported all of the members on WPSessions
on the day of the event, imported them on WordSesh and everything was fine.
It didn’t take enough time for me to say, “I need to build a solution in
code to fix this,” but I still wish one existed.

Joe:
I also wish that existed. Dear listeners, here’s an opportunity for you.
Because I wanted to set up a forum for Creator Courses called
hub.CreatorCourses.com. The only thing on the site was forums, and I wanted
any student who registered for a course on Creator Courses to automatically
have access to the completely separate forums without having e-commerce,
LMS and forums all in one WordPress installation. Unfortunately, there was
not an easy way to share databases between two WordPress installations
easily, so I too wish that existed. I looked into coding it myself, and I
thought, “This is too much work for me to do alone when I’m trying to run
an online courses site.” So this is two very good use cases we’re talking
about here, smart people out there, build that and then come on my show and
tell me how you built it.

Brian:
That’s right!

Joe:
Two follow up questions here. You mentioned it’s powered by WordPress and
Memberships. Memberships as a plugin specifically for WooCommerce. I don’t
know if you said that you were using WooCommerce as the e-commerce side, I
did not write that down.

Brian:
Correct.

Joe:
OK cool. Crowdcast, the last time I looked at Crowdcast you could only
export in standard definition. Has that changed? Have they fixed that?

Brian:
Yes, they fixed that, so you can export the full high def.

Joe:
Fantastic.

Brian:
You can also export the chats, and as the organizer– That’s the only way
you can export those, but you also can export all of the attendee data,
which is really cool for a multi-session event like this one because you
can see for each attendee, which session they attended and whether or not
they watched a replay afterward. I can easily see per person, “How many
sessions did you attend live?” And then per session, “How many people were
here live?” Which is valuable.

Joe:
That’s cool. I’m going to link to Crowdcast and all of this stuff in the
show notes. I’ve been considering using some webinar software to do live
webinars, and all of them are maybe prohibitively more expensive than
YouTube. But you’re selling me on Crowdcast here.

Brian:
They’re all missing one feature that I want. Crowdcast has almost all of
them. The only place that it falls short for me for being a perfect
solution for everything right now is that it has its own separate
authentication. I can embed it on my site, and I can create unlisted events
so that only my members can see them to register for them, but it is weird
that they have to log into my site and then log in a second time into
Crowdcast. I’ve been chatting with their devs about some single sign-on
mechanism to streamline that process, and I’ve gotten at least as far as
being able to pre-populate the log in with their e-mail address. It saves
them one click, which is nice.

Joe:
Gotcha. That was something that I also would have liked to see. I would
love to have webinars behind some paywall after the fact, but have it as
open as possible. Which is why I continue to use YouTube. Because you can
do unlisted and send links and then people don’t necessarily have to log
in. In any case, that’s for a whole other show, and we’re coming up on
time. We have barely talked about– Well, we have touched on WooSesh a bit,
but I would love to know your plans for the future of these two events. As
we record this, WordSesh has happened. WooSesh has not, and another maybe
piece of context here is that WooCon, which is perhaps the biggest
in-person WooCommerce conference which generally happens every year, did
not happen this year. What are your plans for the future of these two
events?

Brian:
WooSesh itself is still in the future, so that’s the very first part of my
future plans is, “Let’s see if I can take this sesh model and repeat it a
few times to make more niche-focused virtual conference events, without
doing so many that people are like, ‘OK I’m tired of these.'” 3 or 4 would
be just about right, one per quarter. WordSesh will be broadly useful to
just about everybody, and then the other ones would be pretty specifically
useful too. Like in WooSesh’s case, people who use WooCommerce. We can go
much deeper into that topic. WooSesh this year, I glazed over this, is
October 17 and 18. I am pulling that up in front of me to make sure that I
didn’t botch it. It’s actually 18 and 19. I did, I did botch it. But it’s
October 18 and 19. Who is this guy?

This one’s fun because it’s two days, two probably 10 hour days when
they’re done. Eight presentations each day, day one is focusing on store
builders. People who are comfortable creating an e-commerce store that
don’t necessarily know any code, you pull all the correct plugins together
set up the host and get everything dialed in and get all the products in.
Day one is perfect for you. It’s also valuable for people who do code
because it talks about maintenance and earning more with copywriting, and
things like that. Then day 2 is for coders only, web developers talking
about performance testing and speed, building better user experiences,
creating your own quality extensions. I like this because it allows me to
hit a larger audience and dig into a particular topic, so I’ve been talking
to other people about other sesh events.

8-10 hour full-day long virtual conferences, because this is a very easily
repeated formula for what I’ve built here. Things transfer pretty well, and
then for the events themselves or for the ones that do well, like WordSesh
already has, and like WooSesh is shaping up to. They will become an annual
staple. Every summer we’ll have another WordSesh and every fall, perhaps
we’ll have another WooSesh and so on. Then they may even perhaps spin off
physical events, and I haven’t shut the door on that completely.

I don’t think I’ll ever do a completely standalone event, but I’ve talked
with other conference organizers about maybe having an add-on event
attached to those which could be pretty cool. Because it’s not super costly
for someone to say, “I’ll stay in that town for one more day so I can get
this other content,” compared to saying, “I’m going to buy tickets and get
a hotel room and travel halfway across the country or halfway around the
world for a one or two day event, and then leave again.”

Joe:
That was something that Brian Krogsgard from Post Status ran into.

Brian:
Exactly. Very easy to get people to say, who were already going to WordCamp
US, “Yeah, I’ll stay an extra day for Post Status Published.” Much harder,
but not impossible, for them to also say “I’m going to come for a two-day
standalone event in a random part of the year all by itself.” The value is
there, but it’s a lot harder for people to go, “Is it though?”

Joe:
Yeah, exactly.

Brian:
And then afterward they go, “I wish I was there.” “We wish you were there
too.”

Joe:
I certainly went to both. I think I got a lot more value out of the second
year, the standalone event.

Brian:
Same. The standalone one had a lot of really good stuff.

Joe:
Yeah. In any case, that’s perhaps something I should have Brian Krogsgard
on to talk about. He’ll be my third repeat guest. As we wrap up here, my
favorite question, maybe the subtitle question. Do you have any trade
secrets for us?

Brian:
I have so many trade secrets. How many can I give you?

Joe:
As many as time allows.

Brian:
My first trade secret, we touched on this earlier in the episode, is
peoples is peoples. If you want to talk to somebody about something, if you
think, “They seem to know a lot about this. I wish I could know what they
know.” Talk to that person. More often than not they, as another rational
thinking human being, like helping people. Particularly if they’re somebody
who is giving a talk or writing a book. That’s a very clear indicator,
“This person likes helping people.” Do not e-mail them and say, “Could I
pick your brain maybe? Could I take you out for a cup of coffee?” They will
probably ignore that e-mail. That is very low value, very low effort.
Instead, e-mail them and ask them a specific question.

Like, ‘Hey Joe. I really like your How I Built It podcast. I’ve been
thinking about podcasting for a while. How important would you say the
hardware is and is there a specific microphone that you would recommend I
buy? And perhaps a cheaper version of that because I don’t know if I’m
going to stick with this.” That is a very easy question for you, Joe
Casabona, to answer. “I like these two microphones. Here’s one that’s
higher in price. Here’s one that’s lower in price. You won’t be
disappointed with either of them.” And then back on with your day.

You could even e-mail that person again and say, “Thank you much for the
recommendation. Do you also have a recommendation for blank?” Or, “What do
you think about this as a title, or format?” Ask a series of small
questions, one per e-mail, and you will get answers more often than not. It
might take a couple of weeks, but those are the kinds of e-mails that
people, especially busy people, love to answer.

Joe:
Yes. The person being asked, they don’t have to spend the cognitive load
on, “What is this person asking me? I don’t understand their question.” Fun
secret for people who need to come up with content, those who ask you
questions are giving you blog topics.

Brian:
Yes. If you have to answer for one person, consider writing it as a blog
answer for many persons.

Joe:
Yeah exactly. That’s an excellent number one trade secret. It’s something
that I always say, “Just ask.” Do you have maybe– I think time allows for
a second if you have one.

Brian:
A second one. It would be well worth your time to come to WooSesh for free
while it’s happening live because that’s $200 you don’t have to spend on
what is ultimately perhaps thousands of dollars in value. That’s more of a
shameless self-plug. I would say one more trade secret is, don’t get caught
up on the tools that you have to use to do something. Work with what you
have and then improve the tools as you go. Because there are many decisions
that are not irreversible.

I feel like that’s pretty appropriate for podcasts like this one, where
we’re talking about, “Here are the tools that I used and how I did it.”
Finding the right tool is amazing. I was talking about with Crowdcast,
“That’s awesome. But because it allows me to export literally everything
that I’m putting into it, I’m not lost if Crowdcast disappears or isn’t a
perfect fit. I can move into the next tool and keep a pretty good pace.
Don’t get hung up on finding the perfect tool, sink some money on a tool.
Spend some time with it. Move on if it doesn’t work.

Joe:
That’s great advice, because I’m sure we’ve all been there where you spend
a whole day looking for the right tool, and then you’re like, “I’m not any
closer. I might as well use Google Docs for whatever it is I was trying to
do.”

Brian:
I solve so many things in spreadsheets, and once in a while I go, “I should
build a UI for this.” And then I go, “Nope.” Because I still don’t know if
this is how I want to look at the data, so I’m just going to keep it in the
spreadsheet.

Joe:
I’ve been thinking of upgrading Airtable or moving from Airtable because
some of the things that I want are way more than I’m willing to spend on
Airtable. I’m like, “It’s doing its job right now, and it doesn’t slow me
down.” Great advice, don’t get caught up on the tools that you are looking
to use, or you have to use, or you need to learn. Use what you got and
improve the process. Awesome. Brian, always wonderful to talk to you. Where
can people find you?

Brian:
Sure. I tweet very infrequently as @rzen, and you can find me on Twitter
there. But probably the best place to find me is WPSessions.com where I’m
hosting tons of training from people who are smarter than me and
occasionally training that I’m producing myself.

Joe:
Yes. To add on to that, you are doing a series right now where you are
live-coding a project from concept to launch. It’s like the video tutorial
version of this podcast, and I strongly recommend it. It’s for members
only, but I strongly recommend you check out some of that stuff that
Brian’s working on over at WPSessions.com. It is excellent content.

Brian:
I appreciate you saying that. That’s my newest thing. I forgot to even say,
that’s a whole series. Every month I’m focusing on a different project or
an extension of a previous project and trying to create concise bite-sized
pieces. Like, “Today we’re going to work with this tool to make this
thing.” It’s a lot of fun.

Joe:
Absolutely, and insanely valuable. I could talk about this for days as
well, but it’s very much learn by doing, which is something I always say.
That’s how I try to teach my courses, so I love that you’re doing that over
there.

Outro:
What a fantastic episode. I love talking to Brian. He’s a very good friend
of mine and his trade secret, and peoples is peoples, I love that. Again,
it would be well worth your time to go to WooSesh. Head over to
WooSesh.com. I think it’s going to be an excellent conference. The speakers
are amazing, and it’s totally free, so there’s no reason for you to not
sign up if you do stuff with e-commerce, or WooCommerce specifically.

I also want to thank Pantheon once again for supporting this episode and
the entire season 5, which we are quickly approaching the end of. December
4th, I believe, is the last episode of season 5, just in time for WordCamp
US. Thanks again for their support, this show would not be able to happen
without them or without you, the listeners. The show has seen fantastic
growth this season, and I want to thank you for that. Finally, if you are
interested in getting your own podcast website up and running, don’t forget
to go to HowIBuilt.it/course to take my new course, Build Your Podcast
Platform in 3 Days.

It’s fantastic, I had a lot of fun making this course, and it’ll be super
valuable for anybody who needs to start a podcast. The question of the week
for you is, what are you doing with e-commerce on the web? I would love to
hear the projects you’re working on, or your store and what you sell, and a
little bit about how you built it. Be sure to reach out either on Twitter,
@jcasabona or via e-mail, Joe@HowIBuilt.it. Thanks so much for listening.
For all of the show notes head over to HowIBuilt.it/98. Until next week,
get out there and build something.

Bryce Adams and Metorik

August 7, 2018

Sponsored by:

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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.

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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 9^th 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 9^th.

Nicole Kohler and Content Strategy

March 20, 2018

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Nicole Kohler is a Growth Marketer at Automattic; most of her job revolves around building and publishing content for her team and her main product, Jetpack. So in this episode, I talk to Nicole about Content Strategy. This is something I struggle with, and usually just publish when I think of stuff. Nicole provides us with some great advice from her time at Automattic, working with both the Jetpack and the WooCommerce teams!

Show Notes

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Transcript

Intro: Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of How I Built It! Continuing our series on How You Build a Business, today I get to talk to Nicole Kohler about Content Strategy. This is something I struggle with, and usually just publish when I think of stuff. Nicole provides us with some great advice from her time at Automattic, working with both the Jetpack and the WooCommerce teams! We’ll get into that in a minute, 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 online 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.

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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?” Continuing with a little theme that we have for building different building strategies, today I am talking to Nicole Collier, who is a growth marketer at Automatic about building a content strategy. I’m very excited about this. Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole: I’m great. How are you?

Joe: I am fantastic. So I’ve got to say that I’ve always … Perhaps this is putting the cart before the horse. I’ve always taken a field of dreams approach to marketing. Whereas, I build something and I assume that people will come because it is good. But I’ve learned over the last year so that that’s not the right approach and I think that your experience doing content marketing for Automatic could probably help both me and the listeners improve their marketing strategy.

So first, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Nicole: Yeah. Sure. So I’ve been with Automatic for about two and a half years now. I actually joined with the WooCommerce Team. I joined six weeks before the Automatic acquisition so I had really good timing. I joined to work on content strategy, specifically as a writer initially. So I was working on all of our blog posts and then over time I started working on more of our strategy. I started working on our email strategy, general marketing, copyrighting, etc. etc. Six months ago, I actually changed teams, so I am now working on Jetpack. As a growth marketer, I am responsible for our content strategy, our overall brand messages like how we communicate about our features, our new features, what we’re releasing, and then sort of the copyrighting within the plug in itself, the copyrighting on our website, etc. etc.

So content is a big part of what I do. It’s a big, I would say, obsession of mine. If you see me speaking at a Word Camp, it’s probably related to content in some capacity. Either like how to do better content with Jetpack or content for your WordPress site, something like that.

So that’s a bit about me, professionally. Personally, I love dogs. I’m obsessed with Pokemon and I’m on Twitter a lot.

Joe: Nice. Very nice. Who’s your favorite Pokemon?

Nicole: Raichu. I have a Raichu tattoo. So folks who see me in person, don’t hesitate to ask.

Joe: That is fantastic. One of the original 150. I don’t know. I think I maybe … I feel like I’m a little bit older than you, but I know that I was there for the original 150 and I was like, “Newfangled Pokemon, whatever.”

But that’s awesome. So something you said there is that you focus on the email marketing and blog posts, but you also focus on copy on the website and within the plug in. Can we just touch on that real quick because that’s really important, right?

Nicole: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s something I didn’t do a lot of with Woo. Now that I’m in Jetpack, I’m learning how important those little touch points are and how much of an impact just like one little line of copy can make. A little nudge to upgrade your plan. If we word that, I don’t want to say incorrectly, but if we word it a certain way versus a different way, it can have a huge impact on conversions on whether or not people trust us. Getting to work on that is really exciting.

Joe: I always feel like … I’m most a developer by trade or at least I build things. Whether it’s my online courses or a plug in or something like that. Copy is always an after thought for me. I’m pretty keen on the error messages. That’s been a crusade of mine to give users good error messages, but the nudges for upgrades or even like the way that you word directions or what a feature does can, like you said, have a really big impact on conversion. Because if you’re not communicating that, if you’re not speaking your user’s language, then there’s going to be a disconnect.

Nicole: Oh, yeah. It’s something that I’m trying to get more involved with. Every time that we are about to have a release or about to add a new feature to Jetpack, I’m trying to get in there and take a look at the copy. As you said, make sure that we are communicating something clearly. So if there is an error, are we telling people what to do next? Are we telling them what’s causing the error? Big error messages are horrible. So what causes error? It’s not your fault. Maybe it’s like a temporary thing on the host side or maybe it’s something wrong with the plug in and you need context about … Contact us, excuse me, about it. So clarity is definitely something I’m trying to work on.

Joe: Yeah. Absolutely. Now, so again, I’m just going to talk about my experience, which is I don’t really know what’s the best way for me to figure out if my copy is connecting, right? I can try different things. I can say, “Okay. I had a bunch of sales after I made this update, but was it because of the update or was it because I was running a discount?” What’s the best way for me to kind of figure out and make sure I’m getting the right connections to the visitors to my website?

Nicole: There’s a couple of different things you can do. The first piece of advice I would give you is only test one thing at once. So if you are running a sale, like you just said, don’t go into that sale expecting to pull concrete results about the success of your copy out of the sale because people are more likely to be drawn to your site from the major discount or the buy one, get one free plan, whatever it is that you’re doing than your copy. So if you want to test new content or new copy, try to test that on its own.

As far as testing goes, there are a lot of tools out there that let you maybe test to versions of a page against another, build dedicated landing pages. You can do that in WordPress or you can do that with different tools. You can get heat map tools out there to see how far people are going down pages. Whether it’s an a version of a page versus a b version, or just your site in general. Then you can just try different versions of social messages. So if you have a tool like Buffer or you’re using Jetpack’s publicize feature, send out multiple tweets or multiple Facebook messages to the same piece of content and just use the built in social analytic tools, I guess I’m trying to say, to see which of those messages got the most people clicking.

So there’s a lot of different ways that you can test depending on what it is you’re trying to test. Whether it’s a social message or home page, blah, blah, blah. But definitely I would emphasize only test one thing at once. Because if you’re trying to test a home page and social messages and a sale and copyrighting in your plug in at the same time, you’re just not going to get a clear results from that.

Joe: Right. Right. Gotcha. Throw a bunch of darts at the board at the same time and you don’t know which is going to hit the best. So you mentioned that you had … I don’t know if you said this on the pre call now or the actual interview, but in case you didn’t mention it in the episode. You mentioned that you had moved over to the Jetpack team and you have more experience now kind of building that strategy, maybe not from scratch but you definitely have more of a hands on approach to that. Jetpack is a well established plug in. So what kind of research did you do to set out and map our your content strategy?

Nicole: Yeah. So a little bit of background, when I joined WooCommerce, I joined at the same time as Aviva Pinchas, who worked originally as our sort of brand strategist, marketing strategist. She had a big, a really, really big hand in creating the WooCommerce content strategy. When I switched to Jetpack, we didn’t have any content strategy. There was nothing. So it was just like we put up blog posts when we have a release and we think we have something to say. So it was just like, “Oh, boy.”

SO some of the research that I was doing wasn’t necessarily research but more of like the experience I had working on WooCommerce and what I learned from Aviva and what she had done. So that played a really big part in it. Knowing what another Automatic product had done to be successful. So talking about your own features, kind of like owning the message about yourself. I took that over. But then I did a little bit more research on what are these other security plug ins? If you want to call Jetpack a security plug in, which it kind of is. What are these other security plug ins talking about? What topics are they talking about? What’s important? So kind of like researching their content. What kind of content are they producing? Are they doing long form, are they doing short form? What social channels are they on? Where are they successful? Kind of since it is a WordPress product, doing a little bit more research in the WordPress environment, I think is the word I’m looking for.

So what is the general sentiment right now about Jetpack on like WP Tavern, on other sites and digging into the comments, which is not my favorite thing, but making myself do that. What are people saying right now? What their gripes? What information are they not getting that we could be providing? In some cases, I was finding things that we were not talking about that kind of bled over into docs, like things we were missing in docs. So around the same time that I started, we had a guild forum of mostly happiness engineers to work on Jetpack docs. So it was kind of like a happy coincidence that we also have this happening at the same time. It’s not like just me working on all the written stuff. But it was a lot of research in the kind of like internet spear that Jetpack is in. So like security, products and WordPress products and seeing what people are saying about us right now.

Joe: Gotcha. So it’s interesting that you mention that you feel that Jetpack … Well, you say that Jetpack is a security plug in. It certainly offers that. It offers like the security aspect, the backups aspect. It also offers a whole lot of stuff. Did you find or do you find difficult crafting a clear message because of that? I’m not trying to nail you to the wall with this question. I’m just very curious about this.

Nicole: Oh, no. That was like my big fear coming in is that I would find it very difficult to come up with a concise statement, summarizing the importance of Jetpack. So the first few events I went to I was trying a couple different things.

The most common question we get at Word Camp, specifically is what even is Jetpack because I’ve heard of it. I have no idea what it does. So we’ve kind of summarized it as Jetpack is a WordPress toolkit that lets you design, grow and secure your site. That seems to be working really well. People are just like, “Oh, okay. So how does it do that?” Then we can go on and talk about the features that do all that or the features that they’re most interested in. So if someone says, “Okay. Well, I already have a security suite I like. How does it help me design my site?” Or, “Oh, I don’t have any security tools right now. I just got started. Tell me more.” Then we can talk about backups. We can talk about brute force protection.

So that has been working pretty well. I think that tag line is somewhere on the site now. So yeah. You didn’t catch me off guard with that at all. It’s something I’ve been working on actually.

Joe: Nice. That makes a ton of sense. It’s very concise and then, like we said earlier, you’re speaking the user’s language because now they can say, “Oh okay. How do I do that?” Whereas just saying like, “We’ve got the publicize module.” Like, “Okay, what does that mean? What’s a module?”

Nicole: Yeah. We’re trying to avoid using those words. I’ve heard people at camps go like, “Oh, it takes the features from WordPress.com and puts them in a plug in.” It’s like if someone just viewed WordPress and they’ve used WordPress.com, they’re going to be like, “Okay. What are those features?” Like you said, “What is a module?” In the past, even I’ve been at camps and been like, “Oh, Jetpack has a bunch of cool features and they make your site awesome.” It’s the worst description ever. I think that’s what we’re trying to get away from, especially in our content is just talking about Jetpack as a bunch of features. It’s so much more than that. It can be custom tailored to your site and to your business and your specific needs so that’s what we’re trying to get across.

Joe: Absolutely. That’s awesome. Then the other follow up question I kind of had was about the .com/.org site. You have Jetpack, you connect it to .com. Do you find that that’s … First of all, I should say it’s a very easy process, right?

Jetpack makes it very easy to do all that. Do you find that that has to be part of your messaging or is that just … I guess what I’m trying to say is do you find enough confusion around that that it should be part of your messaging? Or is it just like, “Well, to make it work you do this one, two, three, and you’re done.”

Nicole: So we’ve gone back and forth on this. There’s like two sides to this, right? We don’t want to slip this phrase about you need a WordPress.com account in there because people were going to be like, “Wait, what? Why do I need this?” That brings up this whole new conversation. At the same time, we don’t want to be dishonest about the need for a separate account because then if someone’s setting it up and they assume it’s one click and you’re done, they might be thrown off and too many logins is definitely a problem that we’re all faced with. So the way that I am trying to talk about it now, and again, it something else I’m sort of testing out is if it comes up, I’ve had someone just directly ask me recently at a local meet up group, “Why do I need the .com account?” Some of our features use the .com servers for hosting to speed things up. You just need to connect to .com to utilize those features. If you don’t connect, you can’t utilize those features. That seems to help.

Being up front about why you need that second account, showing them the connection flow if they’re very curious, that it is one click, and then having more detailed documentation about here’s how the process works, here’s how you can disconnect, here’s how you can troubleshoot the connection, which is something, again, that our quill guild has been super, super great about. They are fantastic people working on these docs.

So it’s been a little tricky. Like I said, I’ve kind of gone back and forth about being too honest or not talking about it a lot, but I think we’re figuring it out.

SPonsor: This episode is brought to you by Vast Conference. Vast offers instant conference calls that have crystal-clear audio quality and tons of great features. If you want crystal clear audio that never gets drops, and top notch customer support, check out Vast Conference. Visited them at buildpodcast.net/vast/. And now, back to the show.

Joe: That’s fantastic. It sounds like it really comes down to … I mean, you’re out, right? Your boots on the ground here. You’re talking to users. You’re talking to user, right? That’s maybe some of the best research that you could do to see what their pain points are.

Nicole: Yeah.

Joe: So we’re about halfway, a little more than halfway, and I haven’t asked the title question yet. So if I want to build a content strategy myself or let’s talk about Jetpack, how do you build it? We talked a little bit about research and talking to users, but what does that look like? Do I blog first? Where do I even start?

Nicole: Ah. I think something I was actually thinking about yesterday, coming into this recording, one of the biggest misconceptions that people have about content marketing is that you have to talk about topics like other than yourself. So you have to start with this sort of top-of-funnely content that you just sort of link to your brand, right? So for Jetpack that might look like, “Here’s why security is important for your site,” or, “Here’s why you should have professional WordPress themes,” or, “Here’s why WordPress is the best platform.” Then just at the very end have like one call to action for Jetpack. I think that the assumption is that you can’t directly talk about your brand to have successful content. I’ve seen that for so many companies that start content marketing. They avoid talking about themselves until the very end of their content. They have this little call to action saying like, “Oh, by the way, we do this.” That may get them a lot of interest from search engines, like that topi-funnel content might be super popular, but it doesn’t put someone in the right mindset to convert at the end in most cases.

So something I learned for WooCommerce and that I’ve carried over to Jetpack is to sort of … I think I said this phrase earlier, to sort of own the conversation about your brand. So content marketing for us has always looked like we’re going to talk about Jetpack. We’re going to be the experts on Jetpack because we are the experts on Jetpack. So we’re going to talk about, “Here’s how you successfully use our product. Here’s why you should use our product. Here’s some tips for making it easier or taking your site to the next level,” and then like maybe have some content that gets people in from search engines, that topi-funnel type stuff. So like, “Yeah, here’s why WordPress security is important.” But then also give them related reading that is further down the funnel. Like, “By the way, yeah, we do have this thing and here’s how you can find out some more about it,” rather than just trying to sell them when they’re not ready for that.

Joe: Gotcha. Which you can do with Jetpack.

Nicole: Oh yeah. Absolutely. But like I said, it’s a huge misconception that you can’t … A, that you can’t talk directly about yourself and sell yourself in your content. B, that you have to start with this unrelated content. I think if people are … First of all, people are coming to your site to learn about you and read about you. If you’re not serving the people that are already on your site, that’s a big miss. Secondly, I think if you are only producing content that’s going to get people from search engines and then not giving them anything else to read and just putting calls to action to buy at the end of that, it’s like a super short funnel that just ends in the brick wall or something.

I was thinking about that yesterday. I wanted to bring that up. I think it’s really important to think about how you own your own messaging.

Joe: Man, that’s going to be my big takeaway now, right? I mean, my blog is mostly tutorial stuff and yeah, I can get away with that a little bit because I’m teaching people and that’s what my product is, right? It’s my online courses. But I’m not telling people why they should learn from me. So they’re not getting that. What you said made me think of this anecdote. This actually happened at my wife and me. We were meeting up with a friend of my wife. She had worked the night shift, but because of scheduling, she just decided we would meet him after work.

So we go to grab brunch at this place and he walks in with a notepad. He framed the conversation as, “Hey, I would love to catch up with you guys. You were just recently married. I’d love to catch up.” He walks in with a notepad. He said his friend might be joining us. He sits down and I said, “Is this a sales conversation? Are you going to sell us on what financial planning, that’s what you do?” “Oh, well, it doesn’t have to be like that.” I’m like, “We’re not interested.” That made the whole rest of the brunch like awkward because he’s like, “Let me just text my buddy and tell him not to come.” I was like, “Why would you …” The old bait and switch after my wife just worked 12 hours? I’m like, “C’mon, man.”

It’s an extreme example of what you said, but it’s true. I wasn’t in a position where I wanted to be sold to. It was a Sunday morning. I just wanted to have brunch. He’s like ready to come at me with financial planning, which we didn’t even need.

Nicole: Yeah. No, it’s super true though. If you’re in a position, if you’re reading something online about how to make a great brunch and you get to the end and it’s just like, “Buy a skillet.” You’re like, “It’s not why I came here.”

Joe: I have a skillet. I want to make a good omelet or whatever.

Nicole: But if you end that piece of content with, “By the way, did you know that you can make really great brunches in a skillet? Read some more about that.” That kind of leads you further down, and that’s kind of what I’m talking about. Not ending your content in a brick wall. I’ve never used that phrase before, but I’m going to use that from now on. That’s good.

Joe: I love that. It’s absolutely true. On the same token, you walk into a car dealership knowing you’re going to be sold to, right? So you’re mentally prepared for that.

So you mentioned that you do a lot of testing, right? So I like to ask has the product gone through any transformations? That’s the canned, scripty question that I ask, but in this case, I want to ask were there things that you started off with in your content strategy, which I guess actually, let me back up. Is there like a possible way to do a list, like one through five, these are the things that we’re doing for our content strategy, or is that too boxed in? If I want to start today, do I come up with topics and then blog first? Do I phone, email list, right? What’s that look like? Yeah.

Nicole: Oh, that’s a good question. So number one, start writing. You can’t get any results. you can iterate on anything. you can’t test until you actually have content to test against, until you have content to like pool email subscribers in against. You actually have to start producing something. Kind of along those same lines, I taught a writing class the last two years at the Automatic grand meet up, which is our meet up where every … Since we’re all distributed, everyone meets up in person. The very first lesson that I taught in that class was kind of like accept your mediocrity. Not that you might be a mediocre writer, but if you’re new to content strategy or you’re new to content marketing or if you’re business is brand new, accept that your first few posts might suck. You’re not going to get any comments or people might hate them. But you have to do something. You have to put something out there. So yeah, number one, start writing.

Number two, I do think building an email list of some kind is really important because you can get those people coming back to your content, you can send them content in the future, you can send them maybe sale’s pitches or something. But start doing it. Even if you’re not actively using it. Passively start building that email list. Jetpack has a subscriber option that you can let people just sign up on this sidebar or widgetized area. You can use that if you’re not ready to pay for Mail Temp or use like Mail Poet or another service.

Number three, start researching. Start looking at your competitors, start looking at other people in your spear. Whether that’s like other plug ins, whether that’s other WordPress companies, whether it’s other business, whatever it may be. See what kinds of content they’re doing. Look at their comments, look at their shares, look at their social media profiles. Obviously don’t copy them, but see what’s resonating with their audience because you’re probably going to have very similar results. Take note of what kinds of content they’re doing. If they’re doing customer stories, if they’re highlighting feedback, if they’re highlighting their successes, how well are those types of things going over? If they’re highlighting their successes and they’re not going over very well, maybe don’t talk about yourself as much. Maybe talk about your customers more. Kind of depends on the industry.

Four, start testing content. This can be really vague, right? This might mean just publishing a bunch of stuff and looking at Google analytics and seeing well, this type of post got more time on page versus this type of post. This type of post got 28 comments and this type of post got zero comments. Maybe testing is not the right word, but actively start watching and picking out the successes versus the failures or the sort of in between stuff.

Then I would say number five, I wouldn’t actually do this fifth, somewhere in the middle. Try to set up like a content calendar. Try to hold yourself to a standard of publishing even if it’s only once every two weeks, once a month. Get your topics planned out in advance. Know what you’re going to publish when. Know who’s going to be working on it. Know who’s going to be responsible for every single bit of the stuff. Maybe this isn’t the first thing that you would do or the third thing or even the fifth thing, but do it at some point so you can be responsible so that someone can be responsible and that you are definitely publishing a flow of content and that something is nagging you, right? So if you miss a deadline. If I miss something on CoSchedule, I get an email. I get something that’s like, “Hey, you didn’t do this,” even if it’s just like I’m a day late on getting something to our editorial team, right? It helps. It does. So yeah, those are my five things.

Joe: Awesome. I love that. I’m going to link in the show notes to the interview that we did with Nate Ellering from CoSchedule to learn about CoSchedule because it’s a very nice content scheduling tool. I mean, another thing about content scheduling is that if you are building things like … It allows you to kind of create the story you want to create, right? You’re not saying, “Oh, did I write about this already? Should I write it? Do I need to follow up?” You can kind of put that in the schedule, see what you’ve done, see what you then need to do. So I love that. So now back to the transformations part, right? Is there anything that you set out, maybe you like scheduled a piece of content that you realized, “Oh, well, this isn’t really working for looking at our analytics. This is no longer what I want to do.” How do you kind of change things up in the middle of your content strategy?

Nicole: Yeah. Just talking about something that we had at Woo. So we did a lot of these customer stories where we would spend … I mean, these were the most time intensive posts that we did, right? So we would spend several hours interviewing someone who was using WooCommerce. Some of them I think we did on site, some of them we did on Skype, some of them we did on Zune or Google Hangouts or something with multiple people versus one person. So we would interview people, find out how they were using WooCommerce, learning about their business, learn about their aspirations, and then write up these really, really long, involved posts anywhere between 2,000 and 5,000 words. I mean, really huge meaty pieces of content. They did not seem to be resonating with our readers, even though we felt like they should be the most successful pieces on our blog.

This was about a year and a half ago, I remember posting something internally like, “Look, our customer stories, they’re not failing, but they’re not doing what we think they should be doing. Why is that? What’s going on?” So that was definitely one of those stop, evaluate everything things and figure out what can we do to make these pieces of content successful or what can we test to make these pieces of content successful? Because we felt like they were so important, right? Like showing other people how they can use WooCommerce, highlighting people’s successes with our product, and ultimately, we just came up with a list of five things we wanted to test over the next few posts. So making them shorter, having less storytelling, having more quotes from the business owners, focusing more on WooCommerce and less on the business, focusing on the business and less on WooCommerce.

I think that’s kind of the key is if you find something that’s not performing the way you think it should, don’t give up right away. Just look at it and kind of think of what could I change in the next version of this that might make it more successful? But then also look at how are you handling distribution? Are you actually promoting that content a lot? Are you putting paid promotion behind it? Could you put paid promotion behind it? Try to evaluate all the potential touch points, right? Email, social, paid ads, blah blah blah. Evaluate everything. Be very critical.

Joe: Awesome. Yeah. Again, that makes a lot of sense because the follow up question that I thought while you were saying this was am I going to have immediate success with … Let’s say I publish this blog post that I think it going to be amazing. I actually did very recently called like What HIPPA Means to Web Designers. I was like, “This is going to get like a million shares.” It didn’t. Does that mean that I did something wrong? Does it mean that it never will? What’s evergreen content, that’s a thing that I’ve heard about. What does that mean in the scheme of content marketing? Am I playing the long game here or are there ways to play the short game?

Nicole: Content marketing is absolutely a long game. Man, one of my annoyances is that I worked at an SEO Agency for a little while, and one of the big things that the team I worked on did was try to create content that would go viral. We were successful several times, but that viral piece of content was viral for a week, right? Then after that, no one cared about us anymore. So like, yes, you absolutely can create viral content and your content marketing can be super, super popular for a short amount of time, but it doesn’t do anything for you. We didn’t even get clients from it that I’m aware of. I don’t want to bash what they were doing at all because they were super, super good at it. But what did they even do for you?

So yeah, it’s absolutely the long game. Just because your piece didn’t garner a lot of popularity right away doesn’t mean you did anything wrong, especially because content takes a long time to generate attention on search engines, which is really where a lot of content marketing is going to get people from. Something might get shared on Facebook on someone’s wall immediately and no one will see it, but then someone will get to it … An influencer will get to it three months later when they actually find it on Google, and then they’ll share it on Facebook. That’s when it has its big amount of success.

So I think you definitely have to realize that you’re playing a long game. Evergreen content also is definitely a thing. If you’re writing about a topic that isn’t happening in this specific moment, if your write … Like security for WordPress, for example, like something that we write about is always going to be a thing. So any content we create about that is going to be evergreen.

I hope that answers your question.

Joe: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, going back to this HIPPA article, people aren’t going to be interesting in HIPPA until they come across it, right? Not all web designers need to know what HIPPA is. But if somebody gets a medical client and they’re like, “Oh, by the way, you have to be HIPPA compliant.” They’re going to be like, “What’s HIPPA compliant mean?” Like you said, it’s definitely a long game.

So we are coming up on time and I haven’t asked you my favorite question yet. But I do want to ask one more. It’s around plans for the future because you say it’s a long game, is it like a forever game? Am I just going to be like content marketing this thing for the rest of my life? When am I done? How do I know if I’m done? Things like that.

Nicole: So I don’t necessarily think it’s … I can talk. I promise. So I don’t necessarily think it’s a forever game. There are some people and some brands who will find that content marketing just like genuinely does not work for them. It could be because of their audience. It could be because of the products they’re selling. They’re a bunch of different reasons. They may work on it for a little while and just like get no comments, get no interaction, get no shares, get no leads from that content, but then find that they’re publishing videos like how to videos and getting a ton of engagement and a ton of sales leads off that. They may find that their social messages are getting them a ton of engagement and a ton of responses. They may find that direct mail or something is getting them a ton of leads. They may be like, “Okay. So I’m getting tons and tons of success elsewhere. These channels are highly successful. Content just isn’t going to do it for me.” I think that’s a, that speaks to the importance of multi-channel marketing and trying multiple things. But b, it also says that just for some people content marketing because of your audience or because of your products may not necessarily work and it’s okay in that situation to … YOu’re not giving up, right? You’re folding a non-successful, non-viable method of reaching customers.

You also can re approach it later, right? There are plenty of industries where customers were not looking online for products five years ago, but they might be doing that now. So maybe now’s the time to revisit content marketing or revisit social media. So no, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a long game, but it is something that you probably, potentially should try.

Joe: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, just to drive home to point of you’re not giving up, right? I mean, you don’t want to keep … If I started a pager business in 2005 and was like, “It’s going to work one of these days.” I mean, I’d just be wasting time and money. I’d be like, what’s his name, Duffy from 30 Rock. That was the inspiration of that. So…do you have any trade secrets for us?

Nicole: Oh. I don’t know if I have any trade secrets. I think a lot of what I know and talk about is public knowledge. But I like the phrase, “Don’t read the comments.” But I like to take that one further, which is, “Don’t read the comments if you haven’t eaten lately because you’ll respond really badly.” One of my major responsibilities at Woo and not so much at Jetpack because we have a team that handles comments is like was to respond to comments, especially on our release posts. We would get hundreds of comments on these posts and some of them were not great. There were people trying to stir things up. Imagine WP Tavern just toned down a little bit. So that was the release posts comments.

My advice for dealing with comments and you could probably take this as a trade secret is to always put yourself in that person’s shoes. Imagine the worst possible day that person could be having and why they’d be motivated to make a comment like that. No matter how nasty it is, no matter how frustrated they may seem, no matter how illogical it may see. Because we did people commenting and being like, “I can’t login to my site.” It’s like this has nothing to do with the content of this post, but like image what drove them to that level of desperation to make that comment on that post.

So rather than being snippy and being like, “Go contact support,” I try to put myself in that person’s shoes and then leave. Again, it maybe not necessarily be trade secret. But I’ll always make sure that I wasn’t replying to comments on an empty stomach because then I wouldn’t be that helpful.

Joe: Yeah. Absolutely. My brother said I don’t get hangry. They say I get “hustrated,” right? I’m not like mean and mad, I’m just like, “UH. Everything’s annoying,” when I’m not in the mood. If you still need to … If you feel the need to write out a snarky response, open up NotePad or whatever and just type it out. I do that with Tweets. I must have drafts of like a bunch of like stupid responses in TweetBot because I type it out and then I’m like, “Is it worth it?” No. It’s not worth it.

Nicole: There’s only one time that I’ve posted a snarky response to a WooCommerce comment. I will own up to it. I posted it on Twitter. Someone asks why we didn’t warn them that we had a major update and I kid you not, the plug in update thing had a bar in red above the notification that said, WooCommerce, blah blah blah, is a major update. I mean, it was in red. Highlight in yellow. I took a screenshot of that comment and a screenshot of the thing and put it on Twitter. That is the one time I had a snarky response. I felt bad about ti later, but I was also like, “Come on. We did warn you.

Joe: Abstrusely. That’s exactly right.

Nicole: Yes. I feel horrible that your site broke and I’m very sorry about that. But don’t say what … It was right there. It was red.

Joe: We tried with everything we do.

Nicole: We tried.

Joe: Yep. So it does feel cathartic for like a minute. It’s a lot like Chinese food. It feels really good and then later you’re like why did I do that? I feel terrible.

Nicole: Oh yeah. Yep.

Joe: Awesome. That’s going to be the tagline for this – “Snarky Comments are like Chinese Food.”

Nicole: I love it.

Joe: Awesome. Nicole, thanks so much for your time today. I had a really great time. I learned a lot. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?

Nicole: So right now I am occasionally blogging on Jetpack.com/blog. You can keep up with my adventures and my word Camp talks at NicoleCKohler.com or follow me on Twitter @NicoleCKohler

Joe: All right. Easy enough. I will link all of those in the show notes too. Thanks again so much for joining me. I really appreciate your time.

Nicole: Yeah, thanks, Joe. I had a great time.

Outro: Thanks again to Nicole for joining me. I know after this interview I started to put my own strategy in place, and hopefully this has inspired you to do so as well!

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. And finally, if you want conference call to be crystal clear and easy as possible, check out Vast Conference. You can get a 30 Day free trial by mentioning How I Built It when you speak to a sales rep over at buildpodcast.net/vast/

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/71/. 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.

Next Week, we’ll talk to Jen Jamar about a Marketing Strategy for your business. This is another great conversation that I couldn’t enjoy more. Jen’s worked with some great clients and has some fantastic insight on how you can market yourself and your product. SO until next week, get out there and build something.

Patrick Rauland and Building a WooCommerce Shop

January 30, 2018

Sponsored by:

Event Espresso: An Event Management System for WordPress that powers over 40,000 event websites.
Jilt: The easiest way to recover abandoned shopping carts on WooCommerce, easy digital downloads, and Shopify.
Liquid Web: Fast, Managed WordPress hosting whether your users are logged in or logged out. Get 50% off the first 2 months.

Patrick Rauland is a WooCommerce expert who joins us today to talk through everything you need to think about when setting up an e-commerce site. So this is less asking, “how did you build that,” and more, “how would you build that?” It’s a great conversation and Patrick offers some great advice and insights when making an online store, especially with WooCommerce. We discuss building trust, content marketing, conversion rates, and more.

Show Notes

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Transcript

Intro: Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of How I Buit It! In today’s episode, my friend Patrick Rauland talks through everything you need to think about when setting up an e-commerce site. So this is less asking, “how did you build that,” and more, “how _would_ you build that?” It’s a great conversation and Patrick offers some great advice and insights when making an online store, especially with WooCommerce. We’ll get to that in a minute, 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 online 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.

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, or in today’s case, how would you build that. Today my guest is Patrick Rauland. He is an ecommerce educator guy. We were talking about this right before we started recording. I asked him what his title wanted to be and then I forgot the end after educator already. Ecommerce educator guy. Patrick, how are you today?
Patrick:	I’m doing really good. I’m on my second cup of coffee, so it’s just a good, just a good day.
Joe:	Very nice, very nice. It is later in the day for me, but I’m still like, I nurse my coffee. This is still my first cup. It’s really cold now and stuff too, but I’m generally a peppy guy anyway. I’m really excited for today’s episode because we’re breaking from the normal format of, “Hey, tell me about a thing you built.” Instead, Patrick, you’re very well versed in WooCommerce. Would you say that?
Patrick:	Yeah, yeah, I’m all that, so yeah. Yes, I can say just the simple word yes, but I can also explain it, in that I was just thinking about this the other day, I used it as … First, I used it for an agency and I built sites for clients, and then I was a support person at Woo and then developer and then product manager and then I built extensions for them or/and for myself and then I wrote books about it and created courses, and I created a conference. I think I’m like almost at eight or nine different roles relating Woo stuff, so I’ve got a good impression of it.
Joe:	Yes. I’m really glad you went through that rundown because I didn’t want to try to remember it from the last time we spoke or anything like that. I’m really excited about today’s topic. You went through your credentials for being a WooCommerce guy and today we’re going to talk about how would you build your online shop with WooCommerce? And we came up with a pretty interesting concept for this.
Patrick:	Yeah. It was actually literally something I was googling yesterday. My partner, she’s very big into comic books and nerdy TV shows and all this stuff, and we’re like, god, and she loves plants and so she wants to merge nerdiness and plants, and we were trying to find nerdy pots and we could not find much. We could find a couple, but there weren’t many. I was just thinking, “If someone had a store that was just nerdypots.com, you could make a killing with all the people that have that intersection in their life.” She would love like a Bulbasaur that has like a little back where little plants could grow out of it, that’d be awesome, right?
Joe:	Yeah, very cool. Not like a chia pet, but like a real plant, like a real pot.
Patrick:	Like a planter, yep.
Joe:	Cool. If some enterprising young person or older person listening to this episode wants to make that site, we’re going to blueprint that site for you.
Patrick:	Yes.
Joe:	Let’s start with this. We have our idea. What kind, like how would you start researching this? How do I know that this is a good idea for me to sink my time into?
Patrick:	Okay, so there’s a whole giant thing we could talk about with choosing a product, but basically if you know that there’s a need and you can know that there’s a need by either talking to people around you or by doing Google SEO SEM type of research to see how many traffic queries there are a month, that type of thing, or you can see what … There are some nerdy potted plant things on Etsy that we found earlier, but there’s only a couple. As long as you know that there is something people want, you can, that’s the first step. Do people want it? If so, proceed.
	Then you need to make sure that you can make money on it. That means you need to … Let me, I’m trying to give a good example here, where like if the cure for cancer was $500 billion, everyone wants it but no one can afford $500 billion. That’s not a viable option. There’s lots of things like that. You want to sell artisanal coffee. People want it but they’re not willing to pay $60 a bag. You just need to make sure that you can make it at a price that people want it at.
	My rule of thumb is you need to be able to sell it for twice what you bought it for. If you’re selling planters, let’s stay with the same example, if you can buy them for $5 a unit and people will purchase them from you at $10 a unit, that’s probably something you can make money on.
Joe:	Nice. I love that. Because it’s not enough to just ask if people want it. If I asked you if you wanted some crazy thing, you’d probably be like, “Yeah, sure, I want that.”
Patrick:	Totally. Totally. One of the classic example, and so many people have said this in other circles but just because someone says they’ll buy is different than them buying it. Some people when they’re doing validation, they will only count validation when someone actually pulls out the credit card to make a pre-order. Because there are a lot of things that people, like, “Hey, Joe, would you buy my Batman mug?” You’re probably going to say yes, just to be nice to me.
Joe:	Yeah, I like Batman and mugs, like great.
Patrick:	Yeah.
Joe:	But when the rubber hits the road and you’re like, “Okay, that’ll be $20,” I’m like, “I don’t know, I’d rather spend $20 on like a Mickey Mouse mug.”
Patrick:	Totally.
Joe:	Cool. I really love that. I’ve fallen to that trap a lot. Or like, “Do you think this is a good idea? I’ve started developing this thing. Do you think it’s a good idea?” Yes. Oh, people think it’s a good idea. At least me and someone else, so I’m going to sink all my time into this.
	On that same token, how much time do you spend researching this? Do you create a focus group or just throwing up a landing page or what?
Patrick:	You know what? Everyone is totally different, and this totally depends on you, and also if your startup costs are like you need to spend $500 on product to get started, that’s relatively small, but if you need to spend $50,000, then you need to do a lot more research, right?
Joe:	Right. Right.
Patrick:	Obviously the answer is it depends. But let me try to give you a little bit more clarity there. I’ve always used my intuition with the stuff that I do. So I’ve never done any SEO work on my own sites. I just say, I had this problem with WooCommerce. Here’s how I solved it. I assume other people will want it. Some of those blog posts are flat and no one ever clicks on them, but some of them are great, so I just use my intuition and see whatever is the right thing.
	But when you’re investing money and not just writing a blog post, then you do want to do some research. People spend months, people do spend years. You could probably get away with a solid day of research if it’s a small thing that’s a small investment. Try to find other products that are similar. Try to find influencers in your space who have podcasts or blogs or something and they talk about, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if,” and then try to find marketplaces where people might be selling this stuff. And if you can find some traction or if you can find online groups where people are talking about this, that’s probably, that’s some amount of traction. It’s not exact numbers, but that’s something to get started.
Joe:	Yeah, it’s at least a group that you can now market to, to get kind of an initial reaction.
Patrick:	Keep in mind before the internet you could not make money selling cat trees for living. Now that the internet exists, there are probably businesses that only sell super hero themed cat trees. You know what I mean? You can be so niched down and still make a killing as long as there’s that super tiny passionate group of people that believe in your product.
Joe:	Yeah. Again, that’s another really great point. I mean if you play your cards right and you market to the right group of people, you have virtually infinite reach. Everybody who is interested in super hero cat trees, or nerdy planters, Pokemon nerdy planters, or superhero nerdy planters, things like that. That’s really cool.
	You talked a little bit about initial investments, and I imagine that that’s also going to be part of your research. We’re setting up a WooCommerce shop. WordPress and WooCommerce are open source and both free. What are we looking at for cost for setting up this online shop?
Patrick:	Some costs that you cannot escape no matter what, you’re going to have to pay something for hosting, let’s say $15, $20 a month. You’re going to have to get a domain name, $15 a year. WooCommerce itself is free. So that’s awesome. You’re going to need an SSL certificate. Those used to cost money but now that Let’s Encrypt has come out, those are free. You can usually just press a button in your hosting and they’ll install for you into all that jazz. I think that’s you need bare minimum.
	Oh, you’re going to need a payment gateway. That’s Stripe and PayPal are both free. I should caveat that. If this is your first time to ecommerce, every payment gateway takes a super tiny cut of all sales. But the service itself is free other than a super tiny cut. I mean that’s seriously about it in terms of hard cost, but there’s, ecommerce can be so … You can spend $50,000 on 20 million extensions that all do really cool stuff and then the custom built blank, affiliate system or this or this or this, so you could spend anywhere from let’s say $200 a year at the minimum for hosting a domain and something up to, I mean I think some of the bigger web, some of the bigger ecommerce sites I’ve built when I worked at an agency were 20 plus, so that’s realistically what I think you could spend.
	But honestly, what’s so cool about WooCommerce, and as I said I work with my intuition a lot, so I just do stuff and see if it works, so start with a super tiny store. You start marketing. See if people actually come from Pinterest or Google or wherever to your site. See if they buy it. Oh my god, they start buying stuff, now you start investing in the store. You get a better email software. You start with Mailchimp, which is free and then you upgrade to something that’s better. There’s so many things that you can upgrade and invest in and get your customers that used to buy just once to buy them a couple of times a yea.
Joe:	Yeah, absolutely. I want to parse out something that you just said, which is about hosting. So $15, $20 a month for hosting. I’ve seen hosting for let’s say, I don’t know, $10, or $5. Why shouldn’t I just go with the $5 a month hosting?
Patrick:	Good question. You know what’s interesting, is I think my answer depends based on whether you’re selling online or whether it’s just a regular blog, in that … Well, my answer is kind of the same, but here’s the thing, when you’re selling online, you need to keep, like you have literal transactions, you have to calculate sales tax just in case someone in your own state buys your thing. God forbid you lose it – like your server crashes and you lose all that data and now you owe the government money and you don’t even know how much because it was all recorded in WooCommerce but your host crashed and you’re stuck. You cannot not go the host or you need to have a host that backs up your data or you need to set up your own service that backs up your data.
	I have always used WP Engine just because they were one of the first good hosts that appeared in the, managed the WordPress space and they do daily backups. With daily backups I’m pretty much covered. You can always take it a step further and get in, he and I have a couple of other things that I could use, but a good host will backup your site for you daily. That for me is actually the most important thing. There’s lots of other amazing features like a testing site, but for me the most important feature is daily backups.
Joe:	Daily backups are so important, and just like that a better host is likely not going to crash on you. If one day 1,000 people come and buy your nerdy pot planters you don’t want your site going down because now you’re losing revenue, you literally are losing revenue there. If there’s one thing that you’re going to splurge on, Patrick I think you’d probably agree with me here, hosting should be that one thing.
Patrick:	Yeah, I think so. See, you know what’s funny, is I don’t think I’ve had my site crash any time recently in the last couple of years, but I have had some weird niggling issues just like some little thing that bugs you like, “Why is this thing not quite working,” and to be able to reach out to someone in support and have them actually answer you is, oh, so good.
Joe:	Sponsor: Hey everybody. I wanna take a moment here to tell you about Event Espresso. If you need an excellent Event management system for your word press site, look no further than Event Espresso. The out of the box event registration and ticketing plug in for word press is now powering over 40,000 event websites. 100,000,000 dollars in ticket sales per year. If you need a stable, well built and highly supported event ticketing platform for your word press website, look no further than Event Espresso. They’re a great supporter of the show. They make an incredible product. You can check them out over at buildpodcast.net/events. That’s buildpodcast.net/events. Now, back to the show. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I really just wanted to touch on that because good hosting is so important.
Patrick:	Yeah, and I think WP Engine, is it $15, $20 a month for their lowest? Maybe it’s a little higher than that, but since everything else is basically free, we’re talking $200, $300 a year for a minimum for a whole online business.
Joe:	Which 20 years ago you needed a brick and mortar store.
Patrick:	Totally. Oh yeah, the startup costs used to be insane.
Joe:	Right, yeah. Awesome. Let’s actually get into building it now. We have our hosting. We have our domain. Let’s say that we’ve installed WordPress. Where do we go from here? How do I make a store?
Patrick:	Cool. We already mentioned WooCommerce. WooCommerce is one of the best options. I just want to be fair there are other players in the WordPress space, but I mostly have experience with WooCommerce because it’s the biggest one. But you just go into your plugin menu. You click or type in WooCommerce. You install it. That is the basic thing that you need.
	When you go through the welcome wizard, they will prompt you to install Jetpack. I recommend that you do that. They have a weird phrasing. They’re changing their terminology. It might also be called WooCommerce Services and a couple other stuff like that. But install Jetpack which will let you connect to wordpress.com and get a whole bunch of free stuff. Photon loads your images faster. There’s some spam protection in there. There’s a whole bunch of stuff.
	There’s also relating to WooCommerce specifically they just installed, oh boy, I forget the name of it but it’s a free-ish … Not free. It is free live rate shipping. That means you can get a quote on exactly how much it’ll cost you to ship your bulbasaur planter from point A to point B, like $3.24 and they’ll, they figure out how big the box is, how big the package is, and they send all that data to USPS. It returns to your site. Then the user sees it and does all the magic. That used to cost like $50, $75 a year. Now it’s built into that plugin for free.
	That’s cool. Once you have that, you have all your shipping set up. When you’re going through the installation process, they’ll prompt you to import tax rates, so that’s basically set up. You should look into what nexus means. It’s basically where you have business presence. This will vary state by state so please don’t quote me or …
Joe:	*We are not lawyers or accountants.*
Patrick:	Yes. Thank you. But basically nexus is where you have a business presence, so that means if you have an office space, that’s where you have a business presence. My home office is in Colorado. Even if I moved out of Colorado, as long as it’s that home office, I have nexus there and I have to pay taxes there. You’re going to want to collect taxes there. You just click a couple buttons and WooCommerce does the rest.
	It’ll prompt you to do payment which is I recommend Stripe and PayPal to start. Stripe is for credit cards. People can just enter their credit card number. Oh, here’s the thing that people always stumble on. Your site never touches the credit card. Because of JavaScript wizardry and iframe wizardry they’re basically entering the credit card number on an iframe which is a piece of Stripe’s website basically and that goes directly to Stripe’s servers. They verify that all the money is there, that it’s the right credit card number, it’s not expired, etc. It returns a yes, no to your site. You never see the credit card number. You don’t need to worry about PCI compliance Issues. There is technically a form you should look. It’s a one page form that says I don’t handle it that you’re supposed to fill out, but yeah, Stripe does that. PayPal is good just because so many people use PayPal as fun money. I totally do that where my PayPal money could be like, sometimes I look at my PayPal account, I’m like, “How? What am I doing with this huge amount of money in there? This is absurd. I should buy a giant toy with.” So definitely have PayPal on there for that reason.
Joe:	I’m going to stop you right there real quick. I want to ask you, well, so with Stripe, with PayPal, the analogy that I thought about is essentially you have an armored car guy. You have a guard. He goes into the bank. The bank hands him money. He’s handling the money and bringing it to his armored car. A bank employee is not carrying all this money to the outside world.
Patrick:	I like that analogy.
Joe:	You definitely want your armored car guy because like Patrick said, PCI compliance is a whole other thing where you’re totally on the hook if credit card fraud happens on your website.
Patrick:	That actually happened in a company I worked for a few years ago where they, basically someone hacked their website and then because they weren’t doing it in a smart cool way they could read what people were typing in and then they stole these credit card numbers, and that company that I worked for was responsible. They had to pay a fine, which is relatively small for how big the company was, but still several thousand dollars. So don’t do that.
Joe:	Yeah, exactly. And then with having Stripe and PayPal, I mean when I launched my shop I did it with just Stripe. I figured I will give people one clear option, but the very first question, like within 10 minutes of launching, was “do you have PayPal?” So I just turned it on real quick. Thank you WooCommerce for enabling me to do that. But it’s just funny. I was like, “People, they’ll be able to pay with their credit card. Who cares.” But like you said, PayPal is fun money for a lot of people.
Patrick:	People care. Yeah. What I will say is PayPal gives a little bit more control to the consumer. The consumer can very easily sort of say cancel a payment. I mean you basically need to provide no proof, so consumers really like it for that reason. Of course as a business, now let’s say you’re selling $5,000 pieces of furniture. You do not want to give the consumer just a quick easy button that you basically have no recourse against. Doing that for your credit cards it’s possible, but it’s just more steps and more complicated and you can contest it.
Joe:	You have to call somebody usually. Yeah, that’s cool. I stopped you right at payment gateways.
Patrick:	But I mean we’re basically done. At that point, so we did shipping, taxes, payments. Those are the big ones. Then you just need to start entering your products. In your WordPress admin you go to Products, you click Add New. If you’ve never used WooCommerce before, it looks just like the or very similar to the Edit Post page. There’s the title up top. There’s the description beneath that. Then beneath that there’s a couple extra fields for price and how much does it weigh, which helps you determine shipping cost and a couple extra things. Of course, you want to upload your image, but then that’s it.
	I should say, this is something that people forget, is that you need to spend a little bit of time doing copywriting and having nice product photography. I am not a photography expert, but even non-experts like myself can recognize when there’s bad photography. If you spend two, three hours looking at how to light a product, just … You can Google this. You can find some free courses. You can find paid courses, whatever. Just look at how to light a product and then you can use your iPhone and take … It’s going to be 10 times better when you spend a little bit of time and maybe a little bit of money on lighting your products and taking nice photos of them.
Joe:	Absolutely. There’s this lighting box that you can buy on Amazon for $50.
Patrick:	Oh cool. Love it.
Joe:	So copywriting and photography, always an afterthought for me, but super important.
Patrick:	Totally. While I’m on copywriting, one thing that people do not get about humans is that their emotional bit … I think this comes from Brine Brown, but I could be wrong with the quotes, so please don’t hate me if I get the quote wrong when she says, “People always think that human beings are thinking machines that occasionally feel, but we’re actually feeling machines that occasionally think.”
	I really like that because we totally think we’re always totally logical except for maybe two minutes a day where we’re upset or angry or whatever. *We are almost always driven by emotion* of, “I wish I looked like that,” and then you buy clothes, or, “I wish people thought I was that cool,” and then you’d buy this toy or this whatever. You would be surprised at how emotional we are. So you need to write, “this is how you feel after you buy the product.”
Joe:	I love that, this is how you feel. I mean, yeah, I think I am like a logical guy, but man, I’m also an Italian guy and Italians are very emotional people.
	That’s a really good point to touch on. We have our shop set up. What theme should I use for my WooCommerce shop?
Patrick:	Good question. First of all, you can use anything, but I think a great place to start, they have a free theme called Storefront. It is a great place to start. It’s one of those things where a lot of WordPress themes are sort of gray by default, but then you just go into the Customizer under Appearance Customize and you just pick whatever brand colors you have and it’ll look pretty good, it’ll be a pretty darn good start because you can customize the header and the side bar and all the footer and all the stuff. I think that’s the best place to start.
	You can if you want spend $50 to $100 on a premium theme. The nice thing is, one thing I like about premium themes is they’re usually a one-time purchase and you can use them for a couple of years and then if you want to switch to something new or keep it or build your own if you ever, if your store takes off and build your own if you want.
Joe:	And just going back to that point, using Storefront at first, copywriting is going to be more important, as long as your site doesn’t look like crap the copywriting is going to be the thing that makes the person buy, not the design of the site.
Patrick:	Absolutely. Yes. When someone lands on a site, one, it should load fast, another reason to get a good host. Make sure it loads relatively fast. Have good product photography. Have good headlines. And then as well the main copywriting. That will actually draw people in. They’ll actually click onto your product pages and then those are serious chance they’ll buy it.
	Actually while I’m on that, just to set standards, *a typical conversion rate is going to be 1-2%.* If you have a brand new store, once your mom’s already purchased, those purchases do not count against your average, once your mom or your best friend has purchased, if you get 100 people to your site and one person buys, that’s actually a great start. That is serious expectation. Sometimes people need to come back multiple times or it just wasn’t for them or whatever. 1% is a solid start, and if you’re an awesome ecommerce company you might eventually get to two or three or maybe four if you’re crazy.
Joe:	Man. So that’s a very telling number, because in your head you think, “I’m launching my shop. I’m opening the doors. People are going to come buy my stuff now. How do I get a lot of people?” I mean we’re coming up on time but I think this is a really important thing.
Patrick:	I love this topic, which is why in the last couple … This is what I’ve been focusing on for the last year or so. I made this thing called … Can I pimp my thing?
Joe:	I was going to ask you at the end, so yeah, let it go.
Patrick:	Yeah. Okay. So I made this thing called Lift Off Summit last year, which was basically online marketing for new store owners, and it’s basically here’s what Facebook does, here’s what Instagram does, here’s what Pinterest does, and I’ll try to summarize this and make it relevant for your audience. You don’t need to do all of these things. I think a lot of people get stuck going, “Okay, I need to be on Facebook, I need to be on Twitter, I need to be on Pinterest, I need to do this,” and you do not. Just pick two to three places where your people can find you somehow, it doesn’t have to be a social network, but that’s one option, and then just start marketing to those people, start testing what headlines work, getting the most resonance people respond to it, start seeing which ones have the most click-through rates, but you do need to do something.
	*I think everyone thinks that if you have an online store people will just show up. That is totally not the case.* You need to spend a lot of time marketing it. I spent for Lift Off Summit I spent for marketing, the marketing event I spent probably maybe 100 hours marketing it, probably not quite that much, but 100 hours marketing it and that got 400 users. That was for a free event. Imagine if I had to make people pay from the get go, maybe dozens of hours for maybe 40 users, you know what I mean?
Patrick:	It’s a long time, it’s a long process and I think a lot of people give up.
Joe:	Right. I hear a lot of, “Well, I tried this and it didn’t work for me.” How many people actually give it the old college try. It takes time.
Patrick:	What’s cool is that because we’re focusing on WooCommece I want to give people the one thing that I think works really well for WooCommerce and that’s content marketing. Because your WooCommerce is built on the best, the most flexible content marketing platform out there, you should definitely look at the content marketing, which is basically writing a lot of blogs that will help your users. If it’s okay Joe, I can recommend, I can give away some of those content marketing lessons from Lift Off Summit away?
Joe:	Oh yeah. That will be amazing. Yeah.
Patrick:	Cool. I’ll put together a landing page. Let’s just do liftoffsummit.com/howibuiltit all one word. Is that cool?
Joe:	Perfect, yep, and I’ll link that in the show notes.
Patrick:	Cool. So I’ll put together, I have a couple talks on content marketing. I’ll put those in there. If you just sign up, I’ll send them to you. You can watch them. It’s so powerful. Over the last couple of years my personal blog generates tens of thousands of hits a month, and I do, I have no paid marketing. I just wrote about stuff that interested me and it interested other people and it drives a lot of traffic.
Joe:	Nice. That’s amazing. We might have to have you on for a follow up because this is a thing that creates trust. You’re teaching people stuff, they trust you, and then they’ll inherently trust your brand.
Patrick:	I also had a session on trust building at Lift Off. Did you watch that? Oh, it was so good.
Joe:	I don’t think I did actually.
Patrick:	Oh, it was with Chris Lema. It was really good.
Joe:	Of course it is.
Patrick:	Building trust is such an important thing and basically it’s the core that I got out of it is consistency, you just need to be there consistently. You can’t just try it for a week and then give up.
Joe:	Awesome.
Patrick:	Building trust is hard.
Joe:	Awesome. I love that.
Patrick:	Cool.
Joe:	Well, we’re going to … I mean, we’re out of time so let’s wrap up. You’ve given us so much, but I always like to ask at the end, do you have any trade secrets for us?
Patrick:	Any trade secrets, oh my goodness, I was not ready for this question. I should have been. I think my trade secret is patience. I’m just going back to all the stuff we’re just saying. A lot of stuff … oh, I don’t want to say that. I think a lot of people give up without being persistent and you need to keep trying and trying and trying sometimes. Sometimes you need to know when to give up, but a lot of the time it just takes a little bit longer to get going than you hear any, “I wrote one blog post and generated $50,000,” not telling you about all the stuff they did before that.
Joe:	Yeah, I mean I love that, because I mean, again, you hear about the overnight success, but you didn’t hear about all the other nights that they were not successful.
Patrick:	Absolutely.
Joe:	Awesome. Well, Patrick, thank you so much for joining me today. I really loved this conversation.
Patrick:	You’re welcome. It’s been a blast.
Joe:	Yeah. I have lots of show notes. So if you’re listening, head on over to howibuilt.it to go to the episode page and look at all of the resources that Patrick and I have both, mostly Patrick, that we talked about, and until next time get out there and build something.

Thanks again so much to Patrick for joining me to talk all about building a great online store. This is stuff that’s worth thinking about for both you and your clients, and I definitely have a lot of great takeaways.

And speaking of online shops, 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! And they recently rolled out Managed WooCommerce Hosting too. They are at buildpodcast.net/liquid. If you want to save your clients (or yourself) money through recovering abandoned carts, check out jilt. They are over at buildpodcast.net/jilt. And finally, if you need amazing event management for WordPress, checkout Event Espresso over at buildpodcast.net/events.

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/64/. Finally, If you like the show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It helps people discover us! And until next time, get out there and build something!

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