[00:00:00] Katie Keith: WordPress currently powers 46 percent of the entire internet. That's a lot and the market for WordPress products is undeniably huge. But what about the other 54%? How much more successful could your product be if it grew beyond WordPress? That's what we're going to discuss today.

[00:00:29] Matt Cromwell: This is WP Product Talk. The place where every week we bring you insights on product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. It's your go to podcast for WordPress product owners by WordPress product owners. And now enjoy the show.

[00:00:56] Katie Keith: Hi, I'm Katie Keith.

[00:00:58] Amber Hinds: And I'm Amber Hinds.

[00:01:01] Katie Keith: And welcome to WP Product Talk. Today, we're talking about building a product that goes beyond WordPress.

[00:01:08] Amber Hinds: And that's why today we have invited Ronnie Burt, who is the head of Gravatar at Automattic. Hi Ronnie.

[00:01:17] Ronnie Burt: Hello. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:19] Amber Hinds: We, yeah, we're so excited to have you.

[00:01:21] Do you want to introduce yourself for our audience?

[00:01:24] Ronnie Burt: Sure. I'm Ronnie. I live in Austin, Texas. I've been in the WordPress ecosystem for, I don't even know, 14, 15 years or something. Um, I spent 12 years at WPM Udev and Campus Press and Edublogs. It's all one company, uh, working there on various websites.

[00:01:44] WordPress products and hosting. And then the last two and a half years, I've been at Automatic, uh, leading some products, both in WordPress and then recently, um, started giving a new focus to this old relic of the web called Gravatar.

[00:02:04] Amber Hinds: Yeah, it's kind of been fun to watch what you're doing with that, because I feel like all I thought about using it for was just so I can make sure I can have a picture everywhere.

[00:02:13] Matt Cromwell: And

[00:02:13] Amber Hinds: now it does so much more and I see it other places. So,

[00:02:19] Ronnie Burt: yeah, it's been really exciting. It was also the first time I've kind of branched out and worked on something outside of WordPress, even though it is a little tan tangential, um, obviously baked in and a lot of ways, and there's some overlap and things, but, um, Yeah, it's been a learning experience, for sure.

[00:02:38] Katie Keith: Yeah. Well, we normally start the show by talking about why is this topic important? So, I'll go first and say some thoughts about why I thought we should do this episode, and then I'll go around you two as well. So, most web prep WordPress products are run to, they're built to run exclusively on a WordPress website, but does this limit the potential market size of certain products that could potentially be bigger than that?

[00:03:05] And I have seen some companies have seen astounding success by building products that go beyond WordPress. And this could be like a SaaS type thing, which is platform agnostic, or it might literally involve building the same product in parallel across different ecosystems, like one for WordPress with Commerce, one for Shopify, and so on.

[00:03:27] And we talked about this topic briefly on the 27th of March, when Amber was speaking with Thomas Fanchin from Weglots about his experiences of building Weglot, For, and eventually beyond WordPress. And so we wanted to delve deeper into the issue with Ronnie to learn about this from an additional perspective, as it's such an important topic.

[00:03:49] So Ronnie, why do you think it's something that we should be discussing?

[00:03:54] Ronnie Burt: Yeah, I think go. Back to, like, the whole basic ethos of WordPress is that everything is importable, exportable, easy to move, easy to do what you want and make it your own, right? And, um, yeah, while we love it when people are bringing in their content or their sites or their services or whatever into WordPress, it's just as important that, um, You know, we're building a better web or an open web that that works no matter where it is inside and outside of WordPress and then beyond that from like a business perspective, I guess the, you know, we were still seeing WordPress grow.

[00:04:37] The market shares still trickling up a little bit. Um, there's only so much growth that you can have, right? And if we're going to be the best, uh, stewards of the products that we're running. We always need to be looking for other opportunities to see what, you know, how, what kinds of problems we can solve for the users that we're serving.

[00:05:01] Amber Hinds: Yeah, I've, I felt like, um, just don't know, you know, why product owners would want to think about this is that's kind of the lens I've taken it from is, you know, what are we doing with our business and what are our goals? With businesses and, um, you know, whether it's an immediate goal of, you know, the kind of experience you want to have, the kind of team you want to grow, um, whether you want to challenge yourself, sometimes going outside of WordPress is fun because.

[00:05:29] you get exposed to a whole different code base or a different audience or network. Um, and, and that can be, you know, a big learning opportunity, which if you feel kind of like, okay, I understand WordPress, I know what I'm doing. It, it might feel wrote at some point in time. So I think there's a whole like business side and sales and growth opportunity, but there's also the potential for, you know, learning and, and challenging yourself as a business owner.

[00:05:55] If you decide to, to do something outside of. Um, you know, the day to day or what we know really well.

[00:06:05] Katie Keith: Yeah, that's a good perspective because that might be something you want. If you're starting, if you've been doing what you're doing for a long time, it might just be a new challenge to keep your work interesting.

[00:06:14] So that's interesting. Um, so the next section will be where we share our personal stories about building products beyond WordPress. So Ronnie, are you able to go first and tell us about your experiences with this?

[00:06:28] Ronnie Burt: Yeah, I mean, really, it's this Gravatar service, which for those not too familiar with, you've probably had this image that you've uploaded of yourself, and it follows you around all the WordPress sites you visit, and also it's in lots of different tools and services.

[00:06:45] It's an open AI chat GPT, it's in GitHub and all sorts of things like that. And we've been working on moving to be more than just the avatar to be the entire profile. So profiles as a service, basically, and we're building for developer first. And some of the learnings that I, I guess I've had is that, um, well, first of all, the WordPress user base is quite large, especially when you take the end user base, those blogging, those leaving comments and all that sort of thing.

[00:07:19] So it's a really good opportunity for Flywheel, Springboard and two, two other things. So about a third of all Gravatar. new users are coming from WordPress. And, um, you know, that's, that's a pretty significant number for us. So you can use, um, your existing like profile within the WordPress ecosystem to help springboard growth in some other way.

[00:07:51] Um, some of the things that's different though, that I'm still learning and I'm like, would love to hear from others or know some tips I've been so ingrained in basically building WordPress plugins and themes mostly for, A decade now we're talking like other languages that we need to support, we're talking, we're building developer tools, um, SDKs, mobile SDKs, like mobiles was kind of foreign to me.

[00:08:17] So we have to really like start over and learn, like, what is product development? Look like for that. Um, so it's not like super transferable just automatically, I guess, um, moving from a plugin or, or a theme type implementation. Um, but at the same time there's overlap in like, what is useful to people, um, keeping things like product led growth so that we're using the product to help teach the end users.

[00:08:50] something or, um, improve usage over time, those basic principles are transferable. So it's kind of distinguishing, I guess, my point, like what is unique to the WordPress ecosystem and then what's just like really good product developments and product, um, management strategies.

[00:09:12] Amber Hinds: Yeah. Yeah. We've been having a lot of these initial conversations, I think.

[00:09:19] So we've talked a lot about long term, you know, do we make. Accessibility checker platform agnostic. I think there's benefits to us being just in WordPress because, um, we can have rules that maybe have fewer false positives because we're excluding things, for example, from blocks, because we know they're okay.

[00:09:39] Um, whereas something that doesn't know the platform might like flag all these things that creates extra noise. Um, but, but we've been talking a lot about that both because we've had, you know, some investor conversations or even like just this week, I went and spoke at 1 million cups. I don't know if either of you know what that is, but it's like a, a networking thing where basically they're saying it's like, One million cups of coffee to help business owners.

[00:10:03] I don't know. It's like a thing, but you go give like a little six minute pitch and you get feedback and a lot of people that were there were like, I would use your thing, but I don't have a WordPress website. Why don't you write like, this is just like the general thing that people outside, um, which I don't know.

[00:10:17] WordPress is a very big market. So I'm, I always kind of take it with a grain of salt, but you know, we've talked about it. And I, and then we've also talked about the, the idea of. taking, um, like still only being a WordPress plugin, but having an external API that can do some of our scanning. So they're not running on the server because we occasionally run into issues where someone's using the pro version of our plugin, which can scan your entire site.

[00:10:47] And they're on like a very inexpensive 5 a month host. And so we're like figuring out how do we manage the performance on that and all of that kind of stuff where we're talking about like maybe taking the product outside of the WordPress environment, still integrating back into WordPress or being for WordPress, but that might do that.

[00:11:05] But then, you know, like you were saying, Ronnie, there's this whole other challenge with that, um, where we've been like, okay, we're really good at building WordPress things. That's what we've been doing. And now we're talking about, okay, we have to figure out what an AWS implementation and, um, you know, building a crawler that can crawl a website.

[00:11:25] It's just, it's a very interesting ballgame and a challenge that we haven't totally started taggling, but we've been having discussions about and, you know, trying to figure out like, do we even want to go there when it still feels like there's a lot we can do in WordPress? And I don't know if either of you have thoughts about that.

[00:11:42] Like when you, when you make that decision that, yeah, we should definitely. Go beyond.

[00:11:50] Ronnie Burt: I think you said something very important, um, about the API service and the potential there. And I think it's AWS that's famous for this, but we talk a lot about this, um, on Gravatar and all sorts of products that I've worked on is API.

[00:12:07] All the things make everything like well documented, um, and is usable in as many places as possible. It's much easier to do early on than like. Redo it later, right? And so even if it never gets your API service never gets used beyond like offloading that work from your WordPress plugin, that's a benefit to your customers.

[00:12:32] But it also is like. a pretty big step towards like providing a service. Being able

[00:12:38] Amber Hinds: to be agnostic. Yeah. Provide the service to others.

[00:12:41] Ronnie Burt: Yeah. And so like wherever the product you're working on has a potential to, to offload, turn into an API that, that can talk with something else. I think that's well worth, Considering and trying to implement.

[00:12:58] Katie Keith: Yeah. I think that accessibility check is a really interesting one because it makes a lot of sense to go outside of WordPress as much as anything because of your vision to make the web a more accessible place. And if WordPress powers. Uh, 40, whatever percent, then you've got another 60 odds to strive for.

[00:13:18] So for philosophical reasons, it kind of makes sense. Although I also understand why for business reasons, it might be easier to stick with what you know, you'd have to hire like totally different developers, possibly with different skill sets and significantly expand the size and scope of the company.

[00:13:35] But that's a really interesting one where it does seem to make sense to me.

[00:13:40] Amber Hinds: Yeah. Yeah. I think I've also seen. Actually, we just ran into this and I'll, I'll say it was so gravity PDF, which is an add on for gravity forms that maps entries into PDFs that you have uploaded. I don't know when they made this change, but they made a change recently where all your PDF templates, where you're like literally mapping the fields, I guess, live in their API.

[00:14:03] And we had had a practice with this on our agency side, where we would frequently build it with our license key. And then make the client go buy their own and, and we had one where it expired last month and we were like, but you were supposed to put your own key in and then he's like, well, I did, but none of the stuff works because apparently all the templates and stuff were saved and attached to our key.

[00:14:32] And, and it's interesting because we're talking about this, like, is, I think there are benefits to sometimes having things with an API. I think that's definitely a benefit for them because that's probably how they started enforcing making people continue paying for the plug in because the plug in does not function.

[00:14:51] Without your active license key. Um, but from a user experience standpoint, it was super frustrating. Cause now it was like, do we have to totally rebuild this? No, they ended up being able to transfer them on their end to his key, but they were kind of like, don't do it again. Right. Uh, and so it's, it's interesting because I feel like we also have to weigh this.

[00:15:13] Like what's the benefit to our user base too, if we're starting to go down this API route.

[00:15:22] What's your experience with, uh, going outside of WordPress, Katie, have you done this with any of your plugins?

[00:15:28] Katie Keith: I, I have researched it, but not implemented it, particularly with Shopify. Uh, for years, people have been suggesting let's do a Shopify version of Cause we specialize in WooCommerce extensions. So that would kind of make sense.

[00:15:42] And one of our developers in particular is quite keen to expand his skillset and get experience of building Shopify extensions. So I have researched, uh, what the demand is for the same, uh, functionality that we've got in our WooCommerce extensions, but on Shopify, and ultimately I decided against it, it partly because I didn't find a gap in the market.

[00:16:04] I found similar things available within Shopify and partly because what we're doing now, um, is working well and we're growing within WordPress. And so it felt like we would probably have the most growth if we Focus on what we knew rather than going into a whole new area where we didn't know necessarily how to market.

[00:16:25] And we weren't part of the Shopify community and we are developers weren't skilled in that way. So it just felt like we might be stretching ourselves too thin and that we should focus on what we know works. Uh, so if I was going to do that in future, though, it might be for other reasons. Like imagine if, for example.

[00:16:44] The WordPress or WooCommerce market had a massive decline or something, and our sales would decline in turn. It's good to know that there is that option to pivot if we needed to. And while I feel it might be counterproductive to spread ourselves across multiple platforms now, if something bad happened in the future, then we could do that relatively quickly, I think.

[00:17:06] Uh, so Ronnie, you mentioned something earlier about, um, non WordPress press platforms such as chap GPT using gravatar. Do you do anything to encourage them to adopt gravatar or is it just so ubiquitous that people know about it and we'll use it without you having to do anything?

[00:17:26] Ronnie Burt: Well, we're trying to be better, uh, Um, being in as many places as we can.

[00:17:32] Um, and so starting with just better documentation, just this week, we were starting to roll out a complete overhaul of our developer documentation and like updating some pages that haven't been updated in like 12 or 13 years or something kind of embarrassing. And, um, so that's one thing, just seeing how we can search.

[00:17:54] I'm very like, Um, interested in the fact if you're building something for developers specifically that more and more are going to rely on things like co pilot or chat GPT, like to help, like, do the research or maybe outline the code or whatever, and it gives. It hallucinates, uh, anything to do with Gravatar.

[00:18:15] It gives really bad, like old advice on old outdated hashing algorithms and things. And so I don't have an answer. Like, how are we, it's going to happen over time, I guess. That's one of the reasons, like we're trying to refresh the documentation, make it much better. Hopefully like the next version of all of these AI tools, we'll use the more recent content and we'll be a little bit better.

[00:18:39] Um, but. That's, um, that's a big part of it.

[00:18:45] Amber Hinds: Hey, I have a question cause I actually don't know if I know this. Gravatar is totally free for anyone to hook into and use.

[00:18:52] Ronnie Burt: It is. Is

[00:18:52] Amber Hinds: there any upsell on Gravatar? You guys just give it away out of the goodness of automatic's heart.

[00:18:58] Ronnie Burt: Well, at the moment, everything is free.

[00:19:00] Um, I do think this is not finalized or ironed out, but like the first kind of public talk about it, I suppose here. Um, right here on

[00:19:09] Amber Hinds: WP product talk.

[00:19:11] Ronnie Burt: With our With our API. So we're having a new, more updated, more efficient REST API very soon. It's, it's now it's an old JSON based and, um, anyone that is kind of giving back to the community of Gravatar profiles, meaning they like make it easy with a link, like go here to edit your profile or to upload your avatar.

[00:19:37] I think that'll continue to be free. Um, and all the. When you, when you add something to your Gravatar profile, it's public. It's on a, that's kind of its purpose, right? You're not meant to be adding like private sensitive data. Um, but if there are tools or service providers out there that want to use that data to give you a customized experience, but they don't want to give you an easy way to edit it or upload it, I guess.

[00:20:04] Um, maybe there, that will be when we have like a paid API. Usage based on like usage of the, of the APIs there. We don't even know if there's like a market for that, how it works. So that's part of that. We'll also very soon we'll have domains available for your Gravatar profile. I'm very interested in DID decentralized identities and like domains as identity.

[00:20:29] Um, and so if you can buy a domain, use your, Change your Gravatar dot com slash username profile to that domain. Then services like Blue Sky are using domains as identity. And I think more, uh, will hopefully continue to do that. Um, then that's one way we can help sell and host domains as to kind of cover our expenses.

[00:20:53] I mean, we're serving billions of photos and avatars and profiles. It's not free. Um, but. It also is a service for the web and for users to have a more personalized experience.

[00:21:08] Amber Hinds: So on following up a little bit more on Katie's question, then are you, do you, is there like a specific sales initiative? So it doesn't cost them anything, which seems like it'd be easy to tell people just use this.

[00:21:19] It's free to you to use. Like, do you do a lot of cold outreach to try and get non WordPress sales? We have it.

[00:21:28] Ronnie Burt: I mean, we've been just kind of put a team back behind this late, late last year, second part of last year. And we're just, once this rest API comes out in May, now that it's May 1st, um, we do plan on first targeting all the people that are using the old legacy API and saying, here's the newer, better API that should be easy for you to switch over to.

[00:21:51] Um, and then once we've made progress with that, then we'll have to figure out the next steps for. For broader reach.

[00:22:02] Amber Hinds: Yeah, I think the other thing I'm curious about us going into, I don't know if you've talked about this at all, Katie, with like going to Shopify and if that developer on your team already knows Shopify, but I think it'd be worth having a conversation about, let's say you do decide to go beyond WordPress, how do you even grow that team and little background for everyone in my pre show, I was like, Talking about our woes with developers, like, it's, that's probably been one of my hardest challenges as a business owner and a product owner.

[00:22:33] And so I'm always curious if you, either of you have thoughts about, you know, let's say you decide to go beyond something. How do you know, like, it's so hard to bet if someone knows what they're talking about, if they're You're hiring them to be the expert on a platform that you know, nothing about. Right.

[00:22:53] Katie Keith: Either you have thoughts. Yeah, that's a really good point because when we hire a WordPress developer, I'm not a developer myself, but one of my team will literally go through their code in great detail to check they meet our quality standards, as well as us doing more user based testing, which anybody can do.

[00:23:12] So if it was another platform, then how would you even do that? Thank you. can't hire one person to look at someone else's code. Um, I suppose they could just generally look at their tidiness and structure and the best practices regardless of the platform, but you wouldn't be able to vet it quite so well for that first project.

[00:23:33] So that would be a challenge.

[00:23:37] Ronnie Burt: Yeah. And I'm, I'm also a big fan of Like listening to the team, if I had someone super interested in Shopify and we had, I know that time is always very precious, but like, you know, I would allow or encourage over a couple of months to spend a few hours a week, like putting a quick prototype together or something, um, that I could then vet with them, I guess, um, I'm always up for experimenting.

[00:24:06] Or something like that, um, and be kind of team living driven and see if there's something there, you know, and maybe maybe they're not as interested as they say they are and they won't follow through with with the project or, um, maybe it'd be they realize that this is like way more complicated and it's going to need a lot more time.

[00:24:26] So we've talked about, like. 20 hour projects or something that you can spread out over a month or two as a proof of concept, or just like a one sheet, like, um, like write up of a technical analysis or a plan of a development plan or something just depends on the project. Right? But I think that could be, That could be interesting if you already have them on your team.

[00:24:50] If you don't have them on your team, you're going to have to take recommendations from others, hope that they have a portfolio that's public and GitHub or something that you can trust and lean on.

[00:25:02] Amber Hinds: And maybe that's one of those, like, fire quickly situations. Like, you're like, Okay, it seems like you aren't producing anything I can even look at.

[00:25:11] So, yeah, I, you know, I think the proof of concept idea is really interesting. Um, and, and I think, you know, that's something we've tried to be sort of nimble about, you know, we have a roadmap for our products, but also leaving a little bit of time if we can, to do some experimentation can be really helpful.

[00:25:32] Um, and, but I also remember our co host Matt. He shared with, with us in one episode, and I can't remember which one it is, unfortunately. Um, but he was talking about how they with give had actually gone through the process of building almost an entirely standalone instance of give their donation platform that would not require a WordPress website.

[00:25:58] And he said it was just about ready to go. And then, and then they were like, they ran into a few problems and then they had internal discussion and they're like, yeah, actually we're not going to do this. And so like, I think. Sometimes it's kind of scary to go down those proof of concepts because you have to be willing to accept that you might just be wrong.

[00:26:14] Trash all those hours.

[00:26:17] Ronnie Burt: I've definitely been there and done that, um, including recently with Gravatar. We started out, um, one of the things that really bugs me about the web is, and WordPress specifically, is authentication and logging in and like user management on WooStores and everything. And it's very much, um, Well, just slightly related to Gravatar, like, if we could provide a much simpler passwordless, like use of Authkey, uh, like passkeys and everything service, maybe this is a great way of growing the overall user base of Gravatar.

[00:26:50] So that was kind of the, the, uh, thesis that we, that we came up with that we wanted to test hypothesis. And, uh, we spent months, several months on it, a good team. We, we loved it. Um, it works, but like we, it wasn't exactly related to the audience we were trying to hit. And there was some very, I mean, not serious, but like, Valid security risks that we'd be bringing on and all this, like, while we're trying to do other things, this is really the right time.

[00:27:25] Right? So we got it to the point where it's basically working, almost ready to ship. And we had to have a really hard internal discussion of this isn't the right time for this right now. Um, and, uh, it was a bummer for the team. It was pretty, like, we had, we It's been a couple of days licking our wounds and like thinking about how it could go.

[00:27:49] Um, it wasn't all for nothing. We're giving back a lot of what we learned to some other systems that will use this and we'll eventually bring some of it back as well. But, um. Yeah, it's, it's, I'm not saying it's easy and you definitely will have those experiences where like this was started off as like one of those little side projects.

[00:28:08] Let's just see what we can do to improve the experience. Then we got really excited. So we were like, well, let's put more resources and time behind to polish it. Um, and then we had to roll it back a little bit. It happens.

[00:28:22] Katie Keith: I think a lot of those problems underline the fact that ideally products should be designed to be agnostic from the outset, like Gravatar, you don't have to do work for somebody else to use Gravatar.

[00:28:37] It's just, that's what it is. So for WordPress product, people just starting out, it makes sense to think about that right from the beginning. Um, it's similar to the idea of whether to do a Sass or not, but a step beyond that really. And we've done a couple of episodes about that. Should you adopt a Sass model for your WordPress product or just a standalone plugin which you install on a website?

[00:29:00] And I think this is like the next step that if you are just starting, then try and think big from the beginning. And even if you're just targeting WordPress websites initially, if you've got that architecture in place to grow beyond, then it's not like a whole. Oh, I need to hire a completely different team of developers with a different skillset or anything like that.

[00:29:21] It's more of an integration thing and API, as you were talking about earlier.

[00:29:27] Amber Hinds: Yeah. Our, our co host Zach is watching on YouTube and he says when unchecked, it's so easy for our product division to turn into an everything app. And I think it might be sort of useful for us to, uh, riff on that a little bit.

[00:29:42] How do you know when you should not go beyond, right? Like the opposite of what we're talking about or not add a feature. Um, I know you mentioned security, like it was, there's just additional risks that might come to the business from, um, that specific thing that you mentioned, Ronnie. What stopped you with going to Shopify, Katie?

[00:30:04] Is there any reason that you haven't? Done that now?

[00:30:08] Katie Keith: It just felt like there was no real benefit. We could put a lot of resources into it, but we probably would be less successful than if we just launched another WordPress plugin, because I know what WooCommerce, I know the market, I know how to find gaps and I know how to promote it and make it successful.

[00:30:27] And I'm pretty confident in that now after doing it 24 times or whatever, um, 19 of which were WooCommerce, I suppose. Whereas Shopify, I've never done that. And the market is still growing and there are more opportunities for plugins because we're a multiple product company. So for me, the opportunities are to listen to our customers and make our existing products better because our customers are telling us how we can increase our sales and also listening to the market and introducing new products that there's demand for.

[00:30:59] And I don't have any of those amazing insights in Shopify or another platform. So Would I really actually increase our sales if I branched out into another platform compared to the increase of putting those same resources into what I already know how to do?

[00:31:18] Amber Hinds: Yeah, I think that's, that's a good question.

[00:31:20] I was, I was chatting with Anil from Multicollab and Multidots. Uh, yesterday and which by the way, I was like, we got to come have him come on that. He was saying he sometimes has those thoughts about, like, the agency versus the product. Right. And I mean, even us now, like, I, I know why we're doing what we were doing with our product.

[00:31:40] But if you look at our. Product resources in verse revenue like it. It doesn't look profitable. Right? Um, it will be, but we have to eat at the whole, like, you have to spend all the time building it before you can even sell it, right? And so I think if you don't have a good vision or picture of like, where, you know, the lines start to cross and it makes sense to have put in all that upfront investment, then it is harder to probably do that.

[00:32:10] But I think you're right about doing customer interviews. Do you all do customer interviews and things like that?

[00:32:18] Ronnie Burt: Yeah, um, it's, it's a constant thing. Sometimes we're better at it than others. Um, when we were first starting, like putting a team back, uh, behind it, we reached out to just our own personal networks, mostly, and like anyone that we could get ahold of and just talk to you about like, how is it being used?

[00:32:37] What is, um, what would be useful for developers? Um, That sort of thing. We also have put in and it comes and goes, or we change the questions based on what we're looking to do. Uh, quick surveys within the in the UI or within the product. Um, where we try to aggregate some quick feedback that way. I can't think of the name, but we just ran a pretty fun test with, uh.

[00:33:07] There's a company that that we used where we, um, I think they found like a dozen random people that had not used Gravatar before, but that were that were developers that kind of walked through our onboarding screen for developers or onboarding flow that we're working on. And they gave us some really good feedback and insights there.

[00:33:29] So something we're trying to do all the time. It's, it's also just from experience know that like. It's easy to put lower on your priorities. Just if you have other fires that come up or like something takes longer than you want.

[00:33:50] Amber Hinds: Yeah. Uh, yeah, I, I feel like that's probably one of the perennial challenges of being a product leader. Right. How do I. How do I do that? I know we're constantly, you know, we talk to our, I talk to our customers a lot. And then I go to my partner, Steve, and I'm all like, can we do this feature? And he's like, well, wait a minute.

[00:34:10] The plan was the timeline was the priorities and we're shifting, which I think sometimes is nice about being a small product company is it's a lot easier to just be like, yeah, we thought this was a priority. I mean, like we had originally said we wanted to have a, an onboarding wizard before. EU, WordCamp EU.

[00:34:30] And then we were talking earlier this year, like in February about things and our priority lists and all of this. And we're like, you know what, this is actually a way lower priority than these other things. Um, and so I feel like being nimble is, is good. Um, and there are definitely upsides to that, that maybe at bigger companies, it can be a little bit more challenging.

[00:34:53] Katie Keith: Yeah, that's true. I like being a small software company because we can make things happen more quickly and I think a lot, customers have often very diverse, very different needs and perspectives, so I kind of prefer more collated feedback from, um, like, for example, we always. Send an email asking for feedback about how they found the product.

[00:35:16] What were they looking for? Can we see a link to it? Um, after they've bought, and then we collate that. I think if you get too close to individual customers on particularly, if you let your developers do that, then they end up adding features for individual customers and things like that, and not what's best for the business based on the.

[00:35:35] evidence, which is things like the amount of demand, the difficulty, the impact on sales. If you add that feature, it's easy to lose that. But there are exceptions sometimes. Uh, for example, sometimes I receive one of those feedback emails because they all come to me individually. Um, it's actually my only remaining touch point directly with the customers, unless I choose to jump into support or something.

[00:35:59] It's an emergency when it's busy or something, um, and sometimes it just makes so much sense what they're saying that I make an executive decision, we're going to do that and immediately put it on the developers list to implement because you just know it's not just about that customer that's going to help everybody.

[00:36:17] So it's good to do that. You've got to get the right balance between getting too tied up in individual ones.

[00:36:25] Amber Hinds: So Zach, um, had a great question. So we're talking about talking to people, doing customer interviews, things like that. How do you find the quote, right people to talk to when considering going outside of WordPress?

[00:36:38] So let's say you want to go to a different platform or you want to build a SaaS. It's totally agnostic. How do you talk to non WordPress people if you don't know them? Any, any tips on that?

[00:36:51] Ronnie Burt: One tip I, if, if we call this a tip, I lurk in a ton of Facebook groups that I will never speak in or write in that are competitors or potential things that I want to just learn more about.

[00:37:07] Um, and so it doesn't have to be a Facebook group, that's just where I've found, found it easy. Um, so I'm not, I'm not necessarily talking, yeah, I'm not necessarily talking to them, but I'm seeing the problems that they're, that they're experiencing.

[00:37:22] Amber Hinds: So, like, Okay. So for me, I could be like, I'm just going to go in all the accessibility or higher ed Facebook groups, I guess.

[00:37:29] But I'm curious, like, would, is like an, would you look for, if you're an e commerce thinking about that, you'd be like, okay, I'm just going to go in all the, like, Micro entrepreneur, Facebook groups, like the people who might be DIYing, e-commerce websites. Like how do you even figure out what groups to go into?

[00:37:48] Do you have examples or thoughts on that? Well,

[00:37:50] Ronnie Burt: scarily Facebook is recommending groups and showing me posts, groups, and they're Right. Recommendations

[00:37:56] Amber Hinds: you get.

[00:37:56] Ronnie Burt: Yeah. That's a little scary. But, um,

[00:37:59] Amber Hinds: they know you.

[00:38:01] Ronnie Burt: I would, I mean, yeah, I would, I would be in some Shopify developer groups. If I was considering Shopify, I would, um.

[00:38:10] There's so many groups, right? And I, you can, when you search for them, you can see like the average activity. So, and I, I join and then I drop, but I look for the ones that have like multiple posts a day or something. And then you can go back through the history and get a good sense for what's going on. So whenever I'm curious on a, on a topic or an industry or something, that's one of the places I go.

[00:38:34] Amber Hinds: Yeah. So basically looking for groups that you have, like your target demographic, or you were saying like competitors might be in, or potential competitors, if you were to go into that market. That's interesting.

[00:38:48] Katie Keith: That's true. The information is already out there for you to look. And, um, Zach says, um, that lurking is a great tip.

[00:38:56] Um, and he also says that that's also a great way to do competitor analysis. So you don't always have to reach out to the customer unless you have a very specific question. A lot of it is just there. People are Googling things. You can look at the website. Things like search trends and insights and volumes and all of that.

[00:39:14] You can look in forums. So there's a surprising amount out there so that you can know what the demand is and look across different platforms that you're not already part of the community.

[00:39:25] Amber Hinds: Yeah. We also, I don't know if all communities have this, probably not, but down in Austin, we have, um, the capital factory, which is like an accelerator and they do a lot of networking events.

[00:39:37] And so I will say like. When we're trying to talk to business owners or just get general, like I mentioned, the 1 million cups meetup, like finding business related meetups is good because I get a really broad perspective and sometimes I just. Like I mentioned earlier, I just kind of say, eh, whatever about the feedback, but it is interesting to get feedback from people that are not in your normal chamber, right?

[00:40:05] Like, so it's echoing, right? You like, you want to get just like some general, like, and I did get some really good stuff that I was like, oh yeah, like, this is what somebody who knows nothing about accessibility and nothing, like, this is their initial reaction to my product. Okay. I like, I need to think about that.

[00:40:21] And so I think sometimes those in person like meetups or networking groups can actually be really good. Like, I don't know, the chamber of commerce or something or whatever the equivalent for that is around the world.

[00:40:35] Katie Keith: I suppose it depends on what you do. Cause what you do, Amber is so universal that, um, anybody.

[00:40:42] that has a website or needs a website, which is basically all businesses, can have an opinion on it and how, what their priorities are with regards to accessibility, what their skillset might be, et cetera. Whereas what I do is as a few more layers in between you and the average user, because they have to know what WordPress is and then probably WooCommerce as well.

[00:41:04] So for me going to, uh, chamber of commerce meeting probably wouldn't have very much value unless they wanted very kind of top of funnel general feedback. So I suppose it depends on what you do. Yeah.

[00:41:19] Ronnie Burt: One thing I just thought about, because this is like one of my all time favorite tips that I learned at a conference from, from a speaker.

[00:41:26] And I wish I could remember who it was, but when you have these conversations or you look in these Facebook groups or whatever, the language, the exact words, like word for word that people are using. Is the best copy on your website, like on landing pages and blog posts and in social media and like just regurgitating basically whatever you're hearing.

[00:41:49] So I try to like, write down really cool things that I hear from those conversations or just keep a long list of like, Oh, I really like the way that they ask that question or they describe that problem. I'm going to use that, you know, um, So it's just,

[00:42:03] Amber Hinds: yeah, I know in agency land, that's literally how my partner closes deals is he asked them to tell him their problem and then he rewrites that exact thing as the solution in the proposal.

[00:42:17] So I can imagine it works the same for sales, right? Of a plugin or a product or whatever

[00:42:21] Matt Cromwell: it might be.

[00:42:24] Amber Hinds: Uh, so I'm wondering if we should transition into our best advice, um, like your top tips for product WordPress product owners who are considering going beyond WordPress. Do you want to kick us off, Ronnie?

[00:42:41] Ronnie Burt: Yeah. Um, not too, I hope this isn't too cliche, but build everything you do, like as native to the WordPress. Way of doing things as possible. Use blocks when you can use blocks, use like, uh, like don't reinvent some new way of storing the data in the database or, or whatever, like stick to as many core functions and features as possible and whatever you're building, because to me, that is going to future proof you.

[00:43:18] Not just within WordPress, but like, let's say something that we all hope doesn't happen, but like, there is another thing that comes, um, after WordPress that starts taking more market share, it's almost gonna certainly, especially with the way AI can now, like, transform data structures and, and everything, like, The more native your experience is, the better chance of moving it into a different CMS or into a different platform or something is going to be.

[00:43:47] So you're going to just set yourself up for moving beyond WordPress, even though it feels like you're, I also personally believe that sets you up for success within WordPress.

[00:43:56] Amber Hinds: Yeah. It's good advice. Because you're saying you'll be able to like migrate the code more easily to a different code base. Code

[00:44:04] Ronnie Burt: or content or whatever it is, right?

[00:44:06] Like, um, if you're creating content, whatever is produced on the front end, um, the UI, like, I just feel like if something takes over WordPress, it's going to have to have an importer or it's going to have to be easy for all of that, those old sites and content and like whatever it's doing, if it's e commerce, we're going to need to move all those subscriptions over or whatever, right?

[00:44:29] So we just being truly as native. And like the core way as possible, I think is your best

[00:44:37] Katie Keith: advice anyway, um, for in all circumstances where possible for many, many different reasons as well, isn't it? So that fits,

[00:44:45] Ronnie Burt: yeah, but we've seen lots of people not do that over the years and some have been successful and some have been less successful.

[00:44:51] Um, so it's, it's just, it's a, it's a gamble that you take if you go off course, I guess.

[00:44:59] Katie Keith: Yeah. Well, my best advice is for people that are just getting started, which is to really analyze your potential market and the potential scope of your product before you start and think about, is this only ever going to be WordPress?

[00:45:14] Should it be, uh, A plugin, should it be a SAS, should it be a more agnostic thing that you can, um, in the, in future extend to many different platforms or just allow anybody to use it, uh, via an API, like with Gravatar and so on. So my advice is to really think about that as early as you possibly can, because all the decisions you make will affect your ability to extend your product in the future.

[00:45:39] Yeah.

[00:45:40] Amber Hinds: And I think along the same lines, I. My advice is to get outside of WordCamps. I love WordCamps. I'm not going to lie, I'm going to three this year. Um, but we also do a lot of conferences and events and things outside of WordPress that are related to our product and our demographic. And it's really helpful to talk to people there, hear what they're working on.

[00:46:08] Um, you know, like, Maybe there's something really interesting with Joomla and at some point in time we're Drupal or something. I don't know, right? Um, but I think sometimes it's hard to know where to start going beyond if all you do is live WordPress and so you have to sort of get outside of WordPress just in your conversations and the communities and that kind of stuff.

[00:46:33] Katie Keith: Well, that's a wrap. Ronnie, thank you so much for joining us and where can people find you online?

[00:46:39] Ronnie Burt: Yeah, at gravatar. com slash Ronnie R O N N I E.

[00:46:45] Katie Keith: Excellent. Um, thank you everybody for watching and tune in next week where we'll be back at the same time.

[00:46:53] Amber Hinds: Yep. A special thanks to Post Status for being our green room.

[00:46:57] If you're enjoying these shows, do us a favor and hit like and subscribe on YouTube or Twitter or wherever you are watching. Please share the episode with your friends, reference this show in your newsletters, and we hope to see you next week. Bye. Bye.

[00:47:13] Ronnie Burt: Thank you.