WP Product Talk
WP Product Talk
Effective Live Product Demos for your WordPress Plugin or Theme
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In this episode of WP Product Talk we turn our focus to the subject of effective live demos for your WordPress products. Special guest Vikas Singhal, the founder of InstaWP, joins co-hosts Katie Keith and Matt Cromwell to delve into the art and science of captivating live demos.

Vikas will share key strategies, gleaned from years in the field, that can make your product demos resonate with your target audience. This episode is designed to offer an invaluable primer for anyone looking to amplify the impact of their WordPress plugin or theme through live demos. Don’t miss out on this practical, enlightening discussion packed with actionable advice and tips. Elevate your product demonstrations and, in turn, your sales numbers.

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[Music]
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thank you
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hello this is WP product talk the place where every week we interview an
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experienced WordPress products owner on strategy tips experiences failures and
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successes of running successful and thriving WordPress product businesses I'm Katie Keith CEO and co-founder at
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Bantu plugins I'm Matt Cromwell co-founder of give WP and senior director of customer
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experience at Stellar WP and today's topic is effective live product demos for your WordPress plugin
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or theme I'm excited to talk with our guest today all about this because we've been
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experimenting a lot with uh product demos and find them to be pretty useful overall and I do think it's a relatively
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new-ish feature that some product owners are using over the last couple years more and more often I think they're
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really useful so I'm excited to talk about it with uh with our guest yep and to talk with us today is special
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guest vikar single so welcome Victorious
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um could you introduce yourself and um tell us a bit about what you do
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hey Matt hey Katie um thanks for having me on the street so my name is and I'm the founder of insta
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WP and we basically make it easier for anybody to spin up WordPress sites so
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that's a one-liner or a liner pitch for myself and the company uh I am in the
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workplace space for last four to five years now I think and insta
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WP is relatively new and we have been trying to make it easier to so the
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bigger goal is to make it easier for anybody to onboard into WordPress so that's the pickle Vision which we have
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nice and we should clarify a little bit um we thought of this subject of product
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demos um and a lot of folks do them in a lot of different ways I've seen recently
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that more and more folks are using uh instant WP specifically for product demos but that's not really the core of
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your product offering it just happens to be a benefit that some folks are using as well can you tell us a little bit
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about the larger product and everything that you offer yeah so the larger product is as I said
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is more about um onboarding people into WordPress so for example we have a quick shortcut
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like wp.new if you type in on the browser you get a WordPress site no questions asked so that's that's the way
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that's Miss we have found a pain point my personal pain point when I started
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this project was there was still not a good way or an easier way to launch a WordPress site quickly in your browser
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um back in like 2021 that's two years ago and it was still a painful process
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you have to install something download a software and then it's just a mess for new people to who are joining to
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Wordpress ecosystem yeah so that's the pain point that we started with and uh
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it became quickly became the de facto standard of like quickly launching test web test WordPress websites uh temporary
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disposable sites and a lot of folks like product companies such as yourself
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started asking can we use uh this to demo all products so of course you can
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then agencies started asking can we use this to actually build client sites of course you can and then and then it just
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means uh rest is history right means we people use the platform in variety of
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different ways um using it for product demos is just one example of it
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that's awesome yeah I love that that's one of my favorite things about having a product business is when you discover
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new use cases for your product you may not even have planned and then it's like a whole new marketing opportunity and
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opens up your Market without needing to create a new product so I really like discovering those things yeah and that's
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because it has it's kind of a like phases of coins it has both
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um it's pros and a lot of con but once you start to discover the potential
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opportunities in a product different use cases then you have to actually the onboarding process and the education
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piece becomes a little bit tough um when you are not focused on a
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particular use case and that's where we are at right now our product is so robust or so vast in in terms of use
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cases we have to find out specific personas of users for example about this
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webinar or this podcast today is focused on product owners per se but same I can
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go on couple of more podcasts such as this and then talk about it different completely different use case and that's
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a little bit challenging at the same time but I just said it's of course very very exciting at the same time yeah
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absolutely I can imagine Freelancers and agencies have lots of use friends to WP and all kinds of things end users might
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use it for different purposes and reasons for sure so yeah yeah well folks uh we do want to welcome anybody who's
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paying attention and watching live right now and if you have questions or comments hope streams aspirations for uh
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live product demos then uh post them into the chat and we will answer them live throughout our conversation
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um but uh first off we want to talk about why we think this subject of live
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product demos for WordPress product owners is so significant and important
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um so uh Katie what's your take um well I say that products
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and shots are up well and good and they're pretty pretty essential but what really brings a WordPress theme or plug-in to life is
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a live demo most companies just provide demos of the front end but people want
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to see what it's like in the back end too how easy is it to use and what's the
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learning curve what features and flexibility is there um so that's all really important and
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historically I would say there hasn't been any really great options for doing that in WordPress yeah of course it's
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quite tricky because it depends on the product because some products are really front end heavy and so the user's happy
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just seeing what it looks like on the front end whereas others back end heavy or both so they do need to see the back
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end so there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach so I would want to help product owner to think about what's the best
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needs and that would help their product yep absolutely yeah
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yeah I totally agree on that means a lot of product owners come to me that do I
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need your product but first I have to tell them that you may or may not need
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depending upon your use case as JD rightly pointed out if the product has a
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very heavy front-end use case then for example a theme right which doesn't
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do much other than which in in the term stuff but there is not a lot of admin settings for it and the user is fairly
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Satisfied by just looking at the front end of it but almost more than 50 of
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cases where users will have to play around with the settings and see their results
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themselves right um a lot of Stellar products are like that and I think a lot of e-commerce
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plugins which I'm sure Bantu uh is doing are like that but as I said not 100 of
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the product meet that yeah yeah absolutely I I really like talking
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about this like I had mentioned in the intro um the whole idea of doing live uh Demos
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in WordPress products I feel like is relatively new um not brand new like it's definitely
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been a thing for a few years now but yeah but previously folks were like well
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if you want to try my product like I've got a free plugin just install it on your WordPress site and try it out uh
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like that was the mentality but the truth is so many products today in order for them to really shine you
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kind of really have to dial them in correctly so that folks will see the use and the power of it you might even need
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to do some sort of like admin like walkthrough demo as well uh just to say
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like I know that here's a settings panel but like did you know if you go over to the post edit screen you'll see X Y and
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Z that's really cool too and if you have a guided tour of the admin that would be
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really helpful for some folks you can do that with a system like insta WP where you create a template that has a
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pre-installed uh thing in it and then you can go through all those things and
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give people the the best experience of your product after it's already been configured because a lot of times that
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configuration phase is just kind of a chore and that you don't get people to
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success you don't get them to the aha moment of the plug-in uh when you click
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install and activate um so I I think being able to put your best foot forward with these product
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demos is is why I think it's significant and important personally yep uh Miss people as you said people
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have been setting up demos using different plugins like a multi-site kind
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of infrastructure or maybe a shared admin demo where they share the same
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admin demo with multiple people right and all of these approaches and or you
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can just spin up something of your own which is not a new concept as you said but the end of the day I think the most
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important factor which you test upon is getting your potential customer to success is means first of all is setting
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it's setting the setting up a product demo is itself is an art a lot of companies have figured it out
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um which gravity have figured it out already I I give that
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peace as an education to my so whoever joins our uh community in a way that you
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do you should even though you are a customer but I want you to be successful and the way you become successful is to
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make your end users know about your products successfully yeah and to do that the product demo instance itself
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needs to be set up very very tight means uh all the all the possible use cases
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needs to be covered and you have to guide them through the admin UI or whatever right it can be anything and I
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mean as I say best is to get inspired from others who have done it best right so and gravity is one of them uh I think
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learned as has set up very well as well so yeah yeah those are excellent examples I want to highlight a couple
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folks here in the wings uh we're always live and um uh we have folks who are
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chiming in um Zach Katz is one of our co-hosts he's here watching with us as well good to see you Zach uh Evan
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batdorf good to see you thanks for being here saying hi satyam is using a slack
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Emoji I'd love to have a pink waving hand emoji in our comments here but
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thank you all for being here um yeah so next one up is we want to talk a little bit about our personal
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experiences with this subject in particular I think I'll try to kick it
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off and talk about some of the things we've been doing uh over the years we have tried to introduce folks to the
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give WP plugin in so many different ways um I'll use give WP as the primary example
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um and at first we really did try to really really encourage people to
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install the free plug-in that was like go install the free plugin try it out that's the best way to get to know
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things and then we found out people were trying it out on their live environment and sometimes breaking things and it
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gets like a little bit hairy when um uh when you're just encouraging folks to just install a plug-in just to see if
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they like it or not and then we started doing a lot more videos I do think a lot of this kind of
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question depends a lot on your audience and what they like what they want I'm
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always one who's like don't give me a video like I would love to have a nice article that I can skim please with
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screenshots that would be great um so we leaned heavily on tutorials and documentation and screenshots and video
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but even then it's not particularly Hands-On um then we launched a a live demo site a
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subsite demo and it's still there I believe demo.givewp.com and there we really tried to put focus on all of the
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different ways that you might want to learn about the free plugin which is screenshots and videos and text but also
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we were like give it a test drive um and we have a button uh form uh that
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they fill out and it launches and it's the wp instance um and I helped kind of build out a an
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admin demo area of uh like when they when they when it spins up and they log in for the first time there's a modal
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that's like welcome to the give admin area um and here you can go make a post or
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you can check out some settings or you can go see your donors and give them kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure
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kind of Route um I felt like that was a good way to go about it um what I was surprised by uh
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is that we also gave the option for folks to sign sign up for a a webinar
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group demo as well and I really expected that the live demo would just be like 90
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of people would just want to be doing the live demo let me get my hands on it right away
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um I think it's Unique to our audience but it was more like 40 percent um sometimes even less maybe 30 percent
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of folks were wanting to get their hands on the plug-in uh the other ones were a
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mix of wanting to do the webinar the group webinar uh or just looking at videos or opting into white paper stuff
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like there was because there were several different options um but only 25 30 percent maybe at the
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most sometimes 40 percent wanted to get their hands dirty on a live demo so that was really interesting to me in
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particular um yeah that's where I'm coming from um personally
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um but I do like the way that we've seen some of that uh launch on other Stellar Brands like learndash in particular like
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the events calendar in particular the events calendar really takes a few things to really get it to set up and
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like actually have a physical calendar that has events on it for example being able to preload that right out of the
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box and be like oh look at all these great events you've got um it's a lot easier to just dump them into an area
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like that that has stuff in advance um yeah Katie what about you what are
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your experiences to date with uh live demos so we've always just done front-end
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demos of all of our plugins um except for a couple where we've not had any demo at all for example we have
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one plugin which um woocommerce multiple email recipients which just adds extra email fills to like the checkouts and
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things so we didn't feel that justified a demo size it's pretty obvious whilst it does whereas all our other plugins
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we've just done a front-end demo plus screenshots on the sales page but that's
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always created dilemmas because it's fine for the front end plugins like say
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a document library or something like that where you can see it in the front end and yeah people might want to see
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what the admin options are but at least they can visualize the plugin in the front end but we have quite a lot of
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plugins which allow you to restrict access to content on a WordPress site so that might be sort of blog categories
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woocommerce product categories we have a wholesale plugin we have a woocommerce private store plugin that high your
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whole shop so how do you show that on a front-end demo and the way we've done
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that is by having things like a password on the demo so it's like here this is
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your private store login page enter username password to unlock it but
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that's not super user friendly because it requires the user to actually read the text on the demo and nobody does
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that of course so I've always felt a bit uncomfortable about the way we have
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demoed some of our products so what we're doing now is a project to
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kind of experiment with into WP having met vikas in um Athens at Work Camp
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Europe and we've taken us a while to get around to it but this is great timing for me actually because this week my
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husband and co-founder Andy has been spending time setting up one of our plugins within WP and it's looking
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really great but there are a lot of decisions to make as you said earlier to really showcase your product in the best
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possible way so there are the dilemmas like what page do you start them on and
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I'd love any advice about that which actually fits in with Zach's question exactly so yeah maybe we should move on
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to that now so where do you start them yeah how do you recommend onboarding users to your product when setting up
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product demos so this is a question that you have yourself Katie is what you're saying yeah so if for anybody who
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doesn't know you can use into WP to pre-populate a demo site which the user
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can then edit as they choose and then it disappears at whatever period you've specified I think we're going to go with
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four hours or something like that um and but the thing we've been debating
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this week is where should we start people should we open the setup wizard even though we've already set it up on
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the front end should we open a front-end page and expect them to find their way to the admin through the WordPress
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toolbar at the top should we open a settings page in the admin that if it's a custom post type should you open the
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list of custom posts like documents or whatever so where would you start people
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to really have a successful onboarding experience so they know what to do
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yep I guess it's one of those decisions where you have to do a b testing right
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which works best for your users I generally recommend uh figuring out the
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major pain point of your customers what is the first question they ask when they see that when they see your plugin for
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example I was actually browsing document Library Pro the other day because there was a use case where I wanted to build a
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video library on Insta WP to show like like an academy or a documentation uh
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using a series of videos um and then while I was browsing it the first question which came to my mind can
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I style this page according to my needs is can I can I change the layout uh can
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I use bigger thumbnails or whatever that question may be and then over a period
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of like running your business you know those top three questions so I I would
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suggest you start from there right if a plugin is complex and you're onboarding solves that I will say leave the
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onboarding on right so start we will basically push people to the onboarding interface and that onboarding should
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take care of the majority of the questions if if you think that it's better for the users to already onboard
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it with a couple of examples pre-built pre-populated uh and then you showcase
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so I'll take example of gravity so they create about 10 different forms for
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different use cases and for each use case they have built a form but they
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also build an a page inside the WordPress site itself which shows which
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itself becomes a landing page so the WordPress site itself becomes a landing page and they read the right users to
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the home page of the WordPress site but logged in the user is auto logged in
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because instead WP can give you the auto login feature so in a way what you're
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doing like two things at the same time you are letting people know that this is what the product is all about so this is
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form one this is form two this is form three and then at the same time you just click on a form and then edit it right
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so so you are essentially I think what comes out of from this story is
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that you show what all things are possible with your product and then you allow people to click on a button and
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then experience themselves what what it is all about so it's it's more about
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like giving them the breadth of your product and then they themselves should go deep into the product that will be
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their browsing experience so I think that's the best way to do it nice I like
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that a lot yeah I mentioned that earlier that um what one thing we did was give them
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options of where they wanted to go like as soon as you log in we popped up a modal and said welcome this is a tour or
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a demo and here's where you might like to go if they did choose to like go see
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the donors it was kind of like well you go see the donors and then well there they are
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and there's not a lot to do there um and and then there wasn't necessarily much more guidance after that so there's
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all definitely more that we could have done to to continue the guided tour and things like that but I love that idea of
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using the front end of the site Which is far more customizable than the admin area the idea you can build literally
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anything on the Block editor you don't even need to use a page editor for that and it means you literally you can build
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like a one-pager landing page so that your demo site itself becomes a marketing side exactly it's not just a
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demo site it's a marketing plus demo site absolutely yeah that's interesting
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because if we're Landing people on the front end and they're seeing the product is that an argument to get rid of the
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existing front-end demos because we were thinking of giving users a choice do you want to just demo you know the site
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that's set up or do you want to create your own editable version of it to play around with but if we're taking them
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straight to the front end which looks like our existing demo size could we get rid of our existing sites or do you
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think they have different purposes I think that's that serves different purposes the front-end demo without much
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of a setup is a quick way to browse around but you can have like a button somewhere or multiple places that try
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spin this up for my for me or try this is a in a live environment uh and that
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takes them to the exact same page where they want to go and in HWP you can actually set up their starting page
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where you want them to land I think that's that's the experience but as we
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discussed earlier it depends upon plug-in to plugin in some cases you don't even need to show the front-end
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demo you can just put them directly into the live demo as you said that's an interesting observation yes
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absolutely I want to throw out just one kind of tangent a little bit uh the one
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of the biggest uses that we have for insta WP in particular is we use it a ton for technical support purposes
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um and I think it's also so useful and valuable for that as well we we just are
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spinning up sites all the time to try to replicate issues and if we do replicate it we hand it over to the developers to
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be like here this is where you can replicate that problem uh it ends up being super useful in those cases as
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well also in for the customers themselves when they're like oh this is not working that is not working we could
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send them the login link to that site and be like go and check if it's working over here
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which ends up being super useful for them as well but lots of users for
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instance lots of use cases as we as we stated earlier and it's one of the best use case we have found product companies
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using it is custom support but by copying their lifestyle so we have a
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plugin which can be installed on a customer site I guess did you tweet about it yeah at
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least two days ago I didn't know that into WP could be used for an instant way
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of cloning a site because customers hate being told to set up a staging site not
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all hosts make that easy so I was like oh that could be a real benefit for support yeah even though there is a
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facility inside the hosting panel not a lot of customers are familiar with it and it's creating an option within the
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dashboard and also like a partial staging so they skip the media folder and things like that so that becomes a
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real real really useful tool yeah and it's talking about different use cases sometimes even I wonder okay can we do
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this as well and that becomes like a and this and that the product team says yes
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you have forgotten that we can do this
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it's actually a good topic that I feel like we've touched on in different episodes about just how like what Katie
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highlighted that it's great when you land on a use case that you didn't know that you had originally but at the same
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time like you said it's like it's great but now you're responsible for that use case like as soon as you go down that
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path now you actually have to like cater to to those customers and their wants and needs I remember one of my favorite
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stories was from Pippin Williamson from Easy Digital downloads he said I like to
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listen to customers as much as possible but they keep asking for a shipping add-on for Easy Digital downloads and
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it's never going to happen like yeah one of those one of those lines you
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have to draw at some point it's like this is our purpose and that's not our purpose so okay have you been having
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that struggle at all vikas in terms of like you can expand and expand and you can become a whole entire hosting manage
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WordPress hosting platform if you wanted at this stage yeah are you talking about those types of things internally yeah
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so that that has been one of the issues is saying no to use cases because we get
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so many because of the nature of the product we wanted to become a platform
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and becoming a platform is not an easy thing when we started requirements I
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have said in a couple of interviews that I want to become AWS for WordPress it's just a vague term so so much a wake time
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but right now what we have found our purpose is to limit ourselves in solving
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those major use cases which can drive revenue for other company which is like the honest truth and also to solve
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majority of the customers problem which nobody else is solving in a proper way yeah so that is I think that's where you
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have to put your foot down definitely absolutely um I did want to touch on a little bit
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of different types of product demos because insta WP is a great option but
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like I mentioned a little bit earlier there are lots of different mediums you could use I don't want everyone here to
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think that only a live product demo is is the way to go here um like I mentioned I I do think that
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videos can be really instructive and really informative especially if you're using like uh on YouTube at least you
28:12
can use the chapters tool to allow folks to be able to skip to different parts of a really long video in order to see what
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they want to see I think those are useful I've seen a lot of video platforms now that are offering
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interactive elements within the video that that you can actually ask people
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questions in the video and say what would you like to see next and you give them options and then they could skip to
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those things by clicking on the video um there's a particular term for that I forget what it's called
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um but um those are I think are super useful as well we've had a lot of
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success personally also with these group webinars or one-on-one webinars even where where we're basically doing their
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their basically pre-sales uh uh Zoom calls with our customers and I do think
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that's a little bit unique in the WordPress space overall um but we do find
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um that they've been valuable for us we do as a whole for for give WP in
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particular we have like an average job size of about 240 dollars uh uh per customer uh which in the end does
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justify um a little bit more time on the pre-sales side of things
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um so there are lots of different options um Katie have you considered other types of um uh demoing for your customers in
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any way one of the challenges for me is having many different products is that you'd
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need we've got like 23 products so that would be a lot of webinars so I love the
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idea but I suppose we could do that for our most popular products and that might
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justify it but our average order value is exactly half what you just said ours
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is about 120 rather than 200 plus so we but then if it's a group webinar then
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that's less time per user so it might be worth it uh for the bigger products
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I saw something really cool um a few months ago on a SAS website where they'd kind of embedded a sort of
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their product in in an editable way into the page into their home page so I can't
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remember what it was but you could actually click on it and change stuff and it was within the sales page so I
30:27
thought that was a really instant way of getting the demo but for me it's always a dilemma as to what to prioritize so
30:35
you've got the top of your sales page and you've got your pricing and buy type
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buttons and you've got maybe a front-end demo and a back-end demo and do you put
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a video there and it's like how you have to kind of offer or a webinar so how do
30:52
you choose which one is the most important um given that users do want different
30:57
things absolutely yeah yeah nice
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Coco well we are uh getting into our last segment at this stage and um it's
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honestly one of my favorites um I love being able to talk about just the best advice that we have for any uh WordPress
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product owner who's trying to get into this for the very first time um I think we can do it in a couple different ways like sometimes I say
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let's give an elevator pitch like what's your like you're passing somebody in the hallway track at Work Camp they're like
31:27
hey how do I get started with instant WP you've got like two seconds while they're walking away what's your pitch there but let's say it's more of like a
31:34
quick little chat together we got some time in space so what's our best advice for folks who want to do live product
31:41
demos um and are just getting started with it uh vikas do you want to start us off
31:47
um okay um I think this I think what we have discussed before I can go back to it a
31:54
little bit um is find a pain point which your
32:00
customers are experiencing uh when they are trying to understand that what your
32:05
product does right if the landing page is not enough if the screenshots are not
32:11
enough if the videos are not enough uh if they're pre-recorded webinars are not
32:16
enough I guess uh with having a admin demo is goes a long long way at
32:24
the admin demo does not only become like a way to demo the product it becomes
32:29
like a lead magnet actually at that point because you can collect email addresses from your users if you want to
32:35
with their permission and then send them a list of emails over the next period of
32:41
let's say 7 to 14 days for them to nurture and then let them know about more about your product and uh that that
32:49
way you you have to actually see that at the end of the day the goal
32:55
is for you to talk about your product uh as much as the user wants to listen in
33:01
the way that they understand right uh I think that's the that's the goal you you
33:06
want to accomplish and then the honest truth is that you want to convert the user to a paid customer
33:13
um which it doesn't matter however which way you look at it and these are all the
33:19
different ways which we are discussing is like different different kind of mechanisms to do that so getting that
33:26
lead leads into your database and they started executing it and then sending a mail again on maybe a Black Friday and
33:33
then have a clear unsubscribe button right if that is is something of a this
33:39
that is always a best uh kind of uh practice to do it so and uh webinars
33:49
are also great lead magnet so if somebody wants a personal demo so it can be pre-recorded or a live demo but if
33:55
the ticket size is good I wish we have 240 dollars for the ticket size but if
34:01
you have that then I I guess person demos are one of the best way to convert somebody uh which in insta WP uh even
34:10
though we make it so easy to launch a WordPress site communicating the benefits uh as we have meant we have
34:16
discussed earlier becomes a pain point for us so I generally hop on to live
34:22
demos and then do personally and I have one more person uh to do that and those
34:27
really work well for us um and then the SAS platform we look at
34:34
more like an LTV value rather than the first ticket size value so if your LTV
34:39
is high enough and it justifies a personal demo then why not yeah absolutely no that's really good stuff
34:46
that's great because Katie what's your take um maybe a little bit
34:51
um preaching to yourself a little bit as you're jumping into it right now but what's your best advice
34:56
my best advice based on what I'm doing now is to put yourself in the customers
35:02
shoes and think about their experience of discovering your product for the first time on the in the context not
35:09
necessarily of installing it on their own website but viewing a demo site that you've already set up so I've learned a
35:17
lot about our document Library plugin just by viewing the into WC demo and
35:22
thinking about what pages to include and where to direct people and things and
35:27
I'm thinking about it like well if what if they start on this page how will they know to go to this page or this other
35:34
place even exists with different settings and then I started thinking well maybe that's an issue in the
35:39
plug-in more generally for all our users and not just in the demo so yeah put
35:45
yourself in their shoes and really think about that Journey because that's what's ultimately going to convert them into a
35:52
paying customer so it's actually funny when you talk about that a lot of like in developers I speak to they say that
35:59
if I expose my admin panel nobody will buy my plugin yeah
36:07
so I I mean this of course there are some complex plugins which are difficult
36:13
to set up but they are just exceptions but in in general if people are finding it difficult to use the admin panel to
36:19
set up something in your plugin then there is like a larger problem yeah uh inside and and I think I think solving
36:27
that itself will help the plugin in the long term absolutely that's a really good one uh me personally I'm going to
36:34
be a little bit uh a little bit different take um I think if you're just getting started the most important thing you can
36:41
do is talk with your customers as much as possible um and so I wouldn't start with a live
36:48
demo that folks can just jump into and jump out of without any interaction
36:54
um I really would recommend doing the weekly uh uh like Zoom webinar type of
37:00
thing uh get people on a call um get them asking questions especially
37:05
if you're a founder or co-founder and you're like I'm building this myself this is my business I'm excited about it
37:12
I'm passionate about it people love meeting you and they feel like they're insiders getting on the beginning of a
37:18
of a new career and things like that they'll give you feedback for years things like that it is it does take time
37:26
but I think it's kind of like it's a killing several birds with one stone uh
37:32
you you basically I don't love that phrase but like you get to get a lot of things done at once you get a lot of
37:38
customer Insight you start to build loyalty for your product you get a lot of feedback on the spots of your product
37:45
that aren't cool that the customers are like that's weird why would you do that um and you get to actually answer all
37:51
their questions right in one call and hopefully turn them into great customers
37:56
um so I'm not gonna Zach is commented he's being I'm not what and now I have
38:02
to show it I don't know I don't kill birds I don't um
38:08
um so yeah that that's my take uh talk to your customers as much as possible be
38:14
the live demo um that you want them to see um and uh I think that'll go that'll pay
38:19
dividends in the long run one more advice which uh is on which we
38:25
have not talked about so far is in the context of live demos it may be like
38:31
admin demos or not that doesn't really matter but if you have if you are comfortable with software like Microsoft
38:37
Clarity or hot jar I think that is also a very good way to understand your customers without even talking to them
38:44
because you are not installing that software in a sensitive part of uh their
38:49
website you're actually installing in a demo environment which is controlled so you can see their Mouse movements and
38:55
you can actually see the recordings how they are using it and I suggest some sometimes to install that on the insta
39:01
WP demo sites and then you can actually log into your customers demo sites the
39:06
potential users who are using the demo sites from the admin panel from from the Instagram to be dashboard and you can
39:12
see how they are actually going through the demo to make your product better and
39:18
better over time uh but I totally agree with you Matt means if you're just starting out I think you just you should
39:25
keep it simple just talk to your customers understand how they are using the product and then figure out the
39:30
journeys which other other users will also get will be will basically those
39:36
the outcome of those those discussions should translate into the product in a
39:41
way that it becomes more useful to other other people as well yeah absolutely yeah I really like that it touches on
39:48
something you referred to briefly earlier vikas which was a b testing and
39:53
I forgot to follow up but I was thinking how do you a B test on an interwp demo
40:00
so is that the way to do it then you install something like hot jar to track what your users are doing
40:06
yeah so you can install hotjar inside the demo sites and those will be
40:11
recorded in your hot jar account or Clarity account and you can just view those at a later point of time that
40:17
becomes like a database of different people experiencing your product and I
40:23
think that's a gold mine when once we do that for our SAS application or when we
40:29
want to understand customer behavior and then with that gives us like a collective input of a lot of customers
40:36
if they are not clicking a button which is which you thought they are going to click and they never click it so that's
40:44
that's an input for you right it means you have just just change that button color which I think Katie you have been
40:50
sharing a lot of insights on Twitter recently and I've been following that so it means even though even just sharing
40:56
even just changing their links text goes a long way right when you're a b testing
41:02
something yeah yeah I love that because means for them you need to go with your kind of
41:08
best guess as to where to start the user but actually you can really get an evidence-based way to make a final
41:15
decision on that over time yeah that's awesome Yep if only we still
41:21
have Google optimized though man that was so great they also just announced again today Sunset and Google podcasts
41:28
too so fortunately we're already on Google Music podcasts over here so we're
41:34
all set because thank you so much for being here I really appreciate your insights
41:40
um it's been really a great conversation overall yeah same here thanks for having me Matt
41:45
and Katie this was wonderful uh I get to speak about my product and also uh means
41:51
talk about a lot of a pain Point area with a lot of product owners actually face and I have been a plug-in and theme
41:59
uh shop we we have a plugin in theme shop in the past so I do understand how
42:04
difficult it is to run that shop and how difficult it is to like convey your
42:10
value prop yeah absolutely well thanks so much everybody it's been
42:15
great next week we actually are going to have a a good friend and and colleague of mine Ben rittner uh co-founder of uh
42:23
our founder of cadence WP um and uh we're excited to talk with him about product Innovation uh Ben has been
42:31
innovating in the WordPress space for years and years internally at Stellar we're always leaning on him for new
42:36
ideas uh the whole way in which we're rolling out Cadence AI it's all really
42:41
geared around Ben's uh intuition uh for products um so I'm excited to bring him
42:47
here and talk about how can we all be more and more Innovative in our approach to products so
42:53
with that said have a good week everybody we'll see you next time

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