0:16 [Music] 0:25 thank you 0:34 hello this is WP product talk the place where every week we interview an 0:40 experienced WordPress products owner on strategy tips experiences failures and 0:45 successes of running successful and thriving WordPress product businesses I'm Katie Keith CEO and co-founder at 0:53 Bantu plugins I'm Matt Cromwell co-founder of give WP and senior director of customer 0:58 experience at Stellar WP and today's topic is effective live product demos for your WordPress plugin 1:05 or theme I'm excited to talk with our guest today all about this because we've been 1:11 experimenting a lot with uh product demos and find them to be pretty useful overall and I do think it's a relatively 1:18 new-ish feature that some product owners are using over the last couple years more and more often I think they're 1:25 really useful so I'm excited to talk about it with uh with our guest yep and to talk with us today is special 1:32 guest vikar single so welcome Victorious 1:39 um could you introduce yourself and um tell us a bit about what you do 1:44 hey Matt hey Katie um thanks for having me on the street so my name is and I'm the founder of insta 1:52 WP and we basically make it easier for anybody to spin up WordPress sites so 2:00 that's a one-liner or a liner pitch for myself and the company uh I am in the 2:06 workplace space for last four to five years now I think and insta 2:11 WP is relatively new and we have been trying to make it easier to so the 2:17 bigger goal is to make it easier for anybody to onboard into WordPress so that's the pickle Vision which we have 2:24 nice and we should clarify a little bit um we thought of this subject of product 2:29 demos um and a lot of folks do them in a lot of different ways I've seen recently 2:35 that more and more folks are using uh instant WP specifically for product demos but that's not really the core of 2:43 your product offering it just happens to be a benefit that some folks are using as well can you tell us a little bit 2:48 about the larger product and everything that you offer yeah so the larger product is as I said 2:54 is more about um onboarding people into WordPress so for example we have a quick shortcut 3:01 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 3:08 that's Miss we have found a pain point my personal pain point when I started 3:13 this project was there was still not a good way or an easier way to launch a WordPress site quickly in your browser 3:21 um back in like 2021 that's two years ago and it was still a painful process 3:27 you have to install something download a software and then it's just a mess for new people to who are joining to 3:33 Wordpress ecosystem yeah so that's the pain point that we started with and uh 3:40 it became quickly became the de facto standard of like quickly launching test web test WordPress websites uh temporary 3:47 disposable sites and a lot of folks like product companies such as yourself 3:53 started asking can we use uh this to demo all products so of course you can 3:59 then agencies started asking can we use this to actually build client sites of course you can and then and then it just 4:07 means uh rest is history right means we people use the platform in variety of 4:13 different ways um using it for product demos is just one example of it 4:20 that's awesome yeah I love that that's one of my favorite things about having a product business is when you discover 4:25 new use cases for your product you may not even have planned and then it's like a whole new marketing opportunity and 4:32 opens up your Market without needing to create a new product so I really like discovering those things yeah and that's 4:40 because it has it's kind of a like phases of coins it has both 4:47 um it's pros and a lot of con but once you start to discover the potential 4:54 opportunities in a product different use cases then you have to actually the onboarding process and the education 5:01 piece becomes a little bit tough um when you are not focused on a 5:07 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 5:14 cases we have to find out specific personas of users for example about this 5:21 webinar or this podcast today is focused on product owners per se but same I can 5:29 go on couple of more podcasts such as this and then talk about it different completely different use case and that's 5:35 a little bit challenging at the same time but I just said it's of course very very exciting at the same time yeah 5:41 absolutely I can imagine Freelancers and agencies have lots of use friends to WP and all kinds of things end users might 5:48 use it for different purposes and reasons for sure so yeah yeah well folks uh we do want to welcome anybody who's 5:54 paying attention and watching live right now and if you have questions or comments hope streams aspirations for uh 6:01 live product demos then uh post them into the chat and we will answer them live throughout our conversation 6:09 um but uh first off we want to talk about why we think this subject of live 6:14 product demos for WordPress product owners is so significant and important 6:21 um so uh Katie what's your take um well I say that products 6:27 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 6:34 a live demo most companies just provide demos of the front end but people want 6:40 to see what it's like in the back end too how easy is it to use and what's the 6:45 learning curve what features and flexibility is there um so that's all really important and 6:52 historically I would say there hasn't been any really great options for doing that in WordPress yeah of course it's 6:58 quite tricky because it depends on the product because some products are really front end heavy and so the user's happy 7:05 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 7:12 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 7:18 needs and that would help their product yep absolutely yeah 7:24 yeah I totally agree on that means a lot of product owners come to me that do I 7:30 need your product but first I have to tell them that you may or may not need 7:35 depending upon your use case as JD rightly pointed out if the product has a 7:41 very heavy front-end use case then for example a theme right which doesn't 7:46 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 7:53 Satisfied by just looking at the front end of it but almost more than 50 of 7:59 cases where users will have to play around with the settings and see their results 8:04 themselves right um a lot of Stellar products are like that and I think a lot of e-commerce 8:10 plugins which I'm sure Bantu uh is doing are like that but as I said not 100 of 8:17 the product meet that yeah yeah absolutely I I really like talking 8:24 about this like I had mentioned in the intro um the whole idea of doing live uh Demos 8:29 in WordPress products I feel like is relatively new um not brand new like it's definitely 8:35 been a thing for a few years now but yeah but previously folks were like well 8:40 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 8:47 like that was the mentality but the truth is so many products today in order for them to really shine you 8:55 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 9:01 to do some sort of like admin like walkthrough demo as well uh just to say 9:07 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 9:13 Z that's really cool too and if you have a guided tour of the admin that would be 9:19 really helpful for some folks you can do that with a system like insta WP where you create a template that has a 9:25 pre-installed uh thing in it and then you can go through all those things and 9:30 give people the the best experience of your product after it's already been configured because a lot of times that 9:35 configuration phase is just kind of a chore and that you don't get people to 9:41 success you don't get them to the aha moment of the plug-in uh when you click 9:46 install and activate um so I I think being able to put your best foot forward with these product 9:53 demos is is why I think it's significant and important personally yep uh Miss people as you said people 10:00 have been setting up demos using different plugins like a multi-site kind 10:05 of infrastructure or maybe a shared admin demo where they share the same 10:12 admin demo with multiple people right and all of these approaches and or you 10:18 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 10:24 important factor which you test upon is getting your potential customer to success is means first of all is setting 10:33 it's setting the setting up a product demo is itself is an art a lot of companies have figured it out 10:39 um which gravity have figured it out already I I give that 10:44 peace as an education to my so whoever joins our uh community in a way that you 10:51 do you should even though you are a customer but I want you to be successful and the way you become successful is to 10:58 make your end users know about your products successfully yeah and to do that the product demo instance itself 11:05 needs to be set up very very tight means uh all the all the possible use cases 11:10 needs to be covered and you have to guide them through the admin UI or whatever right it can be anything and I 11:18 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 11:26 learned as has set up very well as well so yeah yeah those are excellent examples I want to highlight a couple 11:33 folks here in the wings uh we're always live and um uh we have folks who are 11:38 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 11:45 batdorf good to see you thanks for being here saying hi satyam is using a slack 11:51 Emoji I'd love to have a pink waving hand emoji in our comments here but 11:57 thank you all for being here um yeah so next one up is we want to talk a little bit about our personal 12:03 experiences with this subject in particular I think I'll try to kick it 12:08 off and talk about some of the things we've been doing uh over the years we have tried to introduce folks to the 12:14 give WP plugin in so many different ways um I'll use give WP as the primary example 12:20 um and at first we really did try to really really encourage people to 12:26 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 12:32 things and then we found out people were trying it out on their live environment and sometimes breaking things and it 12:39 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 12:45 they like it or not and then we started doing a lot more videos I do think a lot of this kind of 12:52 question depends a lot on your audience and what they like what they want I'm 12:58 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 13:04 screenshots that would be great um so we leaned heavily on tutorials and documentation and screenshots and video 13:12 but even then it's not particularly Hands-On um then we launched a a live demo site a 13:21 subsite demo and it's still there I believe demo.givewp.com and there we really tried to put focus on all of the 13:29 different ways that you might want to learn about the free plugin which is screenshots and videos and text but also 13:36 we were like give it a test drive um and we have a button uh form uh that 13:42 they fill out and it launches and it's the wp instance um and I helped kind of build out a an 13:49 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 13:56 that's like welcome to the give admin area um and here you can go make a post or 14:01 you can check out some settings or you can go see your donors and give them kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure 14:07 kind of Route um I felt like that was a good way to go about it um what I was surprised by uh 14:14 is that we also gave the option for folks to sign sign up for a a webinar 14:20 group demo as well and I really expected that the live demo would just be like 90 14:28 of people would just want to be doing the live demo let me get my hands on it right away 14:34 um I think it's Unique to our audience but it was more like 40 percent um sometimes even less maybe 30 percent 14:40 of folks were wanting to get their hands on the plug-in uh the other ones were a 14:46 mix of wanting to do the webinar the group webinar uh or just looking at videos or opting into white paper stuff 14:53 like there was because there were several different options um but only 25 30 percent maybe at the 15:01 most sometimes 40 percent wanted to get their hands dirty on a live demo so that was really interesting to me in 15:06 particular um yeah that's where I'm coming from um personally 15:12 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 15:18 the events calendar in particular the events calendar really takes a few things to really get it to set up and 15:24 like actually have a physical calendar that has events on it for example being able to preload that right out of the 15:29 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 15:34 like that that has stuff in advance um yeah Katie what about you what are 15:41 your experiences to date with uh live demos so we've always just done front-end 15:47 demos of all of our plugins um except for a couple where we've not had any demo at all for example we have 15:54 one plugin which um woocommerce multiple email recipients which just adds extra email fills to like the checkouts and 16:01 things so we didn't feel that justified a demo size it's pretty obvious whilst it does whereas all our other plugins 16:07 we've just done a front-end demo plus screenshots on the sales page but that's 16:13 always created dilemmas because it's fine for the front end plugins like say 16:18 a document library or something like that where you can see it in the front end and yeah people might want to see 16:24 what the admin options are but at least they can visualize the plugin in the front end but we have quite a lot of 16:31 plugins which allow you to restrict access to content on a WordPress site so that might be sort of blog categories 16:38 woocommerce product categories we have a wholesale plugin we have a woocommerce private store plugin that high your 16:45 whole shop so how do you show that on a front-end demo and the way we've done 16:50 that is by having things like a password on the demo so it's like here this is 16:56 your private store login page enter username password to unlock it but 17:02 that's not super user friendly because it requires the user to actually read the text on the demo and nobody does 17:09 that of course so I've always felt a bit uncomfortable about the way we have 17:14 demoed some of our products so what we're doing now is a project to 17:20 kind of experiment with into WP having met vikas in um Athens at Work Camp 17:27 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 17:34 husband and co-founder Andy has been spending time setting up one of our plugins within WP and it's looking 17:42 really great but there are a lot of decisions to make as you said earlier to really showcase your product in the best 17:48 possible way so there are the dilemmas like what page do you start them on and 17:54 I'd love any advice about that which actually fits in with Zach's question exactly so yeah maybe we should move on 18:02 to that now so where do you start them yeah how do you recommend onboarding users to your product when setting up 18:09 product demos so this is a question that you have yourself Katie is what you're saying yeah so if for anybody who 18:15 doesn't know you can use into WP to pre-populate a demo site which the user 18:21 can then edit as they choose and then it disappears at whatever period you've specified I think we're going to go with 18:27 four hours or something like that um and but the thing we've been debating 18:32 this week is where should we start people should we open the setup wizard even though we've already set it up on 18:39 the front end should we open a front-end page and expect them to find their way to the admin through the WordPress 18:45 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 18:52 list of custom posts like documents or whatever so where would you start people 18:57 to really have a successful onboarding experience so they know what to do 19:03 yep I guess it's one of those decisions where you have to do a b testing right 19:09 which works best for your users I generally recommend uh figuring out the 19:15 major pain point of your customers what is the first question they ask when they see that when they see your plugin for 19:22 example I was actually browsing document Library Pro the other day because there was a use case where I wanted to build a 19:29 video library on Insta WP to show like like an academy or a documentation uh 19:34 using a series of videos um and then while I was browsing it the first question which came to my mind can 19:41 I style this page according to my needs is can I can I change the layout uh can 19:48 I use bigger thumbnails or whatever that question may be and then over a period 19:53 of like running your business you know those top three questions so I I would 19:59 suggest you start from there right if a plugin is complex and you're onboarding solves that I will say leave the 20:06 onboarding on right so start we will basically push people to the onboarding interface and that onboarding should 20:12 take care of the majority of the questions if if you think that it's better for the users to already onboard 20:20 it with a couple of examples pre-built pre-populated uh and then you showcase 20:25 so I'll take example of gravity so they create about 10 different forms for 20:30 different use cases and for each use case they have built a form but they 20:37 also build an a page inside the WordPress site itself which shows which 20:43 itself becomes a landing page so the WordPress site itself becomes a landing page and they read the right users to 20:49 the home page of the WordPress site but logged in the user is auto logged in 20:55 because instead WP can give you the auto login feature so in a way what you're 21:00 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 21:07 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 21:13 so so you are essentially I think what comes out of from this story is 21:19 that you show what all things are possible with your product and then you allow people to click on a button and 21:27 then experience themselves what what it is all about so it's it's more about 21:33 like giving them the breadth of your product and then they themselves should go deep into the product that will be 21:39 their browsing experience so I think that's the best way to do it nice I like 21:44 that a lot yeah I mentioned that earlier that um what one thing we did was give them 21:50 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 21:58 a demo and here's where you might like to go if they did choose to like go see 22:03 the donors it was kind of like well you go see the donors and then well there they are 22:08 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 22:15 all definitely more that we could have done to to continue the guided tour and things like that but I love that idea of 22:21 using the front end of the site Which is far more customizable than the admin area the idea you can build literally 22:29 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 22:35 like a one-pager landing page so that your demo site itself becomes a marketing side exactly it's not just a 22:41 demo site it's a marketing plus demo site absolutely yeah that's interesting 22:46 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 22:54 existing front-end demos because we were thinking of giving users a choice do you want to just demo you know the site 23:00 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 23:06 straight to the front end which looks like our existing demo size could we get rid of our existing sites or do you 23:13 think they have different purposes I think that's that serves different purposes the front-end demo without much 23:20 of a setup is a quick way to browse around but you can have like a button somewhere or multiple places that try 23:27 spin this up for my for me or try this is a in a live environment uh and that 23:33 takes them to the exact same page where they want to go and in HWP you can actually set up their starting page 23:39 where you want them to land I think that's that's the experience but as we 23:45 discussed earlier it depends upon plug-in to plugin in some cases you don't even need to show the front-end 23:51 demo you can just put them directly into the live demo as you said that's an interesting observation yes 23:58 absolutely I want to throw out just one kind of tangent a little bit uh the one 24:04 of the biggest uses that we have for insta WP in particular is we use it a ton for technical support purposes 24:11 um and I think it's also so useful and valuable for that as well we we just are 24:16 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 24:22 be like here this is where you can replicate that problem uh it ends up being super useful in those cases as 24:28 well also in for the customers themselves when they're like oh this is not working that is not working we could 24:34 send them the login link to that site and be like go and check if it's working over here 24:40 which ends up being super useful for them as well but lots of users for 24:45 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 24:53 using it is custom support but by copying their lifestyle so we have a 24:58 plugin which can be installed on a customer site I guess did you tweet about it yeah at 25:06 least two days ago I didn't know that into WP could be used for an instant way 25:11 of cloning a site because customers hate being told to set up a staging site not 25:16 all hosts make that easy so I was like oh that could be a real benefit for support yeah even though there is a 25:23 facility inside the hosting panel not a lot of customers are familiar with it and it's creating an option within the 25:30 dashboard and also like a partial staging so they skip the media folder and things like that so that becomes a 25:37 real real really useful tool yeah and it's talking about different use cases sometimes even I wonder okay can we do 25:44 this as well and that becomes like a and this and that the product team says yes 25:49 you have forgotten that we can do this 25:54 it's actually a good topic that I feel like we've touched on in different episodes about just how like what Katie 26:01 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 26:07 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 26:13 path now you actually have to like cater to to those customers and their wants and needs I remember one of my favorite 26:19 stories was from Pippin Williamson from Easy Digital downloads he said I like to 26:25 listen to customers as much as possible but they keep asking for a shipping add-on for Easy Digital downloads and 26:31 it's never going to happen like yeah one of those one of those lines you 26:36 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 26:43 that struggle at all vikas in terms of like you can expand and expand and you can become a whole entire hosting manage 26:50 WordPress hosting platform if you wanted at this stage yeah are you talking about those types of things internally yeah 26:58 so that that has been one of the issues is saying no to use cases because we get 27:05 so many because of the nature of the product we wanted to become a platform 27:11 and becoming a platform is not an easy thing when we started requirements I 27:16 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 27:23 but right now what we have found our purpose is to limit ourselves in solving 27:28 those major use cases which can drive revenue for other company which is like the honest truth and also to solve 27:36 majority of the customers problem which nobody else is solving in a proper way yeah so that is I think that's where you 27:42 have to put your foot down definitely absolutely um I did want to touch on a little bit 27:49 of different types of product demos because insta WP is a great option but 27:54 like I mentioned a little bit earlier there are lots of different mediums you could use I don't want everyone here to 28:00 think that only a live product demo is is the way to go here um like I mentioned I I do think that 28:06 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 28:18 they want to see I think those are useful I've seen a lot of video platforms now that are offering 28:25 interactive elements within the video that that you can actually ask people 28:30 questions in the video and say what would you like to see next and you give them options and then they could skip to 28:36 those things by clicking on the video um there's a particular term for that I forget what it's called 28:42 um but um those are I think are super useful as well we've had a lot of 28:47 success personally also with these group webinars or one-on-one webinars even where where we're basically doing their 28:54 their basically pre-sales uh uh Zoom calls with our customers and I do think 28:59 that's a little bit unique in the WordPress space overall um but we do find 29:04 um that they've been valuable for us we do as a whole for for give WP in 29:09 particular we have like an average job size of about 240 dollars uh uh per customer uh which in the end does 29:17 justify um a little bit more time on the pre-sales side of things 29:22 um so there are lots of different options um Katie have you considered other types of um uh demoing for your customers in 29:30 any way one of the challenges for me is having many different products is that you'd 29:38 need we've got like 23 products so that would be a lot of webinars so I love the 29:43 idea but I suppose we could do that for our most popular products and that might 29:48 justify it but our average order value is exactly half what you just said ours 29:54 is about 120 rather than 200 plus so we but then if it's a group webinar then 30:00 that's less time per user so it might be worth it uh for the bigger products 30:07 I saw something really cool um a few months ago on a SAS website where they'd kind of embedded a sort of 30:15 their product in in an editable way into the page into their home page so I can't 30:21 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 30:40 buttons and you've got maybe a front-end demo and a back-end demo and do you put 30:45 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 31:02 Coco well we are uh getting into our last segment at this stage and um it's 31:08 honestly one of my favorites um I love being able to talk about just the best advice that we have for any uh WordPress 31:14 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 31:21 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