Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Within WordPress podcast. With me today is Leslie. Now, Leslie, you get to introduce yourself very shortly, but you, I think, are a perfect example of somebody who wasn't into WordPress, and then all of a sudden, you were everywhere where WordPress was. Well, how did that happen? So, yeah, welcome to the show.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Thanks. Really happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Well, how do I answer that question?
Start by introducing yourself. Yeah, I'm Leslie SIM. I live in Singapore. And as we were just talking, it's kind of like a tropical place where it's always rainy and always sunny at the same time, and we have lots of good food.
I think I first heard about WordPress in, I want to say, 2016, maybe.
I was trying to build a website and it was the cheapest way to do it. So that's kind of how I got started. And then over time, I started a digital marketing agency and was building websites for clients.
And then in 2019 I'm giving you the long story, by the way, because we got time. Yeah. Okay, cool.
Yeah. So in 2019, just before COVID I was starting to feel really burnt out by the agency, and I decided to try my hand at plugins because it seemed kind of interesting and fun and different, most importantly, different from agency life.
So I did the unusual thing of kind of closing down the agency. I kept one or two clients that I really liked, but I kind of let the rest of them go. And I went all in into this plugin business, and I met my co founder, who's a developer. He had developed a membership plugin and he was looking for a business and marketing co founder. I think he was originally planning on doing it all himself, and then he very quickly realized, oh, this is really.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: Hard, it's a lot old.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
And so we got in touch. We started working together on the membership plugin, and it didn't go very far. It was really difficult. I was completely new to the product world, I would say.
And even though my background is in marketing and advertising, it turns out that when you're trying to do something from scratch rather than work with multimillion or multibillion dollar brands, the kind of work you do is very different. The way you approach it is very different. And so all of my knowledge was not relevant, basically.
And the membership plugin didn't go very far. And we were planning on shutting it down, but then decided to pivot into newsletters because one of the add ons that we had built for the membership plugin, this is an example of how little we knew, right, the plugin is not even doing well. And we were building add ons for a plugin that's not doing well.
We made all the classic mistakes of overbuilding and under marketing, not talking to enough customers, and so we had built an add on to connect MailChimp to our membership plugin and send newsletters from WordPress. And I had been using that for my own personal newsletter and I was set to see that feature die because I was using it and there wasn't an obvious replacement for it. And so I decided actually if I was set to let it go, but I was definitely not set to let the membership plugin go because there were so many different competitors that could do what we were already doing.
So I realized maybe there's something here, maybe there's like a demand for this. And so we pivoted and newsletter glue was born and we tried to do everything differently from our failed membership plugin attempt. So we talked to way more customers from the start, we launched very differently and for me, at least personally, I made talking to customers the priority, trying to figure out what they wanted, how they use the plugin, what they needed.
That was a big one for me. And that incidentally also answers your question kind of how I started appearing everywhere because I was just trying to talk to as many people as possible.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: I was going to say for those listening, I'm mostly referring to your presence on Twitter. I'm sure you're active in other locations as well, but it's just like all of a sudden there you were.
And in terms of marketing your product, you just said that you decided to do things everything differently than you did before.
I think you succeed in terms of at least visibility because that is the key.
If you have a product to share and you're not sharing it, or the thought processes that go into what feature do we go for and whatnot it's hard to be noticed because there's a lot of folks out there.
Is there currently or was there a competitor in any way, shape or form or were you really carving out a niche for your own?
[00:06:18] Speaker B: I'd say Newspap is our closest competitor and even know the newsletter side of things is their add on, I would say, rather than the main focus of Newspap.
But yeah, in terms of what we do, I think they are the closest.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: Yeah. So that means you have a niche and then it's mostly about other WordPress users and newsletter users understanding your proposition.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:47] Speaker A: What was the biggest challenge in that you come from?
[00:06:52] Speaker B: Exactly? That actually. So like people figuring out what our value was.
So that's actually the second part, I would say, of the newslettergoose story. So the first part was us relaunching figuring things out and building in public and doing things differently. And then very quickly we ran into the problem of we have too many types of users. So we had people like me who are using the plugin for their individual personal newsletters. And then we had really big people like you as well. And then we had really big publishers who are using us with these are people or these are companies with a newsletter team, like a team of employees whose job it is to send out the newsletters. And so you can imagine kind of the range of use cases and needs were insanely different.
And so the proposition for all of these different users was also very different. And we ran into a lot of problems trying to figure out who do we serve, how do we serve them? And these problems occurred across the entire business. So the marketing, the pricing, the sales, the product, the support, everything.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: So the range of customers was too wide.
[00:08:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: I was curious.
There's a moment that you figure out that, yes, we're spread too thin across too many subsections of what our ideal customer is. We have to redefine what our ideal customer is.
How do you go about because figuring out what is the specific segment I want to go to because that must be a challenge because you have customers but you don't know where the largest potential is because that might be the type of customer you have the fewest of.
[00:09:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it took like a year of very painful talking to different customers, taking risks, making MVPs to figure that out. And ultimately we landed on working with medium to large publishers. So like media companies, online magazines, newsrooms organizations like that.
And the reason was, again, it comes back to the, I guess the selling point and the proposition and what those customers needed. So newsletter glue, which I'm realizing we never even talked about what it is, it connects to your email service provider and allows you to build and send newsletters like you would a blog post or an article. So you open up the blog editor, you write your email newsletter and then you send it out by hitting publish for individuals who are writing a newsletter, a lot of them wanted us to just be MailChimp replacement so that they didn't have to use us plus a MailChimp or plus ActiveCampaign or plus Mailer Light.
So they were constantly asking us to build features like that. So can you just connect to a transactional email so that it's going to be much cheaper and we can just use SendGrid or Mailgun and then we'll use you and that's it. So we had a lot of requests like that from that end of the Target customers. But then for the larger customers who are already stuck with ActiveCampaign or MailChimp or whatever large email service provider they're using, they don't want to move out of that because to move is going to be a three to six month project for them and probably costs a lot of money just in terms of the time it would take to move.
But at the same time they had multiple newsletters that they're sending out every week. And it's really painful to use, for example, MailChimp to send out multiple newsletters to get writers and editors logging in and out of MailChimp to look at that same campaign.
It's not really yeah, exactly. And so that's where we come in. We're like we sit perfectly in the middle of an active campaign or even a sale through and WordPress and let all the writers and editors who are already writing articles inside of WordPress every single day just go to a different part of WordPress and then write the newsletter. And for them, that's an amazing proposition.
And the price is also not an issue at all for them.
And also it means that we don't have to build anything. Right. Because what we already have is exactly what they need. In contrast, the individual bloggers and newsletter writers they wanted us to build pretty much a whole other system.
Is a sidecar acting up again?
[00:12:23] Speaker A: No, it's fine.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: Okay, cool.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: I'm kind of curious because what you're saying is something very interesting. You're saying you already had the perfect product, you were just not catering to the right crowd, or marketing to the right crowd, I should say, because you had, I assume, customers in that crowd already at that time.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right.
[00:12:54] Speaker A: That, to me, is a very interesting thing. Like, how do you figure out that that is the customer you want to go to? And that that's where actually the most potential is.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: Yeah, it's really hard. Like I said, it took us a year of talking, soul searching, figuring out. And also, for me, at least as a founder, you are really close to your product, so you always think it's crappy because you can see all the issues with it and the bugs and everything. And so it took me a while to believe that we were ready to go after bigger customers.
Sure, that we were stable enough and all of that.
And I say this, but then at the same time, even before we started going after those bigger customers, we already had really big customers using us who didn't have problems and are happy with our service. So I think this is like the classic founder insecurity with the product.
[00:13:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Would you say it's easier to get those types of clients now, for full reference, what we're referring to here is you had started with newsletter glue.
You had eight targets defined. And then there was a moment in time where you decided it was smarter to focus on a subset of your clientele, which is an upmarket move because the pricing went up. And your whole proposition, I guess, communication, you done your website, everything changes.
Are you finding it easier to find the customers now?
Is that the conclusion you can reach already? Or are we just a little too short behind the decision?
[00:14:40] Speaker B: I think we're still early. It's hard to say. The thing that happened for sure is that once we increased our prices, it cleared out everybody who was currently considering us at the time, because everyone who was currently considering us came in at a much lower price point.
But also it immediately got a handful of people who were considering us to get in touch immediately because suddenly we were exactly catering to them. So I think those two things happened. But then the other big thing is also the sales cycle for much larger customers is much longer.
And so that's part of why it's kind of hard to say whether or not it's working.
It's likely that we have a whole bunch of people who are considering us right now who are just talking about it internally. I've never heard from them yet, and it might be three months before they even get internal approvals to get in.
[00:15:44] Speaker A: Touch with me, get on the vendor list. And that's the famous three to nine months processes you have to plow through.
So that's an interesting I like what you've done there because obviously maybe not obviously, but I'm one of the, I think, earlier users of newsletter Glue.
[00:16:11] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: And it was perfect for the setup that I had at the time.
And yeah, it's very convenient to be able to do that from within your WordPress environment. It just makes a lot of sense.
I have two other customers running the same setup and for them, it solves the same problem.
They're not big budget customers, but they have complex setups and it's interesting to see the problem that it solves. So what I find fascinating is that even though there was clearly a match to that particular crowd, you were brave enough to say, no, there's a better match for us somewhere else.
I admire that. That sort of move, I think, for the this is a long winded way of coming to my question, but the majority of WordPress product owners are looking at WordPress from a I want to be as cost effective price point in the back of their mind, which is typically where WordPress comes from, right? The software is free. You have to sort of wrestle to have them understand that your proposition is actually helping them in their process if it's saving them money and all of that. And yes, you're asking good amount, decent amounts of money.
Would you say that your late entry into WordPress is probably beneficial there for you?
[00:17:43] Speaker B: I mean, that's really hard to say. I'm sure there were also lots of maybe not lots. Even now I don't see lots, but I'm sure there are also large handful of plugins that cost a lot previously for context. So previously our lowest price was $99 a year and now our lowest price is $120 a month, which comes up to like 1440 a year. So that's kind of like the difference in price point. Approximately 110 times the price, I think, like so a couple of yeah, I think also so there are so many things that this is a positioning thing and when you position yourself, you have to change your pricing as well when you update your positioning. And for the larger customers that we are targeting, being too cheap is actually a problem for them because if you think about it, their entire team is working out of newsletter glue every day. Like, literally every day. You have maybe like, five people working out of newsletter glue every day. And if it's $99 a year, that's kind of scary to rely on a $99 a year newsletter platform for your 100,000, 200,000 subscribers, if not more.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: That's a very valid point.
[00:19:21] Speaker B: And so changing the price is necessary. It's actually hurting us if we keep it low. So I think that's an important thing to mention, and I've forgotten your original question, I'm sorry.
[00:19:38] Speaker A: The lack of this is how WordPress does it price as high as you feel comfortable with, but definitely on the low end type of approach to pricing your product.
That has been going on ever since WordPress started becoming more premium, which is around 2008.
That was the first premium themes. And then Plugins started 2009, sort of really get going.
You entered into 2016. So that's already into a much more mature market. And my question was, how much do you think that's been an influence that you weren't aware of, where the origins came from, the expectancy of having a lowish?
[00:20:24] Speaker B: I don't think I was completely unaware. I think I've actually done a pretty good job of decent job, especially in comparison to a lot of other people, about learning about WordPress's history and stuff like that. Cool.
And I think one of the things that I also did a pretty good job of is getting to know a lot of Plugin founders and kind of hearing their stories and learning how they did their pricing and their business and set all of that kind of stuff up before I made the pricing changes. The two people that I talked to were Natalie from Excess Ally and Pete from Nikki Paywall. So the two of them have, I think, somewhat similar pricing. I think they're like 200 plus plus close to 300 a month.
And they encouraged me to go for it and see pretty much go for it. And I think that's kind of what I did.
And I think one thing also that I realized is that I don't really want to.
My customers don't identify as WordPress users. They identify as a writer or like, a CEO of a publishing company or a product manager in a newsroom. And so they don't really think about the history of WordPress pricing. They just care about what works for them. So since they don't care about it, then I don't have to care about it.
So, honestly, I don't really get those low end large agency with 500 customers trying to ask me, like, why is your pricing like this? Don't you have a lifetime license or discount stuff? I just don't get that because that's not who I cater to and I'm really glad about it.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: I can imagine because one of the things that disappears when you change your pricing, certainly when you move up, is that because there is a crowd now less interested in your product, you also are losing a crowd which is extremely high demanding, even though they're on the bottom end of what your ideal customer would be. Have you noticed a big difference in support requests and such?
[00:23:10] Speaker B: Actually, I said that I don't get it, but I guess I kind of maybe get some. Occasionally you get people renting on Twitter saying we're stupidly expensive and stuff like that. But I just ignore it when it comes to support. So that's the other big thing. I don't think the amount or the type of support problems has changed. But now I feel good about just providing 1000% excellent support to every single customer.
Whereas previously, pretty much the moment someone has a support issue, I'm losing money on them. Even for me to spend 1 hour or 2 hours on their ticket, I've lost money on them because my time is worth more than $99 an hour. And so if they're paying $99 a year, I've just lost money on them immediately.
[00:24:06] Speaker A: This is the mode where I say I'm sorry. Right, because that's intended support request probably more than an hour. Yeah, but that's a very good point. You become more motivated when your actual value is perceived as such.
[00:24:26] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:24:28] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: So, different question in terms of understanding and diving into the WordPress community, what is the thing that you are pleasantly surprised with? I didn't expect that, but hey, this is very nice that it also happened.
[00:24:52] Speaker B: I'm not sure it's like I didn't expect thing. But one thing that really, really thankful for is how helpful and open to sharing the WordPress community, especially like the business owners are. So even right now, it's super easy for me to just DM one of the, whatever, top ten top hundred plugin companies out there and message the owner of the company and just be like hey, how are you doing pricing or how are you thinking about this? And they are likely to just tell me the answer and not think that I'm trying to steal anything from them or do anything bad. Everyone's just kind of trying to help each other out. And likewise people ask me all the time as well and I try my best to give them super honest and upfront answers. And I think, again, it's not really surprising necessarily, but it's something that I really appreciate and I don't think I see it in other communities necessarily.
[00:25:59] Speaker A: I agree.
I think that's probably for me also, one of the earliest takeaways that I had, I started using WordPress professionally in 20 06 20 05 20 06 so you quickly learn there's limits of what you know. And I had friends who were essentially jumping into WordPress at the same time.
And some of them were way more already, way more into code than I was. So I would have questions, right. But the funny thing is I could just ping them and they would be direct competitors of me. Sometimes I have even had where another company in my company were bidding for the same project. I got the project and then I had to ask them, I missed something here. Do you have an idea of how to solve this problem? And they would just happily provide me with that. And obviously I've returned the favor many times as well. That interesting concept is like I was blown away that that works.
But it's part of the open source identity, I guess. It's a part of the culture. It's part of the understanding that I give and I take, but as long as there's a balance, it's a great thing to see in humanity. I would say for me, yes, I come from a very different type of background.
It was high competition and there was absolutely zero sharing. They would actively try to hijack clients.
I'm not saying that this doesn't happen in the WordPress community, but what I am saying is echoing exactly what you're saying. That was a very pleasant surprise.
Like, why are we doing this? This is funny.
I didn't expect this. Suddenly at the time. I did not expect this.
Have you been in contact with open source communities other than WordPress?
[00:28:02] Speaker B: Not really.
I guess I kind of grew up on the Internet, so there was a lot of making friends with strangers on the internet type of thing. I think that would be a great way to sum up how I grew up. And so that's why for me, it wasn't different or surprising or uncomfortable. It was like, cool, I can just continue making friends on the Internet in WordPress and that's something that I really like and it comes very naturally to well, maybe not natural, but I did it for my whole life, so it feels very comfortable.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: I come from the world before the Internet.
I'm dating myself. But I'm also happy to share that I'll be turning 50 in about a month.
But the world as I got to know it, the online world, and then specifically my first encounter with open source was actually Mumbo and Joomla. I did not find those communities welcoming at all. There was no fun. There was always if you ask the question in a form, the response came from like a high horse condescendingly. Haven't you even tried to research that? I'm like, if I have to defend myself for that one every single time, that's not fun.
And then WordPress to me was a warm bath. I would just ask a question and I would get close to tutorial type answers.
Wow.
Yeah, that was interesting.
Okay, so you have a slightly I'm not going to hint at your age, but you have a slightly younger experience.
[00:29:58] Speaker B: On the I'm from the ICQ age.
[00:30:03] Speaker A: Oh, well, I am too.
[00:30:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
And so it was very like talking to random strangers. I would be talking to random strangers and we would become friends and I'd be talking to them every single day. We never met them in real life. They're like different countries and yeah, I don't know, I just love that GeoCities and all that. We're just trying to figure out how to build websites together in GeoCities.
I think to me, WordPress felt very similar.
[00:30:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
I'd be curious to do a poll and ask people in the WordPress community, especially those who have been there for a longer time, like how active were they during the ICQ in that era?
I think the number is fairly high.
It feels like a similar vibe. You're right.
[00:30:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:55] Speaker A: But then I have to ask the kind of obligatory question what's a component that you like about the web community or project? Is there in particular that you do not like about either the project or the community?
[00:31:09] Speaker B: You're going to get me that you.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: Feel comfortable sharing with?
You can say pass if you don't, so it's fine.
[00:31:21] Speaker B: I think the thing that I'll say is I wish that the WordPress project was the way that it's being built. I wish that it was more customer first or like, from modern product management principles, and I don't want to go into too much detail, but with modern software that's built let's talk to the customer, find out what they need. And let's build from that starting point rather than, like a more older way of building stuff, which is, oh, this technology is available now. Let's see what we can do with it. Or from a top down Steve Jobs kind of way, where it's like, steve Jobs wants to build an iPhone, so I guess we're building an iPhone. But then I say that. But apparently Steve Jobs was very user centric as well. So maybe that's not a great example.
[00:32:35] Speaker A: But yeah, I guess for as far as I know, I think it's actually a good example because he was both top down and user centric, which my translation would be WordPress is user centric.
I'm just not sure which particular user.
So the question kind of is, are we fully aware of what the actual end user is inside of WordPress? And I don't think we are not truly. Makes it very hard to cater for them. I know kind of maybe we're in the same type of cris you were.
There's a big change in how it started and how it's going. You know the meme, right?
[00:33:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:32] Speaker A: How it started. Just very simple, earnest beginnings. This is a fork. And there's blog and then maybe add a few more custom content types and kind of call it a day and start maturing it. But that didn't happen. So it then sort of slid into wherever we find ourselves.
[00:33:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:52] Speaker A: I think that's a very valid concern or position to have a level of critique on. Let me just very delicately phrase it like that.
I'm kind of curious. Before 2016, you said you needed a website. What did you need a website for? Was that for your digital agency?
[00:34:20] Speaker B: I think so, yes.
So it was like the website that I wanted to build for my agency and WordPress was the easiest way to do that?
[00:34:31] Speaker A: Yeah, it was. Would it be the choice for you today if you started like, I need a website now, what do I do? Do I still look at WordPress, I.
[00:34:43] Speaker B: Need a website for my digital agency or I need a website for myself?
[00:34:49] Speaker A: Answer both, I guess.
[00:34:52] Speaker B: I think for an agency, then. Yes, for sure. Because WordPress isn't just like a page builder, it's a content management system, right? And so it lets you have articles and really grow the website over time. And I think right now there isn't a better way to have a website that scales with you that you can grow and maintain and add to it in the same way that you can with WordPress without having to worry about running up against the limits of the system like you would in a lot of other CMS.
And at the same time, it's really easy to hire people who are very familiar with WordPress and so you also never really have to worry about running into manpower issues, I guess, if you're trying to do that. So I think those two things are really important.
If I was doing it for myself, I would probably not use WordPress today if I didn't know anything about WordPress.
Leslie from the future is able to talk to Leslie from the past, you know what I mean?
[00:36:11] Speaker A: Right.
[00:36:11] Speaker B: I would advise myself not like if a good friend wanted to build a personal website today, I would advise them not to use WordPress. If they were just trying to do something like simple, I think I'll probably ask them to use Card Carrd, co I think that's the most intuitive website builder out there for someone who just wants a simple landing page to help people learn about themselves. Yeah, I think that's what I would use.
But, yeah, for sure. If it was a business, then WordPress all the way.
I don't think there's anything better when it comes to running your business.
[00:36:56] Speaker A: I would agree. I like that. You mentioned Card cart is an interesting let me finish that train of thought there. So the Card is a perfect solution for landing pages, right? So you configure based on an existing template, you configure your personal landing page and you can actually add a few pages here and there. So it's a light CMS almost, but it's very intuitive to work with. And I was playing around with some of the new site edit options we have to our availability now with the patterns and combination of patterns and. It kind of occurred to me like a week and a half ago, we're very close to replicating Card inside WordPress. If we wanted to, I would say if you really wanted to, you could build it in such a fashion that it almost feels as intuitive. But maybe with six three impending, probably at 6465, the dashboard is a little bit more mature. You could bypass the normal admin, just only use the site editor admin. I think we're getting there.
Just a brain fart on my part.
Card triggered me to think about. I have used card.
In fact, I think I have two or three landing pages for friends on it because it makes more sense. It was very straightforward. What they needed. Doesn't make a lot of sense to spin up an entire WordPress site for that.
[00:38:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:36] Speaker A: So you would advise against interesting.
[00:38:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:47] Speaker A: If we're looking at making things smarter for first time users of WordPress, do you have any advice for that? Is that the thing you've considered or thinking about? Because I can imagine that your crowd is already on WordPress, obviously.
Oh, different question, sorry. Do you have any that find you that are not using WordPress at that moment and figure, yeah, I'm going to start using WordPress because it makes sense to do it in a system that is just not as bonkers as MailChimp.
[00:39:22] Speaker B: I just had a sales call yesterday with someone like that. They were on Wix and they were planning to move on to WordPress and hoping to use us. And I said that there were two paths they can choose. One is to just use beehive or substack and do that until they have gone far enough in their newsletter journey to know what they want to be generating revenue and then feel confident to move over to WordPress, which can then scale for them and allow them to have a lot more flexibility in terms of if they want to do memberships and subscriptions and test all the different options. You can't do that with behave and substack. It's like the five options they give you or the two options they give you. That's all you have. Whereas with WordPress, as long as you can imagine it, you can build it. So that was option one and option two was to say, you know what, I'm going all in. I'm going to build everything well from the start because I'm confident that this business is going to work and if I do it well from the start, then I'm not going to have to deal with it in two years time when I have to migrate 200,000 subscribers to a new system. And that's going to be painful.
Exactly. So I actually have customers who did that from day one, and the one customer I have in mind is doing really well now.
But I would say that she was starting at a different level. She was already like an award winning reporter and stuff like that. So she knew what she was doing and I think she was confident about generating revenue. So for her, it wasn't like she is a beginner newsletter writer, but for the person that I was talking to yesterday, I said those are your two options and neither one is better than the other. It just depends on where you're starting from.
But I did say to her, because she never really used WordPress before, that she should just so I gave her the contact of one of the partners that we work a lot with, Tyler from the Paywall project. And for him, his is like a turnkey thing. He'll set up the site for you. He has multiple licenses of newslettergu already, he has multiple licenses of leaky Paywall already. And so, you know, you have a membership site from scratch from him and you don't even really have to learn everything. And so I think that's kind of the way that I would advise people to get started on WordPress today. I don't think it would be a good idea unless it was like someone who likes tinkering and then would be like, okay, be prepared to spend the next one or two years of your life tinkering with WordPress before you even feel comfortable.
So if you're not that kind of person, then I would say just find someone you trust who's just going to do everything for you. Handle your site maintenance for you, buy all the plugins for you and you're just kind of logging in and writing your articles or logging in and doing whatever it is you need to do.
[00:42:34] Speaker A: Yeah, that's interesting because that almost sounds like a sassified version of newsletter glue.
Like have everything, just spin up a new version and connect whatever you need connecting, add it as a subdomain to your site and call it a day.
Yeah.
If you look back at one of the questions I asked earlier, what made you decide to move in which way, like upscale or downscale in terms of customers? You said one of the requests you got a lot was I'd like to just use you and connect with transactional email and just call it a day. That'll make me happy.
Are you even considering looking into that direction at all or is that one of your future goals, to grow in that direction of actually becoming a full fledged newsletter provider?
[00:43:39] Speaker B: We looked into it last year. We actually built an MVP for it and I talked to a bunch of people about what that's like. A bunch of people who either ran ESPS or used to work for ESPS.
ESP stands for oh, sorry, email Service Provider.
And the answer is that it's very scary to deal with deliverability.
And I think the problem is that I know too much.
So sometimes as a founder, it's good to be a bit ignorant because then you don't realize how bad an idea it.
So as an example. I think Airbnb and Uber are actually really bad ideas. They have horrible security problems, right? Anyone can just get into Uber. The Uber can be a murderer. They just kill you. Same thing for airbnb. And they obviously didn't think about that when they started and it turned out to be a good thing for them.
But then for me, I know enough about email service providers and I know enough people to be able to talk to them. And so when I hear how much you actually have to do to deal with all of these things, it was scary. And I'm at least at this point in time, not really willing to invest in it.
I think it would be like probably like one to $3 million investment to get an ESP's deliverability to be okay and include all because email service providers are a very mature niche. Right. And so you have to be at this feature parity with, for example, like 50 to 100 different features before people are even willing to consider you. And then on top of that 50 to 100, you then also need that one feature that nobody else has that makes them convert. And so to get there is really hard.
[00:45:43] Speaker A: Yeah, that would require to build a dashboard. It's probably not even related to WordPress at all.
Quite a different big step.
[00:45:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:45:55] Speaker A: I do like how you subtly compared yourself to Airbnb and Uber, though.
[00:46:04] Speaker B: That's not what I did.
[00:46:06] Speaker A: No, but I meant it more ingest in terms of thinking big.
[00:46:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I think building an ESP would be a think big thing.
[00:46:18] Speaker A: Yeah, it does sound like you are thinking big in terms of there's a lot of product owners who just fell into a niche and then figured in sort of a happenstance way, like, okay, this is apparently what they like, and then let me just build that and continue to build on. And if there's a lot of people asking for a specific new feature, then I'm going to look into it and maybe add it to it. That doesn't sound like you. You sound like I figured out there's a gap. And as I'm building it, I'm also exploring different versions or variations of the theme and kind of work my way into understanding the market in the best way I can and thus build the best product I can possibly have instead of possibly think of because those two to me are very different approaches. Right, so you can build the best product you can think of, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best product you can have.
[00:47:23] Speaker B: Can you expand on that a little bit?
[00:47:26] Speaker A: So you as a person or you as a company, you are limited to how you think in terms of what is your product. You can do interviews, you can be very elaborate about that. But ultimately it's mostly governed about how you think about a product and what particular position it is to have in the market who is your target audience, all of that. So that's inside of your head or inside of the heads of everybody working at the company. So that's a limited set.
The next step is essentially figuring out beyond what the client thinks they need. So you end up with a more I just want to build the best product that is possibly to be made in this particular niche and that requires a very broad sense of understanding your own limitations as a developer, as a marketing person, as a designer and all of that. So to me the latter is way more interesting because you're not letting yourself limit by any lack of knowledge in any field.
Does that make sense?
[00:48:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that really resonates and that's kind of how since the repositioning, that's kind of how I've been approaching it. Now that we know who our customers are, I want to build the best Stem newsletter solution for them.
[00:48:58] Speaker A: Well, my point was it sounds like you are so it sounds like you have a good idea of what you understand or what you don't understand and you're building from what you understand to what you don't yet understand. And I think I like that. I like seeing that at least from my point of view as a user, but also as somebody who follows you on Twitter. It's interesting to see where your thoughts go because you ask a lot of questions and I like that you got a lot of responses as well. And it's again, people sharing very valuable information and oftentimes, at least for me if I look at the question at the end so I can sort of figure out where your question is coming from. But then the answers are never always 100% in the direction that you kind of hope for and yet it is still very rewarding, the type of answers you get. I like seeing that the whole build in public thing, it's a hashtag, one of the few hashtags that I follow. It's just very interesting to see that whole move and I think you do a great job at it. So long winded way of complimenting you, I guess, but.
[00:50:05] Speaker B: I'll take the long conservative.
[00:50:08] Speaker A: Yeah, you should.
So maybe as last question then, what is next for newsletter glue?
Any big features you can share about or any other types of plugins you're considering or looking at or investigating. Kind of curious what you see in your immediate future.
[00:50:36] Speaker B: So there are two big things that we're building for this year. And again, this is one of the cool things about being so tightly positioned. I can commit an entire year. I already know what we're building for our roadmap. So the first, which we are now many months underway, is we're rebuilding all our blocks and all the core WordPress blocks to be.
We're just building our own. And this lets us create a very what you see is what you get experience for the newsletter. So as a past customer of Newsletter Glue, you'll know that sometimes our styling clashes with the site theme styling. And you kind of have to mentally ignore that and know that the email is going to look different from what you see in the block editor when you're typing at the time.
And I've always disliked that.
We're now, I think, like four or five months into this project of rebuilding. So we have like our own text blocks, our own heading block, our own image blocks, our own columns. Everything is like we've rebuilt it from scratch and it's so much better now. Yeah, full control.
It's exactly what you see is what you get. We've also built mobile controls into it, which I've literally been waiting since the start of Gutenberg for that to happen. And they said that they're never going to do that. But newsletters work differently, right? You need the desktop and the mobile version.
[00:52:19] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:52:20] Speaker B: And so we've built the mobile controls in now as well. So that's really cool.
So we're excited to launch that. It's very scary because it's going to break a lot of things because people have to basically just rebuild their entire templates to use the new blocks. The old blocks will still be supported in that they don't break visually on the front end, but then you can't edit them anymore. So everyone just has to move. So that's going to be very painful.
So that's the first big thing that we are building. And that's going to be Newsletter Glue version three, just because it's such a big change. And then the second thing, which and also that's going to reduce our support a lot, which I'm excited about.
[00:53:08] Speaker A: I get that.
[00:53:10] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's a big change. And then the second big change, which is more valuable to customers, is going to be multiple newsletters. And this is more kind of like looking at newsletter production from first principles kind of a thing. So something that's always irritated me a little bit about email service providers is that email campaigns are there's only one.
I'm not sure how it takes with it. It's just one folder. It's just linear. Even if you've got five different newsletters, when you log into MailChimp or ActiveCampaign or send them Blue or whatever, it's just that one thing, right? But actually newsletters are not like that. There might be like five different brands and under each different brand there might be one or two different newsletters. And so we want to create that experience for people inside of WordPress and that works a lot more. Kind of like posts with different categories, kind of no, actually, let's not below that. It's not really like that. But basically we want to be able to allow if I'm the writer and the editor for newsletter A, then we just look at newsletter A and we can create the brand from scratch for newsletter A. We can look at only the newsletters from Newsletter A, and then likewise for Newsletter Bcde.
And I think that's going to be a really cool, very advanced experience for Advanced Newsrooms, and I'm really excited to launch that.
[00:54:51] Speaker A: That sounds cool. That really sounds cool. Because you're essentially segmenting the one experience into multiple experiences.
[00:54:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
And I it think more directly reflects how people are working, actually. So it's like frustrating to me.
[00:55:11] Speaker A: Yeah. This is something you learned during interviews, I presume.
[00:55:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Talking to customers, seeing how they work.
[00:55:20] Speaker A: I get that makes sense.
I said, that's my last question. But I know if I'm sure if I give it time, there will be more questions. But I'm in thinking mode now in terms of that's interesting.
Interesting for me, coming from an enterprise background, I know these types of things are like they'll never really say it unless you ask them, but these are exactly the types of solutions that larger companies are looking for because it takes away pain points. Right. So you solve the problem of them having to go into a complex environment, doing something relatively straightforward. Because I don't think I know any email provider that just works other than I probably convert. Kit is the one that stands out to me. It's the one I'm using now also. But the rest is just clunky as hell.
And I'm a technical savvy user. Right. So that's saying something in of itself. But to then solve that problem for the crowd, that is definitely not in the very technical mindset. Yeah, I think that's a smart move. I like it.
Yeah, you're welcome. And I also want to thank you for appearing on the podcast. Has been my pleasure having you on. I've learned a great deal.
Yeah. Thank you so much.
[00:56:59] Speaker B: Thanks, Franklin. It's been great having here, and you're a great host.
[00:57:03] Speaker A: Well, thank.
