Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to within WordPress, and with us today is Mark Wisgaard. Welcome, Mark.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Hey, Remkus. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Lovely to have you.
We've spoken before, even in this digital version, so I know who you are, what you do, what you have.
Please introduce yourself.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Mark Westgard. I'm the founder of WS form, which is a WordPress form plugin. And I've been in the WordPress space, I want to say, roughly 10 years. I come from an agency background, so I've had actually had an agency since 1996 that shows my age as Remkus waves.
So, yeah, so I've actually transitioned from agency to production. I've had products in the past, but this is my first WordPress plugin and thoroughly enjoying it.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: This is your first. That. I mean, my immediate thought is, okay, what is going to be your second? Also? How long has this been your first? For 10 years now?
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Yeah, we've had WS form for about, I want to say seven years. I've been developing in WordPress for longer than that. But yeah, I had the plugin for about six, seven years now. I think we soft launched it in November 2018, so. So, yeah, almost seven years.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, 2018. Trying to think what I. What was I doing in WordPress? I think I worked at Yoast at the time.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: We did it at our first WordCamp. It was in Dallas Fort Worth.
And yeah, we just did a small one just to kind of test the water and decided after that, yeah, let's go for it. So it's been a while. Been a while.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: Was it intentional?
Was it intentional to go from an agency to a product?
[00:01:56] Speaker B: So I used to have a licensed product called WS Form. Sorry, Wed simple was the product. It was a wedding product for doing wedding websites and wedding planning, which I licensed to a little company called Conde Nast to do Vanity Fair magazine. But they also had Bride magazine, so they white labeled it. And it was very lucrative for a while. And then Pinterest came out and killed the bridal magazine market completely.
Literally. Yeah, yeah. Within a week, I lost three major clients. And because brides were no longer buying bridal magazines, they were just going online and looking at pictures and, you know, and here we are nowadays with social media.
It was actually a project that was only supposed to last about three years, but it actually went on for about six.
And once I wound that down, I carried on with my agency business and really wanted to get back into that because I kind of liked waking up to money in the bank. Without doing much.
It was a.
[00:02:53] Speaker A: Who doesn't?
[00:02:56] Speaker B: I mean to be fair, it was, it was two, three years of development to get it to that point. But when you get to that point it's nice, right, to have a little bit of passive income.
So I at the time had an agency in New Orleans and went to the team and said, look, I want to build something. Tell me what your pain points are with building websites. Not just WordPress, but just with websites in general and forms was pretty high up there on the agenda at the time. It was kind of frustrating having to install so many different plugins to get forms to do what they want. There was a lot of custom code coding going on. Styling was an issue, responsiveness was an issue.
And so took the crazy decision to build a form plugin.
So take about a year to get the initial product put together and have not stopped developing it since. So it's what we thought was going to be.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: I was going to say what, what I initially thought was going to be like a six month development project has never ended so.
But ye enjoy it.
[00:04:03] Speaker A: Is the, like when you've t, when you've tasted the, the product side of things is, is that the main driver then like you said, you, you like the, the more casual money in the bank, obviously.
And we all know it's not an overnight success. It's an overnight success of three years, four years, seven years, whatever.
[00:04:24] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: But the is, is it the, the whole, I don't know, is it, is it combined with the feeling of if I have an agency, I have a lot of clients that are as a whole, let's say you have 20, 30 clients, they're, they weigh much heavier on your load, your workload.
Is that a thing that is part of this, this wanting to do more products or.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I'm trying to figure.
[00:04:59] Speaker A: Out the motivation because it's a very different type of world.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: Very different type of world. Yeah, you're right. And that was part of it. I had been building websites at the time for about 24 years. 23, 24 years. I was kind of burnt out on building websites and was also starting to see that the web industry wasn't what it was back in, you know, the 90s and the 2000s.
We used to charge an immense amount, I mean six figure sums for building websites for companies and that was slowly dwindling.
I was seeing that, I mean as you've seen recently with like the advent of AI, that was obviously wasn't a deciding factor. But we're getting to a point now where building a website is getting easier and easier for just a regular end user.
[00:05:48] Speaker A: Very much so.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: So there was a little bit of that. You know, we've seen changes in the industry. I also having an agency, I didn't really have an asset. It was finding work, doing the work and then launching it and then finding another project. We did have maintenance going on, but it was a lot of sales trying to find these. And really what I was doing was finding work for my staff all the time. And I wasn't doing what I enjoy doing, which was development work.
So being able to work on this kind of got me back in where I'm passionate, which is basically encoding. I mean, I'm a developer, I'm not really a marketer or anything like that, but so it was, it was partly that. It was also just having more of a stable income.
Now that doesn't come easy as, you know, it's taken years and years and years to build recurring revenue with a WordPress plugin. It's been a completely different industry really for me.
Jumping into it and learning how to do it really. I mean, probably 75% of the time I'm just a support company now because it's just answering those support tickets and helping people out and not doing so much development.
[00:06:57] Speaker A: Is that a good warning for anybody wanting to jump in the product?
[00:07:00] Speaker B: I think you'll be doing coding all the time because you want lots of support on the whole. I mean, the customers are just great. I prefer working with my customers in WS form than I do some of the clients I had in the past.
I've still got some great clients I do actually work with, but it's. Yeah, so that, yeah, it's been, you know, stability. It's been just changes in the industry. It's been wanting, almost wanting a change of career, really having something new and exciting to focus on. And I felt that in the past I was building cool stuff for other people. And I'm sitting there thinking, hang on a minute, I should be building something for myself because I can do this.
So that was a. Another deciding factor as well. So.
But just one of the kind of unexpected outcomes has just been the joy I get from the WordPress community. Really. It's been absolutely fantastic meeting everybody in the community and being a part of it. And I really enjoy that part of it as well. So I wake up happier than I did six years ago, I'll put it that way.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: Well, I'll tell you, that's one of the biggest if not the biggest drivers for anything that, you know, as we mentioned before we hit record, I'm in the middle of a transition myself.
I have a sas. Scanfully. Yeah, I'm doing, switching to content in various forms. Much more to the point where I now have a very different flow of the day than I did two years ago. Yeah. And I still like doing some agency stuff. I just don't like the small stuff anymore. Like, yeah, that doesn't give me joy. And this gives me joy waking up in the morning going like, hey, I'm having fun tackling this thing. Because it's not a hit and run thing. It's. There's a couple of days of me working on this, thinking that over, bouncing it off of other people feedback, all that. So much more fun.
[00:09:07] Speaker B: I totally agree. And no disrespect to my past clients, but some of them were a pain to work with. I mean they were hard work and particularly the smaller clients because they are very cost conscious. Right. They want to make sure every, every cent, every penny counts and it was affecting my mental health and I, it took me a long time to realize that. But I am a lot more relaxed now and a lot happier. So.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: Well, I think that is, that is a good, a good thing for people to start thinking about because there are so many options inside this, this industry that we work in that you are most certainly not limited to whatever it is you're doing now. There's versions of what you do and if you want to just develop and, and still do development and not work with a product, you can still do a very different version of what you are doing right now. Yep.
I see some of them, some, some people, I see them move much more into the documentation side of things. I see others way more in the teaching side and doing their main work on the side still. I mean, this is two. But you know, if we start listing all the different options we have, the industry is huge, open and wide.
[00:10:23] Speaker B: Huge. Absolutely.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: So much just pick and slowly but surely transition your way into it.
[00:10:29] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean my agency before me, we did pretty much everything. Custom development, we did website development, we did marketing. There's so many different parts to it and.
But yeah, and even with the advent of AI, there's so much cool stuff that you can do using those tools. And I think people have got to adapt obviously to use the tools that are out there. It doesn't mean the end of our industry by any means. There's always going to be stuff that we can do and there are people out there that are still happy. A lot of new people getting into web development.
There's always going to be big companies out there that don't want to click a button on AI and have their website built. They're very conscious about styling and style guides and stuff like that.
[00:11:16] Speaker A: I think the.
So I would say in the last 10 episodes, AI is every single time is a version of a topic we talk about because it's so omnipresent now. You just cannot escape its impact on.
And I have a very diverse crowd sitting, I'm going to say sitting across of me, but virtually.
But every single one of them sees, not only sees the effects, but has to adjust their sails and find this new wind because it's coming from a different direction. It's still pushing and it's still. But you know, for some of us it's wild what the differences are and how it has enriched the.
[00:12:06] Speaker B: Or.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: Or just flat out you have to do like not a 180, but you certainly have to do like a 45, 75 degree kind of pivot in the. Oh wait, there's a few more things to my availability now. I might as well.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:22] Speaker A: And some of them are even just, you know, finding AI to be the thing and just totally, totally pivot. I find that fascinating. But AI, you cannot.
There's no version of you in this world of web development where AI does not have a strong footholding.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: Yeah. And if you're, if you're not taking advantage of it, you're gonna, you're gonna lack, you're gonna fall behind.
Yeah. You've got to take advantage of it. And, and as it, you know, I still feel like there's a period of adoption with AI. There's some people that still haven't played around with it, but as, as more and more people adopt it, then it's more and more important for you to be ahead of them. Learn your prompts. It's what you've got to.
You know, they're actually employing prompt engineers, you know.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: Yeah. I remember that in, in when Chat GPT GPT came out, the, the rage was all you. Everybody's going to become prompt engineers and this and this and that. No, but everybody should start learning prompt engineering. Yes.
There's no escaping.
I had a client who was hitting a wall in terms of finding some more creative ways of doing something with his product and I was building a special landing page for him. So I was like, what is your difficulty here? And he goes like, look man, I'm just running out of Ideas, I just, I just don't know. And I go, okay, can, can you like type it out what you want and how you would ask the AI? Because he, he said he'd use the AI. Like, okay. So he, he, he sent me his prompt and I said, I'm gonna call you back in about 15.
I just looked at the prompt and I went like, okay, I know the site. I know he wants this and he want that. Made a whole list. And I, I wrote like a prompt that was like six, seven times longer.
[00:14:18] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:19] Speaker A: Because he did have full paragraph. That was good.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:21] Speaker A: But it just, there was no direction. I sent it back to him and I said, why don't you enter this and see what happens?
And he's just like, I hear him on the phone and he just goes silent.
And he's like, is the AI, Is there a hiccup with the AI? He goes like, no, man, I'm just looking at all the wonderful examples of stuff I can use. Immediately I go, like me. I said, it's not me, it's you, but it's me thinking about how you really should have asked the question. And I was like, yeah, man, I got it now. I got it.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: Talk to it like a 6 year old.
[00:14:53] Speaker A: I mean, I mean, it's a good client.
I can do this in half. Jest. So he gets it right. But the whole idea is that you just become so much more descriptive in what you want, what you don't want, how you want it, things you want it to take into account, things you absolutely want to be ignored. The style, the format, all of these things. If you don't address it, it's just going to assume something.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: You got to stop it, got to stop it hallucinating as well. That's my, my biggest worry with people using it for coding is just the hallucination that comes out of it and the number of times I've asked it to write some code.
I just, I recently launched a new styler for WS form, which makes it super easy to, you know, style everything. And I wanted some routines for converting color from like RGB to HSLA and things like that. Yeah, I thought, I'm not going to sit here and write that myself. I'm going to get ChatGPT to, to write it, and out came some code.
And I said, you can write that a lot more efficiently. And he goes, oh, yeah, I'm sorry, I can. And I'm like, well, why don't you just do that in the first place.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: You know, because you didn't Prompt it, Mark.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: I know. Yeah, I know. Yeah. But it's. And sometimes it just comes out with absolute rubbish and you have to correct it. But the. But I can do that because I know what it should look like. And it's the people that don't know what it looks like is what's concerning.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: Exactly.
But context.
Oh, just look at 18 months ago with what it looked like and what we have now. Yeah, it's wild. Certainly in the last month.
And for those of you listening, this is April 2025.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:16:36] Speaker A: But. But yeah, it's wild.
I. I have a question. When you, when you picked the I. Well, when you revisited the idea like, look, I really want to get back into products and you asked for what are your pain points? Somebody said forms. Yeah, A few more set forms and you were starting to form an idea that you wanted to do. Forms, no pun intended, that just flow off the top of my dome.
[00:17:05] Speaker B: I need you in my marketing department.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: I am for hire, I'll have you know.
I'm sure you did a market research thing here. I'm sure you've looked around.
[00:17:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:22] Speaker A: I'm sure you've seen the, the forms that are out there.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
We use your day to day.
[00:17:31] Speaker A: Oh, there you go. Yeah, some of them even six, seven years ago were quite mature and complete already. And yet you said, now hold on, I'm gonna do this. And this is why?
[00:17:44] Speaker B: Yeah, you want to know why?
[00:17:47] Speaker A: Yes, please.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: Like I said earlier on, we just saw some weaknesses there that we could address and fix. So one example, simple example is responsiveness on forms. So we, when we were, I mean this is back seven or eight years, we were very concerned about making sure that websites worked well on mobile devices and tablets, different device sizes. And doing that with the plugins that were available at the time was a challenge. It was a case of adding custom classes and building your own breakpoints and things like that.
So from day one we've had a breakpoint selector in WS form that lets you edit your form at different breakpoints so you can develop a different layout for mobile than you have for tablet, than you have for desktop. And that's all built in with no code, so it's all drag and drop.
So that was important to us. We wanted to include a lot more functionality in the product so you didn't have to go and buy additional add ons to get it to do things. Simple example is like a signature field or repeaters or things like that.
So we found that there was just a Lot of custom code that we had to write to get it to do things and we wanted to try and reduce the need for that. We also found a lot of neglect for the actual HTML5 spec for forms as well. So there are some really cool attributes that can be used, like things like auto complete or setting the keyboard on a mobile device. And, and we've basically taken every attribute for every field type that's in the HTML5 spec and made it available as a setting so you can actually modify that.
I actually saw the other day on a Facebook group that someone wrote, I think WS Forms, the only one that's actually read the HTML5 spec for forms because you've got all the attributes in there and you can actually change those, which I'm sure is not the case, but we've made those available as settings.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: That you can adjust and it's a huge compliment that that's been seen also.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: Mm. Yeah. And trying to think of some of. There's so much stuff that we do with the product. I mean, our post management add on is actually one of the most popular add ons that we have. And that's an add on that enables you to create a post or edit a post from a form. So let's say you wanted to create a website where someone can submit something for sale like a classified ad or something like that.
We have really, really deep integration with acf, acpt, PO toolset, Jet Engine, I mean all the big custom field plugins out there and you can literally just choose a custom post type, hit a template which is the custom post type itself, and it'll build a form for you.
So one of the things, one of our aims has been to reduce the amount of time it takes to build complex website complex forms.
So in the past, if you wanted to integrate in like you build a form to create a post or maybe hook up with mailchimp or whatever integration, you had to build the form form, map everything manually, test it, which meant filling the form out manually and hitting submit each time. And that took time. And so we, we have things like our debug console, which is unique to WS form, where you can just hit the populate button and it fills a form out for you in one click. So all the fields get filled out, you just hit populate.
[00:21:15] Speaker A: That's a really smart one.
[00:21:16] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the first thing we built because we knew we'd be testing a lot of forms, so we didn't want to have to fill out those forms every time. So. Yeah, and that Debug console also shows you debug about the form, so you can see what's going on behind the scenes. If you're integrating in with third parties, you can actually see the post request of those third parties. So again, we've tried to make debugging really easy and just really speed up the whole process of building forms overall.
So that was another big thing for us.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: So not only did you see certain things wanting, you. Excuse me, you wanted to see things handled differently.
You also included way more in the default solution, like the out of the box. Yeah, what's the risk there? Because in terms, if you look at themes, for instance, the one thing you never want a theme to do is be all things.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Yeah. Yep. So what we've done is how did you. Well, we dynamically in queue what you use, so you don't have to use every feature in WS form. And if you don't use them, we don't load the code for it on the front end necessarily.
So our CSS, our JavaScript is all dynamically in queue. So for example, if you have a select field with a certain feature on it, we'll queue up the CSS and the JavaScript that's needed for that particular field type. If you don't have it, we don't even include it.
So we've done a lot on performance as well to try and make sure that the forms load quickly. Just one simple example is we noticed that when the forms were being loaded on the front end of the site with some form plugins, it was literally reading in every field as a record from the database. So it's reading the field, it's reading all the metadata for that field and those are all database requests. Right. So that can slow your server down.
So we actually, we compile our forms down to a single JSON packet that gets loaded. So when they load on the front end, it's very, very quick. It's just one database request to get all that data.
We also render on the client side. So we tested WS form with some of my clients. I used to work with a client that was selling millions of dollars of product every month.
A lot of traffic. And so we actually moved all of our rendering on the client side, which makes the server load a lot less as well. So there's just, there's a lot of things that we've done to, to really try and improve the performance of, of the product.
But it, you know, it really, it really was an opportunity to build a new form product from the ground up and, and try and do things as best we can across the board. So, yeah, it's, it's that there's.
There's tons of other features in there that we don't have time to talk about, but there's just, just things that take, oh, wait, three hours.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: I mean.
[00:24:13] Speaker B: We'Re doing in separate parts.
[00:24:16] Speaker A: Yeah. This is part one.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:18] Speaker A: I don't know why I'm raising two fingers when I say part one, but here we go. This is part one.
No, I mean, I think that's wonderful that that's very much part of your.
We're building in an optimized form and it's not an afterthought of. Okay, now we have it. Let's. Let's try and figure out how to. How to make it fast again.
I've given a few talks now at workcamps where I specifically talk about. Instead of just building it as you hear or get the next briefing, and you start building the site and at the end you go like, let me try and slap on a performance solution. And everything is fast. Now, first of all, it's not caching, and all that sort of stuff does not make your site faster. It caches it, period.
So what you should be doing is what is your foundation? What do you use as a base to create a website? And what's in that base is as fast as lean and mean as possible. That's your base. That means including your form, including your transactional email, everything service.
It means which. Which theme are you using, which. With patterns. And, you know, I don't care if that's a page builder, full site editor, or whatever it is. You find your fastest version and that's your foundation. You work from that. And it sounds like that's very much part of your philosophy as well.
[00:25:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, we come from developing websites. You know, we didn't come into this fresh with an idea.
We came into a very, very saturated marketplace, that's for sure.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
This is why I jestingly said, look, forms wasn't the most logical.
I don't know how many forms there are, but I'm sure It's more than 30.
[00:26:14] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, more than 40 if you.
[00:26:17] Speaker A: Start looking at them.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: Yeah, probably 10, 15 main ones. But there are so many. There's a lot of attempts out there, you know, where people have tried to do it. And marketing a product like that with such a saturated market is, Is a challenge, for sure.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: It's been, how have you done it? How have you. How. How have you reached critical mass?
[00:26:40] Speaker B: I'VE done it through relationships in the WordPress community.
So I didn't go out and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing.
I believe in word of mouth is the best form of marketing. If I can get somebody to say, use WS form because I enjoy it and I think it's a good product, then if they've got an audience, that's a good way of doing it. It's kind of. So when I had that wedding business I was talking to you about earlier on, we originally were going to go direct to consumer and talk about saturated market. The bridal market is horrendous and we, we spend.
[00:27:16] Speaker A: I wouldn't have not. I wouldn't know. It's been a while.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: We. We did drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing with that product and we could not get it to penetrate the market. It was. It's too big.
It's. It's like going out and trying to launch a new Coca Cola. You know, it's. It's very, very difficult.
So what I did is I white labeled it and I went to the companies that have the audience out there, like Conde Nast, who have bridal magazines, and they became my customer and they then promoted it to their end users. So I didn't do the marketing. So kind of a similar approach with WS form, but it's really been built through genuine relationships and I'm pleased to say Friendships in the WordPress community with people that want to talk about product, want to talk about good product.
And there is, there are some people out there that will do a blog post about it for 400 bucks or whatever. There are some other people out there who are very conscious about what products they talk about and you can't just send them a free version as Remkas waves again.
But I think that's great. I think those. I found that those types of people have an audience that has huge respect in them in what they talk about and what they recommend.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: And for the record, we're not including Nathan Wrigley in this bracket here. Right.
[00:28:50] Speaker B: Nathan's just a great friend.
I love Nathan.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: Yeah, so do I.
[00:28:56] Speaker B: So, yeah. So it's, it's. But the thing is the.
I've done a lot of work on the WordPress community and I've sponsored WordCamps and I've tried to give back as much as I can as a small business. I've given back a lot financially back in terms of sponsorship and stuff like that, which I enjoy doing. But there's only so much audience there with Wordcamp you're really hitting the apex of users with WordCamps. I mean, there is a huge WordPress community out there. I wouldn't call it community. They're just users who don't care about the community.
[00:29:29] Speaker A: Community, exactly. I. I've had this discussion many, many times where people go like, no, but everybody's there. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You have no idea.
I'm not going to mention who, but I had a very vivid conversation with this in work camp Europe in Berlin. What is. What is that, 2019?
[00:29:52] Speaker B: Yeah. That was the first European one I did.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: They said.
That person said, listen, there's more than 3,000 people here. This is. This was called Apex, but this is the pinnacle. This is.
[00:30:04] Speaker B: This is.
[00:30:04] Speaker A: Everybody's here like, no, no, no, no, no.
This is a. Is a drop in terms of.
And he goes like, well, maybe there's more users. No, no, no, hold on, hold on. Developers who work with WordPress every single day, who build the. The coolest shit you've ever heard of.
And you've never met them, you don't know their projects, you've never seen their voices, Heard their voices, seen their names. You have no idea. And it's a vast majority out there.
[00:30:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:30:35] Speaker A: And I can say this because I do consultancy for companies. How to become better and more professional. With WordPress, it's Word of mouth. It's not published anywhere. I guess I'm publishing it right now. Hello.
But I come and I get to go inside companies that are just 15, 20 people working with WordPress. 80% just WordPress. And you've never seen them?
[00:31:04] Speaker B: No, you'll never hear about them.
[00:31:05] Speaker A: They lurk a little bit here and there, but you'll never see them. And there's so many. There's just so many. So, yes, there is a community, but what we call the community. And when I say we, I mean you and I, as we are going to work camps and events related to that.
It's just.
[00:31:24] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, there are customers that I will never interact with. They just buy the product. I don't even see the transaction. And they're using it for an agency. And sometimes I'll get a support ticket and I'll take a look at their account just to see what they're up to and crap.
[00:31:41] Speaker A: 300 sites in there.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: 300 sites on the license? Yeah, Literally. I mean, it's amazing.
So, yeah, it's. There's definitely. There's a huge world out there. That's the hardest part to market, to That's. They're the hard ones to get because I can reach people through the. Through WordCamp. I can reach people through influencers within the WordPress space. But those quiet ones that just kind of get on with it and don't really get involved with Twitter and Facebook and stuff like that and just get on with their job, those are the hard ones to reach.
So that's kind of where I'm at.
I make a healthy living from it. I'm happy. And the next step with growth is trying to reach those other people and trying to work out how to do that, which may involve a bit of paid marketing, sadly, but there won't be as good conversion rates.
[00:32:37] Speaker A: No. But I do think it is the direction that you need to go. Because if you start looking into where are they?
They are online, they do read stuff. They're just not active. They're either lurking or just haphazardly just clicking and checking every now and then.
I can see it in the subscribers to my newsletters.
I see all these, you know, the emails. Every single email address that subscribes, I actually see because I want. First, I just want to who and what. Yeah.
[00:33:10] Speaker B: When I subscribe.
[00:33:12] Speaker A: Yeah. And you see the domain extension of what they're using, and they go like, oh, let me check out that site.
And nine out of 10 times, it's a company I've never heard of.
[00:33:22] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:33:23] Speaker A: And I go, like, go figure.
The other day, it was a company 15 km away from where I live.
[00:33:29] Speaker B: Oh, well.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: And they. And they probably have no clue.
[00:33:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And yeah.
[00:33:35] Speaker A: And I go.
And I go like, this is exactly the crowd that is out there that I want to reach, but I don't know how to reach them.
[00:33:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:46] Speaker A: So I actually sent them an email, like, just curious, how do you. How do you find. How did you find.
Newsletter?
[00:33:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:52] Speaker A: You know, I sent out an automated email asking the same thing, but I followed up with, dude, I have to know, how did you find me?
[00:34:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: And it was like somebody referred me and okay, cool, there you go.
[00:34:05] Speaker B: Word of mouth.
[00:34:06] Speaker A: But. But.
So that's. So it is the word of mouth. But I. It did. Did part of me asking that was also trying to figure out, so where did you find me? Where should I be more active? And then a lot of cases, the answers come back to, I need to start proper advertising.
Boring.
Annoying.
[00:34:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:29] Speaker A: But it works in the sense of getting out of, you know, the. This little bubble and reaching people who you would never reach. So LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups.
X. X. Is there's so many people on X.
Yeah.
And I've, I've done a few experiments with, with advertising on X. I've done two different kinds and kind of see what, what happens, what the reaches and whatnot. And it's, it's a decent conversion. I wasn't unhappy.
But when I share that with somebody who was doing advertising for a living, they said, you do, dude, what are you even doing on X? Like go to, go to LinkedIn, like hardcore, man. I go, okay, I'll get to it.
But you know, we often wonder where they are, but they are using the Internet just as much as we are.
They just don't connect.
[00:35:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I totally agree. And what's also been interesting for me was when I first started the product, I was pushing that WS form brand all the time. That's what I was pushing and that was the wrong thing for me to do.
It was the personal brand that people were interested in and that came through on handling support tickets as well. So I would, I still do. I try with every support ticket to answer it thoroughly, be friendly, give them a little bit extra if I can, and that in turn people will come back to me and say, hey, thank you for your help. Can I do a review for you somewhere? Or, you know, I'm going to recommend you to my friends. And that's, I think the support part of it has been massively part of the growth that I've had as well, has been down to how that I respond to customers and just give them that personal touch. And the fact that they're, you know, talking to the person who actually developed it so they're, they know they're going to, you know, I'm going to understand what they need, I'm going to be able to look at their form and help them out with it.
Doing a lot of work on just the support platform I had the knowledge base and making support accessible from within the plugin itself has been another big thing.
[00:36:34] Speaker A: What are you using for that?
[00:36:36] Speaker B: So I use Zendesk as my support platform and within the actual plugin itself you can submit a support ticket. So I just have a form in there that goes to an endpoint that then pushes it through to Zendesk and from that they can click a checkbox and it will send me their form and their system info. And that makes it really easy for me to have a look at what they're currently doing and how we can help them out with it.
So a lot of my focus nowadays is on support, is on just improving that Support experience. And if I get a question more than once, I will write a knowledge base article about it so that I can refer to people to that or they'll find it by looking on the site. And also when they go to my support page and they start typing in a question, it analyzes what they're typing in and will fire back knowledge base articles immediately to them, which reduces my support load a bit. But it also means that the end user is getting the response they want straight away and not having to wait for me to get back to them. So, see, I think the whole support thing is part of marketing in a way, because I believe so you give that good experience, they're going to come back and they're going to talk about you to other people.
[00:37:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I do the same thing with every single question we get through our ScanFly support.
If it doesn't exist in any form, I will.
Sorry, I should probably say shape, because form is a different context now.
But if it doesn't exist, I create it and if it kind of exists, I add whatever needs to be added.
[00:38:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:14] Speaker A: And it's just fun to see. And today, literally today, I got a mention from WordPress.org where somebody linked to a documentation article that I wrote in our context.
[00:38:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:26] Speaker A: But not for our product.
But, you know, people find value in it because it's published, it's out there, it's being shared. And I go like, isn't that nice?
[00:38:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:35] Speaker A: All I did was thinking, this is not an answer I want to do again.
Let me make the answer in all scenarios complete and share that in our documentation. Link to it from the right place, reply to the person who asked the question about it. Wonderful. But, you know, there's a certain element of.
It's not pride, but it's like close to it. Like somebody thought what I was doing here was valuable because they shared it. I didn't ask them to do it, they shared it.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: Yeah. I'm certainly trying to write more contact that content that has more value beyond just WS Form. So actually, one of my most visited pages on the site, funnily enough, is a page with sample CSV files on it that you can download that contain things like countries and colors and industry codes and stuff like that. And I have a huge amount of traffic coming from this page. And, you know, so that's. I actually. I actually put a banner ad for WS form on that page because I felt like people were just going there, downloading it. And, you know, so I've actually marketed on my own Site. About my same. Same site.
[00:39:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it makes sense, right? And now that you say it, I probably. Well, my most visited page on my personal site is how to restart the camera in macOS.
[00:39:58] Speaker B: Oh, really?
[00:39:59] Speaker A: From the grand line.
[00:40:00] Speaker B: Yeah. It's funny how it just picks up stuff.
[00:40:03] Speaker A: Yeah. It bugged me that I couldn't find the answer. When I finally figured it out, I wrote out a how to like just for me and I published it on my own site, which is what I always do.
[00:40:11] Speaker B: So you can refer back to.
[00:40:14] Speaker A: Exactly. And I do. I Google my own name and I camera and then there it is.
[00:40:21] Speaker B: There it is. Yeah.
[00:40:22] Speaker A: And slowly over time, that became the most visited page on the my site. And it's. It's a damn shame it's not WordPress related advertising for what would have been good.
[00:40:31] Speaker B: You have to put ScanFly on there.
[00:40:36] Speaker A: There's still no direct link.
[00:40:40] Speaker B: Yeah. I've been trying to add pages about certain features in forms that people have a bit of difficulty with. So for example, regular expressions on. On for on field. So you know, you can use regular expressions to check if an email address has been entered correctly or if a URL's been entered correctly or maybe like an order code or something like that. So I've got a whole page with an example of regex expressions because those are always a pain to try and find.
So I've just made those available. So it's never ending the. The amount of stuff that you can put out there. I need to do more videos. What I need to do. That's what I'm guilty of. I need to do more videos tutorials.
[00:41:20] Speaker A: After my. So next week I fly out to the United States for. For press conf.
And I. I think I'll meet you there.
[00:41:30] Speaker B: You certainly will.
[00:41:32] Speaker A: Yeah. But when I return, I start recording videos as I've been preparing for the exact same reason. It's just the platform where you need to be.
[00:41:41] Speaker B: Yeah, totally agree.
[00:41:42] Speaker A: People look for solutions.
[00:41:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:45] Speaker A: I'm past 50, so. Meaning the people around me and older than me, they're not too trained to start looking at YouTube for information.
Everybody younger than me looks at YouTube first.
[00:41:56] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:41:57] Speaker A: Like.
[00:41:57] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:42:00] Speaker A: Who was it? I forgot who. But he said I needed to have a specific thing in plumbing. This, this. And then I go like, I don't. I'm already zoning out. I said, no, but listen, listen. This is super, super, super niche. Like random. Is it? I did one search on YouTube and somebody had a tutorial on it.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:17] Speaker A: Shaking camera, iPhone quality, all that Perfectly worked.
[00:42:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I was, that's. I had a light come on in my car about the suspension and I was like, right, I'm going to fix this myself. And it was the most random part. And I went on Google, typed it in and up it popped. And someone's written a whole video about how to replace this part.
[00:42:36] Speaker A: Exactly. I love that. I love that.
[00:42:38] Speaker B: Probably three views.
[00:42:42] Speaker A: You're number four, but you're winning. Number four.
[00:42:45] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:42:46] Speaker A: No, but video, video is, is where you need to be. And I think the whole clue is to write content, create content, whether that is a help doc or a video. But it's basically your.
The less selling you are, the more selling you are just being out there.
[00:43:05] Speaker B: Yeah, Just adding value. Adding value. Yeah.
[00:43:08] Speaker A: It's as simple as that.
[00:43:09] Speaker B: Talking about Nathan Wrigley, I did a video series with him about WS form and it's like a six, seven part series that we did about how to use the product and we've had such great feedback from that. You know, it's just him and I just bantering about the product, but there's people watch it and go, oh, I didn't realize it did that. I didn't realize it did that.
And, and then I've had other people just like, you know, Carl Van Dusen from the admin bar just did a 15 minute intro video to using the product and I was like, wow, this is, this is awesome. So I now feature that on pages and other people just doing tutorials about the product and. But these things, these things have taken time, you know, to get those relationships together and get people engaged in the product and do that kind of stuff and start building that, that community. I mean, that's one thing these other form plugins had over me was just the huge universe they had of people developing content for it and talking about it and it's taken time to do that, so.
And I'm a bootstrap business, you know, I didn't come with millions of dollars behind me. It was all done in my spare time. Much to my wife's dismay.
A lot of late night grin. Yeah.
[00:44:28] Speaker A: I love that word.
So. So if, you know, if the, if adding value is the thing.
And you've also mentioned that the vast majority of what you do is basically support.
I do assume you are still creating new code and adding features.
[00:44:53] Speaker B: Oh yeah, all the time. All the time.
And the product is very much steered by the customers. It's what they need. And what new features are out. We have 100 different integrations now.
And those are all from customers saying, hey, I want to hook this up to this. And then someone will say, oh yeah, yeah, I want that too. So if there's a demand there, we'll build it and that actually opens up. That's another kind of marketing area is when you build an integration with a third party, you can go to them and say, hey, we're hooked up with you now. And they want to talk about it.
One that was really interesting for me.
Typically I'll find the bigger the company, the less they want to do with you because they're just so huge.
It's usually the smaller ones that want to shout about it because they can see a bit of two way marketing going on. But I did one with WebEx, so it was actually pushing a message through to the WebEx chat client and they jumped on it. I mean they did blog posts about it and videos and I was amazed.
They were very proactive on their integration side of things.
So that could be another way if you are thinking about developing a plugin of sorts of if you can integrate your product with third parties, you can take advantage of their audience because they will probably talk about it.
[00:46:16] Speaker A: Well, not only are you solving the marketing problem, you're also solving the actual needs of the clients, which is, that's a win win. And if it indeed also flows back to you in any way, shape or form.
Yeah.
So what would you say?
And I'm sure there's, there's small features you add all the time left and right and improvements and all that.
Is there a thing you can share that's one of the biggest things you're working on?
Like do you have any of those working on currently or.
[00:46:52] Speaker B: Yeah, well, or just about.
I mean the styler was the last big thing that I did and, and that was needed because when we originally built WS form, we actually approached some people in the community and said, look, how should we do styling for a form? And it was use the customize feature in WordPress, which as you know now is pretty much confunct. You can't use it anymore.
So we needed a new way of starting forms and there was a lot of movement in the whole CSS space in terms of like CSS variables and new calculations stuff that you could do. And we wanted to take advantage of that. So that, that was, I mean that was a huge project to completely revamp that.
Some of the, I mean the other stuff that I've got coming up is going to be things like new payment integrations. We've Got some new integration stuff coming through. We've got some. Some more translation stuff is coming. So it's. It's all kind of the. Kind of the big buckets I've done. So I've got, you know, the form editors done, the. All the core field types are done, the styling's all there. So the main products there. It's really. I mean, I literally have over 400 feature requests from users and it's going to be a case of. Let's have a look at those and work out which ones.
[00:48:11] Speaker A: Do you have a voting system connected to that?
[00:48:13] Speaker B: We do, yeah. So there's a feature request page you can put a feature request in and if I approve it, it can then get votes. And it's a case of having a look at the top ones that are getting the votes and trying to implement something for that.
There's.
There's a lot of CRM requests. There's things like, you know, Zapier and make and stuff like other platforms like that that we want to integrate in with. Just really opening the product up to more audience, really. Because when I first started working in the plugin space, I spoke to somebody, I won't say who it was, and he was all about, don't talk about functionality. Functionality is not going to get you where you need to be. And that couldn't be further from the truth with a form plugin. It's. For us, it's been, if we don't have the integration that a customer needs, they're going to go elsewhere. So, yeah, for sure. And building a lot of these integrations don't really take that long to build. It might take a couple of days because we've got a template for a lot of these.
So adding integrations is just an easy way of expanding the capabilities of the product. It's just a case of picking the right ones and not going too niche on those.
[00:49:30] Speaker A: Is there a mix?
Is everything predetermined by the requests that are made, or do you have your own list of things you want to add? I mean, obviously there's bug fixes and things of that nature, but.
[00:49:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:49:42] Speaker A: Do you come up with own ideas as well still, or.
[00:49:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:49:46] Speaker A: Is it.
[00:49:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, 100% it is a mix.
Yeah. I saw that there were laws coming in that required certification of form submissions, so did some research into that, for example, and we've launched some integrations with companies that will actually track.
It's actually quite cool the way it works. As you're filling the form out, it's actually recording the screen and recording somebody clicking and giving consent for something.
So consent certification is something we added recently.
New spam.
[00:50:24] Speaker A: Can you explain.
Oh, can you explain a little deeper there? Because.
[00:50:28] Speaker B: Yeah, so basically what it is, let's say that you've got a checkbox on your form that needs to be checked in order for a submission to go through.
And that's a legally binding check that in the past you would just have had in a database. It just says, yeah, they've clicked that box. But what this does is the minute you start interacting with the form on the page, it's basically recording that screen and it records the time, it records your mouse movements and actually records you going with the mouse and going click or tapping on a mobile device and tapping on that.
[00:51:02] Speaker A: That.
[00:51:03] Speaker B: And then what it does is it generates a certificate and that certificate is basically an id.
And you can, you can put that ID into their platform and it will then replay the full form session showing what they did with that form. So you can see them fitting their, their name out and then hitting the checkbox.
[00:51:21] Speaker A: And everything else I post and backspace and everything.
[00:51:24] Speaker B: Yeah, everything. And, and that is now coming into law for some stuff.
You, you need to have that on your website. So, yeah, so just stuff like that. I mean, the, the, the Internet world is just moving constantly. There are new ways of doing. I mean, like, for example, open AI integration.
You can build forms by just typing in what you want. You can build calculators by just typing in what you want.
People want to see AI because they want it. They're now getting used to typing in what they want.
[00:51:58] Speaker A: Yeah, they're primed.
[00:51:59] Speaker B: They're primed and ready to go. They don't, they don't want to have to build a form.
[00:52:03] Speaker A: Mark, why don't you have AI yet?
It's tedious.
[00:52:07] Speaker B: Even if they don't use it, they still want it. Right?
[00:52:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:52:11] Speaker B: You can't buy a washing machine without it being connected to AI nowadays.
[00:52:14] Speaker A: Oh, don't get me started on that one.
[00:52:18] Speaker B: Let's get you started on.
[00:52:20] Speaker A: I have a washing machine that does not want to do what it's supposed to do. Just wash.
It stops because whatever input it thinks it didn't have.
Like, okay, I'm waiting now. No, no, just continue. Yeah, like, give me old tech, please.
[00:52:34] Speaker B: Yeah, ours broke and the new one we bought has an AI setting on it. And I'm like.
[00:52:41] Speaker A: Did you really do anything?
No, no. Again, don't get me started on that.
I have a very low threshold controlled for things that are supposed to just work.
[00:52:54] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:52:54] Speaker A: Then don't like.
[00:52:55] Speaker B: Yeah. Too complicated.
[00:52:57] Speaker A: I know.
[00:52:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
Even cars are too complicated nowadays.
[00:53:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:53:06] Speaker B: Well, I know you. I know you like a barn in a car.
[00:53:10] Speaker A: I. I hold up now.
No, I mean, the. The youngest car that I have is from 2013.
[00:53:24] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:53:25] Speaker A: And I'm very reluctant to buy anything newer.
[00:53:28] Speaker B: Right.
[00:53:28] Speaker A: Because there's stuff in there now that I don't really like.
[00:53:34] Speaker B: What's an example of something that you don't like?
[00:53:38] Speaker A: So there is.
There's software in there that does more than just motor management.
And, like, the thing I'll enjoy is Mercedes Benz calls it distronic. I think it's adaptive cruise control. I think I like that. But I actually think it's doing too much because it takes away my thinking.
And in general, I don't like that. So lane control, steering vibration, all that sort of stuff. So.
[00:54:10] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:54:10] Speaker A: I'm sure it saves one person annually. Per million, maybe, whatever. Per million.
[00:54:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:54:18] Speaker A: I don't want it. I don't need it. I don't care for it.
[00:54:21] Speaker B: Yeah. My. We bought a new car this year after many years, and the amount of stuff it has on it that I don't. I mean, it literally has a Netflix icon on.
On the dash, and I'm like, I don't need Netflix in my car.
[00:54:39] Speaker A: Never.
[00:54:40] Speaker B: And yeah, it does so much stuff to.
It has like, the parking assist on it. And.
And I'm like, I don't. Who presses a button to park their car? I mean, I mean, mine has learned.
[00:54:54] Speaker A: To park, but, yeah, I've never used it. I don't even know how to engage it. Yeah, I know how to. I know how. I know to how a park.
[00:55:01] Speaker B: So you can have too many features in a product.
[00:55:05] Speaker A: Yeah, you can. Yeah.
On that bombshell, I have one last question for you.
[00:55:13] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:55:16] Speaker A: What is the WS stand for?
[00:55:18] Speaker B: It stands for Westgard Solutions, which is the name of my agency. And when we started building it, we just did.
We thought, let's just call it WS form for now. And then it never changed. So we never. We never came up with a brand or a fluffy character for it. So, yeah, it just kind of stuck. Some people think I'm trying to look like other brands, but I'm really not. It's genuinely. Westguard Solutions is where it came from.
[00:55:46] Speaker A: I like it. I like it. It's the. It's the name that stuck.
[00:55:50] Speaker B: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And people have kind of just. No one's ever complained about it, so I just kept it and so, I.
[00:55:58] Speaker A: Mean, why would they. But, yeah, I think. I think those things are the funny ones where.
Let me just do this temporary thing.
Somebody. Somebody shared a song with me. My brother. My brother said a song with me. Dude, did you know? And then there's a. There's a section in there where the singer goes and. And I go, yeah, yeah. Everybody sings along. Did you know that was temporary?
Like, no. That's a signature part of that song. Do not tell me this is temporary.
[00:56:28] Speaker B: They just never filled that bit in.
[00:56:30] Speaker A: They never filled it in because it went. It felt smooth. So let's keep it in.
[00:56:35] Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah. I don't have any code like that. Thank you. So.
[00:56:39] Speaker A: Oh, good. Yeah.
[00:56:41] Speaker B: There's no comments that say to do. I don't think so.
[00:56:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
Well, we're going to check that now.
[00:56:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:56:49] Speaker A: Thank you so much, Mark. This is a fun conversation and I think your product is something people should definitely check out because.
Does a lot. And it does.
[00:57:02] Speaker B: It does. Well, a lot. A lot that I can't remember. It does, too, so. But yeah. Thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate it.
[00:57:08] Speaker A: You're most welcome.
[00:57:10] Speaker B: And I'll see you in a couple of weeks at press conference.
[00:57:13] Speaker A: You'll see. You'll see me soon enough.
[00:57:15] Speaker B: Absolutely.
