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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
It's the WP Minute Plus, your home for long form discussions with WordPress professionals and industry experts covering our favorite topic, WordPress. Be sure to follow us. Search for WP Minute in your favorite podcast app. Follow this podcast and our five minute weekly edition. Or head to the wpminute.com/ subscribe and join the newsletter.
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Speaker 1:And give your brand the boost it deserves. Hey, Adrian. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. I you know, so your Adrian Toby is your Toby is your last name.
Speaker 1:It's very close to Adrian Brody who's an actor and I just keep wanting to say it. So I might call you Adrian Brody later on in the episode but thanks for hanging out today.
Speaker 2:I'll give you in advance.
Speaker 1:Thanks. You're the founder of groundhog.io. Groundhog marketing automation and CRM for serious agencies and small businesses using WordPress. I remember seeing you come onto the scene six years ago, seven? Close five years ago.
Speaker 1:Five years ago.
Speaker 2:Five years ago.
Speaker 1:It didn't start as a CRM. Did it start as something else?
Speaker 2:Well, my first foray into WordPress was with a plugin, product called FormLift, which I still actually have. It's not very big. It is specifically a form plugin for people that also use Infusionsoft, which is now called Keep, if anybody knows what that is. And I started that.
Speaker 1:I did not know that. Infusionsoft is now known as Keep?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's called Keep now. And then and then it's very confusing. So they rebranded to Keep, and then they have a product called KeepMax, which is basically Infusionsoft. And then Keep is like a simplified version of the old Infusionsoft.
Speaker 2:But back in, like, 2016, that was that was my deal. We were part Infusionsoft certified partners in the agency doing dollars for hours, And I ended up making up this product, this plugin called FormLift, which made Infusionsoft forms, which sucked with their styling and they I'm not sure if you ever used the product, but they weren't great. And it made them better and it made them work on WordPress because they didn't and it just made it a lot easier. And to this day, that product is still useful or formally just still useful because they haven't actually updated the four modules since then. Wow.
Speaker 1:It's amazing how a company that side I remember Infusionsoft as like, you know, everyone was using it back in, you know, at the height of Internet marketing when everyone was printing money with books and courses and all these things. I remember seeing Infusionsoft, working with Infusionsoft when I was running my agency for a couple of clients. Was like, This is the worst piece of software in the entire world. How do people keep using it? But it was like the only thing that did excellent really
Speaker 2:invented the whole drag and drop flowchart email drip thing. They were the first in apps.net.
Speaker 1:You saw that as you were building out your going from agency to product work and you saw that as an opportunity to say, let's take that crazy idea as a SaaS based business and push it into WordPress, right, and build Groundhog?
Speaker 2:Well, I've been doing Infusionsoft work for I I think, like, two years full time at that point. And I've been doing it longer than that part time. I was in school and I was doing that part time, and I ended up failing my first ever course in my life at the University of Toronto. CSE two sixty five, it was like big o notation and proofs and stuff, and that's just way beyond me, man. Like, I'm I'm a marketer, not a Right.
Speaker 2:Data scientist. Right? So I I ended up failing that course because I was actually working on FormLift when I should have been studying. And so, you know, doing school part time, I was looking at the math and I wouldn't graduate till 2024 when my original graduation date was supposed to be 2019. And so I ended up dropping out over the summer because I'm just like, I'm not there's no way I'm investing that much time in a piece of paper that I really don't care that much about.
Speaker 2:And so I had to, like, do something different. And it wasn't FormLift because the problem with going into like FormLift full time is, you know, it's a very specific and niche product. It's total market cap for users is just the maximum number of users that Keep could ever have or Infusionsoft rather, and the subset of those people that use WordPress as well. So that's not a great that's not a great business to scale and grow unless you wanted to just like compete with all the other form plugins which we have enough of those. I wasn't I wasn't gonna do that.
Speaker 1:Did you have that revelation while you were building it or did you come up with that, like, sentiment later on in in life?
Speaker 2:I came up with that that summer. I was like, well, what am I gonna do? I'm not going back to school, so and I'm and I'm tired of doing dollars for hours in the agency, so what am I gonna do instead? And I was like, well, was thinking about formulas, like, well, how far realistically can we take this? And it's not that far.
Speaker 2:Right? I think I think we're like doing like 6,000 a month with FormLift, and I was charging a lot for it for a WordPress plugin, like $50 a month. And it was like a WordPress plugin, but people who are paying Infusionsoft were like used to that, so they didn't care. They'll just pay Right? You couldn't probably you probably wouldn't be able to get away with that as, a regular form plugin.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Right? Because it was specific to Infusionsoft, I was able to charge that. But so it wasn't FormLift. I'm like, what else can we do? And there was a couple big gripes that I had with Infusionsofts.
Speaker 2:And the number one was that it was incredibly expensive for no good reason. Didn't love the the pricing scheme. The the success tax which we really position ourselves as like anti success tax which is the act of pricing based on metrics that don't really impact the value. So for example, we had a customer recently transition from HubSpot to Groundhog, and his monthly HubSpot bill was $70,000 a month. And he went to HubSpot after he already signed up with us and we're getting him migrated over.
Speaker 2:I went to HubSpot and it's like, I'm canceling. Because when you're paying that much, there's no cancel button.
Speaker 1:Right. Right.
Speaker 2:There's right. You gotta talk to somebody. You have to get on a phone call. Like, they're not gonna let you go that easy. So he got on the call to cancel, and they offered him to drop that by more than half to $30,000 a month arbitrarily.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And and I realized, like, it's just it doesn't matter. Like, the number of contacts that you have does not impact the services cost to deliver you support in most cases. Sure. You know, there's, like, high level support VIP people that you might end up paying for at some of these companies, but for like run of the mill marketing automation, like before you get to that enterprise level, it's all just arbitrary.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:I didn't like that. And the second thing that I didn't like was how difficult it was to integrate anything on WordPress and get that data remotely leverageable in Infusionsoft or really any other SaaS. And like you have all this like recent order history in WooCommerce or course progress and LearnDash and and there's just there's no way to get that information in any usable format. Can't see it in the contact record. You can't use it in automations.
Speaker 2:You can't merge it into into email templates. Nothing. It's it's just it just wasn't there. And I'm like, well, it could be there if all that data was at the same level. And so it's like, we if we built this as a WordPress plugin, all that information, it would be in one database and it could just grab it and use it and make it leverageable and make it usable and make it searchable and filterable.
Speaker 2:And I'm like let's build it in WordPress and see what happens. Here we go. And it didn't exist. Like the only other CRM at the time was ZeroBS CRM which is now called Jetpack CRM. The only update that they have made in the last two years is the branding and the UI.
Speaker 2:And there was no email marketing, marketing automation component which is now really synonymous with the CRM as a concept. Right? Some people still think of it the way that it used to be, which is like, you know, you have a pipeline and you have your deals and whatever, but really now it's that plus the marketing automation component. And that didn't exist yet, so
Speaker 1:let's I'm go do curious on how, since we started chatting about enterprise type clients, I'm curious what their reaction is to you when you say to somebody, hey, I can save you, in this guy's case, maybe almost a million dollars a year in HubSpot fees or down to maybe the smaller business which might be a few thousand dollars a year in HubSpot fees or fill in your favorite enterprise CRM of choice. But the but is you have to do it inside of WordPress. What are the particular challenges that you face by telling an enterprise client or even somebody who is spending thousands a month to say, I can do this for you faster, more efficiently, and better inside WordPress? Do they have a knee jerk reaction to saying, oh, geez. WordPress?
Speaker 1:Or are they already there and they just may make sense?
Speaker 2:So for that particular person, what they ended up doing was they actually spun up a WordPress install just for Groundhog because they had, like, an app that they were doing siloed away somewhere else, and then they ended up just creating their own server specifically just for this purpose and saved boatload of money. Right? And they were super happy about that. And as far as they know, they're still super happy about that. But a lot of the larger enterprise people that we primarily work with through agency partners, we have our agency program, and agencies are typically the one that are introducing Groundhog to the enterprise.
Speaker 2:We don't market directly to the enterprise. So if it it is if it is being used by enterprise, it's going through our agencies. And one of the agencies that we work with, Chris Britton, out in The UK, those enterprise companies use Groundhog not at an enterprise level, but the way that their those organizations are broken up. They have those siloed teams and siloed projects, and they'll spin up instances specifically for use for, like, one particular lead gen project that they have for a Facebook campaign that they're running. Right?
Speaker 2:And that saves them the cost of spinning up a new, like, HubSpot instance that might cost them $20,000 a month.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Right? So that's that's where that Groundhog gets used in those particular it's not at the like, there's not like an enterprise level CRM, which is something that a lot of, you know, us down here don't really think about. It's like they don't have this global I mean, of them might, but from what I've heard from our agency partners is that it's also very actually fragmented and siloed and all these teams have their different softwares and their different tools of choice, and then we get plugged into those.
Speaker 1:And your pricing right now it's we're in the week of November 20, it's Black Friday deals. You get a bunch of Black Friday deals running, but normally your pricing is 20 a month, 40 a month, 50 a month, 100 a month, and it doesn't change based on those contacts you were referencing because I work at Gravity Forms, we use HubSpot as our CRM. My last job used HubSpot, my job before that used HubSpot. I I have seen the range of of pricing that HubSpot charges folks from a WordPress hosting company to a podcast hosting company now to a plug in company. Their first year deals are always great like a lot of sales.
Speaker 1:They come in literally 90% off for new plans. They're like, Hey, welcome. Come on in. It's wonderful here. You're going to get all these things.
Speaker 1:And then year two comes, they go, Oh, we're going to discount. It's only 50% year two. And then year three, you really feel the pain. A behemoth like a HubSpot, like a ClickUp, Force, I mean, these are massive companies. They can afford to lose on the front end and then recoup on the back end because they know you're just going to become so immersed in the years two and three that you're going be like, I can't leave this.
Speaker 1:If I leave this, it's going to be even more painful and costly for me. Especially when the options are just as expensive. Right. When you look at the comparative market, right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's almost like a cartel. Like these other organizations. How is professional services in your world, like when you're moving somebody from a HubSpot? I remember being at my last job ClickUp, you came in and it was, Oh, it's only $400 a month for ClickUp, and then they hit you with, like, $20,000 in professional services to get the things set up. Do you go into professional services in the business?
Speaker 1:What does that look like for
Speaker 2:for BitLock? As far as we go, we actually offer first time comp complimentary setup where we'll just you know, we'll we'll make sure that the site's basically ready to go for you to go in and start sending an email. We'll get your list over. We'll make sure cron jobs and add ons and integrations and there's no conflicts. And everything's working as it's supposed to because, you know, WordPress is gonna be WordPress sometimes and it just needs an expert to go in and, you know, uncheck or check a few boxes just to make sure everything is hunky dory before, you know, we send off people because we want people to be successful.
Speaker 2:But that's really as far as we'll go if I mean, the whole goal for us is to limit the amount of professional services that would be necessary. And when it comes to professional services like ClickUp or HubSpot environments, the product is complicated on purpose to justify professional services that they offer. Right. I'm not about that. I'm just gonna make it easy.
Speaker 2:We got templates. You just click and install, you're ready to go. Change email copy. Send an email. Like we're just we're just about making it as straightforward as possible to get you from $0 to a $100 to whatever because you know it's about making money.
Speaker 2:Right? That's what we want. And so we'll get you set up and ready to go. And then we do have agency partners. I mentioned that a couple times.
Speaker 2:We have our agency license and people can opt in to become a certified partner by taking a course, and then we put them on our website. And if people do want to say, hey. I don't wanna deal with any of this. I just want someone to do it for me. We can refer you to those people who we vetted, I've spoken to personally.
Speaker 2:They did the training, and and they'll take care of them.
Speaker 1:What about evaluating the infrastructure? I can imagine this probably adds a lot more weight to somebody's WordPress install. Know Much less than you'd think. Much less. Saving database.
Speaker 1:Saving records to the database, automation, all that stuff. Do you get into the weeds with customers where you're like, oh man, hey, Kinsta says I have to add another plan now because I'm using much more resources or Pressable or Bluehost. What does that look like when somebody starts to use this? Actually, the thing's cranking and running and making money for their business. Is it an easier upsell to them to say, hey, go talk to the host, they'll take care of it?
Speaker 1:Or do they ever ask you about server maintenance and capacity and stuff like that?
Speaker 2:I mean, hosting is so commoditized now that I've rarely run into those situations. I mean, most people, like, spin up something on Cloudways and or, you know, they might even go to, like, s two directly. Is it was it AWS? AWS. AWS directly and and people are very savvy now, there's all these companies that just take care of it.
Speaker 2:Groundhog, as a server impact is minimal because every every we do we do custom tables, everything, no post types. Everything's on an auto loader, and it's very well optimized. The the real surprise that most people actually run into when it comes to server resource or usage is when they send an email for the first time. They've never sent an email before because without the other servers, they've never gotten that far. Right?
Speaker 2:But then, you know, with Groundhog, they actually got to that stage and they sent an email and then their website crashes. Why did their website crash? Not because Groundhog was sending 20,000 people or not because it was sending 20,000 emails, but because that email sent 20,000 people back to their website all at the same time. And they had no caching and no whatever and nothing ready to go to handle the inbound traffic, which is really where sites suffer when it comes to speed is concurrent sessions and all that fun stuff. So what we tell people is if your site is set up with Cloudflare or whatever or you got just great hosting and you guys are ready for large concurrent sessions of incoming people, then you're fine.
Speaker 2:And really there's like any hosting setup that is setup to handle that is going to do just fine with Groundhog.
Speaker 1:I started saying the pricing and I forgot to frame it how you have it framed which I think is fantastic on your pricing page. You can go to groundhog.io pricing or just click on the top for the pricing link. And you have what you said, think you said no success tax or something like that. And your flat rate pricing, $50 a month whether you have 500 users or 25,000 users or contacts in the database is still the same price and you look at that against HubSpot for $25,000 is $2,600 a month. It's probably even higher than that if you have all of the sales and marketing and support components to HubSpot.
Speaker 1:Then you go down the list ActiveCampaign $1,000 a month, Keap $600 a month, ConvertKit $233 a month, really justifying those prices. And largely, think what we've sort of framed here is probably because at least some overhead is not passed to you. In other words, you're not hosting this data, it's all on somebody's WordPress website, so you get to keep your hands clean of that. But I'll ask you the literal million dollar question is, where is, when is Groundhog SaaS coming, if ever? I
Speaker 2:don't know if I have it in
Speaker 1:me to go that road,
Speaker 2:to be completely honest. Okay. We we run Mailhawk, which is which is SMTP as a service. It's basically SendGrid, but it's a service that we manage and sell to our customers. And and that's a SaaS, and that's a headache in its own right.
Speaker 2:There's WordPress headaches and then there's SaaS headaches, and SaaS headaches are expensive headaches. WordPress, not so much. The the the main differentiator between ground like, what makes Groundhog actually special when you compare it to HubSpot and ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit is, yes, the flat rate pricing. That's special in its own right. But what a lot of people don't think about is data ownership.
Speaker 2:Self hosting. The reason why WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world is because you control. Right? When when you're hosting that data, that's data that you own. No one can touch it.
Speaker 2:No one can turn it off. Right? We've gone through a couple of years where crack started to show in how far SaaS providers would be willing to go for the information people wanted to share. Mailchimp did it. ActiveCampaign did it.
Speaker 2:HubSpot did it. Now I'm not I'm not suggesting that, you know, that I I you know, I'm gonna write agnostic on on opinions of what content wanna share, but I I believe that if you wanna be able to share information that you wanna share, you gotta have self hosting. And I'm not willing to put that in the hands of third parties. And even by mistake, like, have filters on outgoing emails now and there's reporting and it could just be completely by we had a couple of people that just showed up and say, hey, our accounts got closed. We didn't do anything wrong.
Speaker 2:It just got flagged and we got shut down over a weekend. There was no one there to, like, you know, cure our appeal or whatever, and we lost x amount of dollars on a really busy weekend that we really needed to be up. They restored our account afterwards, but it was just an accident. And it's like, what? That's crazy.
Speaker 2:And so what you're really buying when you self host with WordPress is not only peace of mind, but control. And I think that's very important.
Speaker 1:I think it's also, you know, if you can so again, saw you come on let me frame it with this. I saw when I saw you come on to the scene, I think you premiered on Jonathan's show, right? Tonic, right? You were a cohost there quite often. And I was like, Man, this guy's young, ambitious, CRM world gonna be tough.
Speaker 1:Right? That was my gut feeling. You're still here, huge testament. I wasn't discounting you but I was thinking, Man, it's gonna be a tough ride trying to do CRM, competing against these big It
Speaker 2:has been a tough ride for what Because it's
Speaker 1:I think when you came onto the scene, the money was bonkers in CRM. Was the company Drift, d r I f t, which was also a Boston based company, freaking putting out I went to their events because I'm just South Of Boston. It was ridiculous. I actually met Chris Badgett up there in person for the first time, and it was just like, you know, when they were printing money and they were doing this big luxurious event. I'm like, how does this come how do they afford this stuff?
Speaker 1:Anyway, the point is is like, not an easy road. Not an easy road to start a WordPress plugin company, especially not one I think in the CRM or ecommerce derivative of WordPress, so a huge testament to your success. Keeping it self hosted in WordPress gives you a unique advantage to, like you said, if you are building up a nice book of partnership, which if you go to Groundhog. And you go in the top nav, you can actually look and find the partner directory, apply to be a partner. And for agencies out there, and this is where I think it makes a lot of sense for you, when the agency gets the end user or the freelancer gets the end user, that agencyfreelancer, that's the customer's world.
Speaker 1:Like they don't know WordPress, the web host, Groundhog, they don't know the SMTP service, all of these different plugins. No, they know the freelancer or agency right in front of them, and what you're providing is another piece of the puzzle for the agency to say, Hey, I'm going to build this nice warm blanket of software for your business. You're going be able to sell stuff, you're going be able to email your customers, you're going be able to run marketing automation or probably in their speak like make your marketing easier for you. You'll be able to publish content when we all know that's important, SEO. They're able to build this nice little solution and Groundhog is a major part of that.
Speaker 1:So I think you're smart to stay connected. But I can also understand, yeah man, it's not easy. It's always easy for pundits like me to say, When's the SaaS coming? Right? And we've seen that with Elementor Cloud.
Speaker 1:Because everyone thinks the next step is always SaaS when it comes to the WordPress world, because we've seen so many people springboard from a plugin into SaaS. Leadpages was one of them from many many years ago, famously started as just a WordPress plugin. He turned Leadpages into an empire, purchased Drip, and I think he sold it all for many multiples of millions of dollars. And then same thing, OptinMonster. Syed, OptinMonster used to just be a pop up, and now it's a it's a SaaS.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I mean, the multiples are definitely bigger in SaaS.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm personally passionate about our self hosting positioning. Because I think I think people are tired, man. I think people are just I think I I I think Alright. Hot take. I think CRM is second only to CMS in terms of dollars generated in marketing.
Speaker 2:I think I think it's CMS and then CRM and then probably AI now is third. But, you know, that might change in the next year or two. We'll see. But I think I think people are tired of just getting absolutely shafted by by these by the SaaS bill. I mean, over Black Friday, I I started collecting feedback when someone checks out.
Speaker 2:We have a little pop up. You can't close it. Too bad. But it says, why did you buy Groundhog today? Right?
Speaker 2:And then I'm I'm I'm just sending the replies to to my inbox and I get it's just like paying $300 a month, paying $500 a month. I'm just sick of paying. I'm just I don't I just won't wanna pay it anymore. It's so painful and and people aren't getting the value that they deserve from those fees because it's either too complicated or they need those professional services that they can't afford it or what there's so many different reasons that I've heard. And so I'm passionate about about the mission.
Speaker 2:Originally, back in the day, I used to say and kinda because because what WordPress says, like, we wanted to democratize CRM. I don't say that anymore because people don't really know what that means. But that's really, you know, we just we just wanted to make it accessible. Yeah. I'm so passionate about that.
Speaker 1:And I think you're I you know, hearing you say it now is is makes me even more a believer in in the success that you've had up until this point. Because if you can own that space, like you said, there's not many competitors in the self hosted CRM space.
Speaker 2:There's a few more now than there used to be. Yeah. Sure. We we we did it first and then a bunch of people were like, oh, we could do that. But you know, fair enough.
Speaker 2:There's enough for everybody. I'm not bitter.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, generally speaking, how how how do you feel? Like, when you measure success, we're going to the tail end of 2023, you look back How old are you by the way?
Speaker 2:I'm 26.
Speaker 1:So you're very young in this space, you've been doing this now successfully for five, six years. Are you measuring success? How are you measuring? I don't wanna put words in your mouth. How are you measuring the success so far with Groundhog personally?
Speaker 2:Well, the only metric that matters is dollars in and dollars out, really. We've always been a profitable company, so that has to account for something. We're we're we're a 6 figure company. I'd like to be more than that. We've I'm investing I'm investing a lot of money right now in in breaking that 6 figure barrier, So we'll see where that goes.
Speaker 2:I've been around for five years, plan to be around for another five. I mean, the goal for me, I think, would be eventually an exit because that's really that's really the it's either SaaS or exit. Right? Which, you know, I'm not I'm not too keen on the sass. What I really wanna do is open a winery because I live in Niagara now and I'm really into, like, the whole wine culture.
Speaker 2:So that'd be that'd be really fun. But for now, it's it's Groundhog twenty four seven.
Speaker 1:Taking a card out of Pippin's playbook and selling the business and starting a brewery.
Speaker 2:There's some another something about that kind of work that's so romantic to me. Yeah. And then, you know, taking everything that I learned in SaaS or in plug ins and sales and marketing and just because all the winery all the all the winery owners here are just farmers. They don't know. If I opened a winery, it'd be epic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'd make tons of money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Get to my age and you just wanna sell everything and just become a landscaper. That's what I wanna do. I just wanna cut I just wanna show up at somebody's house and be like, can I cut the grass? And they say, yes.
Speaker 1:They say, how much? I say, is that $40. And they go, okay. I take the lawnmower out of back of my truck, I cut the grass, and I leave. Done.
Speaker 2:It's like that that the you see those videos of like the people doing like the the landscape or the lawnmower simulators.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? It's like that.
Speaker 1:Can listen to a podcast, no one's going to complain about the color of grass, like it doesn't matter. Like there it is, you cut it, you clean it, you're done. Talk about the advantages of Groundhog. Somebody's moving over. What are most people surprised with?
Speaker 1:Is it the automations? Like, Oh, I never thought I could just get a contact lead in on my Gravity form and now I can put them into a pipeline and it'll go and start emailing them and segment them. What are the biggest surprises you think most people are really happy when they're using Groundhog?
Speaker 2:I think what most people actually surprised about, especially if they're coming from somewhere, if they're, like, coming from ActiveCampaign or they're coming from HubSpot, I think what most people are surprised about is just how comparable it is. They think, well, you know, I'm I'm I'm gonna take the money. I'm gonna save the money. I'm gonna get but I'm gonna get less because it's like a WordPress plugin. And then they get into it and they realize, oh, is I I I I'm I'm not actually having to sacrifice anything.
Speaker 2:I think that's probably what most businesses at least that are switching are are truly surprised about. It's just the the lack of sacrifice because it is very complete. Other than that, if there's, like, a feature that I had to pinpoint, it would it would definitely be our our search and segmentation tool. Like I was saying earlier, one of my biggest gripes was that it was so hard to leverage data in WooCommerce or in LearnDash or in affiliate WP or any of these plugins that you have on your site. Like, that data is there, but you can't see it in your contact record.
Speaker 2:You can't filter contacts. You can't search them. So with all of our integrations for WooCommerce and all these other plugins, you can go into the contact list and say, alright,
Speaker 1:well just show me the
Speaker 2:list of people that bought in the last thirty days and their order value was between a $100 and $300. Right? And then people that never had access to that data like before, you'd have to send it to a custom field or something or do some custom activity tracking, but not every CRM offers that feature. So it was just complicated, but we just pull that data directly from the WooCommerce order table. Easy peasy.
Speaker 2:And so they're like, oh, wow. I didn't actually have to set anything up. I didn't have to, like, do some weird Zapier stuff or I didn't have to use WP fusion. Like, it's just it just worked. And and I think people are pretty surprised but pleased with that.
Speaker 1:When I think of some advantages, a little bit of the hot seat questions, but when I think of the competition, I think of the big SaaS companies, one of the things I think of is like HubSpot as a salesperson. I can come in and I can go to hubspot.com, I can log in, can do all the stuff there. Or if I'm in my Gmail inbox there's a browser extension, emailing somebody I can do that. Or there's the mobile app. I have access to all of this data.
Speaker 1:It's quick. It's it's it's easy. Do you get that same kind of experience for Groundhog even though it's tucked inside of of WordPress? Or is that one of the challenges of WordPress is to have that, like, be everywhere, get access to everything that these bigger SaaS players have because they're in just one one point in the cloud. They're not in a million different WordPress websites.
Speaker 1:Hard to put that into words, but as somebody who's used word HubSpot for years, like, as a salesperson, it was always like at my fingertips for better or worse. What's that experience like for for Groundhog and and WordPress?
Speaker 2:It's not the same. Yep. So if there if there was one thing that you did have to sacrifice, it would be that Access Anywhere stuff. Yep. It is siloed.
Speaker 2:It's on WordPress and you get to own it there, which is nice, but you do sacrifice all, like, the other cloud integrations that would come with HubSpot. So, like, accessing it from Gmail or your extension, like, that that would be gone. Maybe not forever. If we did enter into the SaaS market, it would be to facilitate that. That's that if we were if we were to go into SaaS, it would be like facilitating that, but you're still self hosting, but I don't know.
Speaker 2:There's there's probably a way to technologically get around that. I don't know. Future is the future is infinite.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But it's not this it's not the same. Although, the people that we do have Switch that did have that have not complained too much about it being gone. We've got a few future requests pending for Gmail sync and stuff like that. But for the most part, people are like, well, well well, you know, the however many thousands of dollars in savings is worth it.
Speaker 1:I think one of your bigger feature releases was quite recently. Right? It was This morning. Oh, yeah. I just went to the blog.
Speaker 1:It was this morning. Groundhog three point o was here. But prior to that, it was the it was the email template. Right? I remember you tweeting about that stuff.
Speaker 1:Wasn't it the email template builder? Wasn't that a pretty big release
Speaker 2:That's for all that that's this morning. I mean, we've been like
Speaker 1:Oh my
Speaker 2:god. Just coming for like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Talking about it for a while.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah. No. We've just been we've been talking about it for a while and Okay. Building up suspense. But it went out this morning.
Speaker 1:Nice. Congratulations. And and I'm just looking at the or one of the blog posts, Groundhog three point o columns, conditional content, socials, more. What can we do in these with this dynamic content and and email templates that are so powerful?
Speaker 2:So with the dynamic content stuff, I was talking about in the contact list, can segment and searcher and filter based on all this data that you have, activity, login times, course completion rates, recent order history, and much, much, much more. In the email itself, you can select one of the blocks. Let's say you have like a section where you're generating an automatic discount code, which you can do. You generate this automatic discount code but you only want this discount code to be generated or you want only want this section to show to let's say customers that haven't sent or haven't spent any money within the last thirty days. You can enable the conditional content and then you can select using that same filters tool, only show this to people who have not placed an order in the last thirty days.
Speaker 2:And then you can send that email out to your whole list because it might be like, let's say a blog post or something and you just want that section underneath, but you only wanna show to specific people, you could do that within the content of the email itself rather than having to develop two different email templates and then sending those out to those two different segments. You could just create the one template and then filter out who actually sees that section depending on the filters.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You'd never be able to do that in HubSpot because it's not gonna have that data. Right? It's not gonna have access to that data. And like for anyone who is using a third party CRM and kind of like trying to homebrew that kind of solution, you're probably using Zapier, and Zapier prices have gone up.
Speaker 1:So now you've got your CRM price, then you've got this glue that you've been using for a while called Zapier and that price is going up. So yeah man, makes a lot of sense to move in house to a WordPress solution like this. I think so. You're biased, but I agree with you. Sweet man.
Speaker 1:What else on the horizon? Obviously three point zero literally seven minutes ago on this blog post. What's next? Are are you trying to smash in AI like everybody else? Or is it already here and I just haven't seen
Speaker 2:Oh my goodness. I I am so I missed the boat on AI. You didn't miss the boat. That boat's miles out to ocean and I'm still standing on the dock waving.
Speaker 1:We're about to see an epic collapse of OpenAI, and everyone's gonna be holding the bag like they were with NFTs. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. I and so I was so far behind on, like, blockchain too. And I mean, I saw NFTs for what they were right at the beginning. I was like, ain't no way. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, ain't no way. Right? So, you know, Bored Ape. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Bored remember the Bored Apes? It's like, yeah. Why would I pay for a generated image of pixels that I can oh, look, it's on my phone. Yeah. Great.
Speaker 2:Nice. I didn't pay for that. How's that work? But I own it, but I don't. The original copyright owns it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So anyway, I can't But resell
Speaker 1:you must you must have people ask about AI in in the Oh, Of course. Must be like, hey, what do we like, can I pipe this to OpenAI to
Speaker 2:do some things? If if AI is going to make an appearance, it's gonna be in, like, generative email content. There's, like, AI used like like, some of the other AI features I see in other platforms is, like, predictive sending or predictive sending being, like, analyzing open tie or open rates in correlation to time sent and seeing, well, how long does it usually take for an email to be received versus opened, and then when do the most opens happen so you can predictively send emails at a specific time of day to get the best open rates. That's not necessarily AI. That's just that's just computational.
Speaker 2:Right? We'll eventually get there. But as far as open as far as AI goes, that's probably just generative email text, which we might just end up integrating with one of, like, like, Bertha, for example, which is Andrew Palmer's and Vito's product. Right? We'll probably yeah.
Speaker 2:I spoke to him in October and we might end up just being like, hey, use Bertha to create email content and
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Bingo bango donezo. Right? That's really the the the rest of, like, the predictive and AI stuff is really just computational. I don't think, like, a language model in the way that people are currently thinking about AI would be would be useful. Yeah.
Speaker 1:If your folks are listening to this and you're taking your website seriously, one of the things I remember in my agency days is you have a customer maybe combat you on price a little bit. Hey, why do you charge me $5,000 when this other person down the street is only charging me $500 You know, and we were always looking at it from the complete solution or the platform that we felt we were empowering our customers with. It's not just a website, it's your back when I was doing it anyway, was your blog, it was social, it was connecting up to your newsletter, it was selling something, it was kind of completing this whole experience for your business and your end users. And I think something like this allows an agency to even reinforce that even more is when you're building these solutions for customers, these are sticky solutions for customers. These are the things that your customers will love you for building for them.
Speaker 1:Like, Oh my God, this made my life and our team so much easier. They can kind of complete that sales marketing journey all in one place which is WordPress which is their website. They're already there, they're uploading the products, they're making their blog posts, and now they can see the heartbeat of their business at groundhog.io. Adrian, props man for making for surviving this far.
Speaker 2:I hope to be surviving if not thriving for as much longer.
Speaker 1:I say that because I know the struggles of running a business. Not that you're struggling but I understand the challenges trying to go up against these giants. Do you run the business with your father too?
Speaker 2:No. He helps. He's an he's an adviser. I mean, we used to do, like, the marketing agency together. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But as far as, like, direction and and and, like, the day to day operations. It's it's it's me and Greg, and my wife helps out and
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:Got people on call and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I ran my agency with my father. It was it was challenging.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Now, prod but the product level is just me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Good. Good. Good. Adrian, groundhog dot I o, where else can folks go to say thanks?
Speaker 2:Yo. Find me on Twitter. We got we're we're active on Twitter, so that's where we hang out. We also got a Facebook group. You can come hang out there.
Speaker 2:The YouTube channel, just search up Groundhog. You'll find us.
Speaker 1:Awesome stuff, Groundhog. Two g's, groundhog.io. Thanks for listening to, today's interview. That's it for today's episode. Get the weekly newsletter at thewpminute.com/ subscribe.
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