Hey, Gravity Formers, it's Thursday, April 11th,
matt_1_04-05-2024_123600: and we have exciting news.
For the first time since the launch of Gravity Forms nearly 15 years
ago, the team at Rocket Genius is excited to launch Gravity SMTP,
our second new stand alone product.
TLDR, while it's a stand alone product, for our launch phase, it
will be available exclusively to our Elite Gravity Forms license holders.
We have a lot of future plans and features for Gravity SMTP, So stay tuned to this
podcast or our YouTube channel or our newsletter or our website at gravityforms.
com for all future updates.
If this is your first time hearing about Gravity SMTP, it's
a standalone plugin that takes over the responsibility of sending
emails from your WordPress website.
Everything from username and password reset emails to the important contact form
notifications from your Gravity Forms.
Simply put, if the email notifications leaving your Gravity Forms are
important to you or your client's business, think lead gen forms,
donation forms, membership sign ups, etc., then Gravity SMTP is for you.
By integrating with third party services like SendGrid, we connect
your WordPress website to all of the benefits email sending providers deliver.
Then we bottle it up and give you a bird's eye view right in your WordPress
dashboard, giving you one place to set up your valuable forms and ensure
they're being delivered for free.
without fail.
Here's a few value ads.
Gravity SMTP provides integration with popular email providers, including
SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, and Brevo, support for custom SMTP and API based
services, detailed email tracking within the WordPress dashboard, displaying
email status, send time, recipient email address, plugin source, and more.
And lastly, easy toggling between connected email services to select
the most suitable provider for you and your WordPress website.
I grabbed some quick quotes and interviews from folks on the team,
most notably Carl Hancock, our CEO.
Here's a quote from Carl.
We're thrilled to introduce Gravity SMTP as our next standalone product, said Carl.
While it's currently available exclusively to Gravity Forms Elite licensed
customers, Gravity SMTP was built from the ground up as a separate product.
It's not an add on.
Our goal is to empower WordPress users to send emails with confidence.
Improving their overall user experience and engagement.
I also had the chance to chat with the developers and marketers who are
truly bringing Gravity SMTP to life.
First, let's hear from Paul Kim, a software engineer at Gravity Forms.
Paul: Hi, I'm Paul.
I'm a software engineer with Gravity Forms.
Gravity SMTP is a plugin that allows customers to send emails from their
WordPress website through integrations such as SendGrid or FullSpark.
The way we've approached building Gravity SMTP is different from how
we've approached Gravity Forms.
The first big difference is that everything in the admin is a React app.
We've been building a component system for the past year or so now, and it's been
a very fun and interesting experience.
This has allowed us to build features quickly and maintain
a consistent design throughout.
So the speed at which we can build things is faster and the
admin experience is also smoother.
The other aspect which may not be so apparent to users is that we've built the
PHP side using a different architecture.
Aaron has been hard at work building a tools package for Gravity Forms, which
allows us to extend useful features such as auto updating, license management,
and other very useful frameworks.
This keeps the PHP code clean and maintainable, allowing us
to manage the plugin easier.
Since this was a new product, we had the fortune of being able to architect and
build this plugin the way we wanted it to.
Other than the React app and architecture differences I've mentioned earlier,
the other new coding technique we've employed is the communication between
the back end and the front end.
We are able to pass configurations from PHP to the front end, which the React
app is able to consume and run with.
When any actions are performed, it sends an AJAX request to
the backend, which handles the data and sends a response back.
This allows us to handle user interactions without refreshing the page, presenting
a much smoother user experience.
This was the first stand alone product for Gravity, But I can say that having
good architecture and structure to how we build the product can go a very long way.
Because we had a clear path forward and a well thought out design system, building
the plugin was smooth and quite fun.
This allows us to be able to easily maintain this product for a long time
and also build out new features quickly.
I'm excited for the next product we will build.
There were definitely some lessons we learned along the way and I'm
sure we'll be able to apply the learnings to our next project.
Thanks for hanging out today, Paul, and giving us a behind the scenes look at the
development practices for Gravity SMTP.
Next, I sat down with Travis Tautz, our Director of Marketing,
who is orchestrating the branding and launch of our new product.
Travis: Thank you, Matt.
Super, super excited to be here, man.
matt_1_04-05-2024_123600: We have a fun event happening.
We, if those who are listening already know this gravity SMTP is here
and I wanted to get your thoughts.
I obviously I'm going around the company, talking to people who are developing
it, people who are marketing it.
you do a lot with our branding.
This is an exciting time.
For Rocket Genius, for Gravity Forms.
This is our first ground up build of a new product.
Excited, nervous, or yeah,
Travis: I think a bit of both.
I mean, to be honest, like it's, it's both exciting and a little
anxiety inducing, and really just from the, the, the perspective.
Of where we've been and where we want to go and where we plan to get to over
the next five years or so, you know, I mean, I think, as you mentioned, yeah,
a lot of my focus is on branding and Brandon brand positioning and marketing.
And I think what's exciting about something like this is.
It's simply that I, I believe it's an opportunity to kind of
strengthen and redefine, our brand's position in the WordPress market.
Right.
And not only of course, Gravity Forms and where we've been, but also SMTP.
you know, and honestly like highlighting.
our organization's commitment to, leading edge software and solutions,
super customer centric, dev practices and building new things with new
technologies, you know, gravity forms has been around for 15 years
and there's a lot of technical.
debt, so to say, when it comes to what was built and how we continue to evolve
it and with SMTP, it's really like the ability to approach, solving a new
problem in a new and innovative way using, you know, the latest technology
and solutions, to address, at least in our opinion, current market needs.
both for the WordPress space as well as for, for our customers specifically.
matt_1_04-05-2024_123600: I won't reveal some of our partnership plans and like
what we're doing behind, deep behind the scenes, but through our last couple of
months, Adam and I being public with, the beta versions, the alpha version, the
beta versions of SMTP talking with our beta group, by the way, gravity forms.
com slash beta, if you want to join the beta group, on Facebook.
So you can see the stuff.
come to fruition before anybody else.
A lot of folks say, well, do we need another SMTP service?
why another SMTP plugin in the WordPress space?
largely because our customers are using other third party plugins and services
to send form entries and notifications.
So when our, you know, lovely customers come to us with an
issue with another plugin, this is like one of those natural fit.
Even if you're sitting there going.
Another SMTP service.
Yes, another SMTP service.
Now we're going to unlock some future things in the future.
It is a standalone product, which means that in the future, you're not going
to necessarily need to have gravity forms to have, rocket genius software
in your wordpress website, but it just makes sense from a support ecosystem
standpoint to have a product inside Gravity Forms that we can support
Travis: It just makes sense.
As you said, I mean, yes, there's other SMTP solutions in the WordPress space.
Why not utilize the same tool set provided from that provider, us in this case with
Gravity Forms, to do the rest of the job?
And that, to be honest, just made a lot of sense for us, right?
Maybe you've been a long time customer, maybe you're new to Gravity Forms.
to us, it made sense to create something that's built on the
same easy to use user interface,
It's based on what WordPress is doing, right?
That's been our core focus since 2.
5 is how do we take what WordPress is doing and make our UI, feel like
WordPress easy to use easy to, to, to find what you need to find within that UI.
And, and it.
And it just makes sense.
So when we think about, you know, another SMTP solution, yes, but not
within our ecosystem, not within, within gravity forms, specific
specifically in the gravity ecosystem.
So by facilitating, a lot of that and utilizing a lot of our UI that
we built with gravity forms, it just makes it easy for our customers, right?
That, that we've had have come to us with these concerns, as you, as you've
And it allows us to, to provide that enhanced, solution and performance for
them when it comes to sending emails.
matt_1_04-05-2024_123600: Gravity SMTP has been in the works for a while.
It's easy to build air quotes as the engineering team listening
to this is throwing their phones.
It's easy to slot in a new product to extend what gravity forms does.
But you know, it's not easy building off of a brand that's been around for
15 years, bringing in a new logo, new typeset, maybe thinking about a You know,
colors in a different way and how that is.
Do you remember when you first started sketching out the first
ideas for the gravity SMTP logo?
How many iterations did you go through?
What was the first questions you asked yourself?
Like,
Travis: it's a difficult and exciting challenge, right?
Because we're in the midst of it at the moment, right?
We, last year, acquired gravity.
com.
You know, so, so it is part of our, our brand plan is to essentially
migrate and move into gravity.
com and then in the near future.
And with that comes the expansion of our product suite.
and with that expansion comes thinking about not only, you know,
what gravity forms looks like today.
But what it will look like in the future and not only from a UI standpoint, but
just the brand standpoint, and then the additional new products, of course,
in, in 2022, we acquired, gravity flow.
And that was a part of like trying to think about how that would
look and appear within our, within our brand and, and marketing.
and now we have SMTP and we're on a path to essentially.
create a suite of solutions that allow us and our customers, more, tools that
they can rely on, that are built within the same UI and family of, of usability.
and, and of course, yeah, how we, how we see that look and feel within the brand.
lots of iterations.
I will say, I mean, a lot of this actually originated within, a lot of the
work that the product team was doing.
And, and as you know, with, with Adam Pickering kind of dreaming up where
we wanted to go with some of this tooling and, and then kind of has
evolved into what you see today, and we'll continue to evolve into what
you see on gravity.com, you know, in the, in the hopefully near future.
So yeah, lots of, lots of work there and lots of work to, continue building upon.
matt_1_04-05-2024_123600: Our customers favorite products from the Gravity Forms
ecosystem is not software, in fact.
Don't tell our executive team.
It's our t shirts at WordCamps.
So does that mean we're going to see some amazing Gravity SMTP
t shirts coming to WordCamps?
Travis: Oh man, that's a great idea.
I hadn't thought about it.
I had just thought about grantees.
yes, it is a thing, right?
We, we pride ourselves in always, producing and creating some really
great swag for, for our customers and, and people that have been
fans of our brand for a long time.
And that's just kind of something that we, we have fun with, to be honest.
And, yeah, I mean, please join us at the next WordCamps this year.
Obviously we'll be at WordCamp EU and very likely WordCamp US and, and likely
maybe a couple in between or, or, later in the year, but come visit us, of course,
grab one of the softest shirts you'll have in your closet and, and, maybe it'll
be some SMTP, logos on there as well.
matt_1_04-05-2024_123600: think we should do one per
visitor, and you have to choose.
Gravity Forms or Gravity SMTP?
Which t shirt are you going to take?
Gravity SMTP, first version is going to be a collector's, collector's item.
It's going to
Travis: That's true.
matt_1_04-05-2024_123600: the first one.
And maybe we should run a limited version.
Little gold thread in it, like real gold.
It's worth something.
Travis: yeah, that's a great idea.
Yeah, that'll be a limited edition for sure.
matt_1_04-05-2024_123600: Travis Toss, thanks for hanging out today.
Travis: Thank you, man
That's it for today's episode.
If you're a Gravity Forms Elite license holder, today's the day to
install and configure Gravity SMTP.
With your WordPress website, or maybe it's time to upgrade to the
elite experience while getting all of the extra benefits and add ons.
If you look around the industry, it's quite a value for both products.
Check out GravitySMTP at GravityForms.
com, or if you have any questions, shoot me an email, Matt at GravityForms.
com.