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Discover new WordPress opportunities through stories told using Gravity Forms. WordPress developers and agency owners rely on Gravity Forms to solve complex problems for their clients. Breakdown explores their stories to extract the most useful lessons for our listeners.
Join podcast host Matt Medeiros with special guest appearances from the team behind Gravity Forms to stay up to date on the next opportunity for Gravity Forms + WordPress. Whether it's a new Gravity Forms add-on or a new way to use our e-commerce features, Breakdown is the WordPress podcast you want to be subscribed to.
Matt (00:00:04) - That. Oh. Hey, Gravity formers. It's Monday, July 24th. We're going to learn more about Gravity Smtp. Today I'm going to sit down with the head of product designer Adam Pickering here at Gravity Forums to chat about that, then punt it over to another interview with Zach Katz from Gravity Kit. It's a fantastic episode today. Break down the Gravity Forms Podcast. First, let's jump in to some housekeeping stuff, some announcements. Number one, WordCamp US is fast approaching. That'll be in National Harbor, Maryland, August 24th through the 26th. The Gravity Forums team will be there. We'll have a booth, we'll have our amazing t shirts. If you're going, make sure you stop by and say hi. Don't forget every time a WordCamp comes up, good to remind everybody our t shirts go fast. So definitely show up to the booth and snag one of those before they're gone. Because you know, hey, I know I'm biased, but we I think we have the best. Not only do we have the best contact form in the WordPress ecosystem, we also make the best t shirts in the ecosystem.
Matt (00:01:19) - Challenge me at that. I mean, email me at Gravity forms.com. We'll see you at WordCamp US. There were some minor updates to gravity forms going out this week. By the time you're hearing this, there was a slight delay in the conversational forms. Add on that will be out should be out fingers crossed this week conversational forms that is if you we've been talking about that forever we've done some webinars about it. We've done some training about it and maybe I'll show it off in the next 101 live stream if it does hit the streets in release this week. So that should be there if you're looking forward to that. One last sort of major announcement is Gravity Forms is now available on WordPress.com. So anyone with a business account and above at WordPress.com, you can install and use gravity forms, including all of the add ons, just as you would in a self-hosted WordPress environment. And it's, it's obviously a fantastic collaboration between us and WordPress.com, but it's now allowing you to, you know, take customers that, you know, might be starting off with WordPress and they're looking for getting their feet wet with WordPress.
Matt (00:02:31) - You know, sometimes the complexities of recommending self-hosted WordPress, finding a web host, getting the plugins, there can be an overwhelming task, especially if it's a small business. They're just getting started. Maybe they need some extra support that you can give them as a freelancer or consultant or friend. Because I've been there where it's like, Hey man, you want to recommend using WordPress, but you know all the questions are going to come with it. WordPress.com is fantastic for that. Obviously the largest footprint of installed WordPress sites on the globe and you know, it's going to just be a fantastic collaboration there. So if you want to leverage the power of gravity forms on a site or you already have customers there, it's now available in their marketplace. So today's episode it will be two interviews that I recorded. First one coming up is with Adam Pickering. He's the lead product designer here at Gravity Farms, making all of those awesome onboarding screens that you see, all of the UI templates and so forth. You can thank Adam for that.
Matt (00:03:32) - We're going to talk about Gravity Smtp, which was recently announced Jump on the beta program. Gravity forms.com/beta. Here's my conversation with Adam. Hey, Adam. Welcome for breakdown.
Adam (00:03:51) - Oh, hi, Matt. Thanks for inviting me to the podcast.
Matt (00:03:55) - Generally, you and I are talking about all the fun bells and whistles that you're designing for gravity forms. But for folks who have never met the Adam Pickering Adam, what do you do here at Gravity Forms?
Adam (00:04:07) - I'm the product designer of gravity forms. So everything you see in terms of the visual. I've been responsible for that over the last, you know, since 2.5, I would say, which I don't know if you've been around that long about using gravity forms, but it's it's, you know, a good three years ago and I mean, I've been using it way longer than that. But yeah, things things have been slowly progressing and that's what I've been working on.
Matt (00:04:35) - 11 years. Adam, I've been a customer.
Adam (00:04:37) - Oh, wow. Yeah.
Adam (00:04:41) - You put me to shame. I'm only ten. About ten years.
Matt (00:04:45) - So all those awesome designs, like the onboarding, picking templates, like that whole installation process, we have you to blame.
Adam (00:04:55) - Yeah, exactly. You totally got me to blame for all of the. The design designs that I've been working on there.
Matt (00:05:05) - Well, it is fantastic work, and there's a lot of stuff that I know I'm thankful for of that, that you've helped sort of reshape that onboarding experience. In fact, the other day I was testing out a fresh install on a site that I was working on and I was hit with yet a new onboarding screen, which I hadn't even seen yet right after the fresh install. And I really liked the toggle. This is for agency owners out there or freelancers that help build sites for people where you can actually hide the license key from the customer. Fantastic. Fantastic.
Adam (00:05:36) - Like the little little things that, you know, delight our customers. So yeah, when.
Matt (00:05:41) - I tweeted out that your blog post about Gravity Smtp calling for, I think what we're saying right now anyway, at least on July 13th as of this recording, is we're looking for some alpha testers to join our beta group.
Matt (00:05:56) - We've talked about this on the podcast before. I'll link up that application form in the show notes. So if you if you want to test this stuff out before anyone else, go ahead and click the link in the show notes when I posted it on Twitter. Anyway, people were shouting yes, can't can't believe it's finally here. Reason is because hey, sending submission or entry notifications things that we do with advanced routing. Like if you fill out this form, send it to the sales team, send it to the support team. There's all the stuff that happens in the back end that that is email and email is quite complicated and mail can end up in spam, right? If you're on a traditional shared hosting environment, those things can be become challenging because these entry notifications are very important to some organizations. In fact could be worth some money if it's like a sales lead, purchase receipt, something like that. So the the natural. Evolution of gravity forms is to have something like this gravity Smtp, to support those functions and supported by gravity, not using a third party Smtp service.
Matt (00:07:04) - Did I get that fairly right? Is there another Y to this gravity Smtp?
Adam (00:07:10) - There's a couple. The main one is that. I don't know if you've ever set up one of those plugins, but its UI and also just the process of just going through all that, you know, find your key and then setting up the DNS and it's quite, quite a hard task. I would say. Even someone who's pretty savvy, who knows what they're doing. They're not always the best in terms of, okay, here's what I need to do next. So we're trying to solve that with gravity. Give that experience like kind of holding your hand a little bit, a little bit more, getting you through that process. So I would say that that's another area that we're trying to make sure that our customers are seeing that in the product.
Matt (00:07:55) - I mean, it's a critical, critical component and often not to speak for the support team. But but somebody who started his career in tech support, it's not fair to maybe take the brunt of something that isn't your responsibility.
Matt (00:08:10) - Right. Whether that's the Web host having, let's say, Smtp issues with the server that you're on or. Using a third party plugin tool that is confusing and is complicated. And then our support team has to help with those those areas, which is fine on the surface, but we have to at least have something that that we can support that we wholly know, and then add more features than maybe what you might get on a third party tool. When this launches, do you have a feeling of what? Third party Smtp services we will support with the asterisks of this might change in the future because we are still early days.
Adam (00:08:55) - Yeah, definitely. We we're already getting some great insights from our customers in the group for the Alpha. And I did want to mention on the podcast that we have a public roadmap that I posted in the, the, the beta group where you can go ahead and just there's basically all of the integrations that are available that most people would commonly see in other plugins. So we were looking to find out what what is the next thing to build in terms of what we're building like in the.
Adam (00:09:24) - So we're in an alpha right now as we as you said. So we're going into a beta phase next. And with that, we're going to be building the mail gun integration. And from there, we're we're looking to see what we want to do in terms of what our customers need next. We're going to be supporting mail gun next in the beta release, which will be coming out. Well, we don't know exactly what it's going to be coming out, but we're working hard on it at the moment. Then after that, it's looking more like that people would like mail services such as Microsoft 360 and then Amazon SES, and then we're obviously looking for more. So yeah, if we can get more insights into what people are looking for through the product roadmap that is now publicly available, that'd be great.
Matt (00:10:16) - I'll link this up in the show notes, but the product roadmap board is from Product board. You click the link in the show notes if you want to see what other folks have already entered in for ideas or to upvote other ideas, you can check out that link in the show notes.
Matt (00:10:32) - Do you think there's something here that we can do with gravity forms that is without revealing any kind of top secret product feature? But is there something that you're really interested in that we can do with gravity forms that we can't do with like a third party tool? Like, is there one piece of low hanging fruit that's like, Hey, this is a no brainer for gravity and it'll make the gravity forms experience a little bit better.
Adam (00:10:57) - Right now based on some of the customer interactions that we've had and even our team giving us some feedback on on the product, an area that I don't see a lot of the other Smtp plugins doing is a way. Okay. Let me give you a little story of exactly what I'm talking about. So let's say you're moving from one site to another and you've got a lot of email email accounts set up on that that, that staging site. And then let's say you have a few plugins involved like WooCommerce or, you know, Buddy Press, Bebe Press like things like that.
Adam (00:11:32) - They they often send out emails and with that, that can be kind of challenging, like from going from a staging site to a live sometimes you don't want to send things like you don't want to be able to get those emails to be sent out immediately as soon as you migrate. So our customers have already said to us, you know, we need a simple way of just having a sandbox where you can just pause all the emails that are getting sent out automatically by these other plugins. So, so that, you know, people don't get a bunch of password reset emails and then start, you know, people were, you know, their customers are getting upset and things like that. So we're going to have an easy way to just disable all the emails that are sent out through WordPress and then a convenient UI for that. You'll also be able to see what was sent out and then what state it was sent out. Let's say it was sent out within the sandbox mode or disabled. We haven't come up with a name for it yet, but there's going to be a way to just simply see what was said and then you could resend it from the email lock.
Adam (00:12:37) - So let's say you actually did want to send something that was paused, then you could do that. So there's there's some plugins that do that, but visually they don't take care of a lot of those, those other aspects I've just mentioned. Yeah.
Matt (00:12:52) - I guess we should just discuss what the value of this service is, right? So if this is the first time you've heard of Gravity Smtp, we're talking about using a different service other than your WordPress website or your web host to send email. You might be asking like, Why? Why? I'm like, What's the big deal? I kind of hinted at it before is there are deliverability issues that we that you should be concerned about, right? Given maybe the value of your website, if it's a sales lead generating site and e-commerce site or these contact forms that you get from your customers or your visitors are are super valuable to you, right? That email deliverability, getting to your email so that you're notified when these things happen is super important. And there are services like Mail gun, maybe Office 365 has its own thing, but mail, guns, SendGrid, Amazon, SES, these are services that will help, for lack of a better phrase, clean lead.
Matt (00:13:55) - Deliver your email Right. There is a low probability of these these emails ending up in spam because these are trusted sources. It's all they do is fight spam, protect spam, and they help you send this email out. The other thing is statistics, right? A lot of these third party services also run stats around email deliverability. So if these are receipts, purchase transactions, membership registrations, you might be able to see the stats of your deliverability, Right? These are things that might be important when you're doing things at mass. Thousands of emails happening through your WordPress website or something like that. Adam Is there any idea, because I've seen some folks ask about stats and they just throw out the phrase, We want stats, Everyone likes to look at graphs. I know it's very, very, very early, but. Have you started to maybe thank you and the team think about like what stats might be with us? Or would we just pull in stats from these third party services? It's your idea around stats.
Adam (00:15:01) - Yeah. So that's kind of a challenging area. Like let's say we have with Gravity Smtp, you'll be able to run more than one. Now I'm hinting on, you know, backup connection, things like that. So you'll be able to run more than one connection in the future with Gravity Smtp and then with that, that can kind of get hard in terms of, you know, pulling all those different stats from all of those different services. So how can we do it better? How can we make sure that the stats that we're getting are pretty much consistent across the board? So there's a few ways we can do that. But we could send a tracking pixel, our own tracking pixel out through the email and then that would open, open up the ability to see what open if the email has been opened or if it was being clicked. And then it kind of normalizes the data throughout all of the extensions versus having to rely on those third parties. And let's say maybe one doesn't have that statistics service.
Adam (00:16:00) - So then you don't have you're missing data for certain things. So we can kind of present more data to the customer across the board and it would be normalized because it's using our tracking system basically in the plugin. So that's, that's probably the way we're going to go go about it. But that isn't totally been formalized at this point. Yeah.
Matt (00:16:23) - When I was running an agency many, many moons ago. I would incorporate this type of service, which was very complex to set up back, back in the day, back when I did it. Now it's maybe a little bit easier. And certainly with Gravity Smtp, things are going to be even easier for gravity forms users, but want to just frame who should be using this. Who do you think should be using this type of of plug in or add on from us? And I'll preface it again with as an agency owner, I didn't you know, number one, we hosted on our own at the time cluster of servers. Back then we were using Linode and a mixture of Linode and Digitalocean.
Matt (00:17:00) - We had our own servers that we were managing because hosting was part of the value add and the support add at at my agency. And we wanted deliverability of our customers contact forms to make sure that they reached the customer right. We didn't want any to put that to chance, right? Because our customers were all small businesses. These were valuable forms, you know, even if they were a landscaper, like this was a lead coming through to cut their grass. And then we didn't want their small business to be impacted by deliverability. So agencies probably a good customer avatar. Do you have another customer avatar in your head that should be using this when it's released?
Adam (00:17:40) - Well, obviously we want our customers to use it like gravity forms customers, right? So we're going to make sure that there's a very easy way to migrate your data from gravity forms, because as you know, as you may know, we already have mail service extensions for gravity forms, right? So we've got Mail, guns, SendGrid and Postmark and so.
Adam (00:18:04) - We want our customers to move over to Gravity Smtp, because not only will it be a great experience you want, you'll be able to do more with it. You'll be able to do a lot more with it. So when you install Gravity Smtp for the first time after the after the alpha, this is this is more into like the official release, there'll be a quick easy migration that will pull in all of your preexisting add on data that you've filled into gravity forms. And so, I mean that doesn't really give you an idea of what kind of group of people. But I mean, that's a huge group of people, all of our customers, you know, So I mean, Adam's a typical entrepreneur.
Matt (00:18:46) - Everyone should be using my everyone.
Adam (00:18:49) - Yeah, I mean, everyone should be using it because, you know, a lot of people are using those. There's other services and, you know, it's they're kind of clunky if, you know, in my experience, I've very limited experience using some of those ones.
Adam (00:19:05) - So we're that's our main goal is to make it so user friendly for our customers and, and people who are potential customers. So I don't really have a demographic so much, but more of like, yeah, it's just everyone should just be using it.
Matt (00:19:19) - If you don't use Facebook and you're not an avid Facebook user, you can at least get notified through the email list of when we're going to start releasing the beta and beta downloads are available right in your dashboard, right? Right. When somebody activated, it's available right in your gravity forms account. You can log in and download it right there and start sending us feedback. Probably looking again, want to throw any timelines on this, but at least a few months of more beta testing I'd imagine for this to be tested out and and assured that that we got it up to snuff to where we need it to be.
Adam (00:19:54) - Yeah, we want to make sure it's rock solid. We don't want people to start using it. And until we know it's, you know, really in production sites I'm talking about, we want to make sure it's been battle tested as much as possible.
Adam (00:20:06) - Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:20:06) - Yeah.
Matt (00:20:08) - Fantastic stuff. Adam, thanks for joining us today to chat more about Gravity, Smtp. And folks, again, if you want to test it out, gravity forms.com/beta. Adam decided to record outside that day. It was quite windy in Canada, so apologies for a little bit of the wind feedback there. But somebody who recorded his interview in his office, in his home office, not too far from me, Zach Katz from Gravity Kit, formerly Gravity View. That was a while ago, but that's where I know him from. We sat down to talk about being a certified developer and building out Gravity kit.
Zack (00:20:57) - Gravity kit are all the add ons that you want from gravity forms that aren't built into gravity forms. That's our goal at least, so that you know, its essential add ons for gravity forms to do tasks and make applications that you're really trying to accomplish to make your website more powerful than it was before. Use gravity forms as the entry point. Use gravity kit as the way to import export display chart.
Zack (00:21:24) - Analyze all sorts of amazing stuff you can make happen when you have gravity kit. In addition to gravity forms.
Matt (00:21:32) - You're part of our certified developers group. If you go to gravity forms.com, there's of course an add on sections. One of the one that we have, the certified add ons community add ons, official add ons, a lot of add ons. It's a fantastic collection of folks who work really closely with gravity forms, that is the Certified Developers group. Do you find the certified developer program rather unique and is that a jumping off point or was that a jumping off point for you to say, you know what, I'm going to invest heavily into into gravity forms as a product ecosystem?
Zack (00:22:12) - I invested first in gravity forms as an ecosystem before the program existed. Because gravity forms is the best form plug in always has been ever since it was released. It's the best. Come at me if you don't believe it. But it's true. So they made it easier and easier to develop on top of. And that encouraged me to develop more and more add ons.
Zack (00:22:33) - And then as the ecosystem evolved, they they made certified developer program that just encouraged and help support certified developers by providing them inside looks at what's coming next, which is really helpful to help us make sure that our add ons are compatible with with the future gravity forms enhancements question like they've we have a Slack channel where we can ask questions, get helpful tips on how to do something if we aren't sure how to do it. So it's just a it's a great ecosystem to develop on top of. Even if you're not part of the certified developer program, check out Gravity forums. They have all the hooks you need, the frameworks they have APIs doing building out. What you need is really simple compared to other tools that I've used where there's always that one hook you wish existed. Well, gravity forms I have. I don't remember the last time I needed a hook that didn't exist in gravity forms.
Matt (00:23:27) - What was the first add on that you built thinking way back to when you started the company? It was originally Gravity View Was there anything before that? We've been friends for a while, but I don't think there was a different name before that.
Matt (00:23:38) - What was the first thing you built for Gravity Forms?
Zack (00:23:42) - Him. I built so many add ons back in the day. I felt like a contact form seven migration tool that converted a contact four seven form into gravity forms. I built gravity forms Bad Mimi, which is an email service that got bought out. Think gravity forms. Constant contact was an early one, which then gravity forms adopted and enhanced beyond what had built gravity form Salesforce like I built a ton of add ons back in the day.
Matt (00:24:10) - What was the original gravity view component or add on feature? I guess what was the first thing it did?
Adam (00:24:17) - It.
Zack (00:24:18) - It allowed you to create a directory from gravity forms. It was originally on the wordpress.org plug in directory and you could just kind of simply click the in gravity forms itself. You could configure what columns you want to display in a table and embed that as a shortcode. And there weren't very many options compared to what we have now, that it was more integrated with gravity forms in the sense that like you configured it inside gravity forms.
Zack (00:24:46) - Now Gravity View is its own view editor with a visual drag and drop editor. Lots of customization, lots of lots of cool stuff you can do with it. It was more simple back then, but that was called gravity forms actually called it gravity forms add ons. So that's what it is in the slug for the directory. And I think Alex or Carl was like, Hey, Zach, we're actually planning on having a menu called add ons. So if you could just like not do that, that would be great. So that was an early add on.
Matt (00:25:16) - Yeah, that concept of having data in a database, being a non developer, wanting to display it on the front end, not knowing how to formulate a query, let alone like where do I do that in WordPress? How do I do that? How do I write? What is MySQL? Previous guest on the episode that just went out prior to yours? Michelle Frechette She used it on underrepresented in tech gravity view. That is to do just that.
Matt (00:25:43) - Take that data displayed on the front end. How has that. No direct question here, but from what you've seen with your customers and the user base, how has that evolved? In other words, surely somebody has wanted to do something else. Okay. I've now displayed it on the front end of my WordPress site. What are the request you're hearing? How have you solved maybe another gap either on the back end or the front end that customers have requested for you? Because you and I have talked about this at length before, that is something that is powerful. It empowers people to be like, Hey, I'm a developer now. You know, like I feel pretty powerful. I took this, I just queried it and displayed it. What are those? What's next for for you and how you service customers? What are you hearing in that realm?
Zack (00:26:30) - Our entire team is really focused on helping customers accomplish their goals, and there are always goals that are different and require different solutions. And so whenever we meet one of those intersecting lines that that isn't currently addressed by our products, we make a note of it.
Zack (00:26:48) - And we we want to make sure that that's easier for future customers to accomplish. So sometimes it starts out as a hack, like you can do this and then you could do that and then embed this shortcode in this output and then that becomes a core feature. So we're always trying to close those gaps between you have to work hard to make this happen and ideally we want to make it so that it's easy with a point and click system. So just today we had a call about how we can better make generating reports easier for customers so that right now you can embed charts in PDFs with different solutions. And but internally we aren't. It's not possible to add a logo to some of those PDFs. Well, that should be easier for people to do. You shouldn't need a hook for that. So like those kind of intersecting lines, we're constantly closing those gaps and making it easier for people to do so. Like radius search for maps to build out a directory that's now built in, whereas before it wasn't possible and exporting a CSV of those results, that's possible now like having a chart charting those results.
Zack (00:27:55) - So our goal is to instead of so gravity forms the concept of gravity forms add ons, the first party add ons are often pushing the data out to different places, like a Zapier. Add on What we are trying to do at Gravity kit is build that functionality in so you don't need to go anywhere else external. You can do that kind of stuff internally and have all the business tools that you need inside your WordPress plugins ecosystem.
Matt (00:28:23) - One of the amazing things I think about not just gravity forms, but Gravity Kit and the other certified developers that I've had on the podcast is I feel like people can build. Mean, you have WordPress services globally. Hey, I'll build you a website and then it can trickle down into, you know, consultants and agencies can have these more niche businesses which are still pretty, pretty broad, pretty widespread of, Hey, I can build you business directory websites and that's my thing. Are there any particular customer stories that you can share publicly of like really cool, interesting things you've seen built with your software that you've never seen before?
Zack (00:29:03) - Our marketing manager Casey has been doing a great job talking to some of our customers and building our case studies.
Zack (00:29:08) - And one of our one of the most recent case studies is from the Jacksonville Port Authority, Jax Port. And they are a one of the nation's largest ports. And they use Gravity View to display the routes that are connecting the world in shipping. And it's like, wow, who would have thought, right? So from Jax Port to things like school systems that use Gravity View to display a list of students and their parents or a list of student student homework assignments and allow people to come in and grade those homework assignments that aren't the student or aren't the primary teacher. We have universities. We have really neat like art art submission situation where there's like art contests and you have a bunch of judges that come in and grade the art submissions and then using Gravity view, they would display and grade and then using gravity view, they would sort by their grades and pick the winner of the art contest. That's all done using drag and drop, using gravity forms and gravity view. It's it's. So we have agencies that take that functionality and and keep on seeing, oh I can do that in gravity forms and gravity view.
Zack (00:30:22) - I could do that in gravity forms and gravity charts. How do I move from this other Drupal system into gravity forms where you can export into CSV and you can import using gravity import? We try to connect all these use cases and make it so that we're a suite of product solutions that make agencies more powerful and provide you an agency owner with more value so you don't have to go looking for this suite of connecting tissue. That's what gravity kit is.
Matt (00:30:52) - Let's just talk dependencies, right? So a lot of people see case studies, right? And they go, Oh, gravity kit serves exactly like I want to map my destinations of luxury cruise lines across the world. Now, maybe in that case, Gravity Kit does has all the dependencies there, but of course a customer might come to you and say, Cool, this is what I want. I went to your website, it's $159 or maybe $69 if you start at the real base level. And then you go and then they say, okay, perfect, here it is.
Matt (00:31:26) - Oh, I need gravity forms to right? And then maybe I need this other plugin or maybe I need something from Gravity Whiz to do this other thing that I thought I could do. And then there's all these interconnected sort of dependencies. Is that. Going away or. Or is that less of an issue in our world from your point of view? Do you think most buyers of gravity forms and for your software are already conditioned into knowing that? Or is this something that. It's still a little bit of a tug of war is the first thing that comes to my head. But is it still an issue where you need to educate? Okay. We're going to need gravity forms. You're going to need gravity kit. You might need this other thing, like, do we? How does that sit with you?
Zack (00:32:12) - I'm in conversation with a couple of different add on developers to make this easier for our customers because I know it's not ideal and we know it's not ideal. We want to make sure that it's as easy and affordable as possible to accomplish everything you're trying to do.
Zack (00:32:28) - And I'm excited that Gravity Forums is starting with a nonprofit license level, and that's going to be really huge for nonprofits and we're going to be joining that. And we always have had a nonprofit discount, but like, it hasn't been as promoted. But we're also going to be looking into and this is coming in the future, but we're going to be also we're looking into ways to make it so that startups and really life companies and agencies and entrepreneurs and developers can have access to more affordable licenses to get access to gravity kit at a at a price that's lower so that they can build out that first client website and have a higher margin and be able to to take that that money and put it toward their next win. So we are we are constantly trying to add additional value and make it so that. Combining the products that you need to get the job done is affordable and low friction because I'm always trying to reduce the friction and the customer journey for like, okay, I have this need, I want to get this done to I have done it and it's great.
Zack (00:33:36) - I'm happy and proud of it and my customer or client is really happy. So I'm always trying to make that easier. Right now there are more steps in that that I want there to be, and I'm in talks with a couple of different add on shops to hopefully make that easier in the future.
Matt (00:33:52) - Yeah. How do you balance the affordability factor? With the support factor. And knowing that potentially the customer that you're supporting is is an agency agency owner who might be charging tens of thousands of dollars to their end to their client. With your solution maybe being the most pivotal part of the sale, Right. So if somebody came and said, hey, build me this Jackson Port Authority website just like that, and they say, great, I can go and I can buy, let's say even the all access pass for 3.99 at Gravity kit. They have all the tools there. They have gravity forms and then they turn to you and say, Zach, this map isn't working. You know, like we're trying to import automatically the, I don't know, Vin number of the boat crossing the ocean and we've got some API that sends it to us and it's just figure it out.
Matt (00:34:46) - I bought your software. You know, I'm probably pushing to the extremes, but probably not because I've been both an agency owner and a plug in to sales person before. So I've seen, you know, both ends of that extreme. How do you balance support and affordability but also keeping your own business afloat? No pun intended.
Zack (00:35:07) - Yeah. You know, we as WordPress developers, we are all building code that is technically open source that you could use. I mean, technically the code is free and what we're charging for is support and we work really hard to have amazing support where people, every time they interact with us, they come away happy and we want it to be that like by the time people are contacting us, they are already they've already exhausted other options, whatever their comfort level is with looking through documentation or trying to read the website or trying to understand something, some video they watch. By the time they ask us a question, it's already too late. We've already failed them in some way.
Zack (00:35:53) - So I feel I feel sorry every time that they contacted us because we haven't done the first step of our job well. So we really want to come up and do an excellent job helping them figure out the rest, like whatever they need. We're trying to to make that as good as possible so we're not unhappy to provide support no matter what size of our customer. Like we really want to make sure that our customers accomplish their goals because that's why we're here. So I encourage people to contact us way sooner than they think they need to. Like if at the two minute mark, if you're frustrated, contact us like there's we are here to help. And I really mean that and like we have customers as those gravity forums like obviously because we integrate got like NASA jet propulsion laboratory like these are big companies. They're big, big organizations. And yeah we we have no problem providing support. And I feel like it's our primary duty is the support. Our primary duty is helping people accomplish their tasks and their goals.
Zack (00:36:56) - But our primary service to them is the support that we provide.
Matt (00:37:01) - All right, Zach, as we wrap up here, what's next for Gravity Kit?
Zack (00:37:06) - Well, we've got an exciting new add on coming out where if you've ever tried to move form data using like a standard kind of database migration thing or just to copy one form from one site to another, you might have exported it exported the form as a Json, exported the entries as a CSV, and then used our excellent gravity import plugin to import the CSV. But maybe the form isn't exactly as you had it or there were Add on integrations that didn't get moved over and the configuration is a little different. And while we're using we're we're releasing a new add on called gravity Migrate. That makes it super simple to say I want to migrate this form, this form and this form I want to migrate the gravity view configuration, I want to migrate all the entries, I want to migrate gravity form settings. I want to migrate all of my feeds and you just click export, it, downloads a zip.
Zack (00:37:56) - You go over to your other site, click import, and when you import all the entry IDs get mapped to the new form ID, everything moves over seamlessly. It's really, really slick and I'm excited about it. And yeah, so we've been using this internally and it's been a game changer for us where you can create a website on tri gravity kit. If you go to Sitecore gravity kit, you will find it create a demo, play around with our free 30 day demo, you'll be able to migrate that to your own website and it'll be exactly as you configured it on our demo site. So I'm excited about Gravity Migrate.
Matt (00:38:33) - I'm not going to hold you to the to the fire here, but when when's the official release date for this or is there it's still in the works.
Zack (00:38:39) - Either any minute now or or it's just dropped. We're trying to release it next week. So maybe the week after that knowing how things go. But if you go to Gravity kit, you'll find a release announcement and sign up for our newsletter.
Zack (00:38:53) - You'll stay, you'll stay updated. And who knows, maybe there will be even be a early adopter discount if you sign up for our newsletter.
Matt (00:39:02) - Hint hint Gravity kit.com is where you can go to sign up or is there a different for the email?
Zack (00:39:10) - Gravity kit is a good one and on the bottom of the page there's a newsletter Sign up.
Matt (00:39:15) - Fantastic Gravity Katkam Zach Cats Thanks for hanging out a staple in the WordPress and Gravity Forum space for many years. Check them out. Gravity kit.com.
Zack (00:39:27) - I didn't break down Matt.
Speaker 3 (00:39:28) - No, you didn't.
Matt (00:39:30) - All right. Two great interviews in the books. One with Adam Pickering talking all about Gravity, Smtp and the other with Zach Katz, which you just heard from Gravity Kit. It's the Breakdown podcast. Support us by sharing this on social media. If you have other folks that you know who love podcasts, we love WordPress, we love gravity forms, we just want to stay up to date with some fun gravity forums information. Let them know about the breakdown Podcast.
Matt (00:39:57) - Gravity forms.com/breakdown. We'll take you to the podcast website. Click one of those buttons for your favorite podcast listening app. I'm looking at the stats and most of you use the Apple podcast app and some of you use Overcast and then a whole smattering of others, including Spotify. So we're everywhere. Go ahead, go to Gravity forms.com/breakdown. Subscribe to the show, share us on social media. Tag us when you do that helps. It helps my job, helps my performance reviews. So if you could share it in Tag Us. Let the World Know You Love the Breakdown podcast. We'll see you on the next episode.