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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.
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Speaker 2:Hey, Gravity Formers. It's Monday, July 15. We have a collection of stories and interviews today. I'm excited to get into this dog days of summer episode. Is that is it dog days of summer?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't I don't know. Kinda feels like it, but hey. Anyway, it's Breakdown, a Gravity Forms podcast.
Speaker 3:Hey, Breakdown listener. It's Zach Katz here from GravityKit with some exciting news. It's GravityKit's tenth birthday. I started GravityKit back in 2014 with a single powerful plug in GravityView. Since then, we've grown to offer a suite of useful and powerful Gravity Forms add ons.
Speaker 3:Today, Gravity Kit powers over 40,000 websites. And to celebrate, we're offering a huge 40% off all of our products during our birthday week from July 22 to thirty first. On Gravity Kit's birthday, July 24, join our live call for a chance to win a free lifetime license. For more details, head over to gravitykit.com/live. Don't miss out on the celebrations.
Speaker 3:It's all kicking off on July 22. Be sure to join us at gravitykit.com. That's gravitykit.com.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Zach, and happy birthday to Gravity Kit. Ten years is a major milestone for any business, especially a WordPress business, serving WordPress users, Gravity Forms users for the last decade. Quite an accomplishment. So congrats to you and the team. No major updates to Gravity Forms in this episode to chat about.
Speaker 2:You'll hear from Adam Pickering on Gravity SMTP. He's gonna share a small update with us before we get into today's interviews. There is one major update coming to WordPress. WordPress 6.6 is out this week. Fingers crossed.
Speaker 2:As long as there isn't anything holding it up or some major security thing that they have to pause shipping WordPress 6.6. But there are some very interesting features coming out. One of them being you'll start to see hints of the new WordPress admin look and feel. You'll see that if you're in the site editor and looking at templates and template parts and other parts of the full site editor. You'll start to see the updated admin UI, which will permeate throughout WordPress admin as WordPress continues to evolve over the next six months to a year, and really exciting to see that stuff come together.
Speaker 2:There are some improvements to things like the grid layout. These are new features coming into WordPress, giving you more control over creating and styling grids right inside of the editor. But the biggest update that's happening is the override specific items in synced patterns. Right? Or sync pattern overrides.
Speaker 2:The the name isn't as wonderful as it should be. But what we're what WordPress is allowing users to do is create patterns like they've always been able to do, sync them as they've always been able to do. But what happens in a synced pattern world is if you create a synced pattern to share with other folks, you know, using WordPress alongside of you, whether that's your publishing team, your marketing team, or you're building websites for clients, and you're saying, hey. I'm creating a bunch of patterns for you. You can reuse these patterns throughout the throughout the website.
Speaker 2:When you're syncing them, you're creating a connection across all of those patterns. So you make a change, and it'll happen across all patterns, which is great. If they're a sync pattern, it's kind of what you want it to do. The overrides portion is what's going to allow you to create these sort of fractional synced patterns where you can create a global sync pattern, like you style it, background color, but maybe you want the heading or the image to be able to change. And that's the override portions.
Speaker 2:Users will be able to click on, let's say, the the call to action button and say, hey, this is a this will be allowed to be override. And a user will be able to change that button, that image, that call to action without breaking the entire design and structure of that pattern. So this is a welcomed update for those of you who are working with WordPress, end users, building websites for them, because now you'll be able to style that stuff and say, hey. Only go in and change the headline, but don't break the rest of the styling or the buttons, you know, the important embedded video or background image. You you don't know, wanna give everybody that control.
Speaker 2:You wanna give them just the ability to change that headline. You'll be able to do that now with the pattern overrides. Then there's a ton of things in the background of WordPress that are that are starting to get updated. The interactivity API, these are all things that are going to improve WordPress in the long term, and we're really excited to see that stuff come together. So WordPress 6.6 is shaping up to be a pretty impactful update.
Speaker 2:Even though there's not a lot of features, I think the override systems with the sync patterns, the ability to start creating more refined grid layouts, all of that stuff, along with some minor performance improvements is really gonna make WordPress 6.6 feel a lot more significant than maybe the the fact sheet looks. Okay. Now I'm gonna kick it off to my colleague, Adam Pickering. He's gonna give us an update on Gravity SMTP.
Speaker 4:Hey. It's Adam from Gravity SMTP. I wanted to share an update with you what what's been happening with the product over the last few months. In June, we released one point one point zero, which added a few new integrations such as a highly requested Microsoft integration, as well as Google. And we also added the ability to send emails through PHP mail as well.
Speaker 4:We also added the ability in that release to set a connection as a primary connection or a backup connection. So if there are issues with one of your connections, there's always a backup that it will send through. In July, we also saw 1.2 o be released, which enabled a few new features such as the resend email functionality, as well as being able to migrate from a popular WordPress plugin called WP Mail SMTP to Gravity SMTP. And so, yeah, that that brings us to what we've been up to over the last few months, and we're really looking so forward to what we're doing in the future.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Adam. It's great to hear all of the advancements happening with Gravity SMTP. Super excited for that product to continue to, evolve and develop lots of great features in the works. I can't wait to see some of these things come to the full version of Gravity SMTP. If you haven't checked it out, go to gravityforms.com and check it out right now.
Speaker 2:Next up is my interview with Ryan Sullivan from SiteCare, long term friend of mine in the WordPress space. He lives in the West Coast, but we've met up one or two times out here on the East Coast. Always a great time chatting with him. SiteCare is a WordPress care plan and services company. It's had quite an evolution from when he started it way back twelve years ago as WP Site Care.
Speaker 2:He was doing your typical sort of WordPress maintenance and support type contracts with with customers. Very competitive space. If you're an agency or a freelancer, you probably know you're well aware of selling care plans to your customers, but he's the OG. He's been doing it for over a decade and probably coined the term, site care or care plans. Let's get into my interview with Ryan.
Speaker 2:Ryan, welcome to Breakdown.
Speaker 5:Matt, it's good to be here.
Speaker 2:Man, you have a storied background in in WordPress just as long as I, if not longer. You've been around since probably the inception of Gravity Forms. You are the chief I almost said chief people officer. I don't know why that's in my head. Chief of staff at SiteCare, a company that you started many moons ago.
Speaker 2:We're gonna talk about running SightCare today, what SightCare provides to end users. But first, let me just hit you with the question. Are you going to WordCamp US in September year?
Speaker 5:I'll be there. I'll be in Portland. It's a it's a quick trip for me. I'm I'm just you know, I'm in I'm in Utah, so hard to hard to make excuses to not be there, especially, you know, lots of lots of great people show up, and so I'll definitely be there.
Speaker 2:I I hear rumblings of a potential golf match.
Speaker 5:If that's if that's happening, put me on the email list, put me something, whatever. I'm I'm in. I'll I'll figure it out.
Speaker 2:We we're not gonna disclose our handicaps where though though we were talking about it before we hit record, but, you know, hey, maybe I'll throw my hat in the ring if there's some decent club rentals. I'm certainly not good enough to travel with my clubs, but I'll rent some halfway decent ones.
Speaker 5:Sure. Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Talk to us about site care, sitecare.com. At once, it was called WPSiteCare. Correct?
Speaker 5:Yeah. When I started, yeah, I started a company twelve years ago, I think, called WPSiteCare was, you know, support and maintenance for WordPress sites. So we do things like backups and, you know, updating plug ins and things like that. And then six years ago, in fact, this today is literally the sixth year anniversary. WP Site Care joined an agency called Southern Web, and then about four years ago, we rebranded as as Site Care without the without the WP.
Speaker 2:It's been an exciting ride just like looking at and observing the support landscape or the support marketplace ecosystem in WordPress. It's such well, I mean, you probably know the numbers way better than I do, but I I look at it as such a massive piece of the WordPress ecosystem. It's building sites. Yes. Designing sites.
Speaker 2:Yes. But then I think a lot of early stage agencies really learn that, oh, there's there's money to be made at support and, I guess, what a lot of people call now care plans. You probably coined that. You're probably the godfather of care plans as they've known. I see it all over agency groups, like on Facebook groups and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:But it's a it's a big market. What do you think most people overlook as early stage agency or freelancers? Do they overlook or maybe underappreciate in the support section of after they deliver a website to somebody? What is it that they're really missing that, you know, you'd wanna tell them to pay more attention to?
Speaker 5:What I've what I've learned over the years is the technical side of it, it's I mean, it's way more complex than it's ever been, but I don't believe that's the difficult part. The difficult part is the human relationship part of it. So you like like, if you're considering offering these ongoing maintenance activities, like, you know, people expect a response from a real human, but not just a real human, a real human who can actually address the issue that they're having. So I think what a lot of people do or what I've seen is what I've seen in the industry is, like, you know, lots of canned replies, auto replies, or they'll hire, like, an admin to do triage, and then the developer is kinda somewhere in the background. Right?
Speaker 5:And and at SiteCare, we've always made it, you know, we've always made it a priority to make our frontline support staff WordPress professionals. So people who can not only not only acknowledge whatever challenge the client is having, but also do something to remedy it even if it's a short term, you know, even if it's a short term resolution that can, you know, that can have that that needs more time to have a full resolution later on. You know, just today, there was a, know, there was a client site that they had enabled automated updates, which, we don't know why they did that, but they enabled automated updates because when when they're on a plan with us, we typically go through a pretty, you know, pretty particular update process. But, anyway, the their theme updated itself, broke a bunch of front end layouts, and we had them you know, they sent an email and in a panic, like, what happened? Well, how did this go wrong?
Speaker 5:We could see in the activity log exactly where they hit enable it, automatic updates. We knew exactly what needed to be fixed. And within a couple of minutes, our our account manager had them in great shape. And I I think that, you know, that that type of interaction is really difficult to create. Those types of people who enjoy customer service but are also technically savvy are difficult to hire and and typically aren't, you know, aren't inexpensive to hire either.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:And so it's something that I think gets overlooked a lot, and it's something that really, I mean, really makes a difference between, you know, the folks who are just kinda just going through the motions and the ones who are providing real real support.
Speaker 2:There's a knowledge gap. Right? There's you have the clients who Right. They don't know anything about WordPress. If they do, they just know it from, like, oh, this is a thing somebody told me I should be on.
Speaker 2:If they're savvy enough, they know that it's it's open source and they kinda kinda own their stuff. It's not, you know, beholden to Wix or Squarespace or things like that, but very few really come into the game, you know, even with that kind of knowledge. And then you have the early stage, the agency freelancer who is you know, I can continue to learn on the job too. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but are continuing to learn on the job. Agencies are all you're always learning in any business, really, but especially agencies, you're learning where the customers' needs are.
Speaker 2:You're you're keeping up with technology. And all the while, you're being marketed to from, you know, these automated systems that are like, hey, with one click, can maintain your WordPress website, backups, updates, all this stuff. Yeah. One click is great. It's so easy.
Speaker 2:But what happens when you're doing that for a client and something goes wrong? Or the client does something like you said, maybe turns on auto updates. Well, your little magical one click update system isn't helping you roll back and understanding what broke or how the client fixed it. Enter in the age of AI where everyone's like, oh my god. This is just I could throw an AI chatbot at my clients too, and you start to really create this nonhuman approach.
Speaker 2:And I say, save the humans, especially in in the services world. Because that kind of care and support is what's going to, you know, up up the game for for you, the freelancer, or the the the early stage agency to really have that human approach. Gonna cost more. Gonna cost you more. It's gonna cost your client more.
Speaker 2:But I think at the end of the day, it's it's gonna be a better output for for everybody, like you said.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, I'll even add to that. Like, especially with the the, you know, the the chatbot AI thing, really, we've just created a phone tree with more options. Yeah. And and people don't know don't even know the op like, the people who are in need of support don't even know the option that they need to be choosing.
Speaker 5:Right? So we've created this choose your own adventure that creates an endless loop that people don't know how to navigate. And whereas if they write, you know, two two sentences to a skilled professional that say, hey. Website's broken. I don't know why.
Speaker 5:Like, that's enough information for a really pro human to go and look at all of the logging and the details and all the other things that we're tracking and go, oh, I see what went wrong here. Let's, you know, let's let's get everything back in working order. And and that that's what I mean, that's what customer service is. Customer service is being able to deliver on the you know, being able to resolve the issue on the fewest number of touches as possible. And, you know, not nothing feels less satisfying than even even when you get to the point of talking with an agent, getting, you know, getting some type of reply that says, okay.
Speaker 5:You know, somebody from our development team will get back to you within two to three business days. I'm an active issue that I'd really like to get sorted out here. Is there anything else we can do? Right? Like, that Sure.
Speaker 5:That that whole that whole interaction is just uncomfortable for for customers, and it's it's something we really, really try and avoid.
Speaker 2:I wanna give you the chance to present a way for those listening, freelancers again, early stage agencies, to partner up with site care. Right? When is when does it make sense for an agency to work with a company like yours? And I'll ask the dreaded question, are they leaving money on the table if they partner with you? Do you have referral fee systems, affiliate systems?
Speaker 2:I think a lot of folks are afraid to partner and work with others because, like, oh, man. I might be leaving money on the table. But then you might you also have to ask yourself, are you the one to really do this work? Right? Like Right.
Speaker 2:If you don't have time to support and maintain your customer sites, are you the one to do it just for the sake of making a few extra bucks? Or do you partner with Ryan and his team? So, Ryan, what's the best way for folks to partner and work with you, and do you have the infrastructure to facilitate that?
Speaker 5:Yeah. We do. We we have a referral program. We pay a 10% flat rate of any business that's referred to us. So, you know, anybody sends us you know, refers us a client, they sign up for a plan, 10% is going back to the referrer for the duration.
Speaker 5:We have we make those payment. We we do quarterly payouts on those. As far as leaving money on the table, I I think it come I think that question ultimately comes down to bandwidth and reputation. Right? At what point do you have so many unsatisfied customers that you start, you know, you start jeopardizing the business you've already grown.
Speaker 5:And if you feel like you're ever in that type of situation where, like, every email I get is somebody that's upset or is who's looking for an update or who wants more like, if those are if that's what the you know, if that's what most of the communication looks like, partnering up with somebody like us is is probably a, you know, probably a good way to go. I will say we, like, we're very focused on the things we do. We don't get involved in we don't get like, we're we're hands off on whatever, you know, develop developers or other agencies have going on outside of our scope of services. So we stick to what we do, and we we do it the best we can. And but but, yeah, I think I think that's kind of that's kinda how I evaluate that that whole thing.
Speaker 5:Right? It's like, if I'm I'm not actually leaving, like, I'm not actually leaving money on the table if the people who are paying me for this type of service are always angry because they're gonna cancel and leave anyway, and I might even be jeopardizing, like, relationships that I've established in the past. And so that's if if you're in any similar type of state, it definitely makes sense to, you know, offload that work to somebody like us and have some passive income to go with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I've seen it time and time again, and so have you, obviously, where a lot of folks are just optimizing for the website sale now. Like, I'm gonna do this stuff now, and I'm gonna profit now. And then either overlook the long term of of support, but certainly overlook the long term of customer experience and customer retention. And are they happy?
Speaker 2:Will they refer refer more business to me? Like, should I have done like an SEO audit on their site if I really don't know what SEO is? And then you're just you're just, you know, compounding this stuff over time and you're hit the nail on the head and it shouldn't be understated that that is a a testament for your of your time in this space in serving clients to, like, understand that a well oiled machine serving the purpose of, you know, what you're really good at is much more important than just, like, going broad and saying, I'll do all of these services. Right? Which is actually a lesson maybe that your that your own company went through.
Speaker 2:Right? It's Southern Web sort of optimizing now to site care. Hey. No. We're doing this great thing with site care.
Speaker 2:All this other stuff is is just just too much. And we can do really good by our clients by optimizing on the site care brand. So not only do you know it, you're you've lived through it and you continue to operate it. So that's a great piece of advice. I wanna shift over to talking about Gravity Forms, of course.
Speaker 2:We're here in Gravity Forms. You've been a Gravity Forms user for over ten years?
Speaker 5:For sure over ten. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You started on your own personal sites, or did you start using it when you launched WP SiteCare?
Speaker 5:Probably I mean yeah. The first license I ever bought was probably a developer license for w
Speaker 2:Don't disclose the price because you're probably still paying the same price. We we $17? No.
Speaker 5:We we up we we we upgraded recently. We we're we're paying we're paying retail now. But but we that that was that was because we we got so much value out of it that we just felt we almost felt a little bit guilty about what we were paying. So so we were like, no. This is this is something we need to put a little bit more into.
Speaker 5:And but, yeah, tool a tool that I've used for a very, very long time.
Speaker 2:Is there a common use case or common Gravity Forms stack that you use with, your clients at site care? Is there a typical blueprint using a certain set of add ons that you're always installing and activating with Gravity Forms?
Speaker 5:Yeah. There there there are several. It's I don't I don't know if anybody's, you know, looked at the world of, like, spam moderation outside of Gravity Forms. Like so so the Akismet add on is is kind of a default. That's a go to.
Speaker 5:The any kind of moderation any kind of moderation with other forms, products that we've used has been not great. So that's that's a very common add on. The other we've built I I wouldn't say this is necessarily typical, but we've built quite a few simple simple checkouts for for clients using Gravity Forms where a full ecommerce service just really didn't make sense for what, you know, for what they were for what they were selling. We've used it. We have a client right now that we just set up a a full blown a full blown classified system basically using Gravity Forms.
Speaker 5:So somebody comes to the site, they say I have something to sell, they submit a gravity gravity form, it creates a draft listing, but it also registers the user at the same time. They can log in, make any edits they need to, and then and then it goes through a moderation queue before it gets published. And it all it all runs really smoothly, and and that's all Gravity Forms based. So, you know, kinda run run the gamut with the types of the the all the different things we've done and the complexity. But, yeah, I I would say I mean, genuinely, it's a tool that our team touches every single day of the week.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's a new add on coming out. I don't know if it'll be out, but the beta's out right now. It's it's it's the Salesforce add on. And I know from agency's perspective, like, one of the things and this isn't a direct question, but I'd your thoughts on it.
Speaker 2:One of the reasons why I like Gravity Forms and how I use Gravity Forms in my agency was it allowed me to work with a particular type of of customer. Right? And I like using the our email newsletter add ons as an example because you can have the Mailchimp add on, which is, you know, your generic small business owner needs an email newsletter, gets out there every couple of months to send one email out to their clients. It's nice. But there's that type of customer and certainly a great customer to service.
Speaker 2:But then you start to look at, okay. Now there's the the HubSpot add on where we integrate with HubSpot CRM. That could bring you and elevate you to a whole new class of customer. Right? Just by leveraging this tool.
Speaker 2:Now you can go in and say, hey. We can help you, the HubSpot user, create sales gen gen forms for your sales team, marketing forms, downloads, brochures, all that stuff. Get them into a automation flow with with HubSpot. And now you're talking to a whole different type of customer. Elevated Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Probably a bigger budget, more time, etcetera. Then there's Salesforce that's rolling out. That's like enterprise. Now you can start to really go into that category. Your thoughts on, like, how a tool like Gravity Forms can elevate the service provider, like finding new customers.
Speaker 2:Do you have any thoughts on that or anything that you'd like to share, you know, with that in mind?
Speaker 5:Yeah. We we have a client right now to do 4,000,000,000 a year in revenue who uses the the Gravity Forms HubSpot integration. And and that has been, like, really instrumental really instrumental for them because they I mean, they have the they didn't they, you know, they they had a very, very strong opinion around what the aesthetics of the website should be, but they weren't really able to shape Gravity Forms itself to do that. But we could take a front end form like GravityForms and make it look however they want it to look. And that was you know, for them, that was something that they went, oh, wow.
Speaker 5:This this is I mean, it felt like magic to them because they had, you know, they had with their own internal team, they had messed with trying to make these embed forms look a certain way for a long time and were basically told, you know, that's not gonna be possible for you by the by the HubSpot team. And and HubSpot, you know, and and HubSpot itself, you know, they're paying for an enterprise license of HubSpot, you know, whatever that is, $40,000 a year plus type of thing. And they're and so they're going, we're paying this much money, and we can't make it look the way we want on our websites. So that's just one example of how it provides a solution that even the even the app or SaaS itself can't deliver. And and so that's I mean, that that's the type of solution that, you know, some of these larger companies look at and go, woah.
Speaker 5:Like and and I can get this for, you know, a few $100 per year? And and we're like, yeah. Yes. And and and it's, like, it's almost it's like it's almost confusing to them in a way. But, yeah, it's absolutely allowed us to Gravity Forms absolutely allowed us to cater to, I mean, really, every level of of client with different types of solutions.
Speaker 5:And it's the first thing like, anything forms based, it's the first thing we we look to when our clients start asking us, you know, when our clients start asking us, oh, well, could we do this? Could we do this? And it's like, probably. And and then we spend, you know, a few hours with Gravity Forms testing some things and trying some new add ons, and we come back and we say, absolutely. We can do that.
Speaker 5:And, you know, being able to, you know, being able to satisfy, you know, an an enterprise level client or any any medium or large business with with a tool like that, it it, like, it really their reaction is it just feels like magic. Like, it feels like this is not this does not seem like it should be possible because every all of their other interactions are about, oh, well, yeah, you're gonna need this other add on and this other license. And and the every single time there's another add on or license or whatever, it it's a number with a comma in it or, you know, it's it's never it's just not a typical interaction to be able to for them to be able to have, like, a really good solid web form solution that isn't that isn't just an astronomical fee.
Speaker 2:Ryan Sullivan, sitecare.com, the complete site health solution for WordPress. Ryan, anywhere else somebody should go to say thanks other than sitecare.com?
Speaker 5:That's the best place.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Thanks, Ryan.
Speaker 5:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Don't forget to go check out sitecare.com. Say thanks to Ryan for hanging out and sharing some of his, knowledge with us today. Last but not least is our final segment of the day, and that's recapping what the team did at WordCamp Europe. Speaking to one of my favorite colleagues here at Gravity Forms, Megan Jones. She's gonna tell us about her experience at WordCamp Europe.
Speaker 2:Was it the best? Can another WordCamp top this? Maybe WordCamp US coming up in September where I'll be, and the rest of the Gravity Forms team will be. Here's Megan. You just got back from WordCamp Europe.
Speaker 2:Fun time?
Speaker 1:I did. Yep. Yep. It was yes. It was great.
Speaker 1:They're always great events. This one, I think, a particularly good one, actually. I possibly think it might be my all time favorite word count. So
Speaker 2:Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It it was fun. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I, you know, I didn't get a chance to go. My wife was very upset that I that we didn't go because she was dying to go to Italy. But, you know Yeah. Things things things had to get done around the house.
Speaker 1:We did miss you. We did miss you, Matt. So next time.
Speaker 2:I watched all the lovely pictures on social media, in our Slack, so it looked like a great time. Do you have a favorite moment from WordCamp Europe?
Speaker 1:Oh, I mean, lots of favorite favorite moments really. What are my takeaways? Obviously, always hanging out with the Gravity team. Always lovely to see everyone. Always some great conversations.
Speaker 1:Actually, we had some certified developers there as well. So Gravity Wiz was was there, two of two of those guys. And Gravity Kit, the whole team I think were there. So that's always lovely to see them and talk about what they're up to. I think actually Turin was just beautiful and I loved it.
Speaker 1:If you haven't been, go. That would be my advice. It just felt not too touristy, lovely food, beautiful buildings. Yeah, it was great. And then the actual WordCamp itself is really good.
Speaker 1:The location was great. The actual the area we were in like the
Speaker 2:The venue, everything was great.
Speaker 1:The venue. That's it. Thanks, Matt. Looking for the word. The venue was great.
Speaker 1:So it was really big and there's a lot of sponsors. I felt there was like a lot more sponsors than WorldCamp US. And just a really good sort of like footfall of traffic, really nice space. And this is a funny thing that I really didn't enjoy it but it was a really nice sort of thing. It's that I've been to like quite a lot of word camps now like the last three years I've been going and people would talk about like the inclusive community in word WordPress.
Speaker 1:And I do feel that but I actually do always feel like, oh, I didn't really know that many people at WordCamps. I didn't really know that many people in the community other than a few people that I still connect with online. So I always feel like when I leave those events and then you see all the stuff on Twitter about everyone meeting up and I think, oh, I'm not sure really if I'm sort of in that scene. Anyway, this time around, loads of people came and said hello to me and like remembered me from the last few years. It was very cute and I felt like included like for the, you know, like, sort of properly in the WordPress community.
Speaker 1:So that was a nice, like, takeaway myself from my just personally for myself.
Speaker 2:So yeah. Word WordPress royalty?
Speaker 1:I mean, I wouldn't get that far.
Speaker 4:A few people recognize my face from previous events and it was nice. Like, some
Speaker 1:of our community developers that I've worked with, like, just emailed and stuff. They came over and, like, sort of found me and we had a good chat about their products and, yeah, it was it was a nice nice support. What
Speaker 2:was the giveaway? Like, we gave away the Lego set and like a swag backpack. I remember the crowd at WordCamp US. There was just what felt like hundreds of people. I don't think it was that many, but it felt like that many people in front of our booth.
Speaker 2:Was it that much of a turnout in Europe?
Speaker 1:It it was. It was great. Yeah. It was it was a good turnout. I actually think it was there was more it felt like there was more people just generally there at the event.
Speaker 1:I don't know the numbers. But so, yeah, for the giveaway, it was the same sort of big crowd. We actually brought a microphone this time, but the venue was sort of, like, so big and loud. It wasn't loud enough. So we were back to Mike for shout shouting and getting everyone's attention, but I think it went well.
Speaker 1:Have you got
Speaker 2:Did Mike have to stand up on a on a chair again?
Speaker 1:He didn't stand on a chair, but he did do a lot of yelling after a while. So we did I was I was saying we did bring a a microphone with us, but actually it wasn't loud enough for the venue. So Wow. The crowd. So we have to, yeah, up our game again next time.
Speaker 1:So but, yeah, we had a a couple of winners, three winners. So it was fun.
Speaker 2:Overall takeaway from WordCamp Europe. There's a sentiment from WordPress, the organizers of WordCamp, WordCamp Central, saying that events and participation is down from from new participants. Any words of encouragement for folks to go and actually take part of these in person events? Do you see it from the user's perspective on what somebody could take away from it other than, you know, you and I going for representing Gravity Forms? But what do you see as, like, a great value add for somebody to attend these camps?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You know what? I I don't know. Like, I obviously, people came around to the booth and we talk a lot and a lot of them are sort of long time standing customers.
Speaker 1:I don't know on the I mean, obviously, WordPress know on the numbers of sort of new and people coming and people that just keep coming over and over. It does feel like it's a lot of people that have been in the space a long time. It's tricky. It's difficult because I I think a lot of those a lot of the talks are set up for people that have been in the space a long time. So I do wonder if there's something there.
Speaker 1:If people are gonna, you know, sort of pay the price of flights and hotels and all the rest of it and and they're only sort of like new to WordPress or if they're more like hobbyists. If at the moment those sort of events are worth that cost if you've got like a small business and you know, like if you've just got a WordPress site that you want to improve it, I think maybe I could see why you would go to a local meetup rather than a bigger one. So I do wonder if there is something there that we could do differently as a word count like for the actual like volunteers who are organizing it. If they looked more at what maybe new people coming to the event might need but it is great. It is a great event to come to.
Speaker 1:I mean maybe people feel
Speaker 5:a
Speaker 1:bit daunted coming along because it is a big thing. I would say, you know, like I said earlier, it was really nice people started you know, people actually, like, knew me this time around. So maybe just come up come along to a couple, one this year, one the next, and see how it goes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. These flagship word camps are well, they are expensive. Right? Especially cost of travel. That that is literally the biggest expense.
Speaker 2:Right? The tickets Yeah. You know, when you compare tickets to something like CloudFest or, you know, all these other sort of tech events, the tickets are actually quite pricey in the real world of of events. Right? $6,700 for entry level tickets, and then they have multi thousand dollar event passes to get you into different Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Booths and and VIP sections. And then you still have to pay for travel. So at least WordPress and WordCamps have that value going for it where
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Uh-uh. You know, the flagship events are great, but they're still expensive to get to. Last question here. I think there's a there's a kick start in for WordCamp London to get back in action. Right?
Speaker 2:I see that there's a a collection of folks who are really trying to bring the regular meetups back in session and the actual WordCamp back to London because I think the last one was 2019. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Before COVID. And then I think last year, there was a big push to get something off the ground and then that didn't happen. I did actually see an email yesterday to say that there was an invite oh, wait list, sorry, for the local London, like, meet up. So but obviously, it's getting well attended.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, I mean, it would be great. It would be lovely to have a a big London word camp.
Speaker 2:You know I'm dying to get there. You know I'm dying to get there.
Speaker 1:I'm dying for you to come over and bring the the team can come over and I'll show you The UK.
Speaker 2:Megan Jones, thanks for hanging out today.
Speaker 1:Oh, no worries. Lovely. Lovely to be here. Thanks for having me, Matt.
Speaker 2:That's it for today's episode. If you could do one more thing for me today, share this episode on social media, your favorite Facebook group or Discord channel. Spread the word about this podcast. It really helps. If you haven't added Breakdown to your favorite podcast app, point your browser to gravityforms.com/breakdown, and click the icon of your app to add us and listen to us every two weeks.
Speaker 2:Okay. We'll see you in the next episode.