Breakdown - A Gravity Forms Podcast

In this podcast episode, Matt kicks things off by talking about the release of the Conversational Forms Add-On. Matt will be hosting more Gravity Forms 101 livestreams on the main YouTube channel.

Matt then delves into the meat of the episode, exploring different avenues to generate income with Gravity Forms. Matt asked ChatGPT to provide us with 5 ways to run a “Gravity Forms agency” and the go to market strategy to use. ChatGPT suggests starting a custom form development agency, a data analytics and reporting agency, a Gravity Forms training agency, a Gravity Forms maintenance and support agency, and a Gravity Forms integration agency. Matt takes the time to rate each opportunity and shares his personal thoughts on their potential profitability.

As the episode progresses, Matt shifts gears and welcomes Joe Casabona to the podcast. They engage in a lively conversation about the benefits of utilizing Gravity Forms for podcasting and content strategy. Joe, an expert in this field, shares his experiences and highlights the advantages of incorporating Gravity Forms into podcasting workflows. Together, they emphasize the importance of repurposing podcast episodes to maximize their reach and impact.

Overall, this episode offers valuable insights and creative ideas for leveraging the power of Gravity Forms while also delving into the world of podcasting. Whether you're interested in monetizing Gravity Forms or starting your own podcast, this episode has something to offer.

Important links
- https://www.gravityforms.com/add-ons/conversational-forms-add-on/
- WordCamp US 2023 – National Harbor, Maryland, August 24-26, 2023
- Gravity Forms 101 livestream
- How I Built It
- https://www.linkedin.com/learning/using-gravity-forms-in-wordpress-a-comprehensive-guide
- https://twitter.com/jcasabona

Creators & Guests

Host
Matt Medeiros🎙
Community @gravityforms. WordPress news @thewpminute. Blue collar digital worker @mattreport. Podcast growth @podcastsetup.

What is Breakdown - A Gravity Forms Podcast?

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 (00:00:14) - Hey, Gravity formers. It's Monday, August 7th. Learn more about the conversational forms. Add on. Can ChatGPT help us make more money offering gravity forms, services? And we'll wrap it up with podcaster and automation expert Joe Casaubon. It's Breakdown A Gravity Forms podcast. Conversational forms add on is out and I held another gravity forms one on one live stream on our YouTube channel where I demoed the form design process in more detail, like how to customize a conversational forms, showing off some of the inspiration boards that we have on the Gravity Forums website. I'll link up the live stream in the show notes, but just here's a quick clip of the questions that came through during the demo. Keep your questions coming in. Let's see what we got. Christine Nelson, can you open conversational forms in a modal? There might be some magic. I wish I had somebody one of the technical folks from from the team with me. I don't think you can yet.

Matt (00:01:17) - The idea would be that you want this specifically to take over the screen like it's a distraction free environment where it's taking over the look and feel of the website because you don't want anyone else sort of clicking around. Don't forget to search for gravity forms on YouTube and subscribe to our channel so you won't miss another 101 live stream. I'm planning to hold those monthly, so if you have a topic in mind, you can tweet at us or email me Matt at Gravity Forms and let me know what you want to see and conquer with gravity forms for the next live stream. How to make money with gravity Forms. So with all of the hype around ChatGPT, am I going to get in trouble for calling it hype? I know it's here to stay, but you know at what capacity, really? I decided to ask our chat. GPT Overlord about how I could make money with gravity forms if I were starting a WordPress agency today. Well, nevertheless, the results might surprise you. Probably enjoyed this next segment on making money with gravity forms thanks to AI recommendations or always looking for new opportunities in the gravity form space through this podcast.

Matt (00:02:29) - That's some of the things that I like to dive into with my guests, with the topics that we bring in. And it really dawned on me the other day that and I don't use ChatGPT like the rest of my Twitter followers do, or like everyone else I see online really diving deep into the world of ChatGPT, maybe even yourself. So I said, Well, maybe we can leverage ChatGPT for giving us some recommendations on how to make money with gravity forms. How can we create our own services business? So I went to my ChatGPT account and I prompted it with this. Can you recommend five ways I can start a WordPress agency that only build solutions for clients using gravity forms with these five ways? Also include a single go to market strategy for each so sitting back can chat GPT Help me start something in a niche vertical with gravity forms. Now the response was pretty broad. It could have been because my question was fairly broad as well. But I'm going to read out these five to you right now and sort of discuss them and then throw in some bonuses that I think the human brain, myself could help help you maybe even start in your WordPress professional career.

Matt (00:03:45) - Okay, here we go. So the first question, the first answer that ChatGPT gave me was a custom form development agency as no surprise there, right? As I prompt them to help me figure out a business for a contact form plug in. So ChatGPT says Start an agency that specializes in creating managing custom forms for clients. You'll need a deep understanding of gravity forms and the various ways it can be configured and customized to meet client specific needs. Now that's pretty broad custom form development agency. I don't think that title is going to really rank well in terms of SEO. I don't think many people are searching for a custom form development agency though. You know what? We do know what what has been proven over well over a decade of gravity forms existence Now is that a custom WordPress development agency? Can use gravity forms at the heart of some pretty complex custom forms, right? So whether that's creating user submitted data for like a directory or an intranet, doing things like workflow automations, internal apps. When I was running my agency years and years ago, we built a whole wedding planner for a wedding magazine.

Matt (00:05:04) - That a visitor could go to the website, use the gravity form and calculate. The cost or the potential cost of lining up all these different vendors, whether it's the venue, it's the caterer, it's the photographer. We had an internal database that was filled from that marketplace of vendors. So the vendors would go to the site, they'd fill out their own form to put in their data and their attributes. And then we built this sort of web app using gravity forms that save the sessions, save the raw data. And it was very interactive. It was actually pretty advanced for the time that we were building this thing. So custom form development agency, I'd give this I'd rank this one three and a half out of five in terms of a response, right? You can do it certainly, but it's largely creating a WordPress development agency is the way that I see it. The go to market strategy that ChatGPT recommends here is start by identifying businesses that could be that could benefit from custom form solutions like e-commerce sites, educational institutions, membership sites, picture services as a way to improve their user experience and data collection capabilities.

Matt (00:06:15) - You could also offer a form audit service where you evaluate their existing forms and recommend improvements. So the go to market strategy is actually more interesting than the general answer because. This is something that you could do, right? You could look at these individual markets, educational institutions, membership sites, educational institutions, much harder to sell into and find the decision makers and break into the budget. I know this because I'm a fairly seasoned software salesperson and I used to sell into higher ed and it's a process, to say the least. Membership sites, many of them are much smaller budgets than maybe your your higher ed stuff, but much easier to approach and break into as a as a sales person. And yes, this is amazing because you could look at that and say, hey, if you're using conditional logic with gravity forms, if you're using our Zapier integration, if we're using Stripe for payment integration, there's a lot of opportunity there that that you might have as a consultant to go after these markets. So first answer, not bad.

Matt (00:07:22) - Three and a half out of five. That's what I give. I give the go to market strategy. I'm gonna give it a four out of five on that response. Custom form development agency. Maybe that's your next WordPress venture. Let's go into answer number two, this one rather interesting data analytics and reporting agency. Another approach is to start an agency focused on analyzing and reporting data collected through gravity forms. This would require expertise in data analysis and the various integrations available with gravity form. So that's the underlining variable there as you need to have expertise in data analysis to even approach this kind of market. And maybe that's you. There are certainly some tools out there like Gravity Kit that can do some real fun charting and reporting and stuff like that. If you're into that space, to me it sounds like a very lucrative space, but also maybe the hardest to penetrate. So, you know, you'd be going aft to maybe higher ed again, some political organizations like especially around surveying data or election season, that kind of thing, You're you're analyzing this stuff, government agencies, these are the things that come to my mind.

Matt (00:08:34) - There's probably a million others that that maybe you can think of. But data analytics and reporting agency probably not the most approachable in terms of like, Hey, I want to start this sort of niche side business with WordPress and gravity forms. I'll give this 1A2 out of five in terms of response, it's not terrible, but it's certainly going to be rather difficult. Let's look at the go to market strategy that ChatGPT recommends for this. So target businesses that collect large amounts of data through their forms, such as surveys or customer feedback forms, demonstrate how your services can help them understand their customers, make better, more informed decisions and improve their services. So when I when I read the go to market strategy, this could open you up to e-commerce. Of course, survey companies, marketing companies, advertising companies. But I think a lot of them might already have tools in place and and maybe a there's an imbalance of value ratio here. Right? So, yes, like we would love to have a form analyze this data, but that is not as important as analyzing the data.

Matt (00:09:42) - Certainly building an interface for it is is important. But if it's not this sort of brand value, like they don't need their brand wrapped around a form, you might be hard pressed to sell into gravity forms and WordPress into that mix when they're probably using maybe some more advanced enterprise tools. So go to market strategy. Yes, kind of makes sense, but I'm going to give the overall data analytics and reporting agency a two out of five from ChatGPT. Number three. Something more near and dear to my heart. Gravity Forms Training Agency. This is interesting given the popularity and versatility of gravity forms. That's ChatGPT saying it, not me. There's a market for teaching businesses how to use it effectively. Your agency could offer training courses or consultancy services to businesses that want to handle their forms in-house. I'm going to give this right off the bat. I'm going to go for a 4.5 out of five in terms of opportunity business, there's a million different directions you could go with this. In fact, one of gravity forms certified developers, their first foray into the space.

Matt (00:10:49) - Speaking about gravity, Wiz was training people how to use gravity forms. So and then they turned it into a gravity forms add on business, right? So they started educating and building awareness around gravity forms. And then they started actually writing software and building products. So I'm not saying that that's where you would have to go. But yeah, the gravity forms ecosystem is massive. It's the most trusted contact form plugin for WordPress. We're doing it now for well over a decade. A lot of folks can't even say that about any plug in business, let alone a contact forms plug in business. So there is plenty of space for folks to build training, assets, courses, material to do things with gravity forms, gravity forms is quite powerful and it can unlock a lot of opportunity and of course business. But in in functionality, in doing things with WordPress and the web overall, once you start connecting it up like to different third party websites. So four out of five already out of the gate with Gravity forms training agency.

Matt (00:11:52) - If you're building one, if you have a gravity form training agency. I want to I want to talk to you because I want to have you on the podcast. Let's look at the go to market strategy, identify businesses that already use gravity forms but might not be using it to its full potential, offer a free initial consultation or an introductory course to demonstrate the value of your services. So yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's plenty of things that you can do to monetize this type of content paid for course, paid for membership that has access to a bunch of training material one on one sessions. When I look at the no code space. So if you're thinking right now like, Hey, this is a great idea, kind of reverse engineer, what I'm about to say when I look at the no code, low code space tools like Airtable Bubble. Notion to a degree. When you look at bubble, for instance, just search for it on on YouTube. Right? Search for I don't know how to build a bubble app or something like that.

Matt (00:12:49) - You can see how a lot of these content creators are forming their businesses because just like WordPress, although at a much smaller degree, there is this freely available information on how to do these things right, how to build a WordPress website, how to build a WordPress agency, or you can find this content, you can throw a rock and hit five videos that that are all about this stuff. But look at those. But not a lot of people. Not a lot of people are focusing on gravity forms because it gets bucketed into the greater WordPress world, which is fine. But I think bias, of course, because here I am at Gravity forums, but I think there's opportunity here to just focus on gravity forms. And yeah, four out of five on this response, gravity forms training. Let me know if that's you because I'd love to chat with you. Number four Gravity forms, maintenance and support agency. Start an agency that offers maintenance and support services for websites using gravity forms. This might include updating the plug in troubleshooting issues features as requested by the client.

Matt (00:13:52) - As nice as this sounds, I'm giving it a one because I don't think you're going to be able to just build an agency on top of maintaining gravity forms for customers. And in fact, I'd probably roll this in to ChatGPT answer number one, which was create a custom form development agency and sort of just roll that into into that mix. So I'm going to give this a one out of five in terms of opportunity potential in that answer, because I just don't think you're gonna be able to build a business out of just that. As much as I'd like to say you could, you'd build it out of supporting WordPress as a whole. Making gravity forms part of your core toolset for sure, but you're not going to knock on anyone's door and say, Hey, pay me a hundred bucks a month and I'll maintain your gravity forms. Maybe some of the higher ed clients, the bigger enterprise clients that use gravity forms that have thousands of forms across their enterprise footprint, but certainly not enough to make it a business.

Matt (00:14:52) - The go to market strategy. I'm interested to see this Many businesses might not have the expertise to manage gravity forms effectively, or they might simply want to outsource the task. Put your service as a way for these businesses to save time and ensure their forms are always functioning optimally. That's a pretty big stretch. ChatGPT So even the go to market strategy, I'm going to give it A11 out of five. So that's the the weakest one so far. Let's move on to number five. Gravity Forms Integration Agency. Gravity Forms has a lot of integration options with WordPress plugins and third party services. Start an agency that specialize in specializes in integrating gravity forms with these other services according to the needs of your clients. The go to market strategy here is focused on businesses that already use multiple services, and you could benefit from integrating them to gravity forms or with gravity forms. Show these businesses how integration integrating their tools can lead to more effective workflows and better data management. So again. I'll give this a. Three and a half out of five.

Matt (00:15:52) - Maybe four out of five. Because it's sort of the same as the first answer. Again, build a custom development agency, which I kind of knew going into this, that maybe ChatGPT wasn't going to shock me with something that I had not thought of before with gravity forms. But. With this. It gives it to you at a different angle. So instead of focusing on just building this custom WordPress agency, what I do like and what I've talked about on this podcast before with some of the creators of these other products like Cosmic Giant Gravity Kit. Gravity wiz. Right. All of these folks, they have these add ons for gravity forms that that could be businesses onto itself. So again, I look at Cosmic Giant for as an example. They have the popular pdf Add on for gravity forms. In other words, scan a PDF, it turns it into a form. They have the legal signing add on as well. There's all these things that you can do with just their product alone that you could build a business out of.

Matt (00:16:59) - Right? And it's and it's a business out of their out of their own tools. Right? So if we looked at Fillable PDFs and their legal signing, just thinking about Cosmic Giant for a moment. You could go into these what I'll call legacy industries, which is crazy to say in 2023, but the legal world, real estate world. Anything that uses a lot of paper service, car service dealerships, things like that, or car service garages, things that still have like a lot of paper moving around. And you could go in offering up your services as somebody who can solve the web problem for them, whatever that problem is for them. Right? So they could be like, hey, we're you know, we we want to simplify our sales process. We want to simplify our support process. And one of the most painful things is writing out stuff on paper, printing it out, scanning it in. Wish we had this on the web or we don't have time to do it. We know we want to do it.

Matt (00:18:02) - And this is the perfect play for our services agency is we we know we need to do it, but we don't have the time to do it. Focusing on. That side of the service is an easy sell to a client. So here we have gravity forms at the core. Then we have the gravity form, certified development and other add ons throughout our ecosystem that can enable you to just just do those businesses. So have a poke around at the gravity forms, add ons. See if you can spot a business opportunity there. We again looking at Cosmic Giant Fillable PDFs legal signing. You have like this whole like paper thing you can go after. Gravity Kit has a ton of things with displaying data, capturing data from gravity forms, and then displaying it on the front end graphing mapping. There are businesses to be built, little niche businesses to be built that focus on just that. And the amazing thing about this space, not to do our own horn is that sure, there's this broader layer of WordPress on top of that, but then there's gravity forms and then these add ons that all have support.

Matt (00:19:20) - Which is amazing. It's amazing. So I'll give this 1A4 out of five. All right. And ChatGPT wraps it up. It says, For each of these approaches, you'll need strong a strong online presence. This could include a professional website, a blog where you share your tips, tutorials related to gravity forums and profiles on social media and professional networking sites. It's also important to network with other WordPress professionals and join communities where potential clients might be looking for services like yours. That's a pretty general tip for starting any business in the WordPress space, and it's good that it kind of threw that in there because yes, it's also important to basically market and get the word out. Otherwise the business doesn't exist, right? You can have this great niche idea and this great sort of like productized service approach, but if the world doesn't know about it, you can't describe it and you're not in front of your potential customers, or at least not. In a in a space marketing and promoting yourself where your where your potential customers have has a chance to see you.

Matt (00:20:19) - All of this is for not so. There it is. It's the ChatGPT. Five ways to make Money with Gravity Forms. That'll be probably the title of the podcast episode. I'll throw in my bonus number six. Which is focusing on e-commerce, focusing on payments. Focusing on donations and membership sites. There are a lot of great plugins that already service this kind of space, this kind of industry, but they're not focused on that form operation and largely building out custom forms, building out forms that require conditional logic. If this, then that customer fills this in, they get that as a response. Or once this gets sent in through the form, it gets routed to this team or that person. And then there's all these automations that happen afterwards, or we're pulling in data from different parts of the website, right? We're pulling in data from custom fields, from custom post types, which were created some other way in your business. Automation Gravity Forms is a standout player in that space. And I think if you're focused on building out e-commerce solutions with gravity forms, whatever that looks like to you in your world, maybe not on the level of, let's say, competing with a WooCommerce store or a Shopify store, but maybe finding people in your area or in your vertical, in your niche that only have a dozen products, it's only a dozen physical products or a dozen digital products and gravity forms is fantastic for that.

Matt (00:21:57) - It's more lightweight. It's easier for most of us to manage. Heck, you already have the gravity forms license, so instead of just using it as contact form and then maybe going into a sales database and then going into newsletters, start expanding your tool set of an agency or freelancer into that e-commerce space selling gift certificates online. My God, when the pandemic hit, I had so many phone. I wasn't in the website building space anymore, but I had clients coming to me out of the woodwork. Looking for ways to build a business online and to accept donations online or to sell gift cards and that kind of thing. That's a fantastic opportunity. It's a fantastic opportunity to start using gravity forms, the Stripe ad on the PayPal and on the square. Add on and create these really simplistic e-commerce plays that wire up gravity forms to a transaction. When you're using Stripe, it's super easy. I mean, when you're using them all the major ones, it is all relatively fairly painless these days. We've got a bunch of videos on how to do that and you can start building out some pretty simple and streamlined e-commerce plays to satisfy your client, satisfy yourself, selling your consulting hours, selling your consulting packages.

Matt (00:23:18) - You know, use it on your cell first to sort of get your feet wet with building out e-commerce solutions, with gravity forms connecting up to WordPress, obviously so darn simple and that's my favorite play with gravity forms in the space. And I think, you know, without revealing any secret stuff that I know from the team, you know, it's going to be even bigger for gravity forms in the future. So if you're building out. Donation forms. Recurring donation forms. Digital product transactions. Really, gravity forms is a fantastic solution for that. So there it is. That's that's some opportunity for gravity forms in the WordPress world so far halfway through 2023. Hopefully you found some unique ideas from that segment. If you're running a specialized Gravity Forms agency, I'd love to hear from you. Email me. Gravity forms. And potentially we could set up an interview for Breakdown. Next up, I speak to my long time Internet friend, Joe Kassab. You might know him from his podcast, How I Built It, or from his WordPress developer days or well, many of the other things he does, including having created the Gravity Forms LinkedIn Learning Course.

Matt (00:24:41) - Hey, Joe, welcome to Breakdown. Thanks for having me. You and I, we've known each other for a while in the WordPress world, in the podcasting world. I know you as a podcaster first and foremost with how I built It podcast. You're doing a lot with consultation with coaching in the podcasting world automation, and you have happened to teach and create a LinkedIn learning course for gravity forms. So in our short time today, I'm excited to dive into all of these things and break it all down with you. Yeah, I'm excited to chat about all of that big. I've been a big fan of Gravity forums for a long time and excited to share my story. LinkedIn Learning Course. I'm going to link it up in the show notes using Gravity forms in WordPress, a comprehensive guide. This was put out in February 2022. Not so much has changed in the Gravity Forums world since you released this or you and LinkedIn skill level, intermediate duration, one hour and 56 minutes using gravity forms for WordPress.

Matt (00:25:47) - What do you think is the most common thread for you with Gravity forums? God I use.

Joe (00:25:52) - It for everything, but I think maybe the most common use case just because I have these forms everywhere is is opt in stuff, right? So I use, I use ConvertKit and one of the one of my frustrations with ConvertKit is they do not pass the source or referring URL. So I have the same form embedded on a bunch of pages. Also like I was a web developer, I'll say in a previous life, but for 20 years like.

Matt (00:26:20) - That's I didn't want to say it. I didn't know if.

Joe (00:26:22) - You wanted that. Oh yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, that's, I mean for context, right? And like, so I know they can get that information right. I have their little JavaScript on my website. I know I can get, they can get that information and they just don't pass it. And it's really frustrating. Gravity forms solves that problem for me. They have a really great I don't know if if, if you all make it or if ConvertKit made it.

Joe (00:26:43) - ConvertKit is listed as the plugin owner or the extension owner. I mean, it's really well done. And so I just I have a custom field in ConvertKit called I call it lucky URL. Don't, don't ask me why I don't remember and I just passed the source URL. So now I know like oh, this blog post is doing particularly well or this landing page is doing particularly well. And so that is that little piece of data is so important to me because I have so many podcasts. I mean, you probably see online, I'm like a prolific content creator. I don't like to use the word prolific myself, but this is what at.

Matt (00:27:20) - Least this is what you've been told.

Joe (00:27:21) - This is what at least three people have told me, right? Three in journalism. Three is a trend, right? So I want to know which pieces of content are doing well so I can double down on those. And so gravity forms helps me there. But. It's like the center of a lot of my automations as well.

Matt (00:27:38) - When you were. Well, let's dip into your early web developer and web consultant days, if we can. Gravity forms for freelancer. How does that make you approach customers, if you can remember? If not, we can skip this this topic. But in other words, did gravity forms allow you to say, I can serve, let's say, nonprofit types of customers or customers who are seeking automation or customers who want more leads? And I have this tool that can help sort of build this automation in these marketing leads. How how did you see Gravity forms as part of your toolkit? Did it enable you to reach and profile customers to to get them into your funnel?

Joe (00:28:22) - Yeah, absolutely. And it's because it is so versatile and it's an all in one thing, right? So like there are other I'll tell you. Right. I resisted gravity forms for a long time because like many early WordPress folks, paying for stuff is anathema. And, and then I got in at like 99 bucks a year for the developer version, and then I left because I was like, I don't need all this stuff.

Joe (00:28:45) - Then I realized that there was a reason that the other ones were cheaper. And I came. So I. I shot myself in the foot. I lost the grandfathered in price. But you know what? I happily pay for the developer license at the full price.

Matt (00:28:58) - Today we welcomed you back with open arms for more money.

Joe (00:29:01) - Yes, with open arms for two and a half more times. Times more than I was paying. But like, again, totally worth it to me because when a client comes to me and they say we need a thing that does this, forms are the main type of interaction on websites, always have been, right? If you're interacting with something on a website, it's probably a form unless it's like a drawn thing. But. Forms, number one. And so when they're like, we need this to connect with our customers. I knew that gravity forms could do it right. There's a reason that my LinkedIn learning course is an hour an hour long for a forms plugin. What? Possibly.

Joe (00:29:40) - Right. Oh well, you can make basic forms, but then you can also collect payments and build a membership site. One of the things I do is, is I think collect front end blog posts like creating post submission form like so there's user generated like anything that a client needed for a website I could do from regular contact form to event registration. There's an NPO that I work with. They have one event every year. It's their biggest fundraising event and that I use gravity forms and that form has not changed in ten years. It works so well for them. Connects to PayPal. Super works for them, Right? So like that alone. Pays for my license, Like, easy.

Matt (00:30:27) - Yeah. And you kind of use it for while your own automation tasks for all the podcast stuff that you do and I want to dip into for the freelancers and agencies who are listening to this, I want I also want to spend a little bit of time chatting about how podcasts can help them or how creating content in general can help them.

Matt (00:30:45) - But certainly audio you use it to onboard users to the podcast. Now for those uninitiated in the podcast, the podcast creation space or being a host of a podcast, there's a lot of stuff that happens behind the scenes. What's your name and what's your title? What are we going to talk about today? Like there's a lot of housekeeping stuff you want to collect from the get go before you get into the show. And I think I got it right. You told me that you use gravity forms to do that. How else do you connect the automation dots to go a step further after they send you this this data?

Joe (00:31:22) - Yeah. So this is this is really important, right? Like there's a lot of stuff I want to collect on the front end, but I also want to make this process as easy as possible for them. Right? They're doing me a favor. They're coming on my show. They're going to give me content that I monetize. And so I don't want to hit them with a giant form, but I still want to get this name, like you said, name, title, website.

Joe (00:31:43) - What are we talking about? What are we talking about is on me, right? This is like, I'll lay off the soapbox, but I feel very strongly about that. I want to get their head shot because if I don't get it now, I'm probably never going to get it. So one of the things I love about gravity forms is that you could pass any form field like any data for the form of via the URL. So I usually end up sending my guests a personalized link, how I built out their name or whatever. Right? That is a mostly filled out form. And then just ask them to check the bio, upload the preferred headshot, and then I can pass all that information to Calendly where again, they don't have to fill it out again, but it's all there and then that all goes into Airtable, right? And so that is integral for gravity forms for me, right? But that same form. Also allows people to pitch themselves on my show and then they have to fill out the whole form and even more questions, Right? So like I have probably conditional.

Joe (00:32:45) - Yeah, Conditional logic. Yeah. So if there's a hidden field called, well, I won't say the hidden field because then you can write, but there's a hidden field. And if that field is set to true, right, based on a parameter, then they don't get the invite. They don't get all the application questions. If it's not set to true, then they get all the application questions and then based on that right, I use make formally integrate to send it to one of two airtable bases, the guest the guest application base or the scheduled guest base. And so that just makes my life a lot easier. And again, because with gravity forms, you can pass all the information via the URL, I build a URL for them and if I accept them, then they get sent that URL again and they just need to fill out a couple more things and book their time. And if I reject them then it's like a form letter, basically, help me.

Matt (00:33:41) - Understand that hidden field and how you use the URL.

Matt (00:33:45) - Is that a referring URL? And if that referring URL is the one you. Want it to be true. Then it shows the rest of the form, like without telling us what it is.

Joe (00:33:57) - So. So I mean, I can use fake right for conceptual purposes, right? Maybe the URL is how I built that. Join me. Right? Yeah. That's a redirect. And in the you are in in the redirected url is like asked to join equals true right. And that maps to a hidden field on the form called asked to join and basically the conditional logic says if asked to join equals true. Show them one bit. I'm also using block visibility that plugin to show the message based on right. Because otherwise it's like, hey, apply. Make sure to remember these things. And I'm like, Well, that's like aggressive for somebody I just invited, right? So that whole page is like the linchpin of that whole page is this query string, right? This variable in the URL. But yeah, that's basically how it works.

Joe (00:34:48) - So it's a hidden field. So it's not like somebody can just turn it on. I mean, and web developers listening to this will be able to go code spelunking and change it. But I it doesn't mean anything. It just makes my life a lot easier. Right? Security by obscurity sort of thing.

Matt (00:35:04) - Marketers listening to this might be or even freelancers who maybe have never sort of tried to figure out something automated like this. They might ask because initially in my head I asked, why not two forms?

Joe (00:35:17) - Yeah, great question. It's it's because it's mostly the same information, right. But then. I have a make again formally integral. I'm going to say integral, Matt, because make is also a verb. I have an integral matte automation.

Matt (00:35:35) - Which is an alternative to Zapier, I should say, for those.

Joe (00:35:37) - Yeah, yeah, sorry. That's exactly right. Right. It's an alternative to Zapier. It is 90% cheaper than Zapier, right? Like I'm, I'm very much for like pay for the things that are worth it, but, like, nobody got rich by wasting money.

Joe (00:35:51) - Right, right, right. There's a reason that Bill Gates cuts his own hair, right? He doesn't feel like he needs to pay for that. And it's also a lot nicer looking, right? It's just like kind of Zapier showing its age integral matte a little more modern. And so there I only need to watch one form and then I can route based on information there. So as a marketer, right, it might be easier for you to set up two forms. That makes perfect sense. I my toxic trait is that I overengineering things. And so I thought, well this could be I had the application form already. And after talking to Chris Davis of Automation Bridge, I thought, oh, well, I can actually just take this this one form one step further and make my life a whole lot easier. Sure.

Matt (00:36:37) - And then when you route things, are you using the routing feature of gravity forms to take bits of data to send to different your different email addresses? Or, or are you using the airtable add ons or, or you're using Integra? Matt Right.

Matt (00:36:51) - To do that you're.

Joe (00:36:51) - Using Integra Matt to route right. Yeah. So if yeah, if this field Yeah, but that's a really good point right? This is like again, this is why gravity forms. I mean this doesn't, this is your show. I don't need to make it a commercial, but like, it's, it's a really good tool, right? Like it does a lot like, again, like, this course is an hour and I cover a lot of ground and I feel like I just am scratching the surface. I'm just like showing a bunch of use cases.

Matt (00:37:20) - Yeah. We have a few minutes left. I want to talk about the benefits of podcasting because I can't help it and I love to talk about it. So for those in the in the audience who are freelancers, like I was just talking to some folks the other day, they were trying to figure out how to market their product and. For me, marketing starts super early in in the process. Like I'm biased again.

Matt (00:37:45) - You should be marketing your product or service or organization before it even launches. Like you start talking about it now immediately. And why not a podcast to do that? That's the way that I see it. Do you have an on ramp for those that want to get started? Podcasting. Basic advice to just get started now without all the the fear of buying $1 million in equipment, showing up on live streams, what's your easy steps to get started?

Joe (00:38:18) - Yeah. So first of all, I think that if you're going to buy one piece of equipment for your podcast, it should be an external microphone. Descript does a great job of studio with their studio sound feature of making it sound really good, but nothing beat like it's always easier to capture clean audio on the front end than it is to clean it up on the back end, right? So like that's at least invest in a decent microphone. I have a blog post called like How to start a podcast for less than 100 bucks. And if you're serious about this, if this is part of your content strategy.

Joe (00:38:51) - Right, or if it's part of your promotion, think about how far 100 bucks would get you on Facebook or Instagram ads, right? Not far at like you might as well just set that 100 bucks on fire. Right. But for me, I think starting a podcast, I think a podcast can be where your content strategy starts. Right? And this is something that you and I were talking about. Jay Clawson, the pre-show Jay Klaus recently tweeted, like what? It never goes out of style is is building in public or sharing your journey or whatever he said. Right. Like if you are telling people what you're doing and trying and the thought process that goes behind that, everybody loves that content. You can talk about it on your podcast, you can turn it into tweets, you can turn it into a blog post. AI tools make this a little bit easier. I'm not going to say they do it for you because usually what they produce is not. Up to my standard of publication, but at least gives me a starting point, right? But for a lot of people who have an easier time, like putting speaking words right than sitting down to write a thousand words, right? You can hop on a podcast, maybe have a co-host or a guest, and you can talk about something and then you can break that up into other pieces of content.

Joe (00:40:10) - So I'm really bullish on anybody who sell something online or sell something in general should have a podcast. Maybe you don't get thousands of downloads. Maybe people aren't listening to the show and immediately buying your product, but it's giving you a place to create content that's probably a little easier than sitting down and writing 1000 or 2000 words, right? Or recording a video, right. And making the lighting good. And I've invested thousands of dollars into my studio because I create courses professionally. And so it's worth it for me. But if you're just starting today, videos, higher barrier of entry than starting a podcast.

Matt (00:40:54) - 100% and think you can make more mistakes with audio. Even though being somebody who is a podcast consultant and former years, it can be pretty demanding. It can be pretty overwhelming. Scary for some, but I think you can make a lot more mistakes in audio and spend less time cleaning that up. Versus video lighting. ET cetera. Like you just like you just mentioned. And I think the most important part of this is where we'll wrap up is audio content.

Matt (00:41:19) - A podcast is an absolutely awesome place to have that cornerstone content to build off of for for your business. Even if nobody is listening, that's okay because and I know in your world, Joe, with automation, this is content that I think a lot of people overlook is is not just in that published moment, i.e. I've published my episode. I hope you download it now and listen to it, or I publish a blog post. I hope you read it now and in in consume it pushing this out for months in literally years to come, to repurpose that content through automation, through email, through cornerstone pages of of your website like repurpose that content at every step of your business so that something you published two years ago which is still relevant now you get in front of your new customers face or you reuse it on social and just don't let it die on the vine because that's the part, at least for me anyway, which can be so disheartening as a creator because you see that content just evaporate and you wonder, Man, I could be reusing that again.

Matt (00:42:29) - And you certainly can just have to have a little plan to do that stuff.

Joe (00:42:33) - And it definitely goes both ways, right? So I wrote a blog post over two years ago called What Baby Clothes Can Teach You About Understanding Your Audience. And like I wrote it the next morning after waking up with my son and having to change him and he had this onesie that had a reverse zipper. So most zippers go start at the foot and go up to the neck. This one started at the neck and goes down to the foot, which is brilliant, right? And I just thought, this person has children. The person who made this had the same experience I did of trying to change a fussy baby in the dark without trying to wake like wake them fully up. Right. And I wrote that two years ago, and I just recently shared it with a friend who has a newborn who said, like whoever made looped button baby, Right. Or is terrible. And I'm like, they're sociopaths. And I thought, wow, that would make that would make a really good podcast episode for me even today.

Joe (00:43:32) - Right. And so added it to Airtable. I'm going to record it probably tomorrow as we record this and it'll just be like a short Friday episode of content I wrote two years ago that's now getting new life because I was reminded it exists.

Matt (00:43:46) - Fantastic stuff. Joe, thanks for hanging out today.

Joe (00:43:48) - My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. I love, love talking about this stuff.

Matt (00:43:53) - Thanks, Joe, and thank you, dear listener, for tuning in to today's episode. If you enjoyed breakdown, please recommend us to someone else in the WordPress space. Every episode is chock full of new and exciting opportunities for gravity forms, and at the very least, features a guest story that entertains you. I hope it's gravity forms. Com slash breakdown. Add us to your podcast app of choice and don't forget to visit us at WordCamp US in Maryland at the end of the month. See you in the next episode.