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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, November 13. Our first live summit kicks off this week. Tiny but mighty updates coming to version 2.8, and I can't believe how she's using AI with Gravity Forms. It's Breakdown, a Gravity Forms podcast.
Speaker 2:This week on November 15, 11AM Eastern, our first half day virtual summit kicks off for freelancers and agency owners using Gravity Forms. Head to gravityforms.com/summit to see our lineup of guest speakers. We have six thirty minute sessions exploring the Gravity Forms ecosystem, how people use it in their agencies, and how you can deliver more value for better customers in your WordPress services business. Register for free at gravityforms.com/summit. Gravity Forms 2.8 beta one is available for testing.
Speaker 2:Check the link in the show notes, access the download in your dashboard or take part of our beta group, which you can sign up for at gravityforms.com/beta. 2.8 is tiny, no pun intended, but mighty release of Gravity Forms. You might need to squint to see its full potential. Okay, the puns are over. But a feature I've been waiting for since I saw it built getting built behind the scenes is compact mode for form editing.
Speaker 2:Gone are the days of scrolling forms with dozens or hundreds of fields. With compact view, you can get a more bird's eye view on all of the forms inside the editor. Each compact field includes the most critical parts of the field as well, so you can navigate more complex forms with ease. I love this update because it sets the groundwork for even more improvements in the UI for future versions of Gravity Forms. Remember, you can be the first to know about these releases by joining the beta group at gravityforms.com/beta.
Speaker 2:Black Friday deals are coming to Gravity Forms. I'll link the special landing page in the show notes, but you won't want to miss 50% off all licenses between November 21 and the twenty eighth. It's a fantastic time to save 50% off all licenses. If you listen to this podcast and you're not a customer yet, and you just like, hey, taking in all this information, I love what Gravity Forms can do, especially when you hear today's interview, you can get it for 50% off between November 21 and the twenty eighth along with our Gravity Flow product. If you're looking to build more applications with Gravity Forms, automations with Gravity Forms, intranet type things for your customers, Gravity Flow is fantastic for that.
Speaker 2:The landing page will also have the 50% off deals listed there. Check it out in the show notes. 50% off. You can't go wrong. Coming up next, you're going to hear from Hazel Kimpo on how she's leveraging Gravity Forms plus Zapier plus ChatGPT to create her own home brewed product.
Speaker 2:Talking to her has unlocked so many other potential ways to leverage Gravity Forms in my head. I can't wait to start exploring it. And I hope this conversation does the same thing for you. It's amazing. I mean, AI is a lot of buzzwords, and there's a lot of things on Twitter that I look at and say, oh, man.
Speaker 2:I like, I don't know if this is useful for me, but what Hazel has shared today, I think can help all of us using Gravity Forms in some way. You're really gonna enjoy it. And by the way, if you do and you have feedback to share about breakdown, please take our survey located at formwith3m'sform.wtf/survey. Link in the show notes. Okay.
Speaker 2:Here's Hazel talking about her AI goodness. Hey, Hazel. Welcome to the program. Founder of Clever Marketing. We are in a WordPress group together, post status.
Speaker 2:So I was just happened to be scrolling through, I think it was the AI channel. And, I'm just scrolling through. It's one of those things, you know, one of those things about Slack where you're just, like, clearing messages. And it's just, like, you're going into all the rooms, and I'm scrolling. And I'm like, alright.
Speaker 2:Let me just clear this message through the AI channel. And then I'm, like, scrolling to Gravity Forms AI, and then, you said you're building, like, this cool marketing tool, and I was like, woah. Woah. Woah. Stop scrolling.
Speaker 2:Click this link, and then I just saw you connecting Gravity Forms to Zapier to Videosask to ChatGPT, and then there's something that happens at the end. And I was like, let's get Hazel on the podcast to talk about this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm excited. So I built what I call a sort of marketing machine with Gravity Forms. I had I've seen a lot of people be excited about using AI for, you know, writing blog posts. And I I the excitement seems to end there.
Speaker 1:Like, they're very excited to, like you can write a blog post, then they realize it's not very good at writing blog posts.
Speaker 2:Which is exactly how I onboarded into AI because everyone's like, you gotta use it. And I'm like, okay. Tell me the history of WordPress. Exactly. That was terrible.
Speaker 2:And I was like, I can't use this in my day job.
Speaker 1:100%. What I've realized talking to robots is really good at is taking all of our unorganized human thoughts into whatever structure we need. And I have been playing with Gravity Forms and different form inputs to do, can a user just do either a long verbal or written input or a long cut and paste? And can I take that into structured data to do functionally whatever I need with it? So that's exactly what I've done.
Speaker 2:So you've taken you've taken one software as a service, VideoAsk, and it's a tool that I've used before. It's basically allows you to have, like, this video overlay to prompt people to take form input. So quasi competitor to Gravity Forms to a degree, but maybe more for like support and sales for type of companies. And then once the the the user finishes that user submission, it then goes to Gravity Forms to do a more manual input.
Speaker 1:Correct. Yeah. So the user will do that. It's a verbal or text input they can do on VideoAsk. VideoAsk is a software.
Speaker 1:I think that they're typically trying to sell it for, like, lead generation type things. I'm actually using it very much for this very concept of, hey, verbally just talk about your business for a minute. Kinda freaks people out. So some people are using the text input. After they do that, I guess I'm fine tuning to, like, the voice of their brand, etcetera.
Speaker 1:In that voice input though, they are reading a script. I say, hey, full on, just read the script. In the proto version, I was running it straight on Gravity Forms. I liked it a lot, and we were having people just paste their about page, which worked quite well. Similar idea, but the verbal input has really been interesting to do.
Speaker 2:And then it fires off after the the user submits that data from Videos to Gravity Forms, it then fires off to Zapier. And Zapier is then is that sort of conduit that sends it off to ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:Correct. Yeah. And what's really beautiful about it is Zapier has even built in now, and ChatGPT API also has it built in, taking turning literally anything into structured data. So wall of text, I can just identify fields out of that wall of text and say, AI, hey. Here's a wall of text about Matt's business.
Speaker 1:Give me these 12 fields, which are things like, you know, what's their brand promise? What's their history? Whatever. And I didn't want you to tell me that way because that's a boring way to talk and nobody really talks that way. But AI can certainly suss it out.
Speaker 1:So now what I have is a magical database of about 40 fields about your brand that I can run against any prompt. And there is where I've been building the back end all in Gravity Forms. Because now I have all of your input. Well, cool. If you just need a content calendar for this month, tell me three campaigns you have coming up.
Speaker 1:I know the holidays. I know everything about your business. I could easily give you a content calendar for this month.
Speaker 2:So I should probably zoom out as the professional podcaster that I am and forget to frame it of can people interact with this right now? What is this product that you've created? Can they interact with it? Is it something that they can access and
Speaker 1:have you help? Free version of it right now. You can go to the clever.io. The app lives at docs.i the clever.io. And there's a free version of it live right there where you can run a full content strategy.
Speaker 1:I'm a real big believer in content pillars. I don't if that's how you guys do your podcast stuff. Content pillars is my go to content strategy. It's been really beautiful. I've had brands come in, talk about their business for two minutes, and then you end up with a really nice I have the output right now in Google Slides.
Speaker 1:What do they call their spread their slides. Right?
Speaker 2:I think they just call it I think they call it just presentations. Anyway,
Speaker 1:the output goes there into a really nice, like, hey. Here's your six pillars. You should write 20% about this, 15% about this, 10% about this, post six times a week. And I can share that doc with everybody afterwards because it's a template I've used for years. Now AI can just fill in the dots.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Thanks for reframing that. I learned my lesson as a podcast host to do that at the beginning. That that talk to me about structured data. So for anyone who's in the audience who's listening, I I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think of it, like, as HTML programmer. Like, what does that mean? People take that data. You you're saying that the form let's say somebody came in, gave an interview, took the transcript. It's just the wall of text.
Speaker 2:You're letting ChatGPT identify those areas. It's not something you have to sit back and go, I need to formulate the structured data. It's ChatGPT that's highlighting those areas.
Speaker 1:The work, but I tell it what to look for. So I can tell ChatGPT that one of the fields in this wall of text is gonna be job title. So figure that out. Figure out where the job title is, and AI is excellent at that. There is even further fine tuning within Zapier.
Speaker 1:I suppose if you're slightly more technical than me, probably in the API, to explain to ChatGPT what I'm looking for in that structured field. So in that in that structured data. So whether, hey, there's a title in here but the title is never gonna be president of The United States or whatever other parameters I might want to give it. But on that first wall of input, I pull out about 40 fields from that. And just by really giving them a title, like, hey.
Speaker 1:Listen. Like, here's a wall of text, and you're gonna understand 40 things about it.
Speaker 2:And when you're trying let let's call that
Speaker 1:training the
Speaker 2:AI, which is probably loosely, you know, what, you know, what it is. You know, because I again, listen. I I've been listening to all these AI podcasts like so many of us have, and I hear all these people saying, yeah. Well, we train our AI. I'm like, how the
Speaker 1:hell do you do that?
Speaker 2:Like, how are you training AI? Right? I wanna train AI, you know, but this is a way you've done it. Like, you've done it with with these with these pieces of the puzzle. So is that something that you you constantly go back into your Gravity Forms and say, okay.
Speaker 2:Now I've learned something new from these new customers. Let me add these keywords in. So this is something that you're actually using to say, I see it. I'm training my AI now by going back into Gravity Forms and inputting this this stuff.
Speaker 1:There's one piece of that. Yes. But where I use Gravity Forms more is for I have a really good baseline. Almost all of my outputs are gonna be about someone's business or their business strategy. And I have all of the baseline about your business.
Speaker 1:Now I can use Gravity Forms to just ask some fine tuning on what your next output needs to be. For instance, if you needed your podcast planning for q one twenty twenty four, you would probably give me a little bit of different info. I know so much about your podcast and your info already from what you gave me. But you might be like, oh, yeah. In January, we wanna do this promo, and we're gonna release this product and something else.
Speaker 1:That I would run through Gravity Forms to give it further input. What I also use Gravity Forms for, this is my lazy girl marketing, I I don't like webhooks. I I hate making webhooks. And, like, I use Gravity Forms to run like, so Zapier runs on, like my my Zaps, they run like a kind of a chain reaction. Once one is done, another one might run, another one might run or won't run based on certain things.
Speaker 1:And I use Gravity Forms for every single one of those in the back end. Anything that is it's a it's a Gravity Form getting triggered in the back end because webhooks are I hate them.
Speaker 2:So are you are you having is this in the in the same bucket of
Speaker 1:this product? Yeah. So for instance, if I got your first info and then I need to go it needs to trigger something else, the way it will get triggered by it will be by Zapier submitting a Gravity Form in the back end for that user.
Speaker 2:Oh, so you're actually telling Zapier, hey, come back to my site and interface with the Gravity Forms, and then Gravity Forms will do something else basically.
Speaker 1:So the user isn't interfacing with Gravity Forms a lot, but I use it constantly and it keeps me way more organized because I'm not a coder than doing a bunch of webhooks.
Speaker 2:That is fascinating.
Speaker 1:I I love it. I use it a lot
Speaker 2:for that. That's fast I would I would love to open up my dashboard. Because, you know, like, you have that sort of dopamine hit when you're you're running a WordPress website, you have Gravity Forms, and then you get the little widget, and it's like, oh, there's a content, a little entry. So it's like the most simple thing, but you're like, oh, cool. Like, somebody entered something.
Speaker 2:Let me go take a look at it. As it's something is there's something satisfying knowing that you have these contact forms with the entries lighting up, but it's actually
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I had to turn off all my notifications. I was getting a lot of emails, and I was like, oh, my so busy. I'm like, oh, no. Someone just bought one of those
Speaker 2:things. Yeah. So talk to me now about the business side of things. Obviously, the obvious win here is just a tremendous amount of, like, automation and efficiency. How are you doing this before?
Speaker 2:And do you have, like, a guesstimate of how much time and energy this has saved you at if at all, from, like, doing it the the old way, interfacing with a client, talking to them, running it through your process?
Speaker 1:It's really magical. So on my site right now, you can get two docs, which are a it's like a brand foundation, which gives you kind of core values and mission vision, and another one that gives you the content strategy with the content pillars. I have about a dozen more that run when I sign on a new client. And the way I do that, if a client is either using this tool or not, I could take our transcript for our onboarding call And I put it into our tool and I immediately have all their strategy docs. And when I tell you they're right, like, I it's embarrassing for me.
Speaker 1:I feel like half the time because it's doing my job. But frankly, this is how AI works well with really good instructions. And it has to understand the framework and the expert. I see people telling AI to do the best version of a website and you don't give it the definition of best. And that's the big missing piece.
Speaker 1:Giving a definition of what your framework or best is makes AI work really well. So that's what I've tuned it and trained it to do.
Speaker 2:So there's lot things I I I wanna talk about that just unlocked while while you're saying all that. One, when I first got into using ChatGPT, it was the same thing. Like, it was like write a blog post about something something in WordPress, and then you're like, this is terrible. But it's also unfair to the AI to be like, hey, write about this thing because if you were telling a human to do that, they'd be at like, if I leaned over to somebody and I was like, hey, you're gonna be my content writer. Write me about the the the genesis of WordPress.
Speaker 1:Then you're like
Speaker 2:and they'd like,
Speaker 1:well, what think? Questions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You have a zillion follow-up questions. Right? So any human would just look at you and be yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:Like, tell me about who's gonna read it. What's the you know, how long is it? What areas you want me to focus on? What's the voice? What's the tone?
Speaker 2:And then we expect, you know, AI to just be like, oh, yeah. Just do it because everyone's telling us how amazing it is. So we're just like and then we just run into these moments that's unfair to the robots. So there's that. And what I like is with Gravity Forms well, let me roll it back.
Speaker 2:So a lot then there's the other sentiment in the space where AI is gonna put us all out of business. There's not gonna be any more writers. There's not gonna be as you know, there's not gonna be x y z coders, writers, etcetera, researchers. Where it might be fair to a degree, but it's gonna unlock these efficiencies that you've unlocked. And I think that's like the the the tremendous upside.
Speaker 2:When I hear stories like yours, it's not like we're gonna you're gonna lose your marketing clients. You're you're making it more efficient because the marketing clients are still gonna want a human to talk to and interact with. And so what if this this portion right here is done through AI because it's saving everyone time and effort in my
Speaker 1:And especially the more honed and trained it can be on someone's expertise, I think that actually brings the human. Because if you built one of these, you could very well be like, Hazel, your framework's kind of not good. I like this way. I'm like, cool. Then tell it to do it that way, and that's gonna be yours.
Speaker 1:And but to me, that makes the output so much more valuable because it should disagree if they all agree. And frankly, that's anybody who's worked in marketing has worked for a boss who has been like, who's your customer? And they say everybody. That's the same problem Right. With ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:Now go
Speaker 1:pooling. Exactly. Yeah. It can't be everybody. Right?
Speaker 1:It it's can't be the expert, and everybody's the expert. You have to give it a point of view.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And what's interesting so we're recording this, I think the I think it was this week or last week. I think, no, it was this week when OpenAI had their whatever whatever they call it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Their exactly. I was gonna call it their Apple event.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. They had their Apple event to talk about their things. And I'm, like, closely watching because I've been on the fence with AI over the last, you know, year and starting to warm up to it a little bit for some efficiencies in my content production workflow. Still, you know, unsure how it's gonna you know, I see all these rapper companies, rapper companies being like people who are building, yeah, rappers around AI and hey, it's awesome for them.
Speaker 2:They're they're building a business. It's fun. They're they're making money. But then you see a you see OpenAI AI come out with those features. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So you got like these little I think what they call GPTs, which are gonna be like your own kind of chatbot. And then I start to think about people that I know who are running chatbot type companies, like, damn, man. Now you're in trouble. Right? Because they're building it.
Speaker 2:What I'm getting at here is what I like about this is I think that that your way of using Gravity Forms, and obviously, could be totally wrong, but you're creating an input that's specific to you. And I don't think that that they would have like an input method at OpenAI. Right? I think I don't think they would have that for a brand. Like, you might have a bot that you could interface with, but it wouldn't be something like, you'd have to send your customers to OpenAI to interface with this thing.
Speaker 2:And what you've done with Gravity Forms is create that conversation starter without having to see
Speaker 1:And also living on my site, which was a big reason of using Gravity Forms.
Speaker 2:And living on your site.
Speaker 1:So many of these rappers, you have to go out outside or even if I was gonna sell a GPT, which maybe I haven't got two d, that seems interesting. But, again, you're gonna be beholden to the App Store. Same story as why IBM has been at word on WordPress since the beginning. Right? You wanna be able to own your stuff as much as possible.
Speaker 1:Now AI takes a ton of compute, so that's the problem. You can't run it all.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A 100%. What other areas have you like, I know, like, probably like every other entrepreneur, you started to build this thing.
Speaker 2:You're like, this is awesome. It might not even be off the runway yet, and you're already thinking, I'm gonna do something else. Yeah. It's You know, when I see what you're putting together with Gravity Forms, Zapier, and OpenAI, I start thinking, wow. You know, anyone who has, like, a Slack notification that comes up.
Speaker 2:Like when I ran my agency, you know, I'd have a lead come in and it would notify me in Slack. Be like, oh, somebody wants a website. Let me read about them. Now, I'm thinking like, wow. You could just summarize this with ChatGPT, get an idea whether this is gonna be a good client or a bad client, and it could just one line alert you.
Speaker 2:Good customer alert, bad customer alert. Absolutely. That's what I have that pops off in my head. What else are you thinking about?
Speaker 1:Imagine the early days of your agency before having clients if you were able to give prospects already, like, sample of that sort of thing because it was AI generated that you pulled from their about page. But what I'm using it for that I really love and I haven't perfected, but I think that's most exciting to everybody in WordPress is proposal writing. Like, it has I built one for myself in a very bespoke way to on my on I take my onboarding calls or my sales call transcript with permission from the customer. And my similar functionality this one actually does is all through Gravity Forms. I just put a I dump the whole transcript in there and a few fields that I need.
Speaker 1:And the output is into my own proposal, which is a Google Doc. Into my own based on the input, I know which level of cost they're gonna be because I've trained the AI. I'm working with another client to do this for graphic design clients now. I think this one's really magical because every agency owner I know hates writing proposals, but they want money.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yes. Yes. One of the first things I did when I started my agency, and luckily, I had experience from running a web development agency at another company before I started my own, was build a a proposal builder with Gravity Forms. And this is god.
Speaker 2:This is, like, right when
Speaker 1:Gravity Forms idea, though, functionally. Now this is just v 10.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, twelve years ago. Because that's how, like, that's how monotonous the process is and how important it is at the same time. Because every customer wants the number. They want it now.
Speaker 2:They wanna see it really quick. And literally, what I would do is you would go through and you would toggle off like the different areas of like what was important to you. And I would send you a an email that just had everything outlined that you wanted in a rough estimate of like what that was gonna cost.
Speaker 1:Functionally, if you dug up that old Gravity form from twelve years ago, I would still use the same one because I would do a unstructured input, have AI structure it, and just fill out the form.
Speaker 2:Yeah. 100%. This is awesome stuff. Where else can folks go to learn more about what you're doing? How can they access this?
Speaker 2:How can they get in touch with you if they wanna be a part of what
Speaker 1:you're doing? I'm on LinkedIn the most these days, so easy to find. Hazel q, I'm on post status. I'm I'm most places, unfortunately. So I'm very easy person to find.
Speaker 1:LinkedIn is is the best bet for you these days.
Speaker 2:Hazel Kimpo, the clever dot I o. 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.
Speaker 2: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. Okay. We'll see you in the next episode.