Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Matt Medeiros (00:00)
Gabriella Laster, welcome to the WP Minute.
Gabriella Laster (00:03)
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Matt Medeiros (00:05)
We're chatting a little bit behind the scenes before we hit record. Elementor is a sponsor of the WP Minute, so thank you very much. And also you have the new Elementor One, which I'm told is all hands on deck for this launch. And this year, a lot of folks ⁓ at Elementor are backing ⁓ Elementor One. Everyone is pouring their efforts into this. And we're gonna talk about that new launch in a moment. But tell me how you got started at Elementor, and then we'll just
you know, see how you ended up today as director of product marketing.
Gabriella Laster (00:40)
So I started Elementor in October of 2021. ⁓
I saw a product that I was very interested in. For me as a product marketer, it's very important to feel passionate about the product I am working on and with. I want it to be interesting. I want it to be inspiring, and I want it to make a difference in people's, to make a real difference in people's lives. ⁓ That was actually my first step into the WordPress ecosystem, so I've never built a WordPress website before. ⁓ I had to learn everything from scratch. ⁓
So I've started, yeah.
Matt Medeiros (01:19)
I'm when you got and saw Elementor, I'm just really curious of like how you saw that as a non WordPress person. What was your first take on Elementor? Did you think like, oh, Elementor is the site builder and it sort of like stands all on its own? Did you have to kind of learn, oh, WordPress is really the thing it sits on top of? And it's just, was that like as maybe not somebody who's been in WordPress, know, neck deep in it when you first started with Elementor.
Gabriella Laster (01:46)
I wasn't in it at all. Thankfully, my husband had experience building websites. So as I was in the interviewing process, he kind of spun up a WordPress website for me and he installed Elementor for me at the time. So I didn't even understand at the time how robust it was and how ⁓ big of a system it was because I was kind of given an easier starting point for me.
Matt Medeiros (02:14)
Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to think back, 2021, mean, Elementor was already on a pretty meteoric rise at that point. When you first started, did you have to learn the ins and outs of what the WordPress community was and where to go to understand how the different, I guess, customer avatars use Elementor?
basic user of course but then there's like the developer the agency owner the core contributors to WordPress like there's a lot of people that have to touch and understand Elementor what was that like
Gabriella Laster (02:47)
I know.
taking me back a very long time into the history. So don't remember the ins and outs of the entire process, but I spent a lot of time reading through community comments, looking at the feedback, joining if we had community meetups and hearing what the different users in the ecosystem were saying. I did my own research as part of my onboarding. We have...
just understanding how the different type of personas use the product, how they use WordPress, what are their needs, what are their aspirations, ⁓ and just...
You're always learning. I wouldn't even say today that I know every single one of the personas very, very well. I'm always learning more and more about the different experiences, needs, and feelings that they have.
Matt Medeiros (03:47)
Yeah, that is the word feelings is a perfect segue to the next thing about getting customer feedback and getting a pulse of elementary users. ⁓ If you walk into a word camp and you yell out page builders, there's going to be a real interesting reaction from the crowd. You're going to have people who say they love page builders. You're going to have people who shout out their favorite page builder.
Elementor, as far as I can tell, is the biggest page builder in the space. And when you are that sort of biggest in the room, such as WordPress, ⁓ there's a lot of critical eyes on Elementor. How do you sort of filter out the stuff where people will just be happy to complain about something and they're not even an Elementor user or customer. They just have like this visceral reaction to also complain about a page builder.
no matter who it is, how do you filter that out? But also identify the real customers who might have frustrations that you're going to reinvest into the product, right? You go, I know that's a pain point, and we're gonna help make you understand how the product does it differently. How does one navigate those waters?
Gabriella Laster (05:07)
I think there are a number of different approaches that we take. Before we ever come out with a product, a message, a statement, we do our best to kind of put ourselves in the user's shoes. How are they going to experience this new product, this new feature, the new interface, whatever it is.
We will also sift through the different feedback that we do get. So we are watching the comments in the communities. We're listening to the videos. We're reading the comments. We're trying to understand what's the feedback, the good, the bad, the constructive feedback.
And then again, try to put ourselves in their shoes and understand, this something that we, how do we feel about this? How can we make this better? Is this something that many different customers are feeling the same way or is this the very specific problem that a single user has? And then another thing we do is we try to hop on a call with different users. We'll have user interviews, we'll have usability testing. So we'll try to understand whatever the feedback is a little bit deeper.
Matt Medeiros (06:12)
Yeah, you and I share some similar ⁓ challenges. My day job is at Gravity Forms. We've been putting out a contact form plugin for 15 years. There's a lot of stuff that we developed, you know, 15 years ago that we still have, you know, customers and new customers coming in today. Like, hey, why don't we why can't you fix this or why can't you update that? If and I'm as a marketer.
just like you, you're probably like, yeah, you you're right. Like, how can we market this? if I mean, how can we fix this? Because if we can fix this, we can market this and we can get more customers. But it's a bit of an aircraft carrier, right? Like you can't just turn it in like two seconds. It doesn't just work like that. There's a lot of stuff that has to that you have a lot of people you have to talk to. Number one, there's a lot of like, for lack of a better phrase, technical debt that you have to consider. Like, I can't just change this code because it's going to break all of these other sites. And we have
you know, whatever millions of sites. How do you handle that? I'll call it frustration. You don't have to call it frustration. How do you handle that frustration? ⁓ In the team, when you get that feedback from a customer and you turn to the product team, you say, how can we work together? ⁓ And that's also me assuming that product and marketing work together at Elementor as we do at Gravity Forms. Your thoughts on that.
Gabriella Laster (07:31)
So we do work very well together, the product team and the marketing team. And I think that it all has to do with ⁓ the impact and the prioritization and what else is in motion. So obviously, if you're doing one thing, you're not doing something else. So what is, how important is it, how critical is it, ⁓ how...
and then how fast can we deliver? And at what expense should this come?
Matt Medeiros (08:02)
Yeah, Elementor One is, well, I'll paraphrase for a second here and then of course you're gonna color in the lines, but Elementor One takes all of the good stuff of Elementor, puts it into one package that somebody can buy and sign up for and get from elementor.com. Before we get to that, what was your role in marketing when you first started? Were you just thinking about?
Gabriella Laster (08:23)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (08:28)
one feature, one lane of all Elementor, what was the thing that you were marketing when you first started at Elementor?
Gabriella Laster (08:34)
You want to eye first?
I started in Elementor working on the editor on the flagship product, just the drag and drop editor ⁓ with the widgets that we're all familiar with. That's where I started. ⁓ I started there. In 2023, we started developing AI capabilities kind of as Chatgybd came out and all the other AI tools started surfacing. started looking into how can we integrate those different features into the website building experience. I think we were one of the first to add it to the
website builder, ⁓ and we've been identifying different pain points that we have seen in the community, different things that people were looking for, and how can we solve those needs. ⁓ And over time, we started introducing additional plugins. And that is how, eventually, one came about.
Matt Medeiros (09:22)
Yeah. Yeah.
Was it? I mean, it's an obvious, I think it's obvious to me, Elementor one. It's an obvious thing for me, right? mean, I'm Miriam Schwab. mean, everybody listening to this podcast probably knows Miriam. She's been on the podcast multiple times. I've hosted live, live streams with Miriam with what I'll say, frustrated Elementor customers before in order for her to just be like, here's how we do it. You know, sorry for your.
Gabriella Laster (09:38)
And...
Matt Medeiros (09:51)
whatever issue, here's how we approach it. Elementor 1 seems like an obvious thing and it's really easy for me to use a phrase of just like Monday quarterback Elementor and be like, you guys should have done this five years ago, right? Like having this all in one thing should have happened five years ago. Why now? What was the trigger moment for Elementor to say, now's the time to have this all in one product?
Gabriella Laster (10:20)
I can't say what the specific trigger was. I think it was a combination of information that we've been collecting. So we've seen feedback in the communities where when we introduced a new plugin, then we had users saying, well, I really wish this was part of ⁓ the pro, and I really wish this was part of the website building experience.
And we also looked into our data to see how users were using the different products that we didn't introduce. And I think sometimes when you're, sometimes it takes time for things to kind of click. And when you do, understand that you need to kind of, there was a realization that we should put everything together into one experience. So I can't say what exactly that trigger was.
but it came from a combination of different aspects we were looking at. And it kind of made sense.
Matt Medeiros (11:16)
Yeah, if I click on the product dropdown of ⁓ Elementor.com, there's three columns, well technically there's four, but the three main columns are create, optimize, manage, and host. So we have the editor, we have the theme, we have the AI stuff, we have the optimizing stuff, images, accessibility, performance, and of course the hosting, right? Because I mean, that's where I know ⁓ Miriam brought, of course, her expertise into Elementor many years ago.
⁓ with the acquisition of her company, email deliverability through transactional emails and registering domains now. All of this is included in one? Did you take all of it or are some of these things not in one?
Gabriella Laster (12:00)
So everything except for at the moment hosting and domains, but we are working on including that as well. So in the first phase right now, at the second if you purchase one, it won't be included, but we're working on another version of it. ⁓
Matt Medeiros (12:14)
So right now you can go, you can buy one. It just gives you everything, what I'll call a super license key. And you just take that and bring that to any WordPress website that you're already hosting at. Is that the idea?
Gabriella Laster (12:26)
Yes. You got it?
Matt Medeiros (12:28)
Awesome.
And the hosting stuff is another like, yeah, that makes total sense. Like, when is that coming? Do you have an idea of like when the hosting part is coming?
Gabriella Laster (12:37)
I can ask them to nab on the
window and ask the person who's leading that to see when it's going to be included. waiting, hopefully soon.
Matt Medeiros (12:43)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. So how do you as a marketer, you know, leading this launch and of course all things product marketing at Elementor. Elementor one could be for a lot of people. It could be for the end user. She has a, you know, a Pilates business and you know, she's got her website and she's doing this. It could be for somebody who runs her agency and she's got her agency and she's got clients and stuff like that.
Gabriella Laster (13:02)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (13:17)
How do you think about the different customer avatars and was that a challenge when you were given the task to start marketing Elementor One?
Gabriella Laster (13:28)
think some of the benefits are the same for both. So if you talk about how you build a website.
In the majority of cases, it's going to be very, very similar, but the impact and the flexibility might be different. So if you're building a website for yourself, then you obviously want everything to work very smoothly together. You want to have the editor. You want to make sure that your images are optimized. You want to make sure that your website is inclusive. You want to be able to send transactional emails, and you kind of want that peace of mind that everything is working really, really well together. And that's a benefit for both.
Be.
I'm building for myself and also when I have an agency. When it comes to the ⁓ economic value, when it comes to the credits, so for, and there are similarities here too, but if you're building a website for yourself, you no longer need to purchase five different subscriptions to use a portion of their image optimizer plan, a portion of the accessibility plan, and a portion of the Elementor AI or other plan. You can use your credits flexibly where you need them. ⁓ Same goes for the agents.
They can use their credits flexibly across different client websites. So they can apply it on their client websites and use it freely.
Matt Medeiros (14:44)
So just help me unpack that. It's a credit-based system or is it like a static monthly fee and it just goes up by the number of sites? Help me unpack the credit side of it.
Gabriella Laster (14:56)
So
we have the one for a single site, which has a credit system. So the Elementor Pro is included, the Editor Pro is included in the plan that doesn't cost any credits, that's just included inside. And then you get a number of credits that you can use flexibly across, if it's Elementor AI, image optimization, email deliverability, and accessibility. And we're also adding additional...
plugins and capabilities into that. So we have Manage coming up soon. We have Cookies coming out soon. We are working on Angie, which is in the repository, but we're working on a new version of Angie. So we are already planning to add more and more ⁓ features and capabilities into this.
Matt Medeiros (15:40)
I see.
Gabriella Laster (15:44)
We have the one agency plan which is for all your websites and then you have obviously more credits to use there so that you can use more of them on your client sites.
Matt Medeiros (15:57)
I see. if you have just like, you your average website owner, again, she's got the Pilates website, she might not need a ton of like, she might not need transactional emails at all. It might not be doing the booking through the website. It might be some third party thing that integrates with her point of sale system or whatever. So look, you can buy one, but we're not gonna force the transactional email solution on you. You can use the credits for some other stuff on the site. And it gives that person the flexibility.
Gabriella Laster (16:10)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yes, and maybe you're using it on elementary AI if you're building a Pilates website. ⁓ Yes, but you also don't have to, we still have, our pro plans are still available. So if there are, if you don't need any of the other capabilities, you don't need to get that plan.
Matt Medeiros (16:28)
Yeah, that's cool.
Gotcha,
gotcha, that makes sense. The flip side of this, and this is something that I struggle with as a marketer, is how do you, what are your thoughts, what's your take? And I don't know if this is stuff that you're challenged with at Elementor. I don't know why everything is so challenging with me as a marketer. I would think I would know this stuff by now. I look at everything as a challenge apparently. How do we get the, I don't even have a good name for it. How do we get the average website owner to,
Gabriella Laster (16:59)
What the?
Matt Medeiros (17:12)
to want to see and use these other capabilities. Like yes, you should use important transactional emails when it makes sense. You should be optimizing your images, but a lot of the stuff still today is very technical. It's a very technical thing people don't understand. Like I can't just take this photo from my iPhone and upload it to my homepage and everything's gonna be fine. Like no, because that image is going to be huge, right? You don't know, you don't even know it is, right? The person doesn't even know it is. So how do you think about?
Gabriella Laster (17:35)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (17:42)
getting the average person to utilize these features when it's so technical.
Gabriella Laster (17:48)
So I can speak as someone who did enter the WordPress ecosystem as a complete newbie and not knowing that you need to make sure that your emails don't hit spam and you need to make sure that your image is optimized. I never knew that before.
Matt Medeiros (18:00)
Yeah.
Gabriella Laster (18:04)
⁓ And I think that a lot of people who are building their first site don't necessarily know that. And then they don't understand why their website performance isn't optimized and they don't understand a lot of other things. with website accessibility, I don't know all the rules on my own. I can look them up, but sometimes I'm not even aware in my process of what I need to look out for. So I think as a marketer and also on the product team, we try to identify those different...
opportunities. Those different
times where someone is uploading an image and we can say, hey, this image is really, really heavy. I think you should optimize it. Or we can suggest checking your website to see if there are any accessibility violations. Or we can notify if we know that someone is setting up their form on their website and we want to make sure that the emails reach the inbox, then we can let them know that this is something you need to be aware of.
Matt Medeiros (19:05)
Yeah. How do you divide your time ⁓ as a marketer on what I'll call the external opportunities? You know, appearing on a podcast, pay-per-click ads, other sponsorship stuff like in-person events, ⁓ and then splitting your time there and then going into the product. Like those, like the things you just said, like when you upload an image, there should be a warning that says, this image is too big, but...
Don't you know you can also sign up for our image optimization service and it'll save you time. How do you balance your time and where do you put your efforts into that native product marketing, the in product marketing versus the external opportunities?
Gabriella Laster (19:49)
don't have a set rule where I can say 80 % of my time, I would say actually that 80 % of my time, even 90 % of my time is probably focused on the product itself and the user experience and the welcome flows and what is the user experiencing and trying to see where in the journey. ⁓
things may be less clear, how I can make it clear and better for our users. But I would also say that it really depends on what the priorities are and what my focus is on that specific day, week, month, and it's not always the same exact proportion.
Matt Medeiros (20:29)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a tough balance and, ⁓ you know, we just, you know, I'll say this for you, we just can't rely on the engineers to do it for us. Because it'll just be a little...
Gabriella Laster (20:43)
it's also different perspectives. think that you, different people bring different perspectives into the room and it's very important to at the very least hear what the different perspectives are. And then make whatever judgment you think is best at that time.
Matt Medeiros (20:55)
Yeah,
do you have an example of like engineering brain versus marketing brain in like something that you've had to like either debate or have that conversation about?
Gabriella Laster (21:08)
Sure.
I think a lot of times there can be conversations about whether, even in product terminology, when we're introducing a new feature, how technical do we want to be versus how benefit driven do we want to be. A lot of times we can come into the room and the engineer in the room would say something really, really, really technical. I can't think of a specific example right now, but if it comes to me, I'll mention it. But then when I look at it, I'm like, I don't know what this means. I don't think our user is going to know what this means.
need to be a lot clearer with what this is and what it does. ⁓
A lot of times once we explain why we think it should be updated, the change is made. it's different, it's just different perspectives. A lot of times the engineers will be buried into the technical terminology and when you're in it and you're building the feature and you've been living it for many, many days, you sometimes forget that when you're introducing it to someone from the outside who is seeing it for the first time, they're not in the same headspace as you are.
Matt Medeiros (22:14)
Yeah, yeah.
I do want to touch on, before we get too close to the end, I want to touch on the AI aspect of Elementor, and especially about the stuff that we're talking about right now, about the challenges of whatever, like ⁓ user brain and technical brain, and how do we make that easy for people to click buttons and navigate Elementor. But now, it seems the entire world is shifting to maybe an AI-first experience.
That's easy for you and I, we're like, we get it. We understand what's happening. Like we can type stuff in and we know it. To me, that's still going to be very foreign to users to understand like, wait, I just talked to this thing and it's going to reshape my website. I don't even, what do I even ask this thing to do? ⁓ Where's the challenges there or where's the opportunities that you see with AI and especially for Elementor?
Gabriella Laster (22:53)
to me.
I think the opportunities with AI are huge, especially in the WordPress ecosystem, especially with the robustness of it and all the different plugins and capabilities that already exist and a lot of the challenges that the vibe coding tools have, it's SEO and accessibility, those aren't the same challenges that we're going to have in WordPress.
I think there are, we're still kind of in the early adopter phase of AI, so people don't necessarily know what to ask, how to ask. Different AI tools, features do different things, so I think a really important aspect is setting the context for the users, helping them understand ⁓ what this feature can do, let's not even call it AI, what can I do with, what does this tool give me, what capabilities does it give me? ⁓ Setting, it's very important to set the frame,
context and give examples. Examples can be in a prompt library, examples can be videos and use cases. We need to be very, very demonstrative with what it can do because it's hard to learn, but it also, once you see the example, you kind of start thinking about the different things that you can build with it. So I think a lot of demonstration.
Matt Medeiros (24:26)
Yeah. Yeah.
How do you think about AI sort of, well, it's a tough question because it's running in Elementor, the WordPress AI team from the Make WordPress AI team, make.wordpress.org, they just put a proposal in, I think it was yesterday or the day before, I don't know if you had a chance to see it, but they wanna introduce in WordPress 7.0.
what I'll call is a framework for AI, right? If you're going to integrate AI into WordPress, this is the way you should do it. Again, for the average user, I'll say this is the approved way that WordPress wants you to do it. This isn't WordPress saying, we've integrated ⁓ ChatGPT into WordPress. It just says, these are the of the guardrails for now on how to get this connected. My issue is, this.
It's not so much with AI in Elementor because you've already chosen to use Elementor to build your website. My challenge is if we have AI in WordPress and anyone can do anything with WordPress core with AI, what is even WordPress after that? Like if you can just take the essence of WordPress and just say, I don't need any of these other things, I just need posts. I don't need a plugin system, I don't need a theme system. And if that's the future of WordPress where you can just
Gabriella Laster (25:46)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (25:51)
chat to have a version of WordPress. Sounds cool, but I'm afraid of like, so what, what is even WordPress anymore? Do you have any thoughts on like the AI world of how WordPress matures through this stuff? ⁓ you know, in the future, I feel like we might just be making all kinds of random installs of WordPress and it's not even WordPress anymore. That's one of the fears I have with AI in the core of WordPress. Any thoughts?
Gabriella Laster (26:21)
I think that's a very interesting and philosophical question. I don't notice, I can't say what the feature holds, also because the capabilities, there are new capabilities introduced every single day, even. ⁓
Matt Medeiros (26:24)
Hahaha
Gabriella Laster (26:41)
I don't see it as doom and gloom as maybe you're seeing it from my perspective. think that because WordPress has so many different flavors and different ways you can actually, Miriam described it today as different WordPress websites are like snowflakes. No WordPress website is the same. They're different configurations and using AI and making sure that there are guardrails that help ⁓
help build whatever it is the end user wants to build and customizing it to their specific need.
is I see that as very powerful, actually. I see it as a way where people can, instead of compromising and getting websites results, setups, database setups, whatever it is where this is the default and this is how WordPress site comes and this is how it's built, you can really customize it to exactly what you need. And I think that's pretty powerful.
Matt Medeiros (27:28)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah,
Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's definitely ⁓ the positive side of it. And I'm so sick of using the phrase like we're in interesting times, but like we like no one really knows. Yeah, like what's going to happen with any of this stuff?
Gabriella Laster (27:59)
We are though.
Yeah, interesting, exciting.
Matt Medeiros (28:07)
⁓ Gabriella, thanks for...
Yeah. Gabriella, thanks for hanging out today. The new product is Elementor One. You can find it at Elementor.com. I will have a special link in the show notes of wherever you're listening or watching today's episode. Gabriella, anywhere else you want folks to go to check out Elementor One, any other place where they can go to say thanks to you.
Gabriella Laster (28:34)
You can just check out elementor.com slash one. And if there are any comments or suggestions, you can also reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear more feedback, suggestions, thoughts.
Matt Medeiros (28:47)
Awesome stuff. Yeah, Billy, thanks so much for hanging out today. Everybody else, thewpminute.com, thewpminute.com slash subscribe. Thanks for listening.