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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.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today we're talking with Matt Schwartz about the challenges of starting a SaaS in the WordPress space. Matt is the founder of CheckView, an automated testing service for WordPress forms and checkout processes. He's also the founder of Inspry, an agency focused on e-commerce solutions. Matt, welcome to the WP Minute.
Matt Schwartz (00:25)
Thanks so much for having me, Eric. I'm super excited to be on.
Eric Karkovack (00:29)
Well, I was excited to meet you. We met at PressConf, full disclosure. And you were telling me a little bit about your SaaS service, ⁓ CheckView. And I thought, you know, I'm not seeing a ton of SaaS products dedicated solely to WordPress or mainly to WordPress. So I thought this might be a great opportunity to ⁓ kind of connect and let people know about the challenges and what you've learned during the process.
Matt Schwartz (00:58)
Definitely. Yeah. I think I've got some thoughts on it. ⁓ even when I started check view, I was thinking of the SAS first, you know, WordPress plugin and where we fit into the ecosystem and that sort of thing. ⁓ so one, one thing that might be helpful is to dig into, you know, why we started check view. If that sounds good.
Eric Karkovack (01:19)
Yeah, I was interested in the impetus behind it. I know you have an agency that works with e-commerce, right? So I guess we should probably begin there.
Matt Schwartz (01:30)
Definitely. ⁓ so I started in spree here in Atlanta, ⁓ back in 2011. ⁓ I'm not afraid to admit I was a Joomla guy, ⁓ for a long time, but I used WordPress and Joomla really since that time I was building both on both platforms. ⁓ you know, I had contractors did the whole thing at some point, started hiring employees. ⁓ and then over the years we really.
migrated from doing just brochure sites, more into e-commerce. We did woo as early as 2013, I think. ⁓ we started getting into some Shopify stuff a little bit later on after that, quite a bit after that. ⁓ but over time, one thing that I realized was, ⁓ that there was a little bit of a risk, when it came to checkout and.
You know, making sure things functionally work, especially with Wu. ⁓ you know, Wu is a fantastic platform. I love all the flexibility and how much you can customize it. ⁓ but as we all know, ⁓ one of the beauties of WordPress is you can do anything you want with it. ⁓ but that also means every plugin on the site can do anything they want with it, including break your checkout. Right. ⁓ so that is something that I actually experienced at one of our larger.
Eric Karkovack (02:43)
Yes.
Matt Schwartz (02:52)
⁓ clients, they were a B2C company and, ⁓ we were working with them. They had a really big launch. It was a TV spot. we had done a bunch of testing. ⁓ unfortunately there was a checkout issue, ⁓ that occurred. ⁓ and it occurred, ⁓ I think the, the, the morning of, which if we had checked you, we would have picked up on if we ran morning tests and, there was some issues and.
What happened, you know, it all ended up okay. The client stayed with us, but it definitely was a really uncomfortable conversation. ⁓ and you know, over the years we had had similar things with like forums on websites where, forms break and clients are like, how long has my form been broken? How much has this cost me? And it just kind of puts you as the, I think agency in a really awkward, almost like legally concerning, you know, position. And so.
that's why I wanted to build something that would just go through every day and check things like your forms and your checkout, making sure those critical items work on the websites. essentially whether it's woo or it's, you know, forms on a website, ⁓ that's typically the entire purpose of most websites, right? Is sales not always, but a lot of them are, it's about engaging sales or, ⁓ form submissions, something like that.
And so that's really how we started down the process of building check view internally at Innsbruck.
Eric Karkovack (04:21)
Yeah, I know the importance of the broken form, the broken checkout. think anybody who's been in the freelancer agency space for a while has gotten that panicked email or phone call. ⁓ Hey, I'm not getting any emails. So-and-so said they sent me an email or an order and you know, what's happening. So I could definitely see the ⁓ importance of doing that. Now,
You mentioned that ⁓ you were looking at this as a SaaS. Why a SaaS over a plugin? What were the ⁓ pros and cons of that approach?
Matt Schwartz (04:59)
Definitely. So we really dug into the plugin option. You know, we love open source. We've worked with WordPress a really long time. We wanted to contribute. We had already had like a agency, a small agency plugin out there in the repo ⁓ called the agency toolkit. Check it out if you have it, it's free. ⁓ But with this project, it was a little tricky because we wanted to make sure we weren't.
You know, using resources on people's sites. And of course, with something like this, just to give people a little background, really what we end up doing, ⁓ is we have a browser go to your website and actually complete your form. I, learns the steps. For example, we've trained it on gravity forums and woo and WS forum, all the different forum plugins that the, you know, the major ones.
So we'll build all the steps and the whole point is to keep that persistent. So it's running the same way every single day or every time you run. so with something like that, ⁓ there were some ways to do it from the open source and the, you know, the WordPress side, but it was going to be really heavy and honestly not as effective anyways, cause it's kind of like, how do you test? You would almost have to do, ⁓ the main WP approach where you have like a parent.
install site that would then run the bots. So it's going to be a little bit more involved, not that there's anything wrong with the way main WP handles it, but in this case, it's not even just pulling data. It's literally running a Docker container with, you know, Chromium Chrome browser, right. ⁓ having to go to the site. So we wanted to really minimize the effort here. And that's also what made things different. It went really with the, I would say moat of the product of who we are building for, which is agency owners such as myself.
Eric Karkovack (06:20)
Gotcha.
Matt Schwartz (06:48)
Not necessarily, you know, technical developers, of course, technical developers can use it, but there's already options out there for them. There's a million options for automated testing, but agency owners, they don't typically want to even hear the word automated testing. They may not even know what that is, which is okay. ⁓ and that's really what we built it for is so that it would be as one click as possible. On top of it, I'll also mention that we were seeing even back in 2022.
Eric Karkovack (07:05)
Yeah.
Matt Schwartz (07:18)
There was some movement within the WordPress space of looking at what are called hybrid, SAS WordPress plugins, which is really where a lot of the, you know, meat of the functionality is in the SAS, but it does have a plugin that's helping that process out. And so we really followed some of those examples out there. You know, the maintenance dashboards, for example, you've got things like WP umbrella, ⁓ you know, WP remote.
They were a big influence on how we went about going this because ⁓ it's a similar approach, right? You want to keep it as lightweight possible on the website, but do all the heavy lifting and the SaaS so that ultimately it's best for the agency or the site owner. They don't have to worry that their site's getting slowed down when the entire purpose of our platform is to catch issues, not cause more issues.
Eric Karkovack (08:12)
That's a good point. That's a very good point because I can imagine somebody on like a shared server or just a small VPS ⁓ when you're probably going to ⁓ inundate yourself with support requests. Why is my site so slow? Why is this and that happening? So to have it all going remotely. I checked out the video on the checkview.io ⁓ website about how it all works.
I mean, it's honestly pretty cool because you can see a video then of the test being run by the bot. ⁓ You can actually watch it fill out the form and go through the process. ⁓ Now, what kind of like market research did you do before ⁓ going into this product space? You said there were a few inspirations, right?
Matt Schwartz (09:01)
Yeah, that's a great question.
There were, so we did a little bit of market research. I think we were pretty set on building it, but we did talk to some agencies within the admin bar, which I was pretty involved in. Not a time, probably 15 agencies ⁓ to see their interest in the product. We also looked at market validations at a very...
Basic level. So for example, back in 2017, there actually was a product very similar to ours that automatic bought. Um, and I think it was called a robot Ninja or Ninja robot, and it was only for woo. Uh, but, uh, they, the company that created that, they own some other plugins, but automatic bought them and then, you know, it kind of disappeared. But, uh, so there was some validation there that, you know, they had.
initial success before they got bought. ⁓ and there was one other product at the time that was doing what we were with woo. ⁓ and there was, think one or two platforms that were out there relatively niche doing, form testing. ⁓ and then on top of it, a lot of WordPress, agencies on the bigger end were using like ghost inspector.
which is a automated testing platform for anything, not just WordPress. That kind of seemed to be the choice. And our goal is to create something like Ghost Inspector, but make it even easier. ⁓ Ghost Inspector's already considered a low code automated testing tool, but we wanted to take out the automated testing part entirely out as does my form work? Does, you know, my checkout work? And that was really our inspiration.
Now in reality, you know, I've learned a lot. For example, we didn't really know agencies were going to be our audience, even though I was an agency. You know, I was thinking it would be more site owners specifically. We do have some of those, but ⁓ I also thought maybe it would be developers, right? Because it took a lot of effort. It was a very technical product. And, you know, I did the age old, I guess, mistake of,
loving the technology so much that I pitched it more on the technology side than the marketing side initially. And then realizing, no, you know, our main customer is the agency like myself, maybe less technical, but, ⁓ they just wants to know, they don't want to know, you know, how, how it's built. They just want to know it actually works and that they get alerted. So that has been a learning curve, ⁓ compared to like service product. Definitely.
You know, the, market gap and getting the audience correct can be costly, but definitely a good lesson to learn.
Eric Karkovack (11:57)
Yeah, how technically, did you face any WordPress specific challenges because this was a WordPress-focused SaaS instead of having your own API necessarily or being a more broad platform?
Matt Schwartz (12:15)
Yeah, that's definitely another good question. So, ⁓ in one sense being a SaaS first creating like WordPress plugin, you have more control over, you know, deployments. unlike a WordPress plugin where you push out an update and hope it doesn't break all everyone's sites. Ours is a combination. It does have a WordPress plugin, which of course can break and have issues, but most of the code and functionality is not there. It's on the SaaS side. So we have a lot more control.
We don't have to worry quite as much about, you know, the, the base product not working or not working as intended. ⁓ but I do think that when it came to WordPress, it took more effort than we thought initially. So we actually originally built out, the, ⁓ form side of the, you know, checking forms first. And that took a lot of work because we basically had to, our goal was.
Unlike Ghost Inspector, another platform out there where you set up the steps manually and just by using automated testing, you know, there's just certain things it's not going to do. example, it isn't going to have a way to check the submission. It's not going to have a way easily to redirect test emails only to the test inbox. It's not going to easily have a way to get back past captures. Our goal was to eliminate that friction for agencies, but because of that,
We had to cater our WordPress plugin that we built to do that through hooks, right? ⁓ So one thing that makes it a little more difficult than a general SaaS is the education part, because we're trying to simplify automated testing, but it is still automated testing, which means there is friction. And so if we don't get it right, our customers don't have the background to understand that, ⁓ this capture is not unhooking.
I don't know why, and it could be because they're using a CAPTCHA that we don't support, right? We support like the built-in, you know, reCAPTCHA or turnstile in WP forums, for example. But if there's a third party one out there, we may or may not support it because we actually have to unhook it when our bot goes to the site and say, okay, this comes from our bot securely. Let that CAPTCHA go, let our bot pass through. Where if you were building with a ghost inspector, you would just inherently know.
There's not a really good way to do that unless you've custom coded your own WordPress plugin to do what we've done, if that kind of makes sense. So the education part ⁓ definitely has been a little more difficult between a general testing platform and WordPress specific.
Eric Karkovack (14:55)
That seems like quite the challenge though, because WordPress, as you said, could be, we can make it do anything we want. We can build it out, customize it, put a thousand plugins on the site. And you have to have a platform that can, can manage all that, right? It can navigate all that just to do a form. mean, I, I was dealing with a client who had a spam submissions on their WooCommerce site recently. I put a turnstile plugin on. then you've got to be your
platform has to be able to navigate that just in order to do its testing.
Matt Schwartz (15:29)
Correct. Or at least our customer has to understand what's supported or not, and then be able to put in a ticket if not. So we also try to have really good support because I realize, you know, I empathize with a lot of our customers that they don't know how it works. Again, they don't want to know how it works. So I go out of my way to try to really fix anything, even if it's not because our core product, like I would say majority of the time, it's not the core product.
Not working. Like if we were just ghost inspector, it already does that. It's like, yes, they're using, ⁓ something that, you know, we don't support. And while it's in our docs, we try to have really good docs. get not everyone has time to do that. So yes, that's something where we have to work with our, you know, customers, to make sure they're clear on that and try to work with what we have. And it's a little bit of a trade off. Like even sometimes they may use an unsupported form plugin, for example.
which you can do, it will go through. It's just, you have to tell the bot what it's going to do. And then when it, if there's a CAPTCHA, it's not going to be able to get past it. And if there isn't a CAPTCHA, it's going to submit it, but it can actually check the form itself. If that makes sense, it can only make sure it gets through the steps very much like a traditional automated testing platform out of the work, out of the box would work. you know, it's not a clear cut ⁓ thing, but we try to make it as magical as we.
possibly can, but the best way I find to do that is to have fully supported forums, plugins. That way people know that they can use those and they should work out of the box with things like conditional logic, all that we've built it all to do that. ⁓ so it's a little bit of a trade-off, but it is also the moat. Otherwise people would just be using ghost inspector, right?
Eric Karkovack (17:18)
So what have you learned from your customers? Are there features that you've added just because of customer requests or things that you've, like pain points that you've identified?
Matt Schwartz (17:30)
definitely having more built-in form support, you know, has been a big one again, just making it as seamless as possible. So that's something that we've been working on. Elementor is another one. It's still early to tell, but we are working on supporting Elementor forums. I think I can say that comfortably because we've already built it out. We're just working with the Elementor team on hopefully getting that pushed out, because they had to have the hooks so we could do all this magical stuff we're doing. Right.
⁓ so that's like been a massive one is just what forms can we support out of the box? ⁓ not really surprising per se, but it's one that I have to always go back and forth and figure out like, how far do I take it? And as someone who came from the service side, you know, when you're an agency, yes, you push back on clients if you're a good agency, but ultimately you're going to do what they have you, you know, they pay you to do where with product I've learned.
It's much more difficult. It's almost like an art and a science. talked and interviewed a lot of product managers because I realized that's kind of what I was becoming on the check view side and realizing that, you you have to really consider what's best for the user. And sometimes they may not really know what they need. Or you may not be the right solution for them and helping just get them to the right place, which is very different than agency work where yes, I may refer.
You know, someone out if we're not a good fit, but for the most part, if they're an existing client and they say, I want to customize this, I'm going to do that. If that's what they want me to do, especially if I've already given the caveats of why or why they shouldn't do that. But, ⁓ I think with product, you know, you, when you build in a new feature, it's difficult sometimes to know really, if you're solving what the customer needs. So you have to talk to them more. ⁓ and even getting feedback can be difficult. You know, we have.
Now quite a few agencies, but most of the agencies we don't hear from because the product works how they need it to, or they're savvy enough to figure it out. ⁓ but so, you know, and then you have a vocal group and that vocal group may not represent everyone either. So I've learned a lot about being a better product manager and just trying to balance all of that.
Eric Karkovack (19:51)
You can't say yes to every request, right?
Matt Schwartz (19:53)
No. And you also can't say yes to your own, you know, founder. Oh, this is really cool feature that I think should be there. Cause I did a lot of that. It's been a lot of money. There's a lot of features there that, you know, they get used, but some of them probably didn't necessarily need to be in the platform. And now they're just technical debt. But again, you live and learn. Um, it's, it's been a good experience just learning product first, you know, service.
Eric Karkovack (20:23)
Yeah, that's an interesting ⁓ climb going into the product space after you've been working in an agency for years. ⁓ What advice would you have for someone in your position that says, ⁓ I want to start some sort of SaaS, ⁓ whether it's WordPress or not, ⁓ what would you tell them before they begin that journey?
Matt Schwartz (20:45)
So I think it's pretty cliche, but definitely try to figure out your market validation and market fit always, always, always, always, always, because I knew that and I still, you know, didn't entirely listen to that. Again, I had an idea and I think we've been able to find a market, but I spent a lot of time and money building again, some things that just didn't need to necessarily be there up front.
so I would say before you build anything, ⁓ you know, try to do even more validation. Like I'm not even talking about talk to 10 or 20 potential customers talk to a hundred and then also be like, ⁓ is this cool? Or would you actually pay for this and how much? Cause the second thing that a lot of people miss, I think, which I entirely missed. ⁓ I've got two more good pieces of advice actually. One is, ⁓ make sure that what you're building from the
you know, technical side and the cost side, makes sense in terms of that it's solving a big enough problem that people are willing to pay enough for it. So for example, with our product, ⁓ I think the initial development time was, and cost was a lot higher than I thought it was going to be because it's actually a pretty technical product. ⁓ and with all of that being said, you know, for a long time, we weren't even breaking even.
All right. which I think is pretty common, but I think the, you know, lot of plugin developers I talked about said it was about two or three years before someone broke even. that's something I think to keep in mind is you may not break even for two or three years, but also keep in mind, like figure out what you think you'll be able to charge. Talk to those hundred potential customers and make sure that it's something they're willing to pay enough for to actually sustainably.
Eric Karkovack (22:16)
Yeah.
Matt Schwartz (22:40)
allow you to continue to build this product, right? ⁓ I think that's something I didn't really understand until I got into it. And then I would say the other thing, guess, to keep in mind when it comes to just building product in general is that a lot of times people are, you know, they've got a really good idea and
When you have a really good idea, you may think it's unique and all of that. And that's not a bad thing, but make sure that, ⁓ you do have competitors in the space, right? Cause if you don't have any competitors or you don't have many, that means you're going to be doing a lot more education. And I had to learn about that because there are niche competitors in the space. And then there was, like I said, massive general automated testing, but there's not a lot of WordPress specific ones. So there's been a lot of education I've had to do because
A lot of agencies just don't know that, ⁓ I should be testing. This is the most critical thing on the website because if someone's using web flow, if they're using a custom platform that's built by a heavy development company, they're all doing automated testing. If you use web flow because they own the whole stack, they're doing automated testing. works in a completely different way, but they are making sure their form software works. But of course they control the whole stack with WordPress agencies don't. So.
They have to be responsible for that and realize that. And like you said, a lot of agencies have had that awkward conversation of, the form's broken, but they didn't know there was a solution out there. So you have to have the market and the knowledge and just time to educate the market. If you're going to go into something where there's not a lot of competitors.
Eric Karkovack (24:25)
So you mentioned the proprietary stuff, and I know in your agency life you do work with Shopify. Have you given any thought to ⁓ expanding CheckView into the Shopify space, or is that something that, because it's proprietary, maybe is it not worth the effort?
Matt Schwartz (24:47)
Yeah, that's a good one for sure. So, ⁓ thought about that quite a bit, because our agency does do work in Shopify. In reality, Shopify still has as an agency that works in it, as it gets more custom things like filters, add to cart, ⁓ product pages still break, pretty easily if they're not developed well. The only thing I would say Shopify
Not the only thing, but one of the things that Shopify does do, of course, that we doesn't do is checkout is way harder to break. So yes, there is an argument to be made that it's not as critical, but there's also a lot of massive brands on Shopify where if their ad to cart doesn't work or their product page isn't working properly, it's going to cost them a lot of money regardless.
Eric Karkovack (25:28)
Yes.
Matt Schwartz (25:37)
there is actually a few platforms on Shopify that do that very similar to the WordPress space where they're somewhat niche. but there are already Shopify apps that are basically doing a similar thing to what we're doing. ⁓ so we have considered going to that space, but to be honest, I really like the WordPress space. That's where I spend about 90 % of my time. That's where I know everyone. That's where we as an agency spend most of our time. So.
If anything, we're more likely to, ⁓ really hedge with what, you know, whatever happens related to AI and WordPress, right? ⁓ whether that is, ⁓ every small business still staying on WordPress or maybe only larger sites being on WordPress and smaller sites going to some other potentially open source or, ⁓ custom coded solution that uses AI. think that's more the direction we're looking because if anything,
What I have found is that we use AI obviously a lot at both the agency and in check view. And as I think a lot of people know at this point, ⁓ AI can do a great job. It can get there about 70 % of the time and then you'll be like, what happened the last 30%. So it's going to be really no different if anything ⁓ outside of WordPress, if you're building a former checkout, you probably should be concerned with AI building it.
⁓ and so it's going to have a lot of the same issues. So check few, ⁓ we're actually working on, ⁓ you know, a build where check few will be able to handle more of your lovable type builders as well. ⁓ because a lot of times those are a lot more likely to break than a proprietary system. ⁓ so yeah, I think the tools are maybe changing a little bit or tweaking, ⁓ especially for agencies.
⁓ but if anything, think, ⁓ testing in general is just becoming more important, even outside of WordPress world. mean, I think everyone can complain about the issues that we've seen with software over the past couple of years. And I think part of it is that there's not as much testing and there's more just automation and AI being used with less testing being done. So, ⁓ I think testing, hopefully people are starting to realize there needs to be more testing, not less testing.
Eric Karkovack (27:59)
Yeah, we were so excited to vibe code all of our different stuff, right? And just throw it on there and see what works and just trust it. But there's going to be problems. so testing is still a vital part of the process, right?
Matt Schwartz (28:16)
I mean, without testing, essentially, you may be able to get something out the door, but if you don't have user trust, you know, that is, think also the difference when people without going into the whole AI conversation too much, you know, everyone says, SAS is dead, SAS is dead. You know, you see it in the stocks and all of that. Personally, I don't think SAS is dead for two reasons. One is because ⁓ users don't want to be responsible. They want to be able to trust.
you know, a platform and even as AI gets better, it's going to have issues just like any other code. And someone's going to still have to fix that. Right. So if I am a small business, I'm not going to move my small business, you know, tax and invoices, et cetera, outside of QuickBooks to some AI generated system for multiple reasons. I don't want to, you know, end up owing the IRS because I AI generated my taxes.
⁓ I think the same argument can be made with, you know, lot of other critical systems. do think there'll be some smaller niche SaaS platforms that may struggle a little bit more. ⁓ plus of course, potentially less developers that are needed necessarily, even if more testing is needed. ⁓ so I think that with all that being said that, you know, SaaS is, I still think definitely here to stay.
Uh, we're gonna, we're gonna need it in, terms of just trust. Uh, and ultimately if you're building out an AI platform, something hopefully like check view, even if you're a solo, you know, preneur, you'll be able to use it to make sure the fundamental parts of, know, your website or app are working, whether it's checkout or forums, or maybe it's a login because even with, you know, we also can test right now, logins, et cetera, with check view. It's built to do all of that as well. So.
⁓ think the case is again, only really getting stronger for testing, even with, you know, homemade SAS platforms, or, ⁓ I would say even agencies that are internally building tools. Cause that's another thing that a lot of teams are starting to do is being able to do more testing.
Eric Karkovack (30:32)
Yeah, just because I can build it myself ⁓ with AI doesn't necessarily mean I should. ⁓ And it's also important to have trusted partners who can do the work for you so that you don't have to worry about it as much. So I don't think SAS is going to ⁓ run away anytime soon. ⁓ Matt, I appreciate you taking the time to be on the show. Where can people connect with you online?
Matt Schwartz (30:57)
Definitely so much, you know, community I think is, is really important. ⁓ I'm, I'm pretty active, as I mentioned earlier in the admin bar, if you haven't checked it out, definitely do. ⁓ and then also you can reach me on LinkedIn. I I'm trying to get more active on LinkedIn. ⁓ you know, it's good to connect with people there. You can also just contact me, you know, on checkthrough.io or insprey.com. If you have any questions or if you are looking at starting, you know, your own products and you know, you.
you want to run things by me, I'm happy to at least share the experiences pretty fresh in my mind over the past couple of years.
Eric Karkovack (31:34)
Awesome, well thank you. And thanks to everyone who watched and listened to this episode. Visit us over at thewpminute.com slash subscribe, grab our newsletter, support the work we do here at the WP Minute. Thanks and we will see you next time.
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