Matt: Hey gravity formers it's Monday, December 11th.
And of the year updates or hear some clips from the summit and
a bit of a holiday break it's breakdown, a gravity forms podcast.
The last time you heard my voice, I was prompting you to tune in to
the first ever gravity forms summit, specifically developed for agencies
and freelancers using gravity, but also looking to get a comprehensive outlook
on growing a digital services business.
We invited our certified developers and other agency partners to share
their lessons with you while providing some valuable takeaways you could
implement into your business.
Here's a few clips from the live stream.
Which was recorded to YouTube and I'll link the show.
In the show notes.
Kathy: Let's just jump right into it and start talking about some
of these strategies and things that you can do with Gravity Forms
in order to close more sales.
Our goal with any sales process is to make it easier for prospects, for
customers to do business with us.
Our job is to remove as much friction from those initial stages of relationship.
With our customers so that they feel like we are a genuine
part of their organization with their goals being our goals as
David: well.
It's fun.
It's exciting, but it's tough.
Internal projects can be just as hard.
Complex requirements always seem to extend beyond core plugin functionality.
It's not like you only have one project on your plate either.
You're always juggling a few, many projects.
There's so little time.
can't afford to dig in and figure out the most perfect solution for every
problem because you have deadlines.
And after those deadlines, you have new projects starting soon,
but you're not here to complain.
You're here to get the job done.
that's why you're listening to this bearded fellow tell you about GravityWiz
and how we can help you conquer any project on time and in style.
Matt: I enjoyed hosting the live stream and look forward
to doing it again in 2024.
If you attended the summit and have some specific feedback.
For what you'd like to see next year.
Go ahead and email me, matt@gravityforms.com.
I'm looking for more feedback from users that leverage gravity
forms to sell stuff online.
It could be digital goods, a membership or anything really.
I'd like to hold a couple of interviews for the podcast highlighting how gravity
might power your e-commerce experience.
End users and agencies are welcome.
I'm going to link a short three question form to fill out in the
show notes, . out that form and I'll reach out to you for an interview.
or here, the team is preparing to get some final updates to gravity forms
before the Christmas break hits.
As for this podcast.
You won't hear me until the end of January, 2024.
Yes, that's right.
Break down.
We'll take a short holiday break.
We'll stay indulge in too much eggnog.
Gravity forms 2.8 is out fingers crossed.
By the time I release this episode, it brings one of my favorite
updates as of late compact view inside the form editor window.
Gone are the days of endlessly scrolling or getting lost
in a deluge of form fields.
Users can now collapse fields for an improved navigation experience.
Gravity SMTP beta one has officially graced your dashboard
log in and download it to your staging sites or playground sites.
I don't recommend you use it on a production ready site yet, unless you
plan on sending us lots of feedback, gravity SMTP will help you effectively
and safely deliver emails, leaving your WordPress website, whether it's
your forms, notification emails, or your user password modification.
Notice delivering emails is important to your business, and we're ramping up to
help you with that experience, especially when you're using the gravity forms.
Plugin.
2024 is going to be a great year for gravity forms.
And we're happy to have you here with us.
But we're not done with that holiday cheer either.
We've got a range of updates to your favorite.
Ad-ons here at gravity forums.
Here's a list of updates that you might've missed.
Convert kit.
1.0 was released Stripe 5.3 and possibly 5.4 today was also released turnstile 1.1.
If you're looking for a capture alternative chained selects 1.7
conversational forms, 1.2 poles, 4.2 and PayPal checkout 3.0, make
sure you're running the latest and.
Greatest of those ad-ons above.
And if you want to be the first in line to try out our new beta downloads, join the
beta program@gravityforms.com slash beta.
our behind the scenes segment here at gravity forms, I'm interviewing
veterans support engineer, Chris Hager.
I joked that he's been here so long that gravity forms built the office around him.
And that was almost the case.
If you ever had the pleasure to meet Chris through your support
portal, you know how dedicated he is to solving gravity form issues and
helping you our beloved customer.
So let's go behind the scenes.
of support with Chris.
Hope you enjoy this interview segment, and I'll see you in the new year.
Hey, Chris, welcome to breakdown.
Chris: Hi, Matt.
Thank you.
Thank you for having
Matt: me.
An aptly named podcast for somebody who works in the
support side of gravity forms.
We're at breakdown.
Chris: We haven't been any breakdowns lately, so we're doing okay.
Matt: What do you think?
makes Gravity Forms support different than most?
Let me hit you with the heavy handed question first.
Don't worry, our bosses are not listening to this.
Chris: Not yet.
what makes us different?
I think the amount of experience that we have with the product
and with WordPress in general is probably what makes us different.
I don't think we're faster than other people but I believe our
responses are much higher quality than a lot of the support you get.
Matt: Our customers, heck myself included, because I'm a 10 plus year, we ought
to hand out plaques to our customers.
Now that I think about it, like if you're a 10 year customer, you get a little
crystal plaque that you can put up.
But I think our customers expect this from us.
We've been in the business for so long
do you think our customers are a different type of, of plugin user than most seasoned
more been around the block a bit more than most, or are a lot of us getting a lot of
new or a lot of their interactions, new users getting into the game of WordPress?
Chris: Yeah, it changes, the customers that we have since gravity forms is
the first paid Plug in for WordPress.
I think they expect a higher level of support just for that fact So that's
one thing the second part of that would be that I believe our customers
are expecting how do I put it?
Because they've been doing it for so long, they've evolved their solutions
quite a bit, and they're very complex integrations at this point.
So when they get stuck, they're really stuck, and they need us, because
they've been doing this on their own for ten minutes, or ten minutes,
for ten years, and they really just need us to get them out of a jam,
you know, where they've just gotten
Matt: stuck.
And there are, there are some that who have only used it for ten minutes, right?
And that experience is, is quite different.
you know What do you wish maybe WordPress, the software, did
differently, if anything, that made that experience a little bit
better for that 10 minute person?
Hey, I just got this thing, some, I was at a Word, I was at this meetup and somebody
said, you gotta use Gravity Forms.
It's the, it's the best, it's the most trusted, but they're really wrestling
with the, with, with WordPress itself.
Do you, do you have a, a feeling you wake up to every day?
Man, I wish WordPress just did this instead.
Chris: I don't actually with WordPress.
I, I think it's not a cohesive experience.
You, you install WordPress, you're faced with the dashboard.
You don't know what to do from there necessarily.
So I don't focus too much on that.
But I do focus on, you know, what we, our customers see with Gravity Forms.
And we've, you know, we've added Installation Wizard a
couple major versions back, which is a big leap forward.
So you get a screen right off the bat.
You enter your key, answer a few questions, and now you've
got form templates to start right away just by clicking.
So I think it's much easier now than it used to be.
And, you know, the, the 10 minute user that we sometimes run across, that
happens a lot right around this time of year with the Thanksgiving Black Friday
sale, we end up with a whole bunch of new customers, maybe haven't been using
WordPress for very long, they know they need to use Gravity Forms, they install
it, and then they come to us, and those questions are great because we get You
know, that's kind of our wheelhouse is explaining the basics of how things work.
So it's very easy for us to answer those and help those
people out and get them started
Matt: right away.
They built the gravity forms office around you, right?
You've been here that long.
How long have you been here?
Chris: I've been here since 2011, before the office was
built, we were in Kevin's house.
Yeah.
So, and Dana's desk was under the stairs.
Matt: So you've seen, you've seen a thing or two.
You've seen the evolution of not only Gravity Forms WordPress,
but the, but the end user, right?
Expectations and, and what they're building with, with software.
You've seen quite a rollercoaster
ride.
Chris: Yeah, we have.
I was thinking about that question a lot, you know, the people
who've been using gravity forms a long time have really built.
Some impressive systems around that and they've got, you know, hundreds
of thousands of entries and all these integrations tied up with CRMs and
payments and, and things like that.
So when they come to us for help, they, they're really stuck.
You know, they've been using it a long time and it's been working great,
but now they've run into some problem that they need our support for.
So those are the, those are the ones that we're kind of getting
now on top of the, the very simple, Hey, I just installed WordPress
and I just installed gravity forms.
What do I do now?
Matt: It's one of the things that I know we are challenged with.
I'm not going to speak for product and engineering, but from the marketing
side, like we look at other solutions that are out there, especially solutions
that have only been out on the market for a year, a couple of years, right?
And they are.
Their customers, their end users aren't even scratching the surface
to the complexity of what some people are using Gravity Forms for.
Gravity Forms, quite literally, is the infrastructure, or the plumbing,
if you will, for a lot of, like, SaaS based apps we've seen, right?
People are building these, it's connecting, it's communicating, it's
storing data, it's sending data.
it is not just a contact form.
Which makes your job particularly challenging, I'd imagine when somebody
comes knocking on the door with a super complex thing, do you have a, a war
story that, of, of, or just an example of something that was like, wow, I
can't believe you have built that with
Chris: gravity forms?
Yeah, we do get those quite a bit.
And, I'm trying to think of an example specifically, you know, built around
that, we acquired gravity flow.
Last year, so we're seeing a lot more complex integrations like you just
described with all of these steps and all of these Integrations and I don't get too
much involved in the gravity flow side of things, but I know they're building
some crazy Integrations over there.
What we're seeing now is when there is a bug, this isn't to answer your
question specifically, but what we're seeing is that a customer has, has
built a system and it's as complex interaction of things that have
to happen for this bug to surface.
So it's something that we couldn't possibly have tested for, but when
these three or four different things happen, you know, that's the kind
of problem they come to us with now.
So that's what makes the job a little more challenging.
Matt: The The future of, Gravity Forms, of course, is bright.
We're not going to give away any secrets, but we have Gravity SMTP, that we talk
about quite often, add on after add on.
It's not going to get easier.
Right?
No.
you will be supporting, more and more in the future.
How often do you see a unique problem show up?
Because I'm sure you've seen it all.
When are you hit with something new that you've never seen before?
I
Chris: think that still happens every day.
we do see a lot of the same problems.
those are the easy ones.
Those are the easy ones to knock out.
But we're seeing Like I explained, these complex, a complex payment form,
and when you have additional payment methods enabled, and you've got a trial
set up, and you have conditional logic that only happens on certain times, then
you see this bug, or even it could be a bug in something like Chrome, which
we just fixed, where a certain set of circumstances resulted in the field in
the form being cleared When you updated the payment total, for example, so it's
very, these complex integrations are a little bit harder to troubleshoot.
So I think every day I see something new and I learn a lot from the other
people in support actually, you know, just following tickets that I haven't
seen before, seeing how they've resolved it or what they, you know, what
troubleshooting steps they've taken to, to get to the source of the problem.
Matt: There's a feature coming in, uh, Gravity Forms 2.
8.
Compact view.
I can't wait for that.
I'm sure as you're debugging more complex form fields, something like
that is a welcomed feature to come.
Yeah.
Come to gravity forms.
It's great.
Yeah.
Chris: We have a customer that, you know, talking about these long time
customers, we have a customer that has a personal license, from probably
10 years ago, have this complex form.
They're in your area actually on East coast.
And, they have this super complex form.
Everything's arranged into columns.
There's conditional logic.
They're editing the form all the time in this compact view.
I sent them a copy of, the, the beta release before it came out.
And they're like, this is great.
This is, you know, this is definitely addressed some of the issues we were
having with editing these gigantic forms, which were very messy.
So that for me, that's the biggest, the biggest feature in 2.
8 that I'm looking forward to.
Matt: Do you have a favorite add on to work with something that.
You know, somebody comes through and says, Oh, I'm trying to
make these custom post types.
And you're like, Oh, I know this one.
Really?
This is my favorite one to work in.
Like, this is my zone.
Do you
Chris: have one?
Yeah.
The CRM add ons, all of them and, and the zap Zapier add on, those are
probably my favorite because you can manipulate the data that gravity forms
has collected and modify it in some other way before sending it to that service.
So any of our add ons.
Allow for that, but those specifically, I like, um, taking that information.
Like constant contact may need a date in a specific format and we
collect in a different format.
So.
We can give them the filter that they need to modify that before
they send it to the service.
So I'd prefer those
Matt: We have a slack channel for support.
We have many slack channels and I often see folks from our support team
like post You know Customers saying like oh, I really appreciated that
help Couldn't you know couldn't have done this without you kind of thing.
I think those moments right there When you're sending data from Gravity Forms to
another service, right, you're enabling somebody to do something that makes them
feel really powerful, 15 years ago, you needed a developer to do that, right?
Even pre, Gravity Forms, and do you ever see, I know customers may praise
you on the support side, but do they ever say, do you ever see any of
those praises of, like, the software?
Like, man, this made me feel powerful, like, I felt like a developer, or
this made me achieve something.
That I never thought was possible, like taking this data and sending
it to constant contact, man, you just saved me 25 hours of work.
you ever see those come
Chris: through?
We don't, we don't get that comment very often, but we do, we do see that
where, especially when, when Zapier was introduced and we introduced our Zapier
add on, just how it enabled you to.
You can integrate the data you collect on your site with any
service you wanted to, really.
And then Zapier has improved.
And they actually have an AI tool now where you can kind of
just type in what you want and it will create the Zap for you.
Which, you know, for add ons that don't exist in Gravity Forms,
you can use Zapier to connect to all these additional services.
I think that's the one that makes us feel most powerful and Gravity
Forms feel most powerful because you can send your data anywhere at that
Matt: point.
Chris, thanks for hanging out today.
Folks who are listening, sometimes you might get a reply from Chris.
I'm sure you enjoy it.
Hopefully.
I'm sure you enjoy it.
If you're, if you're working, if you're listening to this episode
right now and you're working through an issue with Chris, say thanks.
All right.
All right, Chris.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks, Matt.
That's it for today's episode.
If you could do one more thing for me today, share this episode
on social media, your favorite Facebook group or Discord channel,
spread the word about this podcast.
It really helps.
If you haven't added Breakdown to your favorite podcast app, point
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com slash 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.