28:6 How to communicate with clients

Lee Matthew Jackson: Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer Podcast. This is your host Lee. And on today’s show I’m going to be talking with Vito from WP feedback all about ways that you can more effectively communicate with clients, sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. Welcome to a conversation with me Mr. Lee Matthew Jackson and today we have the one, the only, it’s Mr Vito from WP feedback. How are you sir?

Vito Peleg: Oh I’m Great and it’s great to be here

Lee Matthew Jackson: And I apologise profusely that you are having to do this from home, not feeling very well. So me and the entire community, wish you all the very best and that you’ll get well soon.

Vito Peleg: Thank you. I was standing too long. You know, I just came back from WordCamp in Europe.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yup.

Vito Peleg: And we were literally standing for 20 hours a day

Lee Matthew Jackson: Dude.

Vito Peleg: So yeah. So it’s, it took it all, but I’m sure that in a couple of days everything will be good.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Well folks Vito is from WP feedback. We met at the Agency Transformation Live event. He came over, we had a great time, met lots of great people, and since then we’ve developed a great friendship as well as Vito, becoming a little bit of a rock star in his own right within the WordPress industry, getting on lots and lots of podcasts and meeting with everybody over at WP. Sorry, the Word Camp EU as well as hanging out with everyone online. So buddy, can you just give us a little bit of background as to who you are? So name, favourite colour, maybe favourite drink or something like that or maybe even something you think people don’t know about you.

Vito Peleg: Right. So my name is Vito Peleg and I’m the founder of Ace Digital London, and WP Feedback. Ace Digital London was the agency that I started a few years ago and it’s kind of evolved into the product that we’re working on now, which is a WordPress communications, plugin. Colour. My favourite colour is purple. I think you already know that.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah I guessed that.

Vito Peleg: And I think we’re sharing that everything you do is purple as well.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Pink, you’re colour blind.

Vito Peleg: Not a good trait for a designer and something that people don’t know about me. I’m not colorblind.

Lee Matthew Jackson: No, that’s amazing. Well, I did, refer to you being a rock star. There’s rumours that you are an ex rock star. Tell us about that.

Vito Peleg: Yes. So, I actually started building websites while I was touring with a band that I had at the time.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah.

Vito Peleg: From Tel Aviv in Israel. And when I was 15 years old, I kind of, I built my first website for, my skateboarding crew, on Geo Cities along with, a few other websites for the bands that I was playing in at the time and really scrappy html. You know how it was in the 90s. Yeah. It was literally in the 90s and since then I just fell in love with music like, like crazy. And that has been my passion for the past 15 years and I was just trying to do whatever I can to make it as a, as a rock star like you said.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Wasn’t the band called chase the ace?

Vito Peleg: Yes.

Vito Peleg: Tell us how the band got started.

Vito Peleg: Right. So it actually started from that same band we had in high school and that first band was actually called feedback. So it’s funny and the same, most of the guys that were with me on that, on that initial band when we were literally 14, 15 years old, we kind of started releasing albums back home in Israel. And, but it was such a niche band, you know, we been doing like hard rock in a tiny country and rock and roll is not really the main thing over there. So, it was really tough. And for years we were kind of battling it out, trying to push ourselves further. Yeah. And then at some point we were like, all right, let’s see what’s going on overseas, you know. So we recorded a few songs and we did like a full on rebrand of the band. We picked a new name, which was Chase the Ace. Still the same guys, started singing in English and we released like six songs online. I did a bit of beta campaign to get the ball rolling on it. And within 30 days we got signed in the UK, which really allowed us to move over here. So we all dropped everything that we had. I had like a small, social media agency, back in Tel Aviv. So I closed everything up and said alright it’s now or never, let’s just go for it. Big Time. And we moved to the UK and started touring, you know, doing the grind, starting literally from scratch with 10 people that show and then 50 people, then 200 and a few hundreds. And then, at the top of the peak of it, we were playing to a few thousand people per show. And, we released two albums worldwide, but doing this entire time, even though we looked like we were pretty successful, we were all dead broke. You know, it never, it never amounted to any kind of like proper resource that we can live on and build the life out of. And so when we put it in much, when we all turned 30, the band was like, okay, screw this shit let’s do something else.

Lee Matthew Jackson: And your Facebook page still exists with some amazing pictures of, you mean of her rocking the stage? There’s some incredible pictures in here.

Vito Peleg: Yeah, yeah, that’s my previous life. But I’m kind of reenacting my old style days, now with the product.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah.

Vito Peleg: And it’s surprisingly so similar. It’s just uncanny. It’s unbelievable how all the things that we used to do to promote the band and to push this forward, are the exact same things I’m doing now to promote this product. And are working very well.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Well on that then, cause obviously with a band there is a group of you now I’ve seen the pictures of you guys getting everything together with regards to the building of WP feedback and marketing, etc. So it’s clear that you’ve not been doing this on your own. A lot of new WordPress products would be bootstrapped with maybe just one person behind it. There’s a few of you involved. How many of you are there involved?

Vito Peleg: So my agency has 12 guys and right now we’re in the process of actually scaling down so that we can focus completely on this. Right now seven guys are focused solely on the product.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah.

Vito Peleg: Which are some developers, Mostly its developers and their providing support. But then I also have Jerome that really helps me a lot with creating content and communicating with clients and presale questions and all this kind of stuff. And Sheila, she’s a, she’s a godsend and she does all the, she manages all my emails and she makes sure that the social media posts all on time and they’re awesome. So, yeah, this is our kind of small power team.

Lee Matthew Jackson: And how did you get like the money together to have that group? Was that because you had an agency prior to WP feedback and you were able to shift everyone over into the development of WP feedback?

Vito Peleg: Exactly. So the, the process was for the past three years I’ve been building the agency. So three years ago, I was literally sitting in a van building a website for a random photographer from the back, you know, stopping wherever there is a McDonald’s to steal some Wifi on the road. And then when the band broke up, I was kind of lost for, for some time trying to figure out what’s the next step in life. And I already had a few clients here in London that just by doing small work for them, so I figured, all right, let’s get, let’s give this thing a shot. And within the first year I, I reached my goal, which was a six figures in the British pounds. And then by year three, I already had a team of 12. And that’s when things started to become hairy, you know, when it comes to managing the large, not that large, but a semi large team and managing multiple clients at the same time, getting projects to, to happen properly and efficiently. And by doing the research, of where is the link in terms of profitability and what I can do to even scale further. That’s when I actually discovered WP Feedback. It was kind of a natural transition from, and you know, and now that I’ve been to Word Camp in Europe, it’s sounded like it’s a natural condition for a lot of people in our ecosystem. Musician, freelancer, agency boarder.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah, it is, isn’t it? There’s quite a few of us that have all got a musical background.

Vito Peleg: Yeah, crazy.

Lee Matthew Jackson: The, the natural flow from learning guitar chords through to developing a digital product. Although my digital product completely flopped which is completely hilarious. I think I sold two licences, so I gave in on that one a long time ago. I might try again, but I’ll stick to events and podcasting and membershipships for now. They seem to be doing all right.

Vito Peleg: That is still a product, you know?

Lee Matthew Jackson: Well, yeah. Yeah. I was thinking more of a, of an actual plugin. Now with regards to the premise or the idea of WP feedback. So for anyone who’s not aware of it, you can check it out over on trailblazer.fm/WPfeedback. And if anyone’s aware of, say I think it’s a invision or project hurdle, etc. You’re able to look at designs or on a website and then mark it up, etc, and say, Hey, I’ve got, there’s an issue here. Can you resolve this? Etc. What led you to designing WP feedback as the product? Was this a massive issue for you in your business and why didn’t the tools out there suffice?

Vito Peleg: Right. So, yes, it was a huge problem for us. A lot bigger than I thought it was. But when I really drilled down and looked at our numbers and started to track everything from trying to identify that as the cause, you know, with being focused on visas, the cause client communications, it just seemed like everything came back to this, no matter how I spun it, everything led to client communications. So, we all know, you know, if you’re doing projects, if you’re doing more than one project at a time, you know how exhausting it is to chase the clients. And they’re trying to get them to just do what we need them to do to help them. You know, cause it’s just kind of a funny, it’s a funny process that you need to chase them to help them build a website. But, but that really delays the final payment, which is a huge, huge problem. And sometimes we add, well not many. We did a few, we did a few hundred websites. So it’s not that it happened every single time, but it is a problem on, on a lot of them. And we had some clients that took a full year to give us the content that we needed, the projects is just thinking, the team needs to get paid so that there’s the pressure of overhead every single month and you need to move projects along. It’s not, it’s not only about wanting to move projects along, it becomes a necessity within the business. And so I started looking into what are we doing that doesn’t work and what other people are doing. And we tried everything. Like we literally went from, you know, we started like everyone with emails and then we tried to systemize this further with spreadsheets and in project management systems we brought clients onto Trello and then we needed some more details. So we went onto Basecamp. Then we need some more details. So we went onto teamwork and you know, you do video calls and you do like hours of video training of screencast video training that no one watches. So, at the end of the day, everything that we tried and everything that we did was right for us. And that’s what I discovered when I was kind of investigating this problem further. It made sense for us as digital people, as people that are, you know, sitting in front of a computer all day long and we’re used to it, you know. But if you bring in a client that this is not the day to day work, this is, this is not their reality. They have no idea what the hell we’re talking about. You know, like I like to say that when, when we were looking at the screen, we’re seeing code, we’re seeing design, we’re seeing pixels, colour schemes, you know we’re seeing the matrix basically and the client is literally seeing a screen.

Lee Matthew Jackson: That’s true. Actually when I look at it, you know I’m already thinking of padding and alignment and vertical alignment and everything else cause my brain is wired for CSS etc. Cause I’m our job as an agency is to translate the designer’s design into a physical working interactive website. So I guess we all think in that manner as opposed to our clients who are literally just looking at an image on a screen as far as they’re concerned.

Vito Peleg: Exactly. And I think a great representation of this, and this is really reminded me to back to my music career background, is that when you’re a musician, you hear a song and you hear it in 3d, You know, I can focus just on the guitar or just on the base track and just on the backing vocals. I can hear just part of the drums, just the bass drum or the symbols to even to the point that when I’m listening to, to a song with, with guitarists, I can literally tell you which model this is just by the colour of the sound of it, you know? But when, when a person that never picked up a guitar and never was in a set up of a, of a band before and listens to music just on the radio, they just see a two dimensional kind of thing. So it’s very, very much similar to that. You, you want to understand that the perception of reality between us and our client is just black and white.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Now, I remember very often when we’ve tried to get our clients to give us feedback that we’ve had to teach them how to do screenshots. If they’re on a Mac, we tell them how to do the screenshots on a Mac or if they’re on a PC with them about the snipping tool. We are so often asking them, please will you remember to tell us what screen resolution you are on, what browser you’re using, what version of the browser, and all of that sort of stuff as well. It’s been this constant battle and we were using Basecamp for many, many years to take feedback, which meant we had big threaded conversations. Clients didn’t like using Basecamp itself. They couldn’t necessarily paste as well, just naturally a screenshot. So very often they wouldn’t or they would attach it, but it would be unnamed.PNG, unnamed2.PNG, unnamed3.PNG, and it was just this constant Imoan.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Now we did get on, I think it’s invision, and we got on pretty well where they would upload a screenshot and then they would mark up the screenshot, etc. So that did help a little bit during that process, but there wasn’t really any, any way for us to do it online. Now we did get on really well with project huddle. That’s a another wordpress tool that we’ve used for a few years, et cetera. But I guess one of the biggest leaps that we found when we were trying out WP feedback when you first launched it was the fact that for every single task that our clients added, we were really enjoying the fact that everything I’ve just mentioned happens automatically so they could do the screenshot instantly just by pressing on screenshot and there’s a really cool noise by the way. We’ll talk about that in a second.

Lee Matthew Jackson: We were talking about that and London weren’t we. The really cool noise when you do the screenshot, but equally I also get all the information I need, the screen resolution, the actual version of the browser that they were using and all of that gets stuff as well so that when they assign an issue saying, Hey, we’ve noticed that why don’t we click on the menu it won’t open. I know what resolution I know the browser, the operating system, everything that I need to know to just go onto BrowserStack and replicate that instantly. What inspired you with those ideas?

Vito Peleg: So that that’s, I’m really glad that you said that because this is the biggest difference between the way that I’m approaching this problem than anyone else on the market because, anything else is built by technical people for technical people. So the entire UI is kind of creating elaborate workflows and a lot of additional steps both for you and for the client. So just to give you an example, when we were working with envision and we had a great time with envision for awhile. We had to upload the images, you know, you have to upload the screenshot to comment on the screenshot itself. It’s not like in the live website. So the problem was that every time the client had a experience because from their end ends just click and, right. It’s like pointing at the screen and telling you what’s up.

Vito Peleg: But from our end, every time that there was, a change on this thing, we had to make a change on the website. We create a screenshot re-upload it in there. We drag all of the stickers that are on the page to realign them with the new kind of position. After the design has change and that was so for every revision that we did there was an additional 15 to one hour of re-adjusting the screen itself. And you can imagine what it was because we, one of the projects we ended up with 107 screens within the invision app. So you can imagine how much time has just gone to complete waste just by doing these elaborate processes back and forth. And the same thing as you said with some of the other tools where you still need to put in the screenshot and you still need to go some place else do it there, bring it in. So my game and I like to look at this from the way that at the end of the day there are a few kinds of tools out there that are trying to tackle the same problem, trying to tackle class communications. But the main competitor, and this is something that we found after we surveyed the 600 WordPress professionals as part of our Beta, we found that the main competitor, by far, I mean like this had 90% of the of the market and the other four options were fragmented across the remaining 10% is emails. People use emails, you know, even though it sounds like because all of these SAS solutions make a lot of noise out there, still everyone, most 90% of people still result to email. So the way I see it, I’m competing with the reply button.

Vito Peleg: That’s the level of efficiency that I want to get to the reply button within your inbox. And by looking at it like this, every click counts. So this means that if someone needs to go and find the, like you’re say, find the screen size or install another add on to create a screenshot and then doing the Command v, you know, control v to paste it into this place. These are all clicks and this, these are all breakpoints before when a non digital person can find themselves getting lost or frustrated by doing all this kind of stuff instead of talking to their clients or managing their team or doing stuff in the real world as they are used to it. So everything is one click. When you, you probably seen that in WP feedback, whatever you need to do is just one click and you’re there.

Vito Peleg: Once you get that notification with a request from the client, let’s say saying, please change the colour of the button or please change this picture, you click that that button in there in the same way that you would click the reply button on the inbox. But instead of then also opening the website and also logging in and also finding that page and also taking a screenshot. It’s takes you directly from that button to the exact page scrolls down to where the problems is and pops the message open for you. So all you have to do is type it in and reply, send. The same amount of efficiency as writing an email, only that you get the additional information in the additional kind of environment of knowing exactly what you’re talking about and what you’re dealing with rather than getting lost and getting confused about what needs to happen.

Vito Peleg: And the good thing is that because it’s designed like this and it’s designed from a completely non digital point of view, clients love it. No? I look at this and I kind of put myself as, as in the mindset of let’s say, the only thing I know about the internet are only two things. Gmail and Facebook. And this is, this is what most clients know. This is their full understanding of the Internet, right? So, everything is designed based on these native tools that they’re already used to using with additional of kind of a gamifying, some aspects of it. Like I said with that screenshot that, that injects a, a bit of dopamine into your system, that just gets you going more in there. It’s all about, you know, when it comes to product design, and this is something that I must say that I owe to the, to the countless of clients we’ve built websites for over the years. You, you start thinking about this in terms of not only how it’s going to look and how it’s going to be used or how can people get hooked on it, you know, how can you get people to keep using it in a way that they want to use it? You know, feedback doesn’t have to be, we consider client communications and feedback as a necessity, you know, as a, you just want to get the lesser of all evil, if you know what I mean. You know, you don’t, it’s not something that is fun or that is something that people usually wants to do. It’s just part of the work that you’ve got to do. But I don’t look at it like this at all. I think that when we’re presenting a product to a client, they should be excited about this and we should give them the right tools to help enhance that excitement of, and you know, that kind of a feeling of new from expanding their business, going into a new place within the digital world and you know, growing things further.

Vito Peleg: So it should be an exciting process in bringing the fun into it is definitely something that is a part of the top values that we have here on top of making things super, super, super easy.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Now it’s something we learnt very early on when we were building websites even years ago is that although we understand how the websites are built and were excited by it, our clients don’t. Like you said, their experience of the Internet is very limited. They think things are very quick. They think you can just go ahead and copy and paste that from a word document and it can now be a website. There’s all of these preconceptions and then when you introduce them, asking them to start testing things and providing the relevant feedback, et Cetera, that’s definitely where projects for us would fall apart. Now we actually decided to trial WP feedback for ourselves on a actual live client site. We had an elemental build that we did with with a client and we had a great time with them. They were actually another agency, so they were at least more technical, but what they really enjoyed was being able to point and click and do those screenshots and assign us the tasks very quickly. But what we then did was when we made the site live, we made the site live. We left it on there to check if there were any post live issues so that we could add a few tasks. But then what we did was removed it and me and you then had a conversation in London because we met up at the RunCloud event and I explained that we’d removed it and you said why and that surprised me. Give me a little bit of input as to why it’s actually a good idea to leave that sort of tool in an existing website.

Vito Peleg: Right? So this is another insane thing that we’re doing in the ecosystem and it’s being taught to us to do like that, which is where it’s basically the notion that you need different processes for different stages of the build. So what I mean by that is that you usually kind of like have a proper process for gathering content. So you would send a word document with some lined text in there in order for them to kind of fill it out, or you would use all kinds of, some of the tools that are out there. You set up like a Dropbox for the, you know, everyone has their own setup, but the idea is that you have this as a full on process on its own. Then you have another process on how to receive feedback from the client about the designs and do revisions and all these kinds of stuff that has a completely separate process, completely separate tools, completely different places where you are expecting the clients to go to, to complete the work. And then once again, once you finished the build, you have a completely different process as to how you provide support. And this is crazy because a good basic website needs to be up and running in six weeks. So imagine if every two weeks your accountant would hit you up with a message and saying, all right Lee now we have another thing to do. So I needed to go to this website, sign up in there, you need to open an account over there. Now I need you to provide me all of these tools like that. Okay. Maybe it’s for the first time you kind of go for it, then two weeks pass and it gives you a full on set of new tasks that are around, you know, accounting, which is completely far from, at least for my reality and expect me to now, okay, now you need to look into this spreadsheet and you need to manage this part of this thing.

Vito Peleg: And this is something that in this is how we do this process. All right. And then it gives you another one. It’s just confusing. And if someone is not within it, to us it seems natural because this is what we do on the, in our day to day work. The same thing as doing this kind of stuff might seem natural to an accountant, you know, pushing you through a different spreadsheets, different accounting software, different documents that you need to sign different people to speak to. So the idea is just why and I just like to ask this question when it comes to things that seem too elaborate in my mind, why? Why would I take my clients through this entire nightmare of communication, retrain them, which is a nightmare for me for every single step of the way that by the time that we launched the website, they’re kind of like already super tired by the entire process here. And then they need to learn something else.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Well, what we’ve done from that therefore is because you’re exactly right. What we would then be doing is then saying, okay, so for the next year your support contract with us is going to be login to this system and this is where you submit tickets, but we actually then create the problem that we avoided using your platform, which was what browser are you using, screenshots and all of that sort of stuff. So, and I hadn’t considered that. So what we’ve been doing is for the next six months we’ve said, right, we’re going to keep WP feedback going with you. This is going to be how you ask us to change content. This is going to be how you report an issue on any of the pages and you’ve since launched the backend as well, which is great for us. That’s the backend feedback, which is really clever because we do a lot of backend interfaces inside of WP-admin as we make a lot of CRM systems and custom office software as it were within the backend of WordPress. So they can manage things beyond just the website. So that’s giving us the ability to say, right, just if there’s an issue, tag it, fill it in and then we can action that in place and we can see it in place. They’re used to using the tool and we’re trialling it with this one client to see whether or not this could be the way that we run all of the maintenance contracts that we have for our clients. One of the things that did surprise me as well was that the content is such a pain in the backside to get from clients and when you do get content it will be a humongous word document that’s not very well organised and you’re copying and pasting and fighting with word formatting, etc. So without telling our client on this particular build, they were simply tagging our lorem ipsum paragraphs and pasting in the content they wanted us to put in there, which was awesome. So we were just copying and pasting and bashing it into the website at top speed. So that was a really good experience for us as well, which we really enjoyed.

Vito Peleg: This is what I tell some of the, some of our users as well, like again, we like to overcomplicate things because we are complicated you know, digitally complicated people. So you see you didn’t even have to tell them why they just saw that option because in their reality they like to point at things and tell you what’s up. That’s the exact kind of point of it. And when they see lorem ipsums they just want to point at it and tell you what’s up and when they see a problem, they want to point at it. So it comes down to like the, to be honest, when we’re using this within our agency clients we train them with literally one sentence, literally we tell them, please click the plus icon on the side and choose any element on the page to comment.

Vito Peleg: That’s it. And that just works on its own. We let them discover this and expand this to them instead of giving them steps and processes that they just start, you know, you have these in their cartoons, you have the guy with the with the circles around his head.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah.

Vito Peleg: So that’s what usually happens when we try to over complicate things. So yeah. And that comes back again to what you said about the care plan stuff because you don’t need to train them about anything. They already know what to do, you know, keep it on there and just tell them you remember that tool, this is how it’s done.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So how have you found it launching a new product? I mean you’ve, you’ve spent the last few years building websites for other people. You’ve developed a product that solves a problem in your business, which you are now putting out there to the world. As WP feedback, is your plan now to stop doing web builds everyday clients and just moving into full time WP feedback or do you have other plans?

Vito Peleg: So my kind of goal is to grow. Basically that’s my objective. But how can I get bigger, faster.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Eat lots of burgers.

Vito Peleg: Yeah. I tried that once. Didn’t, didn’t work out well. I’m trying a different approach now. So that, that is basically my kind of look at this and I think that the agency model, I took it as far as I could have and there is this kind of glass ceiling that a lot of people are talking about. And even when we were going to, you know, when I was attending your event, a lot of people were talking about this glass ceiling that I felt it was happening to me, but it finally was clarified by everyone else in the room that it’s a real thing and it’s real problem that this model just has a limit you know? And I’m sure that I know for a fact that there are some people that cracked it and kept on growing and you have some agencies with 500 employees out there. But that’s very rare and it’s a huge uphill battle when it comes to staying profitable because you basically selling, no matter how you flip it, and we are all saying like we’re selling solutions now, right? You’re still selling people’s time. Basically. If you have more projects, you need more bodies in the room and that and if you have more projects, you still, you still need to have more bodies and the ratio remains the same. So I was looking at a way of doing it differently and I actually explored a few different ways to go about it. So the niche for my agency was charities working with a medium to larger churches, helping them structure their online fundraising strategies and all of these kinds of stuff.

Vito Peleg: So I thought of doing like a course, an online course, because especially here in the UK, the charity sector is really like 15 years behind when it comes to the digital world. And that also emphasised the problem of, because you’re dealing with people that are usually, I don’t know if you know that Lee, but the average trustee, the average age of a trustee in the UK is 74 years old. So imagine that these were our clients. This is what we had to deal with. Imagine that all of your clients are more than 70 years old and you need to get them to build a website and invest into Facebook ads and do all this kind of stuff that to us seems natural. So that’s what I thought was nice. First out, sticking it to this, but while I was working and trying to hypothesise ideas for a product or course or something, I had to get my agency in check.

Vito Peleg: And so while I was doing the kind of research that I told you about and finding the links of profitability and what I can do to make us more sustainable for the long run and build a business that you know, that you’re not scared at the end of the month and it’s going to break two months from now. So I actually came across this problem and I dropped everything and we just fixed that. And now we actually launched the plugin, well you know, about a month ago, a little more than a month ago. And after the past month, there’s no way we’re doing any other client work. We’re just going to be fully engaged with this thing. We already have hundreds of premium users on the account and we’ve generated within just by, by having a product that you create once and then you can systemize the delivery process. We’ve generated what we usually did in the agency in three months in just the first month of activity. So there’s no reason to go back to doing client work if I want to keep moving forward. And I actually have been sharing all the leads that have been coming in with some of the other friends in our community. You know, on some of the Facebook groups that we’re active on. So it was just given back again to back to the people. As I’m focusing in on something that I think the way I sit, and I think you said it before in two years, this is how we’re going to be talking to clients. So it needs focus, you know, the fluids to become a reality.

Lee Matthew Jackson: That’s phenomenal. Now when you, you mentioned earlier with regards to the Beta, when you launched the product, you did something quite surprising. You actually gave away a free version for a small amount of time to a small group of Beta testers. I was actually one of those people, you’ve got to use that because that’s the very version we used for the client website that we made live the other day. So how useful was doing something like that? I’ve not seen anyone do that actually. At least not in the wordpress circles where they actually give away a licence forever as it were to be able to use on on a site and have a go. How valuable was that process and was it worth it for you guys? Both on the marketing side but equally on a R & D side.

Vito Peleg: So it was amazing. It was amazing. And I would do it exactly the same again, the process and the way I way I approached is I created an MVP and this is the same thing that we did with our agency clients as well. You never want to go all out on the first round, you know, because you don’t know how people are going to react to it and you don’t know if you actually solve the problem. Maybe solve it for yourself but you’ve got to have more feedback from the community, from the market to see if whatever solution you’ve created actually works. So the way we did it is we created the most basic plugin that we could have, which is basically just click the element, click any element on the page and you get like a little pop up and you write your message in there. And we started from that as version 1.0 and everything that was done after that came from user feedback. We haven’t built anything since that was just an idea that I came up with in the middle of the night. And we have a public roadmap that people can upvote what they want, what they want us to build. Kind of like this, you know, especially with being called like the feedback plugin.

Vito Peleg: So that’s kind of a natural fit for us to work in this manner. But my game was and I like to say that as well, that I’m not, you know, I love this product but I’m not in love with it. It’s not just for me. So if someone disses it it or if someone passionately loves it, you know, I’m happy either way because both have feedback and I’m not, not gonna let my ego or my myself get in the way of making this product even better for everyone else. So this kind of feedback process was incredible for us. I thought I wanted to get like your first 100 users through this better programme and I thought it’s going to take me like a full months to get to that to recruit the first 100 users, but actually took 10 hours. Within 10 hours we already had the first 100 and by the end of the month instead of 100 we ended up with 1300 subscribers.

Vito Peleg: That didn’t make it to the beta, but we’re notified when we did when we did the soft launch and we’ll be notified again when we do the market launch later this week. So that was an incredible process from that end. The thing about giving something for free is that you must give people a reason to work for it. And I know you said like the plugins are not doing this kind of process in the beginning, but on the other end, most plugins out there start with a free plugin and not for 100 users, but for everyone they put it on the WordPress repo and you can download the plugin and you can mess around with it there as you like. The problem with this is twofold. First of all, the user that you getting that didn’t really, you just got it for free, has nothing invested into it.

Vito Peleg: But I created restrictions. So if the beta users didn’t give me the feedback that I need in order for me to make the product better, I took away their licence and I was happy to do so. And they didn’t complain about this because they knew I laid out the law early on, you know, so they knew that they messed up and they actually went and bought it. You know, if they, if they didn’t follow up on the stuff that I asked them to do. Do you remember in the better there was this weekly survey and that you’ve got to be active within this thing and give us ideas or stuff. So, out of the 100 people, most people filled out one survey but only about 30 people filled out, like did it as intended and only they got the free licence. The rest got a free demo and ended up buying it, ended up buying it basically.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Well I remember afterwards, after we’d been working with it for a little while, I think I submitted some ideas and voted up for the the back end feedback cause that’s huge for us especially because we build all of those interfaces. In fact, I think I mentioned this on the podcast before, it’s actually our biggest source of revenue as an agency is not theme build anymore, but it’s actually building applications within WordPress in the backend. So which is so you suggesting that as a feature was something we got super excited over, but yeah, as soon as you launched the deal I think I got it in there with one of the founders of deals and got a lifetime licence.

Lee Matthew Jackson: I know you’re not doing lifetime licences anymore and that’s good because obviously you’ll need to maintain a business. You can’t give it away for life down forever, but I think we’re having a conversation. Me You, and it was Raj as well from RunCloud and we were saying that you kind of, their your initial investors weren’t they? So you have your initial investors and now the world’s your oyster. As you’re on this podcast, you can start sharing your, your vision and your mission, etc. Whith other agency owners and hopefully you can help change the way people communicate with their clients. Mate this has been phenomenal learning all about your product. Folks, remember if you want to find out more about WP feedback, then head on over to trailblazer.fm/WPfeedback and you can check that out. There’s a lovely video of Vito showing you around some great demos and some great testimonials and I too can account for what a great product it is and I’ve certainly enjoyed using it.

Vito Peleg: I already have a testimonial saved up from you for later which is going to go on the product launch website.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Perfect. Well I look forward to seeing that. So Vito, thank you so much for your time. All of that is left for us to do is to say goodbye and we will speak with you soon. Have a great day buddy.

Vito Peleg: Thank you. It’s a pleasure being here.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Cheerio.

Lee Matthew Jackson: And that wraps up today’s show. Don’t forget to check out more information on WP feedback, head on over to trailblazer.fm/WPfeedback. Folks, if you are not part of our Facebook groups, it’s a great place to hang out. It’s free to be a part of. You can find that over on trailblazer.fm/group and if you’d like to be part of our premium membership where we get a weekly call with yours truly, that would be me or one of our esteemed community members then head on over to trailblazer.fm for more information. Thank you for your support of this podcast. I love doing it. I hope you love listening to it, and if you do, be sure to leave us a review on the podcast player of your choice, be that via apple music or stitcher or whatever you’re using, Spotify, et cetera, et cetera. If there’s a way to leave us, awesome feedback, we would love your feedback. All right. If we don’t see you in the community, then we will certainly see you in the next episode..