Increase Your Ecommerce Product Sales Using Admin Demos

Katie:
Hey everyone and welcome to Woo Bi Chat at Do the Woo. Today we’ve got Vikas Singhal from InstaWP on to talk to us about creating demos of your WooCommerce products. Hey Vikas thanks for coming on.

Vikas:
Hey, Katie, thanks for having me.

Katie:
So I love the topic of demos because most WordPress companies don’t do it. Would you agree?

Vikas:
Yeah, they don’t use to, now they are doing it. There is definitely a peer pressure on a lot of companies because it has become kind of a norm after we started two years ago. And previous to that, I believe rarely anybody did it. The only big ones which did it was Gravity Forms and SoftLive. So companies like WP All Import and so there are only few companies which did it two years ago. And compared to what we are having right now is many, many more companies.

Marcus:
Hey Vikas, thanks for coming on. Before we get really into kind of the nitty gritty, I don’t know if you want to share a little bit about what you think might be the benefits of having live demos versus screenshots and videos or just plain text documentation. Is one better than the other? Do you need both? What are your thoughts from, I guess maybe the marketing side of things about the benefits of having live demos that people can walk through?

Vikas:
It depends sometimes on the product as well. The other day I was browsing a product called Heroic KB from HeroThemes. I don’t know if you know it. Okay. So I was wondering if they had a demo, not just because we offer demo, I was just genuinely thinking if they had a demo, I wanted to see the backend. How much, what are the options do they have? So because I’m an advanced user, at least I would like to think that to myself that if I see the backend, I would be immediately able to know what I’m looking for instead of me going through the documentation, going through the videos, going through the images, it is going to take a lot of time. Whereas when you use the product, you get the feel of it. And if you’re a user like me, you will immediately make up your mind whether to buy this product or not. And that has both pros and cons to it. A lot of companies which have said no, told us that our backend is confusing. So people may actually end up not using the software anymore instead of them buying it and using it anyway.

So yeah, I believe there is merit to it depending upon if your product is just around the front end. Demos, I think best is to just have a front end demo. But if there is a backend component to it where you feel that people will get benefited on actually exploring the product and maybe they can install their own product or a plugin to test out if there is a conflict as such. A classical example would be WP Import because they are an export import company. People would definitely love to see if it is valid for their use case by installing other plugins like WooCommerce or whatever.

Katie:
Yeah, definitely. We’ve always had that dilemma with our own plugins, at least until recently because a few years ago, maybe five years ago or so, there was some admin demo plugins you could install, but they weren’t very good. They all seemed a bit big and bloated and they used things like multi-site and they were quite complex and used a lot of hosting space and lots of things like that. And so we never really did one and customers would ask and there’s lots of alternatives, like we’ve talked about screenshots already, which are useful. People like to see the backend, although actually I recently did a heat map thing of our product pages and nobody clicks on the screenshot link and I thought that’s what they would click on. But apparently people don’t use screenshots as much as you might think.

Vikas:
Did you take it down after that?

Katie:
No, because somebody on the same Twitter thread you saw made the point that maybe they see it lower down the page and I couldn’t use the heat mapping to track if they clicked it in the sticky head or navigated to it. So maybe they’re still using it.

Vikas:
Maybe the number of clicks in total, not just for the heat map, but in total number of visits to that page will tell you the story more.

Katie:
Yeah, that’s the thing, it was just a kind of initial look. So we provided the screenshots and we used to do free trials as well, and if you use something like Freemius then it’s easy to do free trials. But for us we use it digital downloads and it was really, really complicated and required a lot of customization. And then when we analyzed the profitability before and after free trials, we were actually better off without them or it was roughly the same. But with all the complexity, why bother?

Vikas:
I’ve seen that in one of our plugins and teams company for one of the plugins we did free trial and another plugin we did not. And the plugin, which we did not do free trial for worked better more sales, which is, as I said, WordPress world is a weird world.

Katie:
It’s you think a free trial would encourage people to convert more to paying customers.

Vikas:
Apparently they just download and go away sometimes, right means it’s funny.

Katie:
Yeah, so we tried all of that and it didn’t really work and we have some products that are very backend heavy and customers were unclear about how they worked. So we install, we’ve currently using InstaWP for three of our plugins, two of which are WooCommerce, and we have measured on the first one, we’ve measured the conversions and it does genuinely sell better. So based on the data we’ve got so far, we have got more better conversions as a result of having the admin demo.

Vikas:
I would love to talk about that at some point.

Katie:
Yeah, I’ll keep getting the data. It was quite kind of early. We were only a few months in, but the signs were good. So yeah, we could do a case study on that or something. Particularly now we’ve got three lives so we can get even more data and it depends on the product. As you say, with certain backendy plugins, you need it, otherwise you might not. So it depends really.

Marcus:
I’d argue that probably both is a good way to cover your bases. Like you said that you have documentation with screenshots and stuff, which I also thought would be something that people would be genuinely interested in. But that brings up a good point as well though in that you have to maintain all of those screenshots and all of the documentation. I mean documentation, you should keep updated anyways, but when you’re talking about screenshots and all of that, you’ve got to keep things updated. As you change the UX things, look, the UI and things look different, having that live demo allows you to just continue on using the live demo with the updated version of the plugin and letting people look around on their own. Do you find that that is helpful as well in helping maybe reduce some of the maintenance burden of keeping lots of screenshots and video demos and all of that updated?

Vikas:
Yeah, I think that serves a purpose. Another purpose which I’ve seen is that even though somebody purchased the plugin, they wanted to do a real quick play around of the product and they don’t want it to spin up a WordPress and use InstaWP apparently, but they just went to that vendor site and then spin up another demo just to look at how to configure it and see the option. So I think that goes to, that becomes a source of truth for a lot of people. It means I can just go to this website and I can get a new gravity form demo and I can show it to my client. So sometimes that is also a use case. They want to show something to their client that this type of form can be built in gravity forms. So they will just build that form and then share that URL with the client. So that means there are so many different use cases.

Marcus:
In the case of something like gravity forms or a form plugin, I assume that you can then export the form, you buy the plugin, you put it on your own website, you already have the form built because you did it as a proof of concept, you can export that form, import it into your site and keep going instead of having to start from scratch.

Vikas:
A hundred percent.

Katie:
I like that because often with instant an admin demo, you’re going to lose your work. So with the three that I’ve done, we try to be clear with people in the email and things, this is just for testing. Don’t start adding a load of real content because you’re going to have to do it again. So I like the idea of plugin, the have export functions, making that easier for people.

Vikas:
Yeah, we have thought about putting an export button for the whole website so that they can export the whole thing for themselves and then they can import that into their InstaWP account or the archive can be compatible to be imported into local WP or something like that. So that is something which we have been thinking about in the past can be useful. We are working with a couple of plugin companies to give them an option to move that site to a hosted site instead of just keeping them as a demo site. So now that we have our own hosting service, so we can link the two together and people can just click on a button and then it goes live and becomes a hosted site,

Katie:
That sounds good. I’d particularly recommend that for what I would call a platform plugin where that plugin that you’re demoing is the main purpose of the site. For example, a learning management system, a membership site, something like that. Whereas for my plugins, I can assume people are already using WooCommerce, for example, and they want to add a feature to WooCommerce. They’re probably not going to want, they’re not building their whole website on the basis of it, so they probably want to export the content from that plugin rather than the whole site. But for the platform ones, that would be really useful. And then as you say, they can move to your hosting, which makes it even easier for them.

Marcus:
Katie, I know that you have some WordPress and some WooCommerce plugins, and I know that some of the ones that you’ve recently made available for demoing or WooCommerce plugins, maybe you and Ikas can answer a little bit. How do you account for dependencies, right? WooCommerce is obviously going to be a dependency, but there may be others that your plugin depends on to be demoed. So how do you account for making sure that dependencies are there when the demo side is spun up?

Katie:
The wonderful thing about the way you can set up the InstaWP demos is that you create a whole website, which is used as the master copy when your customers spin up their demos. So whenever we need to design one for our plugin, we basically create a website and we control the backend and the front end. So we install WooCommerce, we install our plugins, and if there are any other dependencies or even other plugins we might want to cross promote alongside the main one, then we install them and we set up the products in the backend and the menu in the front end so they can navigate intuitively and they can obviously edit that, but we are creating that starting point for them so we can even choose what page they’re taken into, which might be a backend page, it might be a front end page depending on the plugin. So we’ll probably get more into the exact details later, but you can really think about it for each product, what experience do I want my users to have? What do I want their first impressions to be? Because you do have that level of control.

Vikas:
Yeah, I guess, yeah, that covers it. So you are not creating a demo of your plugin effectively, you are creating a website which will be demoed and your plugin is the main actor in it. That is up to you to decide. But from our perspective, it’s technically a website which is being demoed, and the website can contain a plugin theme content. It’s a full blown website. It’s not like we create a website and then we install Katie’s plugin on top of it At the time when somebody spins up a new demo, it just is like a copy of the entire website spun over and gives the entire experience. And I think one of our USP is that you are never worried about a dependency, you’re never worried that the user will not have a demo content to play around with. All of that is there. And you can also control other aspects of it. Let’s say you want to have the user land on specific page when they spin up the demo, you should are able to configure that by giving a relative URL, which goes to when somebody logs in. So all those are under control.

Katie:
Yeah, I think it’s worth contrasting this with the new preview feature, which WordPress dot org introduced where there’s, you can add a blue preview button for your free plugin and that didn’t work with dependencies for a while, so we had to disable it for all of our free plug, at least our WooCommerce free plugins. And then I think they do support that now. So we’ve been able to do that. But even so when you click that preview button on WordPress dot org, it’s just a fresh install with whatever plugins you’ve chosen. It doesn’t have content. And so I think with certain plugins, the user’s going to be quite lost with that. The purpose of an admin demo is to take them on a journey and introduce the plugin in almost like a training walkthrough tour type way. And what you get on WordPress dot org isn’t that because they’re like, oh, here I am in the admin. Where’s the settings? What do I do next? They’re a bit lost.

Vikas:
Yeah, I think they have made it more advanced. So you can put a blueprint, do json file, and you can do a lot of stuff now, which I believe is really helpful for, because in a WordPress repository type of environment, I think a playground makes a lot of sense because you are not telling anybody to install anything, but they still are able to do demos without any installation, any setup. That adds a lot of value. But I think Marcus, you only started a thread somewhere in meta that there should be an allowance of if somebody wants to use an external demo environment, they should just allow a URL to be input there. So that was a good suggestion, but I don’t think they have taken it so there is a possibility the user might get lost into that environment and if a plugin requires a more controlled, more involved environment, because in some cases playground just doesn’t even work, right? The SQL light databases and all that requires some customization from the plugin author side, so it might not even work. S

Katie:
It would be interesting to know more about the WordPress playground and how that differs from the Insta WP model because of course you can use WordPress playground yourself, you don’t have to do it on.org. We could use that to set up an admin demo. So what would be the pros and cons of that method? I know everyone at automatics very excited about it and I dunno much about it. It’s meant to be very, very clever and the new thing that’s coming in WordPress,.

Vikas:
So I have thought about it. Obviously my major thought process revolves around the fact that playground is first not stable. So let’s assume that it becomes stable at some point and people start to use it a lot more, which is very good thing everybody will be able to do demos. But once you decide to go that extra mile and you want to configure that specific demo environment where you have the website, so as we talked about earlier, I think that’s the main different factor in playground. You tell the playground to install these things, do all these energies on file where you might miss something, there might be some configuration. You cannot actually do it via JSON file.

It’s like instructions manual, which you give to playground and it configures the playground based on those instructions manual. In our case, we actually spin up a copy of your website, which you have configured your master copy, which you talked about. So that’s the major difference. The other major difference, which I see is sharing of the URL, if a client is let’s say spinning up a demo on their laptop and they want to show it to a developer, show it to their colleagues, they won’t be able to because playground only works in their laptop. They can’t just copy over the URL and share it with somebody. So that’s not possible at all. So I think there are some shortcomings and there are some advantages to it. My belief is that people should start using playground if they don’t have a budget of paying a company or a monthly fee or something, start using playground and once you graduate out of it, start using instead WP to make it more personalized, make it more stable, I would say. And you can add whatever content you want. Excuse me, I am having a bad cough today.

Katie:
Well, let’s talk a bit about the journey that we want to take the user from, which ultimately ends up in them buying the plugin because I don’t see this as a standalone thing. Oh, there’s an admin demo. It’s more part of a wider process where they somehow find out about your product through your marketing and then they probably land on the sales page and click a demo link. And what we’ve done at that point is give them a choice of a front end demo or the Insta WP admin demo so that if they do just want a quick look around the front end, then they can do that. Or if they really want to play around and change it, then they can do the admin demo. So we’ve done a pop-up thing, which appears when you click the demo button and we’ve done quite a lot of work to think about how to close the sale, so I’m interested to know what you think about each bit and whether there’s a way to improve on it and missed opportunities and things like that. So on the inter WP demo, we’ve implemented, I don’t know the technical terminology, like tour things, little popups that tell you like step one, the settings pages are over here, step two, add your content here, step three, view the front end, what do you call those?

Vikas:
I think that is guided tour.

Katie:
Guided tour.

Vikas:
Yeah, I don’t know the technical terms for that. I think that’s very clever.

Katie:
Yeah, it’s meant to be like a WordPress library or something like that that you can do it these little nice little popups within the admin. And I was surprised when I tweeted about that. Very few people knew you could do that actually.

Vikas:
No, you saw that.

Katie:
Yeah, so that was interesting. And we’ve added banners to the top so that at any point if people are enjoying their experience, they can go straight ahead and buy the plugin. So we customize the demo to add banners to the top of the front and the backend so that they could click through to the sales page again and that sort of thing. And so basically they’re like a kind of clone of our front end demos, but we’ve tailored them for that purpose.

Vikas:
Yeah, I think preserving user journey via when they enter into the demo, you can do multiple things. First is what you did is inside the demo you have a pop-up whenever they want to buy, and you can put a UTM source also so that you can track if they’re coming from inside the admin demo. So I would definitely encourage you to do that if you haven’t done that so that we can get more numbers on how many sales happened due to that button. And also I would say that an email also goes out, so that is also one of the major difference between us and playground is that whenever there is a demo spun up, we have a landing page where people can enter their email addresses. So it’s not just about spinning up a demo, it’s also about making a lead gen kind of device where you get emails of these customers, potential customers and then you start to email them a thread of maybe a trip campaign of some kind and you can fire up a web hook, which will, I think Katie, you guys are using MailChimp. I don’t know if the integration is working well for you guys. That is something which we have talked in past.

Katie:
So when you sign up to the admin demo, InstaWP sends the initial email to the customer, which you can customize, so that’s good. Which can include things like the logins and when it’s going to expire and anything else that’s relevant to that site. And we also add them to our MailChimp account with a special tag and we’ve written for each admin demo for each product, we’ve got a separate automation sequence which sends quite a lot like eight or something emails. So it sends an email when the demo expires saying your demo is now expired, time to buy the plugin. And then if they haven’t bought and we exclude them, if they have, then we keep emailing every couple of days or whatever for maybe two weeks with more information about the plugin, ask them if they want to do another admin demo, some case studies of other websites using it to show that, what do you call it, social proof, things like that. Or because they’ve done the admin demo, we then get them into this email sequence which is designed to close the sale even if they haven’t bought straight away from the admin demo.

Vikas:
Yeah, I guess that’s a great way to look at a great way to do it. I think the whole demo experience which you have built is instead WP is just a part of it. So MailChimp is another part of it. The whole experience is your project not just instead WP instead WP helps as a tool. I will definitely suggest, as I said earlier, if you are not comfortable with that, go for playground. Once you think that you need the entire stack where you can control the journey of the user, you can start using InstaWP where we can send you a web hook, we can send a tag to MailChimp, and I think it’s more marketing rather than a tool. The whole thing I’m speaking about the whole thing. So when somebody lands on a website, you don’t want to get them away, you want them to convert and the conversion rate becomes very, very important to you. And admin demo helps if having an admin demo helps people experience the product and then get information about the product and then finally convert, I think that’s much better odds of them converting them instead of them just watching a document and then going away. So that helps a lot.

Katie:
Yeah, definitely. I noticed one thing when I was choosing whether to use Insta WP for our admin demos that you’ve got a library of many, many sites WordPress product companies that are using Insta WP for their admin demos. So that was really helpful. For example, I went on that and I clicked on lots of them and analyzed their signup pages for example, the wording, how they’d styled it and things like that to see what’s the best way to implement it. And then of course I started receiving emails from companies that use it, like Learn Dash, Gravity Forms, those sorts of companies so I could see which ones were doing the best job at closing the sale. So we kind of were inspired by a lot. So it is worth checking out that resource. I wonder if we can put it in the show notes or something where people can see other sites using it.

Vikas:
Let me find it.

Marcus:
One of the questions that I have and that I’ve had for a while looking at these demo sites is from what I can tell, you essentially have a WordPress site that you can play around with and you have access to the admin area and all of that. How do you keep folks from adding a plugin that allows you to download plugin files and just have access to the entire bit that you’re demoing without making a purchase? Are there ways to kind of lock down being able to add other plugins or does that limit the demo to some degree because maybe you want to see whether the plugin conflicts with another plugin that you’re trying to use it together with or just walk me through that. How do you keep folks from getting access to the files, the plugin that you’re demoing in the first place?

Vikas:
Yeah, we get this question a lot, especially from companies selling premium plugins. They don’t want their zip file to be stolen in any form, excuse me for using that harsh word, but people do that, but we have security controls around it, so you can just flick a button, which will disable adding new plugins and it’ll also disable site editor, sorry, plugin editor, theme editor, those kind of controls. So you have a very, very restricted sandbox where people can just do what you want them to do, not install more plugins. We are also working on a feature where you can allow people to install plugins but not install the file manager kind of plugins or those restricted plugins. So that is something which we’re still working on.

Katie:
And your license key could be an issue as well, depending on how you do your licensing because by definition you’re giving people access to the settings page on a site that your plugin is active on. And so in our case, that would normally reveal the license key. So we had to do a bit of custom work to create basic display, a fake license key there that can’t be activated elsewhere.

Vikas:
And since they cannot access the database, that’s also another difference between playground because playground is local, so you have entire database, so if you don’t have access to the database, you can’t make out the license key. So the fake license key hider plugin helps as long as the database access is not there.

Katie:
Yeah, good point.

Vikas:
Trying to remember, we are working on a bunch of features, which a lot of product companies have requested us. We already invested a lot of time in a lot of features in the last two years building up to this point. We still get requests such as when the demo site is spun up, we want the users to be locked in as a specific user or a user role rather than an admin user. So those are the things which we are working on right now and a lot of requests has been coming to give more visibility into what user is doing inside a demo site. Did they navigate to pages, did they do any action inside the demo site? How long did they use the demo site for? So all those are coming in our pipeline.

Katie:
That would be really useful to be able to analyze.

Vikas:
Yeah, definitely. Apart from that, I guess one of the cool things which we have is post creation commands. So if somebody a dosign spun up and you want to run a WP CLI command to set a license, which you don’t want to show it to users or you want to do some housekeeping work when a demo site is spun up, you can do that with our post creation command. So you just can type a bunch of commands and those will be automatically executed for every demo site. The cool thing which we are releasing next week is that now you can pass URL parameters into the demo URL. So let’s say you have that demo link and then you send a URL parameter to that URL parameter. Let’s say you wanted to show a specific section inside your plugin when somebody clicks on A URL and that changes, right?

Let’s say in another case you wanted to show another section in a plugin, and so we will pass through those URL parameters all the way inside the panel so that you can take action based on that. Those URL parameters also become available to you as an environment variable. So if you have played around with environment variable inside PHP or inside a Linux session, you will understand that this gives you a lot of flexibility on setting up these demo sites. So now you can have very specialized forms where you can let your user choose which feature you want to demo, and then you show that feature inside your plugin. So that makes it even more flexible.

Katie:
That is useful because it feels like there’s a lot of guesswork as to where to take the user as the starting point. We had internal discussions in which we basically speculated as to do they want to start off on the front end, a particular page in the admin, whatever. So if you could have some guidance from the user that might be useful. I suppose another thing might be some kind of AB testing or something to see what the impact is if they start on one page versus another.

Vikas:
Yeah, that will be an interesting success, and that was always there. So if you pass read DIR into the URL, it’ll help you land into a specific page inside the plugin. So let’s say you want them to experience, so let’s say you are from a documentation perspective on the documentation, you want them to demo that particular feature. You can create redirects for that. So that was always there. So you don’t need to do the guesswork and they will land into a specific section inside your plugin.

Marcus:
I actually want to ask Katie just a tiny bit more about, you said that you’ve been able to kind of customize your InstaWP site install instance, whatever you want to call it with the guided tour and some banners and stuff. Is that stuff that’s being added to the plugin itself that then is looking to see whether or not it’s inside an Insta WP instance or is that a separate plugin that you’ve kind of loaded alongside the plugin that’s specific? Have you built an Insta WP plugin now basically that you can put in your InstaWP instances to handle all the tours and the banners and all of that stuff? That seems interesting too.

Katie:
I didn’t do that myself. That was Andy, but it’s done on the site, not on the plugin. So if you were using your plugin on a site and you wanted to add a banner, you would add the banner to the theme or whatever, wouldn’t you, or install a plugin to do that? You wouldn’t put it in the plugin. So it’s all done by customizing the overall website.

Marcus:
Yeah, it seems like there’d be a lot of opportunity to do some things that are specific to the Insta WP site, like in your case you said the tour and banner, but I can see just so many potential possibilities for being able to write this library of code for helping people make decisions on purchasing plugins that you don’t have to maintain within a bunch of individual plugins themselves. You just kind of keep this Insta WP Helper plugin available to you and kind of keep that updated along the way. I like that.

Vikas:
Yeah, that’s a great point. I think wish a lot of product companies have built their own, and a lot of people have asked us, can you build something like an example helper plugin? I think it’ll be interesting to do a gate repository of all the product companies who have done something special for demo so that other people can just take inspiration from that and just copy paste and start from there. Because a lot of companies just have a buy now button or whatever, it can be anything. The sandbox expiring, click here to buy now. I actually love that it creates an urgency a little bit. Yeah, I think that’s a great idea.

Katie:
Yeah. Speaking of urgency, let’s talk a bit about how long the demo should exist for because one feature of it is that it’s going to self-destruct at some point. It’s not creating a permanent site, it’s just a taster. And I’m not sure we’ve set this up optimally. We’ve set ours to four hours for two reasons. One was to create a sense of urgency and get them to make a quick decision. But to be honest, the other reason was to reduce our bill because you pay based on the number of simultaneous active demo sites. So if you leave the demo available for two weeks, you’re going to be having to be on a higher tier. So that was not necessarily the most business led reason. It was just a cost saving while we were experimenting with these demos. But what would you say is the best balance to create urgency but give them a chance to, as you said earlier, email to their colleagues, their clients so that other people can see the demo before it expires?

Vikas:
Yeah, that’s an interesting question because as again, I don’t think people will like my answer. It depends on the product. If the product is missing people, I took an example of knowledge base, knowledge base, maybe miss, I will explore the options. I will definitely not going to build my knowledge base, I am going to add maybe an entry into the knowledge base and that’s it, right? Means I can take a call whether I should buy it or not. So that should be fairly quick, but say a plugin, we are also selling this to hosting companies now. So that is an interesting use case, the same product but a different use case. Now hosting companies are using this to demo WordPress itself, not a plugin or a theme, just plain WordPress. So hosting companies historically have an issue where they cannot offer free trials without collecting credit cards because that goes against economy or business means you will have to do a lot of free trials.

There is a risk of abuse, there is a lot of things. So that’s where we come in. We give hosting companies an environment where they can offer a free trial of WordPress itself. A lot of people don’t know what WordPress is. They want to experience WordPress before even getting a hosting plan. So in that case, ms, I’ve seen companies give access to the demo site for let’s say two weeks, not just two days, two weeks, where people actually build their entire website. In those two weeks, they might just spin up a demo site, give it to a colleague or a freelancer, they can build in that demo site. So that is an amazing use case and that’s where we have connected. So now the demo site is ready, how do we move it to a hosted environment? So that’s where we have special tools for hosting companies.

Now they can move it to their own hosting panel once the user is ready. So that is just repurposing the same experience into a different use case. I think that will happen. That can happen to any of the product companies. So that depends. As I said, how do you see your product being used for how long to make something take that decision? I think it shouldn’t be too long. Otherwise it just means you are just losing the customer and it shouldn’t be too short so that you’re not giving the customer a chance to play around with it.

Katie:
Yeah, I think that’s really clever about you’re getting tie in, aren’t you? If they’re spending two weeks on a demo building loads of stuff on it, they’re not going to want to start again, which basically, depending on how you set it up, could force them to become a paying customer with the hosting company. So long as there is that way to transfer the website onto the permanent hosting but not to move it to another host, then that’s a very powerful tool for a hosting company.

Vikas:
This is tied to their own hosting company of course.

Katie:
Marcus, does GoDaddy do anything like free trials or demos or anything of the hosting side of things?

Marcus:
We are just beginning to roll out some free trials, but like Ikas mentioned, we are also not able to at least currently offer that without having credit card added. So really there’s kind of a couple different use cases there. If you really want to know what GoDaddy is hosting specifically feels like and looks like, then we ask that you put in the credit card and just you have 30 days go ahead and cancel if you don’t want to continue after that. But if you’re really just not sure about WordPress in general, then something like instant WP is a great way for folks to jump in and see if WordPress in general is good for them with no obligation, no risk, no need to even worry about cancellation at some later point. So it really kind of depends again there on the use case, whether you’re looking to figure out what WordPress is all about or if you’re already a WordPress person and are looking to figure out whether GoDaddy is hosting it specifically is going to work for you or not.

Vikas:
And we have been, I think in touch with a lot of folks at GoDaddy, especially Adam and the team we have across channel as well, where we talk all these about all these. I would really love to have you there, Marcus. We have been talking with very large hosting companies to do the same. I guess as you said, they’re not your customer yet, but then putting a credit card is a very big commitment, especially in the cases where they just want to experience WordPress. So that’s tricky to decide on whether to do go in that route or not.

Katie:
I really like that about helping to convince people to use WordPress and indeed WooCommerce it would work for that as well in the first place because one thing we need to do as a community that we probably don’t talk enough about is to promote WordPress and WooCommerce to increase their market share combat things like Shopify, which is growing rapidly. And by making that cake bigger overall, our individual slices of the cake, our markets for our products are bigger, aren’t they? So we do all need to work together to grow WordPress and WooCommerce and I hadn’t thought about the role of demos to people that haven’t decided what platform to use yet. So that could be very powerful.

Vikas:
And that’s our mission, right? Means we want to make using WordPress simple, make building on WordPress simple and bring more people to WordPress by reducing barriers of entry to it. And that’s why we love Playground as a project too, because you don’t need to install anything. Same goes with us as well. If a hosting company is able to provide that experience without spending a lot of money, why not? And I think there is some work to be done on onboarding new customers. There are some companies I know who are working on that regard when some people, so if you install a plain WooCommerce plugin inside WordPress, I think that now I think it’s better than before what WooCommerce offers now. All the settings, which it does. I think for a newbie, a beginner, that helps a lot. But still as we can customize the whole experience, say you can preview a beauty salon, e-commerce website to a customer so they can get to experience how to configure it. So those things are definitely possible.

Katie:
Yeah, that sounds really good. It would actually be very good for the hosted Woo express service, which is aiming to create a more Shopify like onboarding, but you have to sign up I think as a paying user to play around with it. So that could potentially work for that as well.

Vikas:
Yeah, yeah.

Marcus:
Well we’re coming up on time here I think a little bit. So Vikas, why don’t you let people know where they can find out more about you, about InstaWP, about the things that you have going on and on the roadmap?

Vikas:
Yeah, sure. So obviously you just type in InstaWP on Google and find us. And I am personally available on Twitter most of the time. Our roadmap is pretty simple. As I said, our mission is to make WordPress simpler to use, simpler to build upon, simpler to get started with. And we have accomplished just few percentages of that mission so far. We want to work with hosting companies as much as possible in the next 12 months so that we can integrate some of our product line into their offerings to make it easier for them to find new customers and give them add-on services. So we also have a very nice nifty utility where you can sync between staging and production without messing up production data, especially comes in handy with an e-commerce setting because nobody wants to mess up a production site of an e-commerce website and nobody wants to put it in a maintenance mode when you’re doing staging to production. So that comes in very handy and a lot of companies are open to integrate this feature. So we are building for freelancers, we are building for designers, we are building for developers, and the same will be bottled up and served to hosting companies so that the distribution is much stronger.

Katie:
Excellent. Well thank you very much for coming on the show. That’s been really interesting and I think many more WordPress products should be thinking about how admin demos could potentially help to increase their sales. So thank you very much.

Vikas:
Thanks for having me guys.