The Founders of Podcaster Plus Share Product Development Experiences and Community Insights

Mark Westguard:
You’re listening to WP behind the Builds, part of the Open Makers channel and Open Channels FM production. I’m Mark Westguard and in this series we go behind the scenes of WordPress plugin businesses to explore the journey from concept to creation, as well as the ongoing work involved in maintaining and running these businesses. Today I’ve got two very special guests, Dan maybe and Nathan Wrigley. Welcome, gentlemen.

Nathan Wrigley:
Hello.

Dan Maby:
Hey, how are you doing?

Mark Westguard:
Doing good. Today we’re going to talk about Podcaster plus, which is a soon to be plugin. Not quite there. Right? Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley:
You mentioned at the beginning from concept to whatever it was and I think stop right there. Yeah.

Mark Westguard:
Podcaster Pass is a new WordPress plugin that Dan and Nathan have been working on and it’s very soon to be released. I’ve had a play around with it. It’s a great little plugin and they’re here today to talk about what it does and how we got to this point in time. I was going to ask you guys first of all, just to give me a bit of background on yourselves before we talk about what Podcaster plus does. Dan, do you want to go ahead and give us a bit of history on yourself?

Dan Maby:
Yeah, no problem at all. Yeah. So I’m Dan Maby. As you mentioned, I’ve got a background in WordPress. I’ve been around the community for many, many years. I deliver the WPODN events. So the Word London events. I’ve been doing that for 14, 15 years now. I am passionate about community. Essentially we provide development services as a business and a wearer of many hats. I’m going to say, as many of us in the community are.

Mark Westguard:
You are indeed you are indeed. I. I’ve missed two WordPress London, so I’ve been literally a day away from being able to attend them with my travels. So I need to better schedule that actually attend the WordPress London. I’ll try and do that next time. Nathan, what about yourself?

Nathan Wrigley:
Well, I AM Nathan, born 1974. You can work out how old that makes me. Father of three and unable to basically get anything across the line. That is my cross to bear. Except the one thing that I can Lay claim to is a podcast, which is one of the only things I’ve actually managed to sort of keep going in my entire life. It’s called WP Builds and it. I guess the name says it all, really. It’s a podcast about WordPress and I’ve been doing that since 2016. We’ve had lots of guests, including Dan and including you, Mark, on there, and we talk about wordpressy things. And I also do a podcast over on the WP Tavern website as well. In fact, if you go over there at the moment, really, the podcast has kind of taken the place of the writing because the writers are not there at the moment. So it’s hanging in there as a podcast. And that’s really all that I do. I used to build websites for clients and things, but I don’t do that anymore. I just make content in the WordPress space. So that’s me.

Mark Westguard:
You definitely do. And you produce a lot of good content. And usually when I’m on WP Builds, it turns into a discussion about AI. But we’re not going to talk about AI today.

Nathan Wrigley:
Oh, go on.

Mark Westguard:
So Nathan’s not going to be able to ramble about AI.

Nathan Wrigley:
I can. It just will be off piste.

Mark Westguard:
Well, we can do that in the second half. How can we apply AI to Podcaster Plus? So what is Podcaster Plus? Can one of you give me an explanation, Dan, then you can do that?

Dan Maby:
Yeah, sure. So Podcast plus is a WordPress plugin that aims to simplify the process of getting your podcast online, getting it onto. Onto a WordPress website, essentially, or it’s an atomized audio player, which has been quite cool to actually work on, essentially. So we’re using the. The Interactivity API, which getting a bit sort of in the weeds on it straight away, but I enjoy that sort of technical aspect of it. And it’s about creating individual blocks that essentially interact and work with one another. So the. So for example, we’ve got a play button, a skip button, a volume button, play speed, etc. And it enables the user to build out an audio player that looks and feels and behaves exactly as they want it to, so they can match their brand, match their site’s colors, match the site’s look and feel, essentially. So it’s a very, very flexible audio player, but behind the scenes it’s doing a lot of stuff with the RSS feeds and enabling the user a smooth UI to enable them to select episodes, develop patterns, and essentially get their podcast online very, very easily. So it’s been a. An Interesting journey. It was something that was born out of Nathan’s need essentially as a podcaster. And it’s just been a never ending journey of adaptation and evolvement.

Nathan Wrigley:
I’m going to be to blame for this.

Mark Westguard:
It’s all your fault.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, it is all my fault. It’s kind of curious if you. Basically a podcast is an RSS feed. That’s essentially what it is. And then there’s loads of stuff wrapped in that RSS feed, like podcast episode tit, obviously the audio file itself. But when you go to your podcast player of choice, which is typically on a phone, maybe there’s a, you know, an app on the desktop or something like that, but you, you plug in an RSS feed. So you may not actually copy and paste the RSS feed, but if you search and then click on the name of the podcast in the background, the app is consuming the RSS feed. It’s going out and finding that somewhere. But what that means is you need to put the audio into that RSS feed. And so what you do is you sign up for an rss. Sorry, you sign up for a podcast host. And in the same way that you’ve got a website host for your WordPress websites and they take care of the storage and the database, the podcast host takes care of your, the data surrounding your podcast. So you upload your audio there and what have you. And as soon as you click Publish, that goes into your RSS feed and all of the rss, sorry, all of the podcast apps can consume it. Now, typically, those podcast hosts will give you a fairly banal, fairly basic player which you can copy and paste. I know maybe it’s an iframe or a bit of JavaScript or something, but there’s minimal option to customize it. So, you know, it’s fairly generic. The designs are kind of not really all that opinionated. They’re just. It’s usually a rectangle. You’ll know exactly what I mean. If you’ve been around the Internet for any length of time, you’ll find an audio thing and it’ll be a rectangle and often there’s an image on the left, a play button somewhere, and a little scraper that you can, you know, go backwards and forwards in the audio. And so what Dan has built, and I, can you confess, Dan has built it. I. I’m just here for, I’m just here for giggles.

Mark Westguard:
Dan built for you.

Nathan Wrigley:
That’s right. What Dan has built for me, bless him, is each, each of the bits of that player are completely separate and Then there are separate blocks. So if you imagine when you go into the block editor, you got this blank canvas with a little bit of customization and we’ve got a container block so that you can, you know, wrap the bits inside of it and add styles to it and what have you. You can build a player in any width, shape, height, dimensions, color, put the buttons wherever you like. And let’s say you’ve got a podcast, which is about heavy metal music or something. You might want to really lean into that design and add background images of gigs and concerts and things. And I don’t know, maybe if you’ve got a WordPress podcast, you’d have it looking completely differently. But you can drop in the blocks in any which way you like. So it’s. I don’t think there’s anything like it anywhere.

Mark Westguard:
It’s really cool. I. I played with it yesterday. I signed up for your beta program and was. Someone accepted me and I was able to.

Nathan Wrigley:
Sorry Dan, we let him in.

Mark Westguard:
But it’s great. I added a page and then I chose a feed at a page level and then I was just able to at the player choosing a pan or you can obviously you can modify that and use your own blocks to build that and it just solves. Solves the problem. When I was playing around with the RSS feed, before I actually even installed your plugin, I noticed that the browser itself would present an RSS feed kind of look and feel that was built into Chrome. I was using Chrome and then when I clicked on one of the episodes, it would then show a player, you know, the Chrome determined. So with this, you can basically have any look and feel that you want. You know, maybe you’d be like some kind of children’s podcast. You could do any design you want is for that player. It’s brilliant. So.

Nathan Wrigley:
And the interesting thing is as well, because. Because it’s going inside of a post, typically I imagine it’ll be a post. It definitely could be a page or a custom post type. So. But typically it will go in a post because you know, you repeating the content. It doesn’t have to be because it’s a bunch of blocks. It can be surrounded by whatever you like. So you could come up with, let’s call it a template. You could have a title, you could have a background featured image. You could have the player, you could have the description text underneath. You could have buttons, call to actions and you just save that as a native WordPress pattern. And then each time you drop a new episode, you just say Use that one, you know, and you just recycle and repeat. And really the whole process of building your page is the work that you’ve got to do. You do it once, save it as a pattern, and then each time you do an episode, honestly, it’s like four seconds.

Mark Westguard:
It is. It’s so quick. And then you could save your player as your own pattern. Right. And then reuse that anywhere on the website, which is fantastic.

Dan Maby:
And you can surface that through the episode selection process. So we’ve got. In the. When you’re in the editor, you go through the process. It’s a three step process, essentially. You select your episode, you then select the pattern that you want to use. It’s an optional step. And then you can confirm. We can overwrite the post title with the title from the RSS feed. We can inject the episode image as the featured image directly into the post. And then we’ve got blocks for episode title, description, image, etc. So you can have all of that being dynamically generated. The idea being here is that you can essentially put your podcast into an automation flow to enable you to have your. The. We developed, We’ve developed an automation add on that enables you to essentially set and forget. So you go through the process of creating the template that you want using a pattern, select that pattern, and then every time a new episode is published, you’re. You’re basically publishing a post on your website. So it’s about having your content on your site. We’re big, big proponents of open source and we want to ensure that you are owning your data in this.

Mark Westguard:
So if a new episode appears in the RSS feedback, you can have that essentially create a new post.

Dan Maby:
Exactly. Yes. Yep. And then you pair that with our. Pair that with our custom post type add on, and then that will obviously generate a. You can generate a unique custom post type for your podcast. And then we’ve got an SEO add on that provides dedicated SEO functionality which will work out whether you’ve got an existing SEO plugin installed or not. And work with that. With that plugin.

Mark Westguard:
Dan’s been busy, hasn’t he, Nathan?

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, it’s been very hard to track him down. I’ve had so many fresh ideas, but he’s a difficult man to track down. Yeah, he has been busy. This started as a bit of a side project and it’s. It’s morphed into much, much more. Yeah, you know that kind of thing where you come up with an idea and then you implement it, or rather Dan does. And then I Come up with another idea and then Dan implements and then another one and so on.

Mark Westguard:
So you heard it here. If you have an idea, just contact Dan and he’ll just start building it for you.

Nathan Wrigley:
I found this is true.

Dan Maby:
Yes. Sometimes to your detriment.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, yeah, it’s great.

Mark Westguard:
So you came up with this idea. Nathan and Dan thought, okay, I can build that. But what made you decide to turn that into a product? And what process did you go through to determine there was an audience for that product?

Nathan Wrigley:
There’s a few steps which might seem counterintuitive here, but if Dan and I both organize the WPLDN is the acronym, but it’s a meetup in London. It’s a WordPress meetup in London. And so we know the WordPress community really well. Obviously I do a podcast. Dan’s been doing that event for years, building websites for years and years and years. And we have this intuition about building a wider podcasting thing. We probably won’t go into that too much, but we have this idea that there’s maybe more to it than just a WordPress plugin. But we felt that was a good way to begin the relationship that we have with this, with launching a product, in that we could start with something that’s not WordPress related, but that would be trying to get into an audience that we don’t really know. So we thought this was a great way to just test the waters on having a product and having a business together. And honestly, it’s been a disaster from day one. No, it’s been great, but it’s taken longer than we imagined because we keep coming up with these fresh ideas and it’s kind of Perfect for a WordPress user. Really?

Dan Maby:
Yeah, I mean, certainly, I mean, Mark, you know yourself, productization is this sort of. We have this. I think some of us may have this sort of fantasy of productization. It’s so much easier than client focused work. And the reality of that is actually very, very different. Incredibly challenging. And part of that challenge is actually us. I think it’s, you know, knowing when to stop, knowing when to say, enough’s enough.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah, enough. Let’s get a first version out.

Dan Maby:
Yep.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah, I had the same thing with WS Form. It was about, I want to say, a year in the making to get the first version out. And looking back now, it was shockingly bad compared to what I have now. I mean, it was definitely workable, but I had to get it to market. But it’s taken me six, seven years to get it to where it is now. And a lot of the work is in documentation and support. I mean, you basically become a support company once you’ve built it, helping customers with issues they’ve got with the product and then addressing those. And I do a lot of work in producing new knowledge base articles if I get asked a question more than once and trying to cut down support as much as possible and getting people to the information quickly. So I know you’ve already got like an faq, you’ve got documentation online. You’ve done a great job with the website, by the way. Love the video, which really explains the product and shows how easy it is to use. So, yeah, I’m sure there’s an awful lot more to come.

Dan Maby:
So I was just gonna say we’ve been having these exact conversations just this week. It’s around documentation, it’s around support flow. What does that look like? There’s so much more than just the product itself when it comes to going to market. And that’s certainly been some interesting challenges it’s thrown up for us of late.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, it’s kind of interesting because we’ve never been through this. It’s almost like we’re going to have to make the same mistakes that everybody else has made. And whilst we could rely on, you know, I could have messaged you, Mark, and asked you a thousand questions about it, but it would be a different. It would definitely be a different experience. We’re going to get a bunch of things. Even if you advised against them, maybe they wouldn’t crop up for us. Maybe they would. And it’s just in the same way that the product itself, you can go for years and years and years and never launch because you’ve got new idea and then another new idea. I think the same is true with things like the website, like how much do you need, how perfect does it need to be? And the same with the documentation. What is the basic, what’s the minimum requirement? What kind of support do you need to offer? Just things like that. It’s been curious stepping through those. Those hurdles and we haven’t finished that yet. It’ll be an ongoing journey, but just we’re definitely this week trying to figure out more of what’s the MVP in terms of the website and the documents and things like that.

Mark Westguard:
It’s amazing how what was seemingly quite a simple requirement has turned into such a huge project. Right. It’s. It’s crazy. I made the mistake of building a form plugin. It will never be finished.

Nathan Wrigley:
Well, I suppose the thing that you’ve got as well, is it’s. It’s ubiquitous. Every. More or less. Every website needs a form, you know, really more or less. Every website needs that. We’re going to be much more niche than that, so maybe that’ll be more straightforward in that our customers presumably will be podcasters, so we’ll have some understanding of their needs. I guess that’s a little bit more difficult for you because the need for a form is, like I said, it’s ubiquitous, so we’ll have to wait and see how that goes. But I remember you telling me that piece of advice about you become a support company fairly rapidly and. And on that note, I’m out.

Mark Westguard:
We’ll leave Dan to it.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, no, no. The idea is to offer, just like every other company, you know, is to do our best with support and provide a timely response and all of those kind of things.

Mark Westguard:
I know that when you were, you know, researching this and researching the market, you had gone to a show, right? A podcast show. Did that. What, what did that open up in terms of, you know, what, where you were going to target marketing and stuff like that was, were there, did they change your mind on anything when you went to these types of events?

Dan Maby:
It was an eye opener, certainly very, very different. It was. We attended an event in London. It was about 10,000 attendees at this particular event.

Mark Westguard:
Wow.

Dan Maby:
Big event. Yes. Yeah. And it really, I guess it really opened our eyes to the demographic more than anything. We were quite pleasantly surprised by the demographic. It was very much a younger audience, extremely heavily leaning towards female community, which, which was good to see, but it certainly opened our eyes around what we’re doing with the product itself, I guess less so with the plugin and more so with the wider scope that we’re looking at within Podcaster Plus. But it was. There were certainly some unexpected results off the back of that, that one event for us, looking at what is a podcaster? You’re trying to answer that. We have our idea of what a podcaster is. We’re sitting on a podcast. We’re talking right now on a podcast.

Nathan Wrigley:
We.

Dan Maby:
But it’s so much more than just that. It’s so much more. Looking at the industry as a whole, we were seeing people that were, for example, their flow would be publishing content on Instagram or be publishing content on TikTok. And they classified themselves as a podcaster, which was quite interesting. And there was very, very little talk around open source. It was all about closed source systems. So, yeah, it was an eye opener and it certainly made us question a lot of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it essentially,

Mark Westguard:
So do you think it’ll move outside of WordPress because there are others, obviously lots of other publishing platforms out there. Is this something you could see that you would potentially produce a similar widget for other platforms?

Dan Maby:
So the way I’ve tried to develop the elements, the blocks within it is to use web components so where we can essentially move those across to other, utilize those in other technologies if we choose to. But it’s was really this sort of question around where does open source sit in the podcasting space at the moment? And that’s something that I’m certainly deeply passionate about. You know, I want to enable users to be able to own their own data, to be able to, you know, have a space on the web that they can call home that isn’t behind some proprietary system. And that was a. Yeah, that was a big eye opener for me in that regard.

Mark Westguard:
So that’d be a good push for you, right? Is, you know, pushing on the open source, pushing WordPress and everything that you do. I think that’s, I think that’s great. Sorry, Nathan, do you have something.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, I was just going to say about that event. So it’s huge. I mean it’s really fascinating going to an industry which on some level you imagine is quite small. You know, podcasting, it turns out it’s massive. I mean it really is massive the day you read these things. So I subscribe to quite a few podcasting tech journals and things like that and obviously they’re inside the baseball. So you wonder sometimes how, how reliable that can be or if they’re so, you know, bigging up the podcasting industry because that helps them shift their, you know, newsletter or whatever it may be. But the numbers are eye watering. To the point where, you know, it is on the. It’s in the region of. So often the data analyzed is American people. I guess that’s where they gather the data. And it’s something on the lines of per annum, about 60% of adult Americans. And I could be getting this number wrong, but it’s that kind of scope. Yeah. Will consume a podcast at some point, many of them, so obviously percentage dwindles the further down you go. But many of them, it’s monthly, many of them it’s weekly, quite a lot, it’s daily and it’s an insanely large audience. And I think it’s, you know, you’ve got the device in your pocket 100% of the time, everybody’s got a phone. The fact that you don’t have to concentrate on the thing. You don’t have to, you know, you’re not, your eyes are not fixed on it like they would be for YouTube or watching the TV. So you can be doing any other thing. You could be working, you could be, you know, mowing the lawn, doing chores around the house, whatever. You know, you can be doing all those things. And it’s, it’s huge. So that was an eye opener just how big the industry is. But also it was kind of interesting to see that there’s a big push in that industry to, to create opportunities for people to, to generate revenue from their podcast. That seems to be an enormous thrust of it. So that would typically be through like ad insertion. So the same way that you may with Google AdSense or something like that, I’ve put ads on your website. You can insert ads into your audio and. But nobody has cracked that knot. That technology is still not solved. There was a. Quite a lot of companies at that, the event that we went to that were trying to solve that problem. I think it’s kind of, it’s, it’s trying to fudge a solution because the fact that it’s an RSS feed really doesn’t generally lend itself to that. And then analytics, trying to figure out what reliably what your podcast reaches again, that’s because it’s an open RSS feed. It’s very, very difficult to determine, you know, who listened for how long and which bit did they jump off at with, with the web, you know, Google Analytics and Fathom and all of those things. It’s, it’s much more straightforward. You can get much more precise data and there’s a lot of people trying to solve that problem. So it was a real eye opener. The demographics, the age Skewing young, definitely skewing female at that event. Really interesting. So very different to the WordPress space.

Mark Westguard:
So probably opened your eyes up to a lot more opportunities that you could think about for the future with this. But also I imagine got your thought process, thought processes going around. How are you going to market this plugin? Right. So that’s going to be, I would assume, once you’ve got this launched and you’re happy with the documentation and the website and the product, then you’re ready to press that green button and go. Now you’ve obviously already got a platform mason that you can talk to.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah.

Mark Westguard:
People about this on which is, which is good. What other marketing channels and strategies do you think you’re going to approach for this to, to get the word out there?

Nathan Wrigley:
I think, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. I think we’re going to leverage the, you know, the WordPress bit that I know. You know, we’re definitely going to lean into the podcasts and things like that. Outside of that it will be directly speaking to people at events and things like that in the future. We definitely don’t have, I mean maybe we should have at this point, I’m not sure, but we don’t have plans for, I don’t know, a dedicated spend on Facebook ads or anything like that. Obviously those are opportunities. It’s not really something we’ve delved into a lot, but it will definitely be driven organically at the beginning. Word of mouth podcasts that I do and so on as well.

Mark Westguard:
That’s basically what I did, is just became part of the community, got involved as much as I could, gave back as much as I could afford in the first place. And I found that that was just a really powerful way of getting my, my message out there. I used to have a wedding business back in the day and initially we were marketing that ourselves. And the wedding industry is a brutal, absolutely brutal. And trying to get a bride to latch onto your product is nigh on impossible because they love all the big brands that are out there already. So in the end I went to those brands and white labeled my product behind them. And that’s basically how I grew it all. I went from 0 to 400,000 users in a week by doing that with one of the customers. So I guess a similar kind of strategy in the WordPress space is kind of different though. The whole WordPress space is a very close knit community of people, lovely people. I mean, I absolutely love working in the WordPress space. I even like Nathan.

Nathan Wrigley:
Can I just write that down, please. We’re at 27 minutes and 12 seconds. He said that.

Mark Westguard:
But a classic example is that, you know, Nathan’s been really supportive of me and has recorded some episodes with WP, builds about WS4 and all the. All these things add up. You know, there’s no. I don’t think there’s one golden carrot that you can latch onto to. To make loads of money. It’s. It’s definitely about lots and lots of different relationships.

Nathan Wrigley:
Can I just ask. Can I just ask quickly, is. Is the phrase golden carrot an actual phrase or.

Mark Westguard:
I just made it up on the spot there, but now I like it.

Nathan Wrigley:
Now I’m desperate to have a golden carrot.

Mark Westguard:
A golden carrot.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah. Yeah. I think speaking to that, I think another thing that we discovered because we are so familiar with the WordPress events space and really how welcoming that is, maybe that’s a function of how long we’ve been in it, and we’ve been, you know, returning over the years to lots of familiar faces and all that, but I definitely got a sense, even on my first Word press event, that it was really open and friendly. I think the podcasting space will be a more difficult not to crack. A bit like your wedding space. I think we’re going to have. We’re going to definitely have some learning to do there, because I don’t know that it’s going to be quite so accommodating. But the idea that you just offered of white labeling or, you know, going round and talking to companies, that’s certainly an interesting idea. And maybe because there are some big players who probably would welcome exactly what we’ve got to get their. Their customer, you know, hosting companies and things like that.

Mark Westguard:
I assume there are some communities out there that just talk about podcasting in general, right? I mean, I’m not aware of them because I’m not in that space, but there must be a WordPress equivalent for the podcasting space that you could get involved with.

Dan Maby:
There certainly are. And I don’t know, it’s a really interesting dilemma. How do you get into a community that you’re not familiar with and how do you. It’s the same as, I guess I did with the WordPress community. You just become active. You try and put yourself into environment. The environment and connect with community members. Really.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah.

Mark Westguard:
Keep chipping away until you find something.

Nathan Wrigley:
That hits and turn up with loads of golden carrots.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah, there you go. There’s your solution.

Dan Maby:
We have got. We’ve not just niched into podcasting, but we’ve niched into blocks within WordPress podcast. So it’s a very, very niche product.

Mark Westguard:
It is, it is, but I hope it’ll just be the tip of the iceberg, what you guys can do with this. I feel like there’s so much. You’ve got some good ideas and I know that, you know, these could be rolled into whatever you’re doing and hopefully will turn it into a larger product.

Nathan Wrigley:
Absolutely, yeah. I think the creep possibilities are still there. There’s loads of things that we could do with just this plugin. There’s loads of options. I won’t go into them all, but there’s tons of things that we could slightly morph it with. But I guess we just decided to get this podcast version of it out. You know, just tune on the podcast and see how that goes.

Mark Westguard:
Get that right first. So was this, Dan, was this you that wrote everything or is there a team behind this or.

Dan Maby:
No, no, this is me and AI supporting the development workflow.

Mark Westguard:
Great. That’s fantastic.

Dan Maby:
Similar to me then, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it’s something I’ve really enjoyed actually getting back into writing code and spending the time solving logical problems. It’s something that I do, I do enjoy. I’ve not done enough of. Certainly a lot of learning, definitely a lot of learning around blocks. The challenges that can be faced with combining JavaScript and PHP and the front end, back end, all the ferris. So it’s been, yeah, it’s been an interesting journey and certainly the use of AI in that development workflow. I mean, my workflow in the last six months has changed so many times. It’s been, it’s such a fast paced, such a fast moving space, as we know. Yeah. Again, trying to, trying to sort of document that has been part of the challenge because I want to understand how do I. How do I create a repeatable workflow that we can work with others on.

Mark Westguard:
This product and it will evolve, the blocks API will change and we’ll have to rewrite it. Again.

Nathan Wrigley:
That was said in a slightly weary way, wasn’t it?

Mark Westguard:
I’ve done it several times. The last time I did use AI actually to help me out because it’s quite complicated putting together a block and if you haven’t kept up, because a block is one piece of my product, yours is a lot more dominant in your product. But I don’t, I don’t keep up with it. And then so when I, you know, needed to redo it again, I found AI to be incredibly helpful with that. And it seemed to Absorb all the documentation. Well, because it, what it spat out was pretty workable.

Dan Maby:
So that was really, I think as a tool, if you’re using sensible guardrails, it’s an incredible tool. Obviously it can be abused as any tool can be. A hammer isn’t always the right tool.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah.

Mark Westguard:
What do you think your approach to customer support is going to be? Are you going to adopt a certain platform? Do you have any plans around that?

Dan Maby:
We have, we already have, yes. So we’re actually using freescout, another open source PHP based solution. We’ve been using it for a number of years actually behind the scenes for WPLND.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah.

Dan Maby:
Managing speakers, managing those workflows. So it’s been quite a nice, quite familiar with that platform but again trying to, trying to build that in. So we’ve built a number of modules over the last few days to support that flow. So trying to combine creating a single sign on, for example, between WordPress and Free Scout’s been a interesting little problem to overcome which, which we’ve done.

Mark Westguard:
So you’re going to have support in the website, so you’re going to kind of white label.

Dan Maby:
So just creating single sign on. So you know, as you’re logged, if you’re logged into your site, into, into our dashboard where you obviously can download the plugin, you’ve got direct access into, into your support tickets as well then.

Mark Westguard:
Very cool. I’ll have to look into that.

Dan Maby:
Yes.

Mark Westguard:
Anything I can do to achieve support tickets. Yeah, yeah, it goes. There’s another plugin, you can get to it. Dan, if you could give one piece of advice to other WordPress product developers based upon your experience so far, what would that be?

Dan Maby:
I think for me, if you can get a partner, work with somebody else on it. I think the solo aspect of it can be incredibly lonely, incredibly isolating. Having somebody just to bat ideas back and forth with has been very valuable for me. I know Nathan and I, we meet on a weekly basis and sometimes I’ll just waffle on about stuff that Nathan probably has absolutely no interest whatsoever.

Mark Westguard:
I’m sure you’re just listening to Nathan, right?

Nathan Wrigley:
I’m just sitting here eating golden carrots. That’s what I’m doing.

Mark Westguard:
Exactly.

Nathan Wrigley:
Curiously, my piece of device is don’t find a partner because you have to sit listening to them waffling on every week. No, sorry. My British sense of humor, it’s incredibly caustic and deprecating of everybody around me. I’ve been such a light touch on this, I kind of drop in. My real role will begin Soon. So maybe, maybe that question could be asked in a, in a few days, weeks.

Mark Westguard:
Do paid advertising on WP builds.

Nathan Wrigley:
That’s the. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah. Luckily I get to avoid the paid aspect of that, but yeah, I mean.

Dan Maby:
It’S things like pricing we were discussing this morning, trying to hit the right price point for something like this. Do you do lifetime deals? Do you not do lifetime deals? Do you do monthly? Do you know, there’s so many questions that come up and I guess until you’re out there, you’re actively getting feedback from live customers. It’s incredibly difficult to know the answers.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah. And this desire to get it all right. The first try is kind of debilitating. No, no. But it’s curious how.

Mark Westguard:
And you will disappoint some people with changes that you. And there’s no, there’s no way around it, really.

Nathan Wrigley:
No. Yeah.

Mark Westguard:
I think for me the most important thing was getting the customer support. Right. Because that led to more word of mouth traffic, it led to more sales and it’s so critical, I think, to any plugin business. You know, when someone, even when somebody parts with $29, for some people, that’s a lot of money and they want results from it and they expect good customer service. And if you don’t give that one bad review can knock a product. It’s like a restaurant, Right. You open a restaurant, you’ve got to get it right. You get bad customers, that community is just not going to want to go there. So that’s been something I’ve focused an awful lot on, is the customer support element.

Nathan Wrigley:
I can vouch for this because I spent a bit of time with Mark Westguard in Switzerland. We spent a bit of time. And Mark answer support tickets all the time, you know. Yeah. Top of a mountain. There he is. Cracks open the phone and if I.

Mark Westguard:
Can get a bit of WI fi.

Nathan Wrigley:
That’s right. As soon as the WI fi’s on. Yeah. You have to build a Faraday cage around Mark to stop the support.

Mark Westguard:
That’s right.

Nathan Wrigley:
From happening. But that’s good advice and I think that’s well made. Can I just ask a question of you about that? Do you incentivize your customers to recommend your product to other people? In other words, if they felt that you’ve got a good product, do you in some way, I don’t know, offer them something or have an, I don’t know, affiliate scheme or a way of recommending.

Mark Westguard:
I mean, I do have an affiliate scheme. I keep that quite limited to who I work with because I found in the past that only a handful of people will actually generate revenue through an affiliate scheme. A lot of people want to join it and say, yeah, you know, I want to try and promote it, but they just don’t have the clout there. It’s not worth their while, really. They’re making four or five dollars per sale. I think I offer about 20%, but you’ve got to have some serious traffic to make any kind of revenue from that. But really now I’ve just found that if I do a good job on a support ticket and I feel the customer’s happy and I’ve maybe gone out of the way to do something for them, and I’m not shy in doing that. If somebody asks for a particular feature, I’ll try and implement it for them. I will very simply just ask them for a review and they’ll maybe join the WS form community that I have on Facebook and they’ll just be an active member in there. Some people just really latch onto the product and get it and enjoy using it. And I’m just very grateful to those people. There’s, you know, I’m not handing them ten pound notes under the table just to say thank you. They just genuinely enjoy using the product. They use it in their day to day work and they find it a helpful tool, which is great. That’s basically my aim with the product is to reduce the amount of time it takes to build a form. So, yeah, I’m not giving them golden carrots or anything like that.

Nathan Wrigley:
It’s a dreadful mistake. This is the key to all success in business. I feel from now on I’m gonna order some.

Mark Westguard:
So I was going to ask you about licensing and pricing, but I don’t think you’re quite there with the price yet. But where can people learn more about Podcaster Plus? And also how can they get in touch with you guys if they’ve got any more questions about the product?

Dan Maby:
So podcasterplus.com is the place to head. We’ve got our contact details there. We can be contacted through the site. Yes, Podcaster Plus has some social media presence, but being completely honest, that’s something that we’re trying to figure out. Again, where do we market, how do we market, who do we communicate with? How do we communicate? But yes, podcastplus.com is the best place to connect with us.

Mark Westguard:
Go to the website, join all the social media channels and follow along the journey. So. Well, thank, thank you so much for, for coming on and best of luck with the product and hopefully we’ll have you on again in the future and you can tell us how it’s been going with phase two.

Nathan Wrigley:
I will have more gray hair, that’s all.

Mark Westguard:
Certainly will.

Dan Maby:
I would just have less hair.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah. Oh, I can lend you some, if you like.

Dan Maby:
I had a full head of hair when we started working together.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Curiously, mine went great.

Mark Westguard:
That was just working with Nathan, anyway. All right, guys. All the best. Thank you.

Dan Maby:
Thank you.

Nathan Wrigley:
Cheers. Thanks, Mark.