Exploring Plugin Solution Creator LMS: Next-gen development insights, advanced functionality & game-changing features for modern education.
In this video, we delve into the exciting journey of developing a new plugin solution for Learning Management Systems (LMS). Discover how this innovative tool enhances user experience, streamlines course creation, and integrates seamlessly with existing platforms. We’ll explore the features, benefits, and real-world applications that make this plugin a game-changer for both educators and learners.
C S Sultan From WPFunnels
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:16.600] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 974. In this episode, we have a friend of the show. We got Sulton from WP Funnel. He’s the Marketing Manager there. They’ve got a new plugin which they’ve just recently publicized. I think it’s still in beta, but he’s going to tell us all about it, including the journey and the reason why they think there’s an opportunity in the particular area they’re focusing on. It should provide you with a wealth of useful information. It should be a great show. Sulton, can you quickly give a 10- to 15-second intro? And when we delve into the main part of the show, we explore your background and WP Funnel in more detail.
[00:01:12.220] – C S Sultan
Okay. Hey, everyone. This is Sulton. I’m the Marketing Manager at WP Funnel. I’ve been with this company for a while, and we currently utilize a funnel builder and an email marketing tool. Recently, we have been working on a brand-new tool, specifically an LMS plugin. With a different focus than everybody else, though.
[00:01:33.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
All right.
[00:01:34.100] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. I’ve got my co-host, my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to new listeners and viewers?
[00:01:43.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, folks. My name is Kurt von Annen. I own a company called Mañana Nomás, and I work with the great folks at WP Tonic, as well as create membership and learning-type websites.
[00:01:52.920] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. As I mentioned, it should be a great show, especially if you’re considering creating your own plugin or exploring the possibilities. We’ll be able to share a wealth of information with you, hopefully. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I also want to point out that we have some great special offers from the show’s sponsors, plus a curated list aimed at you, the WordPress freelancer and professional. These are the plugins and services that we use at WP Tonic, so you know they’re top-notch and legitimate. Save you a ton of time. You can get all these goodies by going over to Wp-Tonic.com/deals, WP-Tonic.com/deals. What more could you ask for, my beloved WordPress professionals? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. They love me to say that, Sulton. I don’t know why, but they just do. So, Sulton, as I mentioned, the company is best known for its WP Funnel and Mint, which are really fantastic products.
[00:03:23.440] – Jonathan Denwood
Obviously, marketing optimization is really important to people, so you We need a plugin and a company that’s pretty rock solid. I understand that the founder, Lincoln, is the person behind it, and you assist with the marketing, but you are also affiliated, I think, with a company called Codirex. Is that correct? Perhaps you could provide us with more information about Lincoln Coderex and how long WP Funnel has been in operation.
[00:04:01.940] – C S Sultan
Okay, so basically it’s Coderex. I mean, those are two words. That’s our parent company. Essentially, we operate under Coderex, and we have two distinct brands within Coderex. That’s Rex, Theme, and WP Funnel. Those are both under Coderex. Essentially, all employees from those two brands are part of Coderex. We’re employed by Coderex. Coderex owns those two brands. Lincoln Islam is the sole owner of this whole organization. Organization. He’s been with WordPress for a while. Previously, they began offering services like this to provide web development solutions. However, it then transitioned into a plugin development service, where we created our own plugins under Wrex. And then, about three years ago, when we created WB Funnelz, we developed another brand, our third brand. That’s the current scenario of our company. Lincoln is basically well-established in the industry, having attended numerous work camps in the past. He has a very good knowledge of WordPress users and the type of things required for it. At the same time, he has great knowledge about course creation, coaching, live sessions, and other related aspects. He’s quite an expert in that, which is one of the reasons we created tools like that.
[00:05:26.320] – Jonathan Denwood
So, how many people roughly work for the company and the main company? How long has that been around, Salton?
[00:05:34.400] – C S Sultan
We’ve been around since 2012. Right now, we’re not that large. We currently have approximately 25 employees. Initially, as I mentioned, it was just code REX. It was pretty small at that time. It slowly grew. Currently, we operate as an umbrella organization for two distinct brands. The Rex team started about 2014, and WP Funnel is just three years back.
[00:05:58.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I love WP Funnel. I think it’s a great plugin, so I’m trying to be supportive with it. The company has been generous towards me as well. Over to you, Kirk.
[00:06:12.980] – Kurt von Ahnen
I have really dug my feet in the eLearning space. And so I guess this question falls to me. I should probably clarify, I have a full scope. I’ve worked with SCORM, SaaS platforms, custom LMSs, and more, and I work directly with the team at Lifter LMS. And so I got really embroiled in the learn-lifter-lms structure. I was curious to know what led the company to pursue an LMS solution. And by the way, I’m completely open to whatever the answer is. There’s no judgment here. I’m fascinated that another one is coming.
[00:06:51.380] – C S Sultan
Well, there has been a few reasons why we went for this. First up, it was our plan from the beginning to serve online coaching coaches and creators, we always had in mind to create a whole ecosystem for that target audience, right? So we started off with sales funnels, which is an essential tool for coaches, online creators, because that’s how they collect leads and run sales funnels. And then we moved on to email automation because that’s another core tool they need. And then the next big thing we had was creating an LMS because that would complete the journey. Most of the people who try to teach their knowledge, they go through creating courses. From there, they go into live sessions, webinars, and then make sales. So it’s part of the ecosystem plan that we had right from the beginning, actually, when we first launched WB Funnel. So this is all planned. It’s not a spontaneous decision. And from there we came into thinking about Teter LMS. And obviously we had some challenges in deciding how we could be relevant in the market because there are big stuff out there. Like Lifter LMS is pretty good, LearnDash is pretty large, and then there’s Teter LMS recently taking up the market.
[00:08:03.530] – C S Sultan
So we did have a lot of thoughts in there, but I believe we managed to find out something that would make us stand out a bit different. I mean, we’re not competing with them in terms of the same audience. We have our own set of audience that we are trying to solve a problem for. And there are a few specific problems that we are trying to solve with creator LMS.
[00:08:27.710] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I’ve always been attached to that speaker, author, trainer, audience, right? And that’s a little bit different than standard course creator. And when you mentioned the sales funnels, WP funnel, that whole thing, I could see how that would really appeal to the coach and speaker thing, right? And what’s the best way for a speaker to sell more public gigs, have a short course, put that in a funnel, do its whole thing. So I can see where that audience makes a lot of sense.
[00:08:56.340] – C S Sultan
Exactly.
[00:08:57.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan?
[00:08:58.900] – Jonathan Denwood
So You think you’re bringing something to a Pacific market, how would you describe that market, that ideal user base that you’re trying to focus this new plugin on, Saltant?
[00:09:16.860] – C S Sultan
Well, our initial main target is online coaches and trainers, obviously. That’s the people we’re trying to serve from the beginning. At the same time, with creator elements, it opens up the door to a lot more. Like If you talk about single creators or mid-level creators who are trying to teach their knowledge, it could be anyone, to be honest, like an artist or maybe a marketer who knows SEO too well, they might want to get into the e-learning because this industry is pretty huge. In this year, it’s projected about over 300 billion as the valuation of the industry. And in six years, it can go up to 900 billion. So it’s a huge industry. Everybody is trying to take a piece of the cake for the industry. So anybody can actually create course nowadays and start their own business and make some money because there’s a lot of things to teach. And the latest generation, they’re actually pretty active. They want to learn things really quick. So what we are trying to do is we’re trying to solve a problem for people who actually has talent and want to get out there. The main issue, what we found is we have seen a lot of tools, definitely.
[00:10:24.820] – C S Sultan
In WordPress, the tools are pretty good. But you can see if I talk about Lifter or LearnDash, their core product is the course builder. And then for other stuff, they need additional add-ons. So people have to install a lot of add-ons, invest in additional plugins to do the whole course system. With Credo LMS, what we decided is, all right, we don’t want them to have too many plugins. What if one system had all of those? So the main challenge was to find out what could be those core stuff that everybody actually needs when they’re thinking about a the whole course, creation, business, monetisation stuff. If you think about it, we could all talk about SaaS tools like Kajabi or Podia and stuff like that, but those are quite expensive.
[00:11:12.160] – Jonathan Denwood
I would say that your main Apart from the WordPress, which I do agree, it’s marketing and it’s focus is probably a bit different. But I think what I get from what you’re saying is that you’re really trying to focus on the creator, the kit, it used to be called Convert Kit. The creator that might be looking at Patreon, but don’t like having to give them almost 20% of their revenue, and that’s looking to add extra value at another source of income. But I think Patreon, and maybe Podia or Kajabi are some of the main competitors outside the world of WordPress. Would you agree with that?
[00:12:15.740] – C S Sultan
Yeah, definitely. They are definitely big competitors, and it’s difficult to beat them if you think about their customer base. But if you think about the people we are looking at, it’s not really a direct competitor. Competition, because we are not looking for people who are trying to make an extra buck by spending a lot of money. We’re looking for people who wants to grow on their own, right? So in WordPress, you get that luxury. You can Sell your course and keep your whole earnings. You’re not paying that transaction fees every time you’re selling a course. So you really get that opportunity to grow on your own. Because quite frankly, when I spoke with a few people out there, what I found out is people that are small, it takes time for them to grow. Now, if they’re going to pay a chunk of their revenue to other platforms, it takes a lot of more time than what they could have actually grown. If they could have had this additional money with them at that time, they could have probably invested in growing their business faster and become established. But now what happens is those platforms are so expensive and they don’t really get much opportunities elsewhere.
[00:13:28.660] – C S Sultan
That’s why they’re stuck where they are. They cannot grow and compete with the ones that have already taken the market. So it gets quite difficult. So that’s the area where we are looking into bringing in people the opportunity that they get similar features, they get to create their same courses, but they can keep their own earnings. That’s one of the things. But there is also another thing. If you look into Kajabi, I’ve used Kajabi for a while, I know. The problem you will see is that even their own report suggests that students actually do not finish their courses. They enroll the course, they don’t finish it. So one of the key specialities of creator LMS is student engagement. We have included a lot of features that are dedicated to create engagement for students, such as cohort-based learning, creating a community, gamification, quizzes, email reminders if they forget about the course. So all of those are included in one single plugin. And you might as well think, okay, I could do all of that with the SaaS tool, but in WordPress, it’s not that expensive and within their control. So that’s where I think we’re trying to create a market, getting a chunk out of those people who cannot actually grow on their own but are struggling, now have an option to make their own business.
[00:14:48.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I see where you come from because like, Patreon, you got the normal 2. 9 transactional fee if you’re going through Stripe or PayPal. But then I think it’s around 20% they want. Then with Podio, if you’re looking at the lower plan, they add another 5% on the 2. 9. It all adds up, doesn’t it?
[00:15:15.200] – C S Sultan
Yeah.
[00:15:16.360] – Jonathan Denwood
Then I don’t think Kajabi, but I think you’re talking about their basic kickstarter plan, and that’s around $80 month to month. I don’t think they take a percentage. I wouldn’t say it’s cut down, but it is limited quite a bit. The basic plan, you’re talking about $150 a month, aren’t you? If you go month to month. What have been some of the biggest challenges the company has faced in the development of this plugin, the thought process? Did it take a few attempts before you felt that you found the right position and the right functionality in the plugin? Maybe you can give some insights about that journey.
[00:16:12.900] – C S Sultan
Well, you see, if you talk about a year ago, things are pretty different. You could have actually took a lot of time to think about a product, planned it and go for it. But just six months ago, things changed completely and everybody is now creating products left and right, like one week or two weeks, right? So we actually faced three phases of challenges. Initially, we actually started working on creator elements about a year ago, to be honest. And within three months, we didn’t really create the position that we’re thinking now. We had a different type of plan at that time. But by the time we could get out with those features, a couple of products already created those features. So our initial focus was only the monetization. So what happened was after three months of development, before we could actually come to launch, someone else already did that. We didn’t have that specialty anymore. And we knew that launching at that time would mean that we’re just competing with another guy who has already taken up the market, and we would probably not get much further with that. So that was one challenge. The second challenge came when people started creating LMS tools with AI.
[00:17:22.720] – C S Sultan
So now people are creating tools with AI in one week or two week, releasing that in LTD, And users are getting excited, wow, this might be great. But I think both of you understand that those tools are not worth it. But we had the challenge because people were going for the hype. They’re thinking, hey, it’s a great tool. They took less time. Maybe they’re a great team. But you cannot just a team by the time they take for development, right? So that was another challenge. So we had to delay our launch. We had to think twice that, all right, we cannot create a tool that becomes similar to another AI tool. We have to be better because if someone can do it with AI and if we are doing it human, then we should be doing it better. So we took more time and eventually we did some research. We went through primary research, secondary research, and we found out the engagement issue, which is still a big issue. I personally launched two courses on Udeme, and the completion rate is only one %. So you have to understand. There were about 2,000 students students, and only one person of them completed the course.
[00:18:33.780] – C S Sultan
So that tells me a lot that even if the course is valid, when I create videos or courses, my main goal is to give value. I’m not there to sell. I’m not there to do anything. It was genuine value that I have used in my experience. But students enroll, they see that, okay, this is valuable. They start one or two lessons, and then they don’t complete it. Why is that? That reminded me of my school days when I used to enroll in courses, do one or two lessons, and then forget about it because I move on with my life. So that’s what triggered this idea that, all right, so if we could create a way that students would be engaged and they would actually complete the course, it would be very valuable. Why? Because as a creator, word of mouth plays a big role in creating your authority. Reviews is the other thing that you must have if you want to sell. Even if you are going to buy a course the next day from Masterclass or maybe Udemy, the first thing you look into is the reviews, how many people gave reviews and how great that is compared to similar topics out there.
[00:19:32.380] – C S Sultan
So if your students are not completing the course, why will they give you a review? So that’s the situation. So that was the third phase of challenge that we had to overcome in finding out exactly that jackpot that we had to bid. Right now we’re confident that our tool is going to have that engagement feature that almost no other tool gives you in one single package. You could do that. Definitely, you could work on engagement with 5 to 10 different plugins. That’s possible. One single tool to do all of that, I don’t think too many plugins or SaaS tools exist right now that will let you do it in an affordable cost. Those are the three different challenges we had, three phases of challenges. And finally, we can say that no. Right now we have a tool that definitely is something unique and It really can help a lot of creators out there.
[00:20:18.440] – Jonathan Denwood
So what would you say about this, Kurt?
[00:20:21.820] – Kurt von Ahnen
Okay. I’m enthralled by a lot of things in his answer, so I got to go to something else first, Jonathan. I got to know, when you put a course in Udemy, I did the same thing as an experiment. How much spam did you get from people trying to help you sell your course in Udemy?
[00:20:40.960] – C S Sultan
Luckily, I got less spam in one course. In the other one, I got about 12 people messaging me, Hey, this is a great course. And then when I respond, they’re like, Hey, I’m a professional in promoting your course. Why don’t you work with me? It’s a common thing in Udemy.
[00:20:57.360] – Kurt von Ahnen
I put my LinkedIn course in there as a sample, and I must have gotten 1,200 spam messages over the course of six months. It’s an absolute disaster. That’s just one of the points where I say, Well, you should have your own LMS. You should have your own LMS on your own website. Don’t get locked in these playgrounds where it’s just rife with spam and nonsense. So the way you were talking about having everything in one place, part of me truly, truly agrees, and the other part of me just goes, sometimes we overload people with features and they don’t know what… For example, I love a lifetime deal. I bought SweetDash and I run a lot of my business on SweetDash for invoicing and stuff like that, and it works great, but I’m only scratching the surface. I’m only using 25 % of what that tool would actually do. And sometimes I feel overwhelmed by it, and I’m a pro in the field. So how did you guys come at it from the angle of, we’re going to put everything in this root core plugin, but we need to make sure that people can navigate it and not get overwhelmed.
[00:22:05.860] – C S Sultan
Well, first off, we have an expert UI team, I would like to say, because the first challenge really is getting people not to get confused with so many stuff, right? And the second thing what we did was we also thought about this that, hey, not everybody needs everything, right? So the way we are trying to handle this is through pricing plans. For people who are solo creators, they don’t really need creating a community. They’re just starting out. So they could just go for the smaller plan where they don’t need a community, and then they could just pay a little… When they grow a little bit, they can later think about upgrading to a plan where they have the community to use. Why we’re doing this? Definitely, I also like only a single price plan. I personally like that, but I also have to consider that not everybody would want those advanced features and pay the fee. And if they’re not going to use the advanced features, rather I have them charge less and use only the core features. That would make more sense for them. So that’s one way we’re handling this. And in terms of UI, the core focus is the course creation and monetization.
[00:23:13.860] – C S Sultan
Everything else is for users who actually need them. If you think about cohorts, not everybody thinks that, okay, I must have a cohort. But those who need them, they will get that option separately. So during the course creation, we don’t confuse them with cohorts, engagement and everything. We keep them at a later stage once they’ve created the course, because that’s the first step. I mean, according to stats, about 60 % of people, they plan to create a course, go halfway and then stop, and they leave it hanging for one year, two year. They don’t complete it. So the first step is that. So we created the course creation process distraction free. We don’t tell them to do anything at that time. Just create your course, keep it simple, and then we can talk about the next step. So then what we was we created a simple step-by-step process so that they can have their monetisation set up because that’s the next part. If they don’t make money, it doesn’t have any value. And then we’re thinking about engagement. Engagement is the third stage. Definitely, it’s important if they want to grow. But if they don’t start, how do you expect engagement?
[00:24:19.440] – C S Sultan
So that’s how we are taking this. The UI is set up in a way so that people have to go through one by one rather than getting everything in one place and get confused. So if you’re an advanced user who knows LMS a lot, then definitely you’ll initially say, hey, I need to plan a whole funnel where I’ll create the course, I’ll create a landing page, then I’ll take them into my community, and then I’ll build on that and future courses will be sold there. That’s something you know when you’re an advanced user. But when you’re starting out, all those won’t come at the beginning. At first you think, Okay, let me just launch my course with a paid ad or maybe a video or a landing page, and that’s it. Let’s just make some money. Once I have enough money, I We can reinvest for those higher steps. That’s the way we are taking it. We’re trying to make sure that people don’t get overwhelmed through the UI. The UI is a key factor of our product. All of our products, in fact, I think Jonathan knows that when you look into WP Funnel or Mailman, we invest a hefty amount of time and money in creating the UI.
[00:25:21.180] – C S Sultan
We have a dedicated UI team for that. After that, we move on to the other values because if it’s confusing from the beginning, we already lost the business. As simple as It allows that.
[00:25:31.140] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, yeah. And I’ve used WP Funnel as well. And that drag and drop feature, add your elements. Visually, it tells people what to do. It’s intuitive. It’s good. And as someone that works with a lot of people in the LMS space, I can attest to the idea that these creators have to wear multiple hats. They have to be a salesperson, an educator, a community person. And what happens is they don’t do anything great. They do everything halfway, and then they end up with just a muddied mess. And so maybe your approach of handling things step by step will keep people more on focus. Definitely. Jonathan?
[00:26:10.740] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. I think we We’re going to end the first half now. It’s been a great discussion with Sulton, and we’re going for our middle break. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming We’ve had a great discussion with Sulton, the Marketing Manager at WP Funnelz, about their new plugin, their journey. It’s just been a fantastic discussion. Before we go into the second half, I just want to point out, if you’ve got a major membership, community-focused website that you’re building for a client or a big marketing project in general on WordPress, why don’t you look at partnering with WP WP Tonic. We’ve got some of the best affiliate deals in hosting available to you, and we host on Vulture, which is some of the best hosting on the market. To find more about what we can offer to you, the freelancer, go over to Wp-tonic. Com/partners, wp-tonic. Com/partners. Let’s build something special together. I think everything you said makes sense to me, Sulton, but how are you going to market this? You got the power of the WordPress marketplace. It’s one of the reasons why you wanted to come on this podcast, obviously, I would imagine.
[00:27:52.100] – Jonathan Denwood
But have you got your plan, your vision for the next 6 months to 12 months about how you’re going to get some traction for this.
[00:28:08.220] – C S Sultan
Okay. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we have actually started our promotions about two months back. So it’s already started. We are already giving out messages to people. We have been working with beta testers for a while, giving them access to the tool so that we get feedback. And many people think beta testing is just for testing the product, but it also gives some word out to people that, okay, it’s happening, right? And if you talk about WordPress plugins, we all agree that affiliate marketing is definitely one of the largest contributors. So we are trying to work with different people who have their own channels and hopefully will help us out. At the same time for sustainability, we do have a growth system in place because initially we We will definitely go for LTD. But if you look into WFrance, you’ll understand that we will also have subscription plans. If you just have LTDs, then it’s difficult to grow in the future. So we do need MRR, right? So we will definitely, after the launch, we will introduce some annual plans which people can go for, which would be quite cheaper. And that’s something that we’ll work on over the next 12 months to build our MRR so that it grows into a good tool for everybody, right?
[00:29:32.050] – C S Sultan
At the same time, we have our own community in Facebook. Obviously, we had less activity in the past, but we have decided that we need to put more value into the community so the people actually trust us even more. So that’s one of the part where we’ll be investing more on. And obviously, a lot of you will have questions that, hey, this is a time of AI. People no longer trust blogs and stuff like that. Definitely, it’s difficult. But we have our own marketing team working on the latest trends. We try to keep up. If you understand that now there’s Gemini taking most of the traffic away from everybody. And then there is ChatGPT as well. Chatgpt is quite generous giving sources at times, but in case of Gemini, they’re just pulling out the data and giving it to people and not even taking people there. So we are having to adjust our strategy so that we can appear on the search results. And it’s not similar to SEO anymore. Seo is, what I say 50 % debt, 50 % working. We need to tie that up with AI marketing, AI SEO, or many people like to call it, or geo.
[00:30:40.680] – C S Sultan
Those are the things we are implementing so that we can actually come in front of the people. One of the things that we’re confident about is that anything we create, the content we create, anybody who actually visits it, they’re going to get real value. So we’re not concerned that people are going to bounce. People don’t bounce usually when they come to our website. But the challenge is getting in front of them. So we are adjusting our strategies to the overall brand of WB Funnel. And obviously, there are a few other tactics which, obviously, I’d like to keep some secrets there because those are some of our Trump cards, which would surprise people. It’s something great we’re creating for our users. I don’t want to reveal it right now. We want it to be an element of surprise so that they understand that this is something just for them. So just It’s just about it. But obviously you understand that those element of surprise are like something we cannot repeat all the time. But what I told you a few moments ago, the things that I talked about, those are things you have to do regularly for any tool.
[00:31:42.820] – C S Sultan
If you’re talking about any WordPress plugin, you’re starting out or you’re old, those things you have to do. If you don’t adjust your SEO strategies now, in about six months, your organic traffic is dead. You cannot sustain. So you have to make those adjustments. If you don’t build communities now, you understand that in the future is community.
[00:32:02.980] – Jonathan Denwood
What do you really mean by the word in your own mind? What do you really mean by that term community?
[00:32:14.880] – C S Sultan
When I say community, it really means a group of people who has like minded requirements. So let’s say if we talk about the WB Funnel community, there are a lot of people who just want to learn about funnels and use WP Funnel. I mean, one of the case is users, but if I talk about others, not everybody in our community is our user. But they’re here because we are sometimes posting some useful content to help them out. So that’s what I call a community where everybody has the same mindset that, okay, this is the topic I’m interested in. So that’s what I call community. And another thing that involves community nowadays, I’ll just be honest, is the factor of influencer. Influencer marketing is That’s something that everybody trusts nowadays. You have a known face. If you say a product is good, a lot of people will trust that. But if someone unknown comes and talks, people don’t know them. If you really want to compete with that market, the only other way is having a community where people really trust your brand. That’s something I suggest any tool should work on as soon as possible.
[00:33:22.180] – Jonathan Denwood
Before I throw it over to Kurt, at WP Funnel, have you got any sense of the user base? Is it mostly, and it’s a great product, by the way, folks. I do like WP Funnel a lot. But is it mostly freelancers and WordPress professionals of the bulk, or is it end users, as I call them, power users or people that are not really freelancers or small agency owners? Have you got any idea about the split that are using WP Funnel?
[00:34:07.540] – C S Sultan
Well, for WP Funnel, since you’re asking about the funnel builder, in WordPress, you won’t find too many freelancers experience over there. Most of them are power users. They like to have their own website and build their own business. Freelancers usually go for SaaS tools because that’s easier to convince the people and handle the In case of WordPress, there’s also element of privacy. If you allow your website to a freelancer, you have a lot of issues there. I have friends who had their website hacked once they trusted a freelancer. So in WordPress, It’s less likely that your funnel builder is going to be used too much by a freelancer. It’s mostly used by end users who own their own business or have their own marketing team.
[00:34:57.680] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. That’s very insightful. Over to you, Kurt?
[00:35:02.520] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I feel like we all have a mixed opinion of AI, except for maybe Jonathan. I know he’s a fan. He’s a diehard fan through and through. I was trying to do some internal work here with Mañana No Mas and figuring out, okay, how do I do better with AI search and stuff? So I asked AI, how do I do that? And then it said, well, you rank here, you rank there, these, these other companies, blah, blah, blah. And I said, well, how do you come up that answer? And the first thing on the list was Google search results, right? And so half the time we say SEO is dead or SEO is half dead, or we try to be nice about the whole SEO conversation. And then we say, well, it’s not going anywhere. But then when you look at the results from AI, you go, oh, holy crud, it’s using those results to come up with those lists. So it’s a huge frustration because, as you said, AI at one point is scraping your content to give out answers away without the accreditation, right? But you still need to have the content and you still need to know that your SEO was ranking you high enough to be searched by AI to find it to be referred.
[00:36:07.460] – Kurt von Ahnen
Let’s just get to it. What are the AI tools that you depend on? I’m assuming you use AI, right?
[00:36:16.360] – C S Sultan
Yeah, I do.
[00:36:17.340] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. So we’re all in the same boat. I tell everybody I’m the biggest hypocrite with AI because I use it every day, but I tell everybody how dangerous it is. What are the AI tools and services that you’ve been using that that you lean on that you could share with our listeners?
[00:36:34.940] – C S Sultan
Well, if I talk about me personally, I am not a big fan of using AI. I’m just saying because it’s just a copy of what others do, right? Mostly when I use AI, I use it for marketing purposes, for research. I don’t use it to generate content because the content they will generate is just regeneration of what someone else did. And that’s something you cannot trust someone who’s using AI to pitch you a product. That’s like they’re just lying on the teeth. So what we do here is we use AI heavily to do some research. And obviously, as you said, that they scrape it from websites, right? You need to rank high enough for them to scrape you, right? But I think what you should look into, or I think you already know this, the dynamic that AI has gone to now is valuing brands over content, all right? So if you look into more insights, you’ll see that people who are mentioned more often in different platforms. So let’s say you have a content and people are talking about in Facebook, Reddit, those are being more prioritized by AI than when you have your own blog and you’re writing about it.
[00:37:49.280] – C S Sultan
So the way Google is ranking blogs in SEO right now is not what it used to be before. Now they’re valuing more about how many people are actually talking your content before they’re actually trying to rank it up. Previously, we had a few regular stuff, if you had enough backlinks, if you had keyword depth, if you had enough internal linking, all of those were there in the past. But when you use AI right now, it’s completely different. So in our marketing, when we use AI, we use it to research, find out sources, find out data, and then we need to verify it manually because we want to give authentic stuff. We don’t want to just copy, rewrite, and publish. In our company, we do not do that. There are others who do that. They see that, okay, this is the top ranking content. Let me just rewrite it and publish it. I’ll at least be up there in number three, I guess. We don’t do that. We actually find out the main sources. We actually learn, we actually experiment before we write the content. So most of the content you’ll see, we have about 100 plus content, but all of those based on our experience.
[00:38:56.800] – C S Sultan
Those are real experiences explained over there. So with AI, We mostly use ChatGPT 5 right now, where we use it for research. And then in between, we did use Napkin AI to create some reports. For presentation, there is Gamma. Basically, I’m talking about internal presentations. We don’t really go for external presentations. Internally, we do have a lot of processes in place, so we do use that. We have our developers there using Trey AI to help them out with improving the code standards. So that’s there. But we definitely don’t entertain them writing the whole code with AI raw, because I think you’ve seen in Facebook recently that people are saying, hey, it generated the whole code, but now the product doesn’t work. So we don’t want to fall there. Our developers are generally talented. We’re lucky to get such developers, though. But we’re using Trey over there just to maintain the coding standard and maintaining things in GitHub. Those are the minimalistic AIs that we are must using every day. And it’s not like we don’t use any other AI. We use some other AI when we need it. For example, our designers are using AI through Adop.
[00:40:14.220] – C S Sultan
They have Figma right now. Figma has AI included. So they’re trying to use some of that when preparing websites, web designs. But one thing we try to make sure is that even if we design the initial copy with AI, we read We design it to match our brand and match what is necessary for the users. I’m sure you have seen many businesses instantly launching through AI content. And once you scrape through it, you’ll see a lot of mistakes, a lot of errors. So we don’t do that. Since we have our own in-house team, it doesn’t make sense. So we do allow them to use AI to the initial generation, but again, they have to rework on that, make it into something that’s good. So seemingly, those are the main AI tools we are using. A lot of people suggested us to use AI PM tools, but that hasn’t been that great. We tried ClickUp, but it’s not that great yet. I mean, they have to work a lot on that. So that’s the work in progress. So that’s just about it. That’s the tools we use, mostly.
[00:41:19.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. We create these things as human beings saying that we’re going to make life easier, and all we do is create more work for ourselves. Just as point of reference with the AI thing, I started getting a lot of 404 errors. I was getting people that would search me up or look me up. It would hallucinate URLs to my website that didn’t even exist. Like, oh, AI said to go to this, money on the nomas. Forward-slash light bulb. And I’m like, I don’t have a web page called light bulb. So I actually had to change my 404 page with a redirect. They just check out our home page or go to our contact page. And I know that Katie Keith had to do the same thing over at Barn 2 Plugins. It’s so unique to me that AI is this ubiquitous tool that everybody says is easy, but then for us, it’s not. It’s just continuing to stack more dot the guys across the t’s work for us than ever. Jonathan, feedback?
[00:42:23.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think I agree with a lot what you said, Salton. I’m in the middle road. I do use AI, but it’s heavily edited, and I mostly talk about subjects that I know something about. It’s edited, and I add additional video and personalize it and manipulate it. But I know other people that are just producing it and they just put it on the website, and I don’t think that’s going to achieve much, really. Well, I know it doesn’t achieve much. I got a follow-through question that’s not on the list, though. You and your team, you’re heavily involved in the WordPress community, the whole commercial environment. Where do you feel WordPress is going in 2025? Do you think it’s growing or stagnant or declining? What’s your vibe about in general, where WordPress is? It’s got a lot of SaaS competition. You got a lot of internal competition in the WordPress space. Where do you sense the broader community? Is it still expanding, doing better, or do you sense that everybody’s just staying still is the main objective?
[00:44:01.620] – C S Sultan
I don’t think it’s a problem in the WordPress industry anymore that you need to worry about other industries taking over because WordPress has grown a lot and So has the people who are developing in WordPress. I really like to credit this to all developers who are still working in WordPress. You might think that even this question came up a few years back as well, that, hey, where is WordPress going? Is it really a a good future or a bad future. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. I mean, WordPress is still huge. Most people rely on this. If you think about the user point of view, they never want WordPress to go, right? Why would they? Because you don’t get this level of control of self-hosting and managing stuff that you’d normally get. So you need to make sure that you’re doing the right things. When you’re using WordPress, you need to maintain a lot of stuff in terms of privacy, in terms of security. That’s true, but it’s still more control. So WordPress is not going anywhere. And developers are being creative and expert nowadays to go beyond a lot of boundaries. For example, if I talk about AI, we couldn’t think of AI in WordPress one year back because we thought, okay, the server cannot take it if we go through WordPress, right?
[00:45:25.420] – C S Sultan
But when we went for creator LMS, we initially also thought the same, that, okay, AI is not possible. We just will give an integration with OpenAI. But look at us now. It’s just three months ago, we thought that, okay, let’s look into this. And now we have our own AI integrated into creator LMS. So that has been possible in WordPress, which we never thought it was possible before. So I don’t think WordPress is going anywhere. It totally depends on how developers are managing their own skills. And And if they’re good, they can use WordPress to the best of best. And SaaS wouldn’t be a competition because we know how to maintain lower costs and we know how to offer more control with SaaS people will never give you.
[00:46:13.800] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I follow. So, in general, most people who have some idea of what they’re doing still see opportunities and a lot of growth in the WordPress space. Am Are you on the right track there?
[00:46:31.200] – C S Sultan
Yes, definitely. You’re absolutely right.
[00:46:33.940] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Back over to you, Kurt.
[00:46:39.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
I turned off my noise. My dog was making noise. Are you talking about me? I guess I get the pleasure of the last question. It’s a famous question for Jonathan in the show. If you had your own time machine, your own H. G. Wells or Doctor Who, and you could travel back in time to the beginning of your career, like the very beginning when you got started, Sulton. What advice would you give yourself?
[00:47:09.240] – C S Sultan
If I were to talk about the beginning of my career, it was a long time ago. I started back in 2009, actually. So I would actually give myself advice to say, ‘Hey, get on Instagram and TikTok, because that’s what everybody gets a bite of nowadays.’ If I could become an influencer now, I would be in Dubai, riding a Lamborghini, and doing things like that, if I had started back then. But I never really got into that, and I think that’s why I’m in a position here in this company. But I don’t have regrets, but I would definitely tell myself to become an influencer if I were to go back in time.
[00:47:49.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Well, you know what? It’s never too late. I’m 58, and I got a thriving TikTok channel, Barbecue and Meat in the Backyard.
[00:47:56.520] – C S Sultan
Okay, that’s great. Hopefully, I get to do something like that pretty soon. Jonathan?
[00:48:06.880] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, sure. We’re going to end the show here. So, Salton, what’s the best way for people to learn more about the new plugin and the company in general?
[00:48:20.340] – C S Sultan
First, if you want to learn more about WB Funnel, simply visit getwbfunnel. Com. That’s our website. Regarding the new tool, we have already reached out to early adopters. We are asking people to join the early adopters list to offer them an additional discount. For that, you can simply visit the link, getwbfunnel. Com/getwbfunnel. Creatorlmsearlyaccess. If you click on that link, people will have the option to join the list. So that’s one of the ways. However, you can also reach out to us directly through our support team. So it’s support@getwifunnel. Com. If you reach out to us, we will always be happy to answer any questions and provide more information about our new tools. And, of course, if they wish, they can also reach out to me. There’s nothing wrong with that. However, if you reach out to our support, you’ll get faster answers, as I’m always available.
[00:49:22.240] – Jonathan Denwood
All the links will be included in the show notes that support this show, which you can find on the WordPress site.
[00:49:31.360] – C S Sultan
One more thing, I would actually ask them to… Sorry about interrupting. I’ll actually ask them to join our community. We have a Facebook community, Facebook/group/wbfunnels. That’s where we announced everything the first time we launched or did anything. That’s another place I would ask them to keep an eye on.
[00:49:52.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, sure. As I mentioned, all the links will be included in the support show notes on the WP-Tonic website. So, Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find what you’re about?
[00:50:07.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
To connect with me personally, I’m on LinkedIn frequently, and I’m the only Kurt von Ahnen listed there. So if you make the connection or pop a message, we’ll connect there. And if it’s for business, manana nomas. Anything manana nomas leads back to me.
[00:50:21.020] – Jonathan Denwood
If you want to support the show and are listening on your iPhone or Android phone, or on iTunes or Spotify, why not leave us a review? It really does help us be more visible to new listeners and viewers. We would greatly appreciate it if you could leave a review. As I said, it’s really easy on the iPhone or the Spotify app, and it genuinely helps grow the community. If you could do that, both Kirek and I would be really appreciative. We will be back next week. I think next week will be our roundtable show. Matt Madeis is joining us on that show from the Matt Report. It should be a great show. We love you to join us there live. It should be really fantastic. We look forward to seeing you soon, folks. Bye.
[00:51:16.210] – C S Sultan
Take care, everyone. Have a nice day.
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