#559 WP-Tonic Show With Special Guest Spencer Forman CEO of LaunchFlows

Lessons Learnt Connected To Building Add-on Plugin for WooCommerce

We discuss building a modern WordPress plugin for WooCommerce LaunchFlows how to avoid the pitfalls and what WC brings to the table for so many WP users.

Intro: Welcome to the WP-Tonic podcast where each week Jonathan and his co-host, interview the leading experts in WordPress, e-learning, and online marketing. Jonathan, take it away.

Johnathan Denwood: Welcome back folks to the WP-Tonic Show, this is episode 559. It’s our first episode of 2021, survived the Christmas New Year period, didn’t get the virus and I wasn’t at Washington yesterday, so everything’s fine and dandy, isn’t it? Got my great co-host Steven and we’ve got a great friend of the show, a sponsor of the show, a member of my Friday show panel, Spencer Forman, he’s agreed to come on. And we’re going to be talking about the lessons that he has learned and the arrows in his back that he has received in launching his LaunchFlows plugin, an add-on plugin for WooCommerce but much, much more than that. So, Steven, would you quickly like to introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?

Steven Sauder: Yeah, my name is Steven Sauder, I’m from www.zipfish.io, where we optimize servers and the code to make your WordPress site blazing fast.

Johnathan Denwood: And Spencer, can you give us a quick 22nd intro about yourself?

Spencer Forman: Sure, Spencer Forman, long-time WordPress advocate, and I’d say author and teacher, but really, I focus now on helping people understand that there’s a small stack of plugins you need to achieve all the goals you want out of your e-commerce members’ site and so forth. And we focus on mainly using WooCommerce and making it do things that it never could before do on its own, including sales funnels, and so forth.

Johnathan Denwood: That’s great. And before we go into the main part of the show, I want to talk about our main sponsor. Obviously, Spencer also sponsors the show, his company does, but our main sponsor is Kinsta Hosting. Kinsta is a specialized WordPress hosting provider, it’s a great company; they’ve been supporting the show for the past three years and it’s been much appreciated, their support and they’ve just been a great sponsor.

Why should you care? Well, they supply really fantastic hosting, it’s on the Google cloud, if you’ve got a client that needs good hosting and good support, I would have no concerns about sending them to Kinsta. So, if you’re looking for a hosting plan for yourself or for a client go over to Kinsta to have a look at what they have to offer, if it meets your requirements, sign up. And if you do, do that, please tell them that you heard about them on the WP-Tonic Show. So, we’re going into the main part of the interview.

So, Spencer what’s the background story to LaunchFlows? Why did you decide that it was time to go into the arena of a commercial WordPress plugin? Well, in the course of all my other being involved with WordPress, my other endeavors were actually creating plugins and creating things back in the days before the page builders. And although the specialty of consulting that I did, went away, from that, WooCommerce became a real powerhouse. I would say it’s probably the most fundamental plugin that anybody can use in a WordPress space, ironically, even if you’re not selling anything.

So, as WooCommerce grew and as WordPress grew, it became very clear that other platforms Kartra, ClickFunnels, Kajabi, and even the CRMs like Salesforce, Infusionsoft, HubSpot. We’re making it clear to people that there’s a way to onboard and register new people, track them with marketing automation, and take them on a journey. And as my relationships and experience in WordPress continued forward, I was very fortunate to meet Jack Arturo, with who we started a relationship professionally for me to help him with the marketing and other aspects of the product.

Johnathan Denwood: Can I just slightly interrupt but I’m not being rude. How did you meet Jack?

Spencer Forman: Well, one of the things that I’ve always enjoyed about WordPress is, it’s kind of like if you were a baseball fan or a rock and roll fan and you had access to all the players or all the rockstars, see WordPress is sort of a potluck dinner. Even today you have an environment where if you want to get to know your favorite author, it’s not like they’re locked behind a paywall somewhere, you can just reach out and say, hi. I give credit to Luke Stacey, who works with me directly, he discovered Jack’s plugin when it was in its infancy, and he brought it to my attention and the two of us looked at each other and more or less said, game-changer right here.

Everything is going to be different because Jack’s plugin allows you to connect an outside CRM to WordPress, which was sort of one of the missing links. So, I immediately reached out to Jack like a fawning schoolgirl at a rock concert, and I said, Jack, I don’t know you, but I guarantee you’re going to want to work with me because I saw his product, not as a geek tool, which he can speak for himself on that. But I think he looked at it more like a geek tool, I looked at it as a marketer’s dream come true.

And as such we worked professionally, he retained my services professionally first, but then I immediately said, we need to just be more of a collaborative effort because the long-term prospects for this are obvious. And I think that’s where we bring the story to today, which is I’ve always enjoyed, you’re one of the people, and Steven’s another person, I’ve always enjoyed meeting anybody that’s involved with WordPress because you never know how those pieces fit together.

But here’s the thing that I think I do to solve problems today and what I guess you could say my focal point is, is that the page builders and the other plugins and the specialty tools in WordPress have sort of taken this potluck dinner of 200,000 plus random things made by people, everybody’s making meatloaf and a few of them have stood out from the rest. And by organizing those as a consortium, sort of saying this minimal stack of really well-done things, all working together solves the problem that you don’t need the confusion of the rest.

I think that’s the future of WordPress and most, all of it is really believe it or not stacked in many ways upon WooCommerce. So, LaunchFlows is my contribution at the development level to what I was already doing at the consultative and hands-on level, working with both the authors and the people. And the only twist to the story is, I have the advantage, I’ll call it the second mover advantage; in late last year before all the pandemic and stuff, there were other plugins who do the sales funnel modification of WooCommerce.

In other words, WooCommerce is a product that is like walking into the home Depot, you just are overwhelmed with like here’s a shop and a million products and you click a product that goes to a product page. And then a product page goes to a cart and a cart goes to checkout, and it’s like, oh my gosh, I don’t know what to do. These other plugins were trying to achieve what everybody really wants, which is how can I sell my product or service or register somebody from A to B with nothing in between.

But they all had various flaws because of my experience in coding, my experience with relationships with other authors like Jack, I had second-mover advantage. I decided at the beginning of this year to just make the lean mean focused plugin, that modifies WooCommerce along with other cool page builders, to do the thing people need without breaking other stuff, and that’s it.

Johnathan Denwood: That’s great, over to you, Steven.

Steven Sauder: So, in building LaunchFlows, you have this idea, and you start building your MVP or whatever as most people go about doing it. But then when it comes to launching a product, that’s where a lot of people I think get hung up, how do you know you have something good enough? How do you know you have something that you can ship to the market? How did you decide that, yes, this is what the market needs, or at what point did you decide to start selling the plugin after you started putting some of these pieces together and writing some of the code behind it?

Spencer Forman: It’s interesting because I’ve read another entrepreneurial endeavor that they say things like, if you want to start a new business, you do it as a side hustle while you have a job. So, I never built LaunchFlows as a livelihood, it was never intended to take the place of where I make my livelihood, which is on the professional, consultative level, and so forth. At the same time, I also had that second-mover advantage, which is to say, I have not only access to my own audience of students and clients.

I mean, there were probably over 20,000 at the time I started and it’s over 30,000 now, but also, I had the advantage of being able to go in and help the people who were struggling with other people’s products. Now, I will admit to you, there’s a certain level of politics and friction, and in one case, some real little drama, when you come in and see, there’s something wrong with somebody else’s product and you try to improve upon it, you do that at your peril, but you can oftentimes be a Robin Hood for many people.

We’ve seen this, for example, when WooCommerce, which was a theme company at the time came into the Jigoshop plugin and said, you guys have such possibility, you’re just really not doing it. We’re going to take the plugin, we’re going to buy out all your developers, and it’s nice to know you, that’s open source. I didn’t take anybody’s code, LaunchFlows was created from scratch, but I will tell you that one of the well-known first movers in the sales funnel space, I was in there early days, helping all their clients to try to get around the fundamental flaws of their product.

And I would say to this day, at least half of the LaunchFlows customers are refugees from that software because it’s still not fixed. The other half are people that come from the other worlds, like the CRM world, who are just saying, look, I don’t want to pay Russell Brunson $300 a month when I can have and own it and control it on WordPress with WooCommerce, LaunchFlows, Elementor WP Fusion and so forth.

Steven Sauder: So, when you were coming up with the idea of LaunchFlows, were you solving your own internal need, or was it because you had all of these clients that you were kind of consulting with that have to you? And you’re like, oh, I know this is a need for all of these people and everybody’s asking me how to solve it, and there’s not a good way, so I’m going to create that way.

Spencer Forman: I mean, you raise a good point. It’s absolutely the method, I used to teach this at 1WD, but it’s the way to success, whether you are going to make a dollar at first or not, find the pain. So, the definitive universal pain was, people wanted to sell their product or service and onboard new users to their marketing automation, in an easy way that also made sense with something they could trust for e-commerce.

So, the pain was people in WooCommerce were so close, but couldn’t do the things that really made the difference between I’m lost in Home Depot versus here’s the thing, so, sales funnels and upsell, downsell, cross-sell instant registration, donation forms, and so forth. Then you go and help people solve the pain with the existing tools, so the first three to six months, I was in that other group finding what’s wrong with the existing products and trying to work out, weirdly enough I didn’t want to be a developer and coder but working out coding patches.

That’s what led to A, I have a solution for the pain B unfortunately, or fortunately, the solution is not viable by patching what’s here, I just might as well put it into its own fresh product. And then the last part is if you can give away or experiment with people on your own dime with that thing, and it works, then you can sell either to teach them the pain or offered to it and ready to go bundle, and that’s essentially what happened.

So, I didn’t have one of these, it’s nothing wrong with it, but pay me to do a pre well, I’m not sure what you call those things, but where you sell people on the idea of a product, they’ll come in the future, I follow more of the let’s get in the airplane. You’re all getting on board for free and I’m going to work on the engines while we’re flying, and if it works, then stick around, If not, not, and that’s how it worked out. It was never a cost of development because I was just doing it as a side gig on top of my stuff but at the same time, I had an infinite amount of people that were willing to jump on board and say, yeah, please solve my problem, and that’s where he got the testing.

Steven Sauder: That’s super cool because I feel like people say, find the pain or oftentimes you’re solving a pain that you have, and then you start looking around for other people that have that pain. But because you went more of the community route, I’m going to be a part of these communities that I know there’s this paining system, I talk to all of these people. Then on day one, when you start to build that product when you start building LaunchFlows.

You have all of these extra people that are weighing in and you know what everybody’s thinking versus just your own silo, which I know I’ve struggled with in the past when building products. It’s just like, oh, this is a pain I’m going to solve it, and it turns out your pain is a little bit different than everybody else’s because the more people you get weighting in on that the more accurately you can build out that product and that feature set that you’re offering.

Spencer Forman: I’m sorry, you bring up a good point though, which is the beauty of WordPress because it’s open-source. I’m not referring to taking advantage of somebody else’s code, but because it’s open-source, you can see how they did things. So, if you have a technical area of expertise or it could just be not on the tech, you could see how they sell it or how they price it or how the customers are in their own, this is what happened in the one group, in that other company’s own Facebook group, dozens and dozens of people begging for some help.

It was like in the 1WD days, one of my earlier companies where we taught freelance development, I had a thing I taught it said, go find a small fishing hole and stick your line in and see if the fish bite because it’s way better to build a product, build a solution into a small community, a Facebook group of people or a single product. And then you get your first hundred customers versus trying to sell into the open market at the first worth and you’ll never the attention. Just to add on to your point, that’s kind of the thought process in it.

Steven Sauder: That’s cool, back to you, Johnathan.

Johnathan Denwood: All right. I was wondering on reflection, one of the problems with a product like LaunchFlows is that it’s not a form plugin, or it’s not a pop-up and I’m not being disparaging to form plugin developers or pop-up developers. I’m just pointing out, it’s really easy to explain what it is, it builds forms, it builds pop-ups; you can explain what you’re doing in literally one sentence, and the majority, unless they know nothing about websites or WordPress, your audience almost immediately knows what the plugin does.

Yours is a much more on the surface, a more complicated proposition. Has that been a challenge, Spencer?

Spencer Forman: Well, I grant you that the marketing message is always challenging when you’re building even a first layer plugin. So, for example, what do I mean by first layer? And I’ll call LaunchFlows a second layer plugin. It doesn’t need absolutely, free to use Elementor although, we recommend it, you can use a variety of page builders, including Gutenberg, but it really works best with free Elementor, but it absolutely needs WooCommerce.

So, if I was trying to make an e-commerce plugin or something, obviously you have to look for those things that attract people to this as an e-commerce plugin, or as you said, it’s a popup plugin. LaunchFlows is easy to explain now, but only after working with people and finding out their pain points. So, what we say on the website, and when I explain to you now, is what LaunchFlows does, is it makes it possible to do things with WooCommerce you could never do before sales funnels, upsell, downsell, marketing, registration done and done the reason that it doesn’t do things like, well, by the way, it does do pop-ups, but it doesn’t do pop-ups itself.

Is that there’s a philosophy that I was just sort of trying to describe the modern WordPress stack, is that each plugin stays in its own lane like runners in the Olympics. If you cross over, you’re out of the race, the old way of doing WordPress is every plugin trying to stay in everybody’s lane and doing everything for everybody, and then like a bad TV dinner or something, everything’s mixed up in every tray container. We say that if you keep with using the specialty pop-up plug you have maybe it’s Elementor maybe it’s Gravity Forms, maybe it’s something else, LaunchFlows directly works with that.

So, you can have a pop-up that allows an instant registration to your sales funnel, or you can have a pop-up that sells somebody into a multi-step process. And it requires quite frankly, a lot of feedback from the users of, do you know what I’m explaining to you? I mean, a lot of deer in the headlights’ moments, and that’s why, to be honest, I really enjoy working with customers at the very moment the idea comes out and giving them stuff to use because you never know where the pain is until they explain it to you and test it.

You can make hypotheses, but relationships are relationships, whether it’s with a software pain solution or a personal friendship, you just have to get into it to know what the thing is you’re solving.

Johnathan Denwood: That’s great, we’re going to go on a half-hour break. We’ll be back in a few moments and are going to be asking Spencer some of the lessons he’s learned through the process of launching LaunchFlows. We’ll be back in a few moments.

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Johnathan Denwood: We’re coming back. We’ve had a bit of chat with Spencer Forum, the founder of LaunchFlows, a friend of the show, personal friend, and panelist on the WP-Tonic Round Table Show that we do every Friday, at 8:30 Pacific standard time. And you can join this live for that great show by going to the WP-Tonic Facebook page around 8:30 every Friday, and you’ll be able to watch this discussion live. We got Brian Gardner, the former founder and the joint founder of StudioPress joining us but obviously, that will be before you’ll be hearing this, but there we go.

So, what are some of the lessons that you’ve, LaunchFlows before we went live, we had a little bit of a discussion and it’s been around 9 10, 11 months since LaunchFlows has gone public? What have been some of the surprises, some of the things you could share that you didn’t anticipate that you’ve learned through this process, Spencer?

Spencer Forman: Interestingly, there are things that could be construed as like more positive than I imagined, but a lot of them also have to do with the messaging. So, I would say that because I had done this before, I wasn’t as surprised as I would have been the first or second time of doing this, how much effort actually goes into something, that’s a spontaneous idea. So, as I indicated, I never intended to write a plugin, I thought I was done with development, I built a business around it for five years and it was exhausting, and it’s a challenge.

You have to be at a different mindset to be a marketer, as a daily person who does consulting calls versus a developer, I mean, it’s literally the other part of your brain. I think if you’re going to develop anything, make sure it’s in an area of interest that you don’t feel like you’re working because I thought this, I got a bunch of these little patches for this other software product, I’ll just bundle them together and call it a weekend and give it away for free or something.

And then I realized like reading a Tom Clancy book or something, I couldn’t put it down, and one thing opened up another door and another door and not in a bad way, but in a, oh my God, I can do this, and oh, now I can do that. But now the problem is I have this one-day project turned into three months and I have a hundred document pages of randomness and all the videos that I like to make, I’ve got a real mess on my hands. And so, you have to decide at that point A, is it something you love enough to Marie Kondo it, organize your sock drawers, get it into a real product and product-market fit, or is it something you’re willing to like a GitHub thing?

Yeah, good luck guys, it’s yours do what you want with it. So, if you love it, it doesn’t feel like a lot of work, and I would say that’s true here, regardless of the money. The second thing is that in today’s development world, the tools and the techniques are so out there. I’m not a professionally trained developer, I don’t even call myself a developer, I’m a hacker, but there’s enough info out there that I’m spending the time in my leisure time can go out there and learn to do stuff that I always dreamed. How cool would that be to do like speaking a foreign language?

But having some project like this is actually quite good for a busy minded person because you can really go farther than you ever dreamed of, it’s not a barrier to entry problem, and so I would encourage anybody to say the optimistic thing. If you find a topic you love that has a pain you can solve, and you love doing it as a side gig, you can one day wake up wearing a hat you never expected to wear. At the same time, I, as a marketer, get to flex all those muscles.

I get to decide what is the thing it’s solving and how to explain it and how to price it, and weirdly enough, this is the pain I’m solving versus what you might have thought. And then you get to do the politics, which I don’t really love, but the relationship part of politics is fun, to know that I’m in the circle of all the people that are creating stuff at the same time, having an influence on the people that can make stuff in a world where let’s be honest, WordPress has what, 35, 38% of all websites. It’s kind of cool. Do you know what I mean?

Where else am I going to go? I’m not going to get into a rock band and get to be in front of that many people. But if you make a plugin that becomes successful, you kind of get to be like in your own mind, exposed to a big audience of people. So. There’s a lot of excitement for anybody who chooses to do it, no prior experience is required.

Johnathan Denwood: I’ll throw it over, it’s just a complimentary quick follow up question before I throw it over to Steven. Do you feel that for all the benefits you just explained that you like coding? Do you think they would have, if you had the budget or you might’ve had the budget, but you’ve chosen this path? Do you think reflecting back because of the difference between the mindsets between marketers explaining handling customer and coder that you would have been better handing the coding side of it over to somebody else, and you just concentrate on the marketing and the educational part of it, which you’re such an expert on because of your experience with your previous businesses?

Spencer Forman: I love that question. And I love the question because it dovetails into what Steven asked, but it also dovetails into something I can offer to anybody. When I was doing my early days before WordPress on the SAS platform, that was, let’s say open-source-ish because they had an open rest API and they encouraged people to make stuff. And it was a Marc Andreessen company that had a hundred million dollars of funding, and they said, here’s the free thing, make what you want.

Well, I had a coding partner who had similar interest and a friend, but he always felt limited because I would get as a marketer, these incredible ideas, or the customer wants this, and then I had to go to him, which he was very receptive to and he had to make it happen in a vacuum and then hand it back to me. And as a fair person, I had to accept what he gave me because I can’t say, hey man, you made those eggs, and they don’t taste good. I had to be like, it was pretty good, a little more salt or something, so I always felt limited.

In WordPress, you can pick a second-level product, that’s an accessory to something, go out directly, find out what the pain is. And in many cases, the product doesn’t even have to be a full-blown plug, and it could be a couple of snippets, or it could be a lesson or course, but the benefit of being a double threat, being a marketer first in contact with the customers and being able to immediately create what the customer says, they need. It’s a superpower and it’s not my own superpower, it’s a superpower anybody can achieve.

And I will tell you it’s a competitive advantage because that other company where I was originally helping their clients, they had a division of labor. There was the marketer guy and there’s the coding guy, and the coding guy had a team of people that had a very, still does, a very popular set of products and services that obviously had priorities. So, they had a ton of customers who were really unhappy and so, that left room for a guy like me as a double threat to come in and go, what’s your problem? Oh, I can do that today.

Oh, what’s your problem? I can do that today. And it was so easy to achieve satisfaction in a customer like the hotdog vendor who wheels up to a stadium where they’re not selling hot dogs, every Tom, Dick, and Harry coming in and out of there wants to buy a hot dog. It’s not hard because you go where the pain exists, and so, that’s my answer. Is that I would always rather be a marketer who can do enough coding to make the solution than to hire somebody where I had no idea what they’re making, I’m at their mercy.

And I can’t get the instant satisfaction because boy oh boy is that incredible. When you have somebody post on Facebook, hey, can your product do this? And you go, hold on, mic drop, here you go, and then you release a new version of the product it blows people’s minds.

Steven Sauder: I think that’s like some of those like I’ve been super impressed with, just following kind of what you’ve been doing for a little while on Facebook. As you said, I’ll see somebody that said, hey, can you do this? And then later that evening, there’s this video with you Spence just walking the person through, like, yeah, now all you have to do is click this button over here, and now you have this real hyper custom specialized flow. The speed that turnaround time that, that happens is incredible, so you’re right, that is definitely like a superpower.

I don’t think that there are a lot of plugin shops out there that have that skill set or that ability to listen to the customer and implement the things that need to happen from a very customer-focused area in a timely manner. Because oftentimes like myself, there’s a plugin that I like to use or something, and I make a feature request and it’s going to be eight months until that feature even has a chance of getting implemented. By that time, I have to move on and use something else.

Spencer Forman: And I want to give credit where credit’s due. My desire to become a developer and do those things had a couple of caveats on it. First of all, by choosing a second-tier plugin that accessorizes off somebody else’s core things, I was able to have the advantage of avoiding the mistakes of those other products, which all sought to interfere with, hijack or break the core behavior of the product they’re working with. Which I found to be their biggest handicap and still is, so I was forced to a set of rules that I said, I refuse to break the core products behavior, that way I won’t be in a pickle if I do these cool things.

And there are other plugins that do it, but the second thing, I was very inspired by some of the people we just referred to, and some that we haven’t, but I’ll mention, Jack Arturo and getting to know him, his product is incredibly complex, he’s a true developer’s developer.

Nevertheless, he’s extremely good at staying in his lane, and so, he often does that same thing as well. Like somebody asks for a feature and it just pops out and people are like, oh my God, you are the best. But also, if you look at him, even though he no longer is, my throat is going thin, even though he’s no longer at the development side, like Pippin Williamson, it was very inspirational to me in general because when he was active, they would oftentimes have these very clever, he’s a double threat. He was marketing it and he was creating the plugin before he had the bigger team.

Now, their development is like the opposite, it’s glacial, I’m not being uncomplimentary, it’s just because they have a bigger audience, a bigger team, they have got to be more careful about breaking stuff. But yeah, it’s fascinating that I get inspired on my own, I get excited by some of our clients where they’re using the same TV, dinner plugins that I’m recommending and making a couple of them. They take the same TV dinner formula and just pour in their own product or service, it could be dating advice or photography advice, or some specific little service and unlike normal people who make a couple of bucks here and there, their thing goes through the moon.

And that’s, what’s cool because if you can control the tool and then you can work on your marketing, you can just keep stumbling and stumbling until you find the marketing part that goes, wow, could be in a niche. And all of a sudden something that was overlooked by most people becomes incredibly lucrative.

Steven Sauder: What are you doing for marketing now? Because you started very community-based and focused, and building those relationships, is it still very much of a relationship sort of marketing effort, or how have you changed that and pivoted that over time?

Spencer Forman: What’s interesting is that I want to explain something that’s kind of coming around to your answer. I find in the WordPress world because we’ve got open-source to start with, that there are what I’ll call upstream market opportunities and downstream. And I don’t mean to be uncomplimentary saying downstream like that’s bad, but downstream would-be people who are customers either starting out in WordPress or are WordPress only.

And let’s just say, they are still experimenting, they’re still budget-minded, they don’t have a product-market fit, so they’re not monetized enough to pay for a real, this is a no brainer. The upstream opportunities are the people that have a product-market fit and are tending to come to me through other relationships and other onboardings. But they’ve been using CRMs or closed source platforms that are quite expensive and claim to do everything under the sun for an extraordinary price but don’t always deliver if you are in a situation where you’ve got that market.

I like to say that you can experiment with the product at both levels at a price point that is objectively fair to both, but at some point, you have to decide whether you’re a mass-market product or you’re a kind of personal concierge product. And I would say that where I’ve chosen to position LaunchFlows is at the moment is more in the direction of upstream and ironically more as an accessory to the larger consulting and other direct help opportunities.

So, I wouldn’t call it a lead magnet or a tripwire product because it’s still even with the discount, it’s 225 bucks, but we’ve made it simple enough that you’re not going to find us doing a Black Friday sale for a lifetime deal for $99 because if you think that’s a good thing, you’re not the customer that’s ultimately going to buy where I really make my bread and butter, which is helping you with the actual business.

Steven Sauder: So, no app streamer?

Spencer Forman: Yeah, exactly. No, no, it was business and it’s a great business, but that’s not the business and our other competitors in the space, the ones that I was referring to, they’re downstream marketing, they’re marketing to because of the market, a person who’s extraordinarily good at what he does. They’re marketing to the people that find them on YouTube and otherwise, and go, oh, you sold me the lifetime deal for $500 and great.

But the deal with the devil there is those people don’t realize they bought a plugin that they don’t know how to use in the space where they don’t know how to connect it to the other plugins. And then when they start to use it just like a ClickFunnels or Kartra, Kajabi, they realized like, oh my God, I need somebody to help me to actually achieve the goals with this, crickets, hey, sorry, we don’t know you, we sold you the thing, good luck. Do you know what I mean? Go to our Facebook group and leave a question.

Johnathan Denwood: In fairness, there are about three to four actual products that come to my mind. It’s a kind of general problem with WordPress its plugin ego-system has great strengths. What, you’ve pointed out is one of the weaknesses in the actual ego system of WordPress in general, isn’t it?

Spencer Forman: It is because, again, let’s call it what it is, in today’s world as of 2021, we’re seeing differentiation. So, we’ll talk about this maybe in a minute where I predict things are going to go, but the differentiator between upstream and downstream marketing is going to be the difference between people who just take the ready to go consumer-level bundled pricing of a random plugin versus I’m really not buying the plugin. I’m buying a relationship into an author and a system of plugins that work to achieve the higher goals I need so that I don’t end up losing money, losing time, losing my business over things that otherwise would have been fixable.

Johnathan Denwood: I just because there’s the need, funny enough, that’s what WP-Tonic is trying to do in the course. And the membership area is to help people who want the freedom of WordPress but give them support and guidance where they need it the most plus offer all the tools and the hosting and everything in one bundle. And I’ve learned an enormous amount over the past year by launching this, it’s been an 18-month process for me. We’re going to finish the podcast, but Spencer’s agreed to stay on.

We’re going to butt in on the bonus content, which you’ll be able to see on the WP-Tonic YouTube channel, and I also post a load of training and other videos on that channel.
So, I suggest that you do subscribe to it as a support of the show. In the bonus content, we’re going to be discussing our predictions for 2021, when it comes to the world of WordPress, I think that it’s going to be a great little discussion.

So, as I said, do join us and you’ll be able to watch the whole interview, plus the bonus content, as I said on the WP-Tonic YouTube channel, please subscribe to that. It’s been growing quite quickly, recently so very pleased. So, Spencer what’s the best way to find out more about you and LaunchFlows?

Spencer Forman: Well, the easiest way is, you could go to LaunchFlows.com. You can also join our free Facebook group, which I’m proud of that, unlike a lot of groups is actually really active, both from myself, as well as our, and we’re at over four or 500 active users now of people really using the product. And that’s, I think a nice reflection upon how the community has grown. It’s not a, please help us, we don’t know what we’re doing, the people who speak up are the people that have been using the product.

And I’m also there with those same suggestions of, hey, tell me what you like, don’t like, what I can change. So, that’s a fun way to get direct contact, but also, I encourage anybody to just set up a free call with me. So, our consultancy business is at WPlaunchify.com and you can click the button there and just have a call because what my marketing efforts essentially are is, I take four to six calls every day from people with any number of WordPress, WooCommerce related issues, or marketing automation membership.

And you just tell me what your setup is, and what you have a question about, ironically, it often leads to a free answer that helps you immediately, but then you realize, wow, you can come on over for a virtual hour and help me remodel my kitchen and make those brownies and stuff like that.

Johnathan Denwood: That’s great. And Steven, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to.

Steven Sauder: Yeah, head over to zipfish.io and run a speed test to see how much faster your website can be.

Johnathan Denwood: And I can really say Steven’s helped with the WP-Tonic website, it’s a lot quicker; he and his team do an excellent job of making your website a lot quicker, so, I highly recommend Steven’s service. As I said, please join us for the bonus content, we’ll see in next week, with another great guest, or it will be an internal discussion between me and Steven around a subject around WordPress. We’ll see you next week, folks, bye

Every Friday at 8:30am PST we have a great and hard-hitting round-table show with a group of WordPress developers, online business owners and WordPress junkies where we discuss the latest and most interesting WordPress and online articles/stories of the week. You can also watch the show LIVE every Friday at 8:30am PST on our Facebook WP-Tonic Show page. https://www.facebook.com/wptonic/

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#559 WP-Tonic Show With Special Guest Spencer Forman CEO of LaunchFlows was last modified: by