He Built His Own Gravity Forms Chatbot
4321. Sam Texas, welcome to Breakdown.
Sam:Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate the the opportunity.
Matt:Serial founder, we were chatting in the green room before I hit record. Serial founder sounds like something I would have as a title if I didn't have this day job. You you've been in and out of the WordPress space. We're talk talking before a decade ago, you were in WordPress proper. That was like the real, maybe just a couple years away from the real gold rush of WordPress.
Matt:Right? Like, people were just like, I need a site. I don't wanna use, Microsoft SharePoint. I don't wanna use Adobe's stuff. I don't wanna use these big heavily licensed CMSs.
Matt:WordPress, like, the fish were jumping into the boat. I ran an agency for a decade. The fish were jumping into the boat. They're like, give me WordPress. Nowadays, not so easy as an agency owner, but we'll talk about that, in a little bit.
Matt:What are you up to these days? I saw this tweet about AI, MCPs, Gravity Forms. How did you get back into WordPress?
Sam:Yeah. So I kinda joined up with an an old friend of mine. I worked for his agency or contracted his agency, yeah, ten plus years ago when it was you were really fighting to get WordPress up and running for big brands and things. And, you know, you go separate ways. A decade later, I'm I'm I'm coming back, and he's got this agency or this this company called Trooper Trooper Dev where they do WordPress maintenance.
Sam:I was sitting in on a client call, and, you know, you get the rundown of the multitude of plug ins and how it's all stitched together. And they were really trying to figure out their strategy of how to to leverage more with with Gravity Forms. And I've been playing with AI and and this MCP server stuff for a while now that's been my bag for the last couple of years, and I thought, let me go look. So I go off and find Gravity Forms website, spin up a a trial thing. I'm looking at the documentation going, this is great.
Sam:I can really knock this out pretty quickly. And within a couple hours of of a little bit of vibe coding, a little bit of background in PHP, I'm able to stitch together this MCP server connecting it to my Claude AI account. And next thing I know, I'm I'm chatting to Claude, and he's creating these forms in the in the background. So, yeah, I thought, hey. I'm gonna record this, throw it up as a tweet, and and, you know, just share.
Sam:And the inbound has been pretty interesting.
Matt:So And at Trooper, they're using Gravity Forms for their customers now, or did you just say, oh, I I know how to solve something. Let me go get Gravity Forms. Or do they have Gravity Forms in the mix already, and they were just, like, asking to to push it maybe a little bit further?
Sam:Well, that's exactly it. Right? They we were sitting in there trying to figure out like, they their use case was they have a bunch of different types of customers, and each customer needs just a little tweak to each of the Gravity Form. They wanna capture this field, not that field. They want they want each one wanted something different, and they didn't want to be clicking around a lot inside of the admin.
Sam:And and I was just sort of thinking, it would be great if I could just chat to to Claude or GPT and say, like, I need a form with these fields. And sure enough, just from a very basic idea, I was able to sort of try that out. And it it doesn't go to production right now, but I think it really illustrates a new way of of thinking because all of a sudden, we with this interface, we've take taken the entire tech team out of the flow, and it's now landed directly with their sales, sales and presales team.
Matt:Yeah. And I assume this means that they their sales team and probably eventually marketing teams, they can start to just, like, rapidly deploy these forms for lead gen, maybe, direct sales, accepting money right on right on the site without waiting for the engineering team to, hey. We need another page. Can you build this Gravity form? Can you tell us when it's ready?
Matt:You know, GitHub issues, Slack messages. Like, why are we waiting for this? It should be this easy, and and you're kinda helping speed up optimizing that process.
Sam:Exactly that. Right? The the idea here is, like, Claude, the the whole AI thing, it reads you know, the way the MCP server is built, it has all that documentation, and and I saw immediately Gravity Forms had great documentation. It's got a REST API, and you can do all of the all the things that you do sort of through the through the admin panel. And and with some tweaking and iterations, you know, you get to a very usable form very quickly.
Sam:Now the the I guess we'll have to test and see, you know, does that work soup to nuts from the the the marketer alone to having their their delivered endpoint only through this MCP server, but I it seems I'm quite confident that that it'll it'll get there.
Matt:You know, one of the biggest challenges that I have as part of the marketing team is letting people know. This is more of a statement, not a direct question, but I loved your feedback, know knowing what you know about Gravity Forms now. I was talking to somebody the other day. They're trying to same thing the same way I met you. They put out a tweet.
Matt:I saw the tweet. Was like, hey. Let me DM this person and just chat about, like, what they're working on because I'm always interested to learn how people are using Gravity Forms. So, anyway, he's building this thing, WordPress multisite. There's a bunch of stuff going on, and he wanted to use Gravity Forms for, like, this just this one part of it, was accepting payments.
Matt:So we were chatting, and, like, he started saying he was using all these plug ins to do all these other things and to activate users and to register users and to create multisites. And I was like, hey. Gravity Forms does all this. Like, it does all of this. You don't need to, like he was stringing together a bunch of other plug ins.
Matt:I'm like, we could do all of it right here with Gravity Forms. With the elite license for, like, a couple $100 a year, you can have this app that's running. So I'm curious over your span of of starting businesses and working with teams. I wait. How do you think we if you could just wave a magic wand and, like, reposition the tagline for Gravity Forms, maybe in the face of AI, like, what would you say Gravity Forms does?
Matt:Not just contact form, but, like, how do you think I should tell people, like, Gravity Forms does all of this stuff?
Sam:Yeah. I mean, I I kind of had the light bulb when I was going through the docs. I'm like, what it's it's it is like a a soup to nuts process flow. And, you know, I I think I would probably beg, borrow, steal a lot from from, like, you know, HubSpot who have already spent millions on on the marketing and messaging there. But I I I feel like that it's it's kind of from the the spark of an idea to the the delight of a customer.
Sam:I feel like that's probably where Gravity Forms can play, the spark of an idea to the delight of a customer because kind of to that point, someone who has gone through the pain of stitching together all these plug ins, but but the sort of the the premium module here I imagine a world where you have the premium module engaged, you have the MCP server engaged, and then you just talk to Claude or you talk to the AI, say, this is what I want. This is my process. This is where I need to be human in the loop, and then let Claude kind of figure it out. Yeah. Yeah.
Sam:Then you get to test and iterate from there because that's actually what I'm doing already in code when I'm when I'm I'm coding in in inside of my IDE. But I feel like that's now graduating to nontechnical people having an interface like MCP. And I think that's probably a a good opportunity.
Matt:This is this is a weird statement to say halfway through 2025 when AI is changing literally, like, every hour. There's, like, a new thing that comes out. But I feel like we're all, we're all kinda settling in, like, here's what ChatGPT is really good at. Here's what, Google's really good at. Here's what Anthropic's really good at.
Matt:And then you sort of, like, there's that other layer on top for vibe coders, which might be something like Bolt and Replit and Lovable where you can kinda, like, start to see the lanes. I haven't found the the lane for MCP yet, and I still scratch my head on its sustainability
Sam:is
Matt:the best word. Like, it it's almost one of these things, like, everyone has to kind of agree on this standard. And knowing tech companies, I'm just like, somebody's not gonna play nice with m with with this idea of MCPs, and it's not gonna really work out. Where's the place one per if somebody's listening to this going, I I wanna start an MCP service two for my Gravity Forms and my agency. Is Anthropic slash Claude the place to go to do that, or can somebody sort of, like, grassroots build their own MCP service with other tools and technology?
Sam:Yeah. Great question. That was the actual question I was asking myself as I've started building this stuff. It's like, how do I get started?
Matt:Yeah.
Sam:So you can actually get an m so so here's the magic with with that. Gravity Forms has a very well documented REST API. I think and and that that you can with a few different little pieces of glue, you can generate an MCP server just from the documentation of the REST API, which I think is part of the part of the magic. Now I think that will MCP be the de facto standard? I it looks like that's you would be foolish to compete with that concept right now.
Sam:If you want an MCP server today, go do MCP stuff because that's go on GitHub and start searching. Everyone is that's the that's the protocol that everyone is implementing. Kinda like with and and so it it's fortunate that Anthropic has given away that standard, so everyone is sort of piggybacking onto it.
Matt:Yeah. Yeah. I built a a so I've been vibe coding a lot of stuff. Folks listening to the show already know that. But I had built a little website called wpapiexplorer.com.
Matt:Okay. It's the longest domain I think I've ever registered. Wpapiexplorer.com. And when I got into this, into, you know, exploring AI, WordPress has REST API. Gravity Forms has their REST API.
Matt:And I was like, I wanna build a tool just to explore, like so I can debug my own stuff. It's like a utility app. Like, anyone can use it. You can just go punch in a WordPress site and see what API endpoints are available and, like, what data it's returning. But it was like a little utility tool for me to be like, okay.
Matt:When I'm working on stuff with WordPress and connecting up to other sites, I just wanna see, like, what data is available to me. And I vibe coded that. And I think that and I'm curious on your thoughts, obviously. Like, I think that's the the future for WordPress. Like, building business sites, portfolio sites.
Matt:One might even challenge the blogging concept with WordPress. Like, is that the future, or is it using WordPress and its open source architecture as this place to store and retrieve data. Like, that's the that's where I see the longevity of of WordPress being at. But I I'm curious your thoughts. Like, how do you see WordPress surviving in a world where anyone can just go vibe code something on Replit or Bolt for their business site or their blog?
Sam:Well, I think WordPress has well over a decade of patterns embedded in the code, embedded in the behavior, embedded in the marketing. And the more that all WordPress based platform companies, you know, that that's that is the strength are the patterns that are in there, the the user patterns, the flows, the the logins, and, you know, we've had more than a decade to to make WordPress more secure. So that's not the issue. I think it's more about how do pages get published. Right?
Sam:You can make a an MCP server automatically through the rest APIs publish posts ready for, ready to go live. So I I think that's where WordPress really excels, and I've really come to view the whole WordPress ecosystem as a a really good front end to a to what sources of truth might exist in a CMS somewhere else, like a a Prisma or a, you know, some enterprise CMS, but it's nice to extract that data and have WordPress be the the presentation container for Yeah. For for that stuff. Yeah. I see that sometimes with with Trooper Dev, the the company I'm working with.
Sam:You know, they're working with some very big work WordPress multi multisite. Right? And those parts of those sources of truth live outside the context of WordPress, but they have things like SSO. They have things like other CMS things that are, floating into WordPress and then get presented. So I that's that's the future I see is WordPress has a good API.
Sam:It's it's it's extensible, and it can really be a great extensible front end to to sources of truth out there in the enterprise.
Matt:Yeah. Yeah. There's I've seen a few headlines recently about, especially in the enterprise and in bigger business where content is actually really valuable to their business, whether it's, I don't know, instructional design stuff or research papers. And some of them, at least according to these articles, people are going, woah. Woah.
Matt:Woah. I don't wanna give this content to an LLM. Like, I don't want that, you know Yeah. Chat GPT bot coming in, scooping up our data, and then just presenting it to somebody in a quick query, and then they never come to our website. You know?
Matt:Not not even talking SEO. We're talking about, like, valuable business stuff. And Right. I think WordPress is one of those platforms where it's easy to control that data and very affordable because it is open source. Yeah.
Matt:And I think we, you know, we might see publishers turn to WordPress because it's, you know, free and open source. Obviously, there's a learning curve if you're not using it and you have to develop for it depending on your organization, but, it's still it's far cheaper than, you know, some other, you know, commercial CMS. And, to toggle this stuff on and off to control that data, I I think we might be heading into a world where people are like, yeah. You can't just scrape my data for free anymore. Google did that to us for twenty years.
Sam:Yeah.
Matt:And, you know, we saw what happened there. And now all these other AI bots are doing into it. Woah. Woah. Woah.
Matt:Like, I wanna put my stuff behind a behind some kind of wall or login system. What's your take on, like, preserving content to the brand?
Sam:No. I absolutely. I think that people will I mean, it's I think that the the research and academic places kinda had a bit of a solve where there's an abstract that's published, and then the rest was behind the paywall. And I feel like that's probably a a pattern that we'll see emerge is when I land on a site, there's an abstract of what's behind there, and then I either gotta join the site. You know, there there's some sort of hoop to jump through to get to the to get to the rest of the content.
Sam:And I'm I'm also curious about I don't if you've seen this llms.text where people are now they're doing what they call LLM optimization or l it's like SEO for LLMs. And so I think there's probably gonna be some of this where where they're showing when they see that the the LLM is scraping their site, they're gonna present sort of abstract or summary data that that goes in. But the but the real valuable data will remain behind the the the gate. It'll be gated.
Matt:Yeah. Yeah. That's what you know, it's it's weird. I have I I push back against the I'm out of an age where, you know, when I started my agency way back in 02/2007, it was, like, everyone needed a Facebook page. You know?
Matt:Like, literally, like, that was the thing. And you had Facebook saying, everybody's gonna have a page. Reach your fans. You and you probably remember this. It's like, get a thousand fans on your Facebook page, and you can reach 900 of them.
Matt:You know? And now fast forward wherever we're at now, twenty years later, and it's like, have a thousand likes on your page and reach 12. Right? Unless you unless you advertise. Right?
Matt:And, you know, and there's all all this other stuff. And I'm always and same thing with Google. Right? SEO, pay per click, metadata, OpenGraph data. Like, put all your data in the OpenGraph tags for Google to help index, and then suddenly, like, they're taking all that and showing it at the top of the SERPs.
Matt:And you're like, what? People aren't coming to my site anymore, and now AI, the organic traffic falling off a cliff. And then we get to MCP, and I'm just like, man, like, don't we do this with with APIs? Like, you know, why MCP? I mean, I have an idea of it, but I'd like maybe to you for you to explore a little bit more.
Matt:Why is MCP the thing that we're all trending to over APIs in the in the sense of, like, open web and access to data? Why do you think MCP will win, over just, like, standard APIs?
Sam:I it's kind of this I think it's just a meta it's another meta. Right? I and I think in a year, we'll we we may we may see something better than MCP, or I think that this it's just the current iteration. And there's to to be fair, there's a lot of security that's just not handled right now. Like, you know, caveat emptor, it's it's this can be dangerous if you just start sticking MCP on the back end of your site.
Sam:Like, buyer beware. I think we're in this exploratory phase. To really be honest, I don't know where this lands. But what I like, and I think we saw this early on with the Microsoft stuff, like, with SOAP and some of these other ones, it was auto discovery of endpoints. Right?
Sam:So I feel like the more things change, the more they stay the same or history doesn't repeat. It rhymes, and it really is rhyming for me at the moment. But I do think that we're we're it looks like this may force a bit of standardization towards what REST APIs do and how they present themselves. So that's something I would welcome is that MCP is maybe a forcing function on adding a bit better metadata or something like that to to REST APIs.
Matt:So after your sort of ten year hiatus away from WordPress, how how do you wanna see WordPress evolve in an AI world? I've been scratching my head going, will plugins exist? Like, will the will the idea of searching for a plug in, uploading a zip file, hitting install and activate, will that still be a thing, you know, in, like, two years, or are we just gonna be talking to WordPress? Where where do you hope to see WordPress evolve in this new era?
Sam:That's a good question. I'm I'm just getting familiar again with everything. It it there there's an amazing amount of value, I think, like, in the themes. Right? In the the way that you can brand a site so easily, I think there's a lot of opportunity there for AI to come in and and and leverage on the back of that.
Sam:Tweaking a theme, you know, I think getting much more into the personalization of what a site can do. I think that like, I'll here's a free one. Here's a free one. I would love to visit a website, and it kinda knows who I am or my preference. And then it dynamically can change the it'll modify the copy on the site to talk to me in my voice Yeah.
Sam:In a voice that I understand. And I think WordPress has all the hooks to make that happen very easily. It's got the data. It's got the hooks, and it it it knows. So I think there's probably to me, it feels like it's a platform that that can create a ton of experimentation simply because the biggest opportunity is that there's so many developers on the platform, and it's so easy to go from from a lovely little plug in in the marketplace to a top 10 because it it's got the right the right narrative.
Sam:It's got the right hooks. It's got the right sort of sell. And I think that's where WordPress excels over everything else that's out there.
Matt:Do you think it's a fair trade off, at least, again, halfway through 2025 to look at WordPress, you know, in the context of vibe coding. Right? Because everyone's saying, like, I'm building apps, stand alone React apps. I I could never do this. Right?
Matt:Like, I understand software. Right. I understand infrastructure, the Internet, and how things should work, front end database, all this other stuff. But I don't write lines of code. But with Vibe coding, can do it.
Matt:Replit, Bolt, again, I can build some really cool things. Do you think and I now I look at WordPress as, wow. Yeah. I guess I could build my own WordPress with Replit or Bolt, but why when WordPress is already done for me? Right?
Matt:Sure. I can customize maybe customize it my own way. I see the advantage of WordPress and especially Gravity Forms because everyone's saying, oh, you can just create contact form with with vibe coding. Yes. You could.
Matt:A simple contact form, maybe a semi advanced contact form. But to have all the things that Gravity Forms does done for you I think people are gonna start to actually see the value in Yeah. Hey. WordPress is done. Gravity Forms is done.
Matt:Just give it to me, and I'll just build the rest of the stuff that I need maybe with AI or whatever.
Sam:No. Absolutely. I I think there's an I I don't I'm not super familiar with all of the Gravity Forms things, but it's an excellent sort of first stop along process flows. And to me, it's a no brainer that says, you know, the Gravity Forms does this part. Oh, we need to send it off on Zapier or Make to do to do some cloudy stuff, and then it comes back.
Sam:But then all of that is stitched together either with MCP, stitched together with more layers inside of Gravity Forms, but it's it's really a no brainer. And I feel like that Yeah. Because Gravity Forms already does so much, it it occupies a big chunk of what's the the Zappiers and the make.coms of the world are already struggling to do well. Yeah.
Matt:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is just a side tangent, but there are things that I I I can build in I use Replit a lot, and that that'll be one of my sort of wrapping up questions to see what tools you're using. But I use Replit a lot only because it's just all in one database hosting.
Matt:Obviously, the AI agent, like, everything's there, and I just default to Replit for a lot of the stuff that I build. But it's like, I can just start to automate all these things where I don't need to hook into a Zapier or a Make Mhmm. Because I really just need, like, one or two things to chat with each other and pass that data, you know, back and forth and then notify me at at some other end. And these tools, again, they're really empowering people, and it's, yeah, it's just really interesting to see, like, where this whole space is going, for for folks like me. But, yeah, when you're not at at Trooper or you're not working with a WordPress agency, what else are you doing with AI?
Matt:What else are you vibe coding, and what other tools are you using to get the job done?
Sam:Yeah. I mean, maybe not perfect, but, you know, I I'm deeply invested in the Python ecosystem.
Matt:You
Sam:know, I've been building on Django. Django is kind of, like, my go to for a lot of this stuff. But I I see a lot of parallels with WordPress as, like, a an application platform. And so, you know, now that I'm working with Trooper, I'm thinking a lot about WordPress as an application platform. And you wanna have asynchronous calls.
Sam:You wanna have, you know, you know, parallel tasks. You wanna have things that WordPress wasn't initially intended for, but clearly would benefit from. And and so things I'm exploring now are WordPress has a simple a great authentication system. How do we, you know, we can bring SSO in. So now I have functionally an enterprise ready template to deploy on.
Sam:And now with you see something with Gravity Forms, I have data ingestion. I have rest APIs for for automated ingestion. And I'm building these little pieces on the side that say, hey. We need a a robust email sending function. We need a robust robust social media publishing function.
Sam:Right? So I can capture OAuth two tokens from from LinkedIn, from x, from from Facebook. And those are the things I'm looking at very seriously as to how can I piggyback onto WordPress to build these enterprise things and then have the vibe coding just sort of start Monte Carlo iterating on these different things? Just like, what what's gonna work? I don't know, but I can vibe code five versions and then sort of cherry pick the best ones.
Matt:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let hold on. Let me just pull up five, you know, replic browsers or cloud browsers and start vibe coding five different projects.
Matt:I don't know which forest is burning down while I'm doing that, but I'm getting something done, you know, very productively in the browser right now. I'm glad you brought up auth auth because user authentication because I also think that that's a huge win for WordPress, which I don't see a lot of people talking about because, you know, once again, you get into I keep going back to it. I keep Replit or Supabase or I forget Amazon's all encompassing
Sam:a m a m AMS. Yeah.
Matt:Yeah. AMS. The hook with these services are is the user authentication. Right? Because it's like, hey.
Matt:You're gonna build your app, but why would you touch don't build user authentication from scratch. Why would you? Security, you know, management, email notifications, profile information, all this stuff. And I'm curious if, like, that's that's the hook for these these platforms when the user wants to migrate away and say, you know what? I don't wanna use Repla anymore.
Matt:I wanna I wanna switch over to AWS or AMS. I wonder how portable, like, the user authentication stuff is, whereas WordPress is open source, and it's gonna allow you to be a lot more portable. So I'm glad you brought that up. That's just a little thing that, was in the back of my head too. Like, I think that might be a strong win for WordPress in the future for sure.
Matt:Especially for app application development.
Sam:Yeah. Look. It it's all fun and games until you have 50,000 monthly active users.
Matt:Yeah. And then you
Sam:and then you get the bill. Right? You get the bill from Yeah. From from from zero off. Like, those are great services, but you gotta pay attention.
Sam:Like, every time you buy another third party service, it's it's gonna come crashing down when you hit scale.
Matt:Yeah. Yeah. We've seen we've seen this, over the last year with competitors to WordPress like Webflow, where everyone's like, oh, Webflow is great. It's a move over. It's all you got everything.
Matt:And then all of sudden, get the bill literally for $45,000 for a hosting account. You're like, what the hell happened? Well, the terms say you can only have, whatever, 10,000 CMS items. What's a CMS item? You know?
Matt:And it's all of a sudden, all these things add up, and you're like, I didn't even know that was a thing. So that's, again, another advantage to WordPress.
Sam:No. Yeah. Look. Look. I agree.
Sam:It it's you know, WordPress fits beautifully into the self hold self hosting mantra. And now that we're in this post zero interest rate environment where the cost of capital is is going up, we're having to look very closely at what is the cost of hosting? What is the cost of of of running these services at scale? Because it's not like there's another round of funding around the corner to to fund it.
Matt:Right. Right. Right. Sam Texas, thanks for hanging out today. Where can folks go to say thanks or if they wanna learn a little bit more about what you're up to?
Sam:I I live and die on the socials, so find me, Sam I think I'm the only Sam Texas on LinkedIn. But if you want, I'm hey, Texas everywhere else.
Matt:And are you actually in Texas? I forgot to ask that.
Sam:I am. I'm in Austin.
Matt:Nice. Fantastic stuff. Everybody else, thanks for hanging out today. Thanks for listening to Breakdown. You can find it at every week, or every other week at, breakdown.gravityforms.com or gravityforms.com/breakdown.
Matt:That's it for today's episode. If you could do one more thing for me today, share this episode on social media, your Facebook group or Discord channel. Spread the word about this podcast. It really helps. If you haven't added Breakdown to your favorite podcast app, point your browser to gravityforms.com/breakdown, and click the icon of your app to add us and listen to us every two weeks.
Matt:Okay. We'll see you in the next episode.
