Breakdown - A Gravity Forms Podcast

[00:00:16] Hey, gravity formers, it's May 30th. Welcome back from that US holiday. We've got a great show lined up for you today talking about the updates coming to Stripe 5.0. I have a fantastic interview. With the Travis Lopes from Cosmic Giant, formally for Gravity, a gravity forms giveaway. You can hear that from Izzy.

[00:00:36] In a moment, it's breakdown, a Gravity Forms podcast.

[00:00:48] With Word Camp EU right around the corner. Most of our marketing team will be there in the booth greeting you, letting you try gravity forms if you've not tried it yet. Uh, and uh, grab some sweet swag. Of course, we always have some of the best t-shirts. I know I'm biased, but I feel like of all the word camp, word press.

[00:01:05] T-shirts that I own. Uh, the gravity forms ones are always the best. They go fast, so definitely check those out. I think we chatted about that in the last episode, but we're doing a bit of a giveaway, uh, on TikTok for Camp Eu. Uh, I'm gonna let Izzy from our team, uh, describe what's happening with that word.

[00:01:23] Camp

[00:01:23] Izzie: EU will be here before you know it, and we can't wait. Not only are they chopped full with learning opportunities, but it's a great time for networking and sharing groundbreaking ideas, which is why we're hosting a Word camp. You hashtag form anything giveaway. Here's what you need to know to enter.

[00:01:40] All you need to do is follow us on TikTok share or repost one of our recent toss and tag us in your own TikTok using hashtag form anything. And that's it. The giveaway will run until June 9th at 9:00 AM e s t, and we'll be giving away the prizes June 10th at the Gravity Forms booth.

[00:01:59] Matt: We'll see you there.

[00:02:01] All right, so if you're headed to Word Camp EU and you're a TikTok user, follow at Gravity Forums on TikTok, share or repost a recent Gravity Forums TikTok, and then tag it with hashtag form. Anything gives you from our team, we'll pick a lucky winner. Okay? Enjoy your time at Word Camp eu. Enjoy toking.

[00:02:20] Enjoy following us on Gravity Forms on TikTok. She does a fantastic job. Let's talk about this Stripe add on. So hopefully by the time you're listening to this episode, Stripe 5.0 will be available to auto update or download from your Gravity Forms dashboard, Stripe 5.0. Um, it's gonna come with some amazing features that a lot of you have been asking for.

[00:02:41] A lot of it is, Improvements on gravity form side improvements on Stripe side. I'm gonna talk about a high level, um, and then maybe get a Gravity Forms engineer on in the future to talk about sort of under the hood of what's changing or what has changed. The biggest thing is now enabling 20 [00:03:00] plus payment methods, I think for a lot of us.

[00:03:02] Who are servicing clients or running our own sites with either donations or products. We just simply want more payments. We want to turn on more payments, uh, you know, including age old ach, debit, apple Pay, Google Pay, um, and all of these payment methods that make the transaction. Easier and faster for our end user, for our customer.

[00:03:25] Autofill Payment details with Link. Link, uh, capital L is Stripes Accelerated Checkout. Um, if customers choose to opt in, link saves and Auto fills user's payment. And shipping details across hundreds of thousands of sites, tens of millions of customers use link. You can tell I'm reading this from Stripes, um, documentation to check out as in as little as six seconds.

[00:03:49] Uh, there's a link in their own documentation from something called, uh, stripes 2023 Sessions, or Sessions 2023, where they sort of talk about sort of almost like the state of the word of Stripe. Um, They talk about how seven, uh, to 10% of businesses gain more revenue because of, you know, obviously saving, uh, the payment details, right?

[00:04:12] It's quick, it's easy, it's fast. Since most people are doing things on mobile, you don't wanna be searching around, you know, for your credit card or your payment details. Heck, even logging into, uh, PayPal is a one step process. If you've saved the password, it still pops up. So saving this stuff moves it.

[00:04:28] Through moves a user through the checkout process a whole heck of a lot faster. And again, again, you're just benefiting by making it easier, uh, for your end user, for your customers. If you're using Stripe checkout, uh, there's no other, you don't have to do anything else. Once the plugin updates, uh, and of course it's activated on your site, there's nothing else you have to do if you're already using, uh, Stripe checkout.

[00:04:49] Once you've updated, uh, additional, the additional payment methods will be automatically enabled and link will be handled, uh, on the checkout page. So that'll give the user option, uh, on the checkout page. So nothing you have to do, those additional payment methods will automatically be available again if you're using, uh, Stripe checkout and that's enabled.

[00:05:07] On your site, if you're using Stripe Elements, once you've updated to 5.0, you can enable and disable additional payment methods and Stripe link on, on a form by form basis from within the Stripe field settings. Let me just bold that. We're also gonna mention that in the email that goes out. I'll repeat it.

[00:05:22] Stripe link on a form by form basis from within the Stripe field settings. That's where you want to go to enable that stuff on a form by form basis. Simply select to enable additional payment methods as well as map your forms email field to the link email field to allow your customers to use Stripe Link on your site.

[00:05:42] I'll have that linked up in the show notes. It'll be in our documentation, of course. Uh, pretty simple, pretty straightforward, uh, but an exciting new time to have this new version of Stripe coming up, I'm gonna sit down with tl. Travis Lopes of [00:06:00] formally for Gravity. Now, cosmic Giant gonna sit down with us and chat with us about the move to the new brand name, and what does products do for you in the Gravity Forms ecosystem?

[00:06:12] Cosmic Giant. Yeah, get a rebrand on our hand. How did we get there? Yeah,

[00:06:17] TL: it's been a long time coming pretty much since I started the company back in 2017 and picked a name but didn't like it dodge from the job.

[00:06:25] Matt: But you

[00:06:25] TL: know, sometimes you just like, Hey, I want to ship these plug-ins and I need a name, so like, let's go with this.

[00:06:31] Let's see what happens. Cause you don't know, like I could put these plug-ins out there and no one likes 'em. And like two months later I'm like, okay, that was a unsuccessful project. Let's move on. Yeah.

[00:06:40] Matt: Are we allowed to say the old name or is that exactly? Yeah,

[00:06:42] TL: so we were for Gravity before because we build our products for gravity forms.

[00:06:47] But that can be tricky sometimes if you type in four gravity, you get Google results for things, for gravity forms and not necessarily us. It's like a mix of stuff like that and us w looking a little bit forward and wanting to expand into the broader WordPress space in in the future. Made us want to switch the name up a little bit and go with after eight, eight month search and looping back to a name we discarded like a weekend.

[00:07:13] We landed back on Cosmic

[00:07:14] Matt: Giant. Cosmic Giant. Now the new home for entry automation, fillable PDFs, advanced permissions, and legal signing. You have a favorite child here of the plug-in themes. Which, which, which one's your favorite of the plug-ins, fillable

[00:07:31] TL: PDFs. It's definitely like our, our highest seller, and I think it's because it.

[00:07:36] It's very easy for platforms, user rather you're a beginner, a power user, advanced expert, like it's very easy to pick up and start generating PDFs with. Um, you don't need really any technical knowledge going into it. All you need is an existing pdf d f that has fuel in it, which you can export something you made and like in designer Microsoft words it into Adobe Acrobat, have it detect those fields and then all of a sudden you have a P D F.

[00:08:01] You can generate gravity forms, entries with, and we've like streamlined the process that way. When you need to like link up your form with your pdf, you can just very easily see like, Hey, here's my pdf d and I see the fields, and you click on the field and like, boom. Like map your gravity forms field to it.

[00:08:16] Matt: Part of my hope for this podcast is that folks who are listening to this are listening to it because they wanna unlock new ideas and new opportunities within the Gravity Forms ecosystem. It's part of the description, or at least I hope I, I left that in the description of the, of the podcast. This immediately unlocks tons of opportunity, things that you can either start probably an entire business.

[00:08:41] On converting your customers old PDFs that they have in a drawer that they have people fill out in person only now unlocked to do this whole online thing in the year 2023 to submit forms, scan forms, and you could probably build a whole service. Have you heard of any of [00:09:00] that? Have you, any of your customers come to you and said, you know what, I have like this niche micro business taking PDFs.

[00:09:07] And and running with it with a certain set of, let's say, local customers in my community.

[00:09:12] TL: Oh, absolutely. Like there on off the top of my mind, I can come up with three. There was one business that did a lot of like wedding plannings, like they would do all their certificates around like the wedding certificate, all that stuff they would generate through the forms.

[00:09:24] There's a company that does court forms, It's like you can just like go in and plug in your information and it will generate like all the like legal documents you need to like submit when you go to court. And there's also a business, they do estate planning for people, like doing wills and stuff. And their old process used to be like a client would call in, they would talk to one of their customer service reps for about an hour and a half, two hours, like collect all the information that's needed for will.

[00:09:51] And then they would have to send that information back to the customer to get verified and then that would go to their legal department so they, there would be all this bouncing around and like all this person time put into it. And by being able to, to utilize Filled loop PDFs, now the customers can go right on the site, they can put in all their information themselves and it goes right to the legal team.

[00:10:12] So it cuts out all this back and forth all the time for people on the phone and it's been a big boom for their business.

[00:10:18] Matt: What about saving data? Maybe personal data? I think a lot of things that come to mind is like, yeah, there's a lot of old crusty businesses out there that, that were still handwriting things in, but maybe they're asking for, I dunno, social security, they're asking for income, they're asking for all this information.

[00:10:35] Is that still relied? Does the users still have to rely on, let's say, their hosting plan where they're saving data to do these kinds of things? Or do you have any checks and balances from the technology side? That can kind of safeguard people from that? Or do you have best practices that you put in place?

[00:10:51] Well, our

[00:10:51] TL: best practice is always like, don't store secure information on your, on your website. Like if you're doing stuff like that, you definitely wanna look into like HIPAA related hosting and stuff. But with fill booth PDFs, you can also send generated documents off to Dropbox, which can be very secure.

[00:11:06] So you could easily like have like collect that secure data. Generate your fobo pdf f have that sent off to Dropbox and then using entry automation immediately after, delete that entry data

[00:11:16] Matt: immediately off your server. And that's a, a plugin that. That will trigger an action that happens on the site, like you just said, delete it.

[00:11:24] What else does it do? Yeah, yeah, so

[00:11:26] TL: entry automation has three main actions. You can export entries, you can delete entries, and you can send notifications either on form, submission on a schedule, or manually. So like what people will often do is for GDPR compliance, they will set up a schedule and automatically delete either full form entries off the site or they pick.

[00:11:48] Specific personal identifying data and they just delete those items from the entry. People often create weekly reports of like, Hey, here's everybody that's submitted, like [00:12:00] this giveaway contest form. Like here's everybody that this week that's submitted it. And you can also do that like in a notification.

[00:12:06] So instead of getting a notification every time someone submits the form, you can have a digest that that collapses all of those notifications into an email. And the beauty of entry automation is that on top of being able to do all of that with entry data, if you are using the Gravity forms saving and continued feature to do draft submissions, you can also export, delete, and send notifications around those draft notifications so you can access those draft submissions that you normally can't see in Gravity forms and get copies of those.

[00:12:39] And you can also send follow up emails of like, Hey, customer, you have not filled out, you've not finished this form.

[00:12:46] Matt: Come back and finish. There's so much. Opportunity around that, just for the, the, your, your end users who are already purchasing your product and, and adding it into the suite of, of Gravity forms plus your stuff for them to solve these issues.

[00:13:01] There's businesses that can be had from, from this. You, I mean, I, God, I just, I think of real estate. We, you and I have talked about this before, if I think about real estate, God, real estate closings, like all this stuff where people come to you with reams, literal reams of paper and they're like, here, right on this.

[00:13:19] Uh, do it twice because we need a copy. Yeah. I'm like, I, I, why, why it's 2023. I just wanna do this stuff online. Business must be fairly good for you. What's the one thing, and speaking,

[00:13:30] TL: speaking about like all that paper generation stuff, one thing we plan on doing soon is launching like a sustainability page, cuz we keep track of just general data about like how many PDFs are generated and like the file size and stuff.

[00:13:43] So we'll be able to provide. Information soon. I'm like, Hey, here's how many trees we saved from being cut down by like not having to print out all these PDF documents.

[00:13:53] Matt: Assign them. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. 20 years ago you didn't think you'd be the hero of trees today. Today you are. Absolutely. You should have called yourself Tree hero instead of cosmic.

[00:14:03] No, that's terrible. Terrible name. That's why I'm not in the product team. All of this stuff. Right? So like putting all, binding all of this technology together. Gravity forms your solutions WordPress, it's amazing to me to think about WordPress as like solving this as a general hub, right? Like this platform that you can put Gravity forms and your suite of solutions on top of.

[00:14:27] Is there a future of Cosmic Giant that sort of just runs on its own? No need for WordPress. Question mark.

[00:14:38] TL: We definitely always see ourselves being a part of the WordPress space because

[00:14:42] Matt: that is, Travis is the politician. Everybody.

[00:14:45] TL: I've never really deeply thought about that question before, but like you asked me that I'm already taken in of like, man, that would be a lot of engineering lift to like get like all this user management and like form creation.

[00:14:56] Like it's nice having all that taken care of [00:15:00] and like being able to leverage WordPress. And on top of that, the Gravity Forms platform, it's not just like, Filled with PDFs and enter automation, legal signing, and advanced permissions like on their own. It's also how do we interact with the other certified developers and other third party apps in just the gravity forms ecosystem itself.

[00:15:22] Like a lot of like what people like to do is like with enter automation or even filled with PDFs, they use like the gravity forms, nested forms. Perk to be able to like create a bunch of child entries. And sometimes like that could be a form for like, Hey, you're signing up for a soccer tournament. And like, Hey, like there's a child form that collects all the team information, and then you could generate a PDF with of just that main form and then generate PDFs off of all those child entries.

[00:15:48] So it's like doing stuff like that, bringing everything together by staying on the WordPress platform and working tightly in the gravity forms ecosystem allows us to make those powerful solutions very

[00:15:58] Matt: easily. What's the workflow like? Illustrate it For somebody who's listening to this, they have a 20 page pdf.

[00:16:08] Document that they're printing out now and handing out to people that walk into their offices to do a thing. Is it the, is it an act of, of taking that document and just uploading it right in? Do they have to print and scan? Like what, what does that workload look like for somebody who wants to load in their current form?

[00:16:27] Yeah, into your system. So you

[00:16:29] TL: have to have your document in a PDF already, whether if it's a paper form, you'll definitely need need to scan into a pdf. Or if it's like in InDesign, Microsoft Word, like any of those apps like exporting into a pdf, then you wanna bring into a tool like Adobe Acrobat or Jot Form or PDF escape.

[00:16:46] And what those apps can do is add those fillable fetal fields to the P D F that are needed to input the data into. And most of those apps just have like a one click, like magic detect, like all the fields and just like pop 'em in for you. So like that part of the process is seamless. From there, you'll need to create a gravity form on your site.

[00:17:06] And there's two ways you can do this. You can do it like the standard way, which is just like clicking the add new button and gravity forms and like adding all your form fields. Or you can use our import P D F feature, which lets you drag and drop your P D F file in and we'll go ahead and detect all those fields in the P D F.

[00:17:22] Map them to their Gravity Forms counterparts and create a gravity form based out of that structure. From there, you'll just upload that PDF as a template. Go to your form, select that PDF as a template, and just click and map all of your form fields of the PDF and nice like that. You're generated PDF so you can, if you have your PDF already prepared, you can honestly be up and running in 10

[00:17:46] Matt: minutes.

[00:17:46] Yeah, it's amazing. As we close out here, let's just talk about pricing. You have. What I would say is one of the most progressive pricing structures in the WordPress space because you have a suite of products that do un that, that all unlock [00:18:00] these unique features. But when combined, you have a lot of folks that can leverage this from the agency's perspective, right?

[00:18:08] So if you go to the upper right hand corner of Cosmic Giant, you can click on the bundle and save. You have the agency bundle for 9 99 a year. That gets you. All of the products across 50 sites, right? Yes. So if you are an agency who, again, appeals to, I keep going to real estate just because I just keep thinking of so much paper.

[00:18:27] The last time I bought, uh, refinance my house. I, I think of that. So if you're an agency and you want to. Lead yourself into your customer. You can say, Hey, look, not only can we build you the website, but let's shift that conversation to making your website and your digital workflow way more efficient.

[00:18:46] Right? And as an agency can turn to you and say, Hey, look, we can get, we can service 50 clients for 9 99 a year. And then they're. Making on top of whatever their support and services fees are. Seems like a pretty smart way to go. Any changes to pricing? Anything new? Anything that you want to comment on, on how you structure your pricing?

[00:19:07] TL: Our, our pricing is pretty much set for, for little while. No, I don't, I'm trying to like, be careful cause I don't, we could have a call tomorrow and be like, Hey, we should raise prices, but like, that's unlikely. Um, we definitely price around the value we bring, which can make the prices like a little higher than other WordPress plug-ins in the space.

[00:19:28] But like, As we've discussed on the call, like that one estate business, like all that time that they're saving by like not having to do all those phone calls and all that back and forth, like that's absolutely worth like $279 a year for the plugin and especially with like the legal signing product that we have that starts at 2 49.

[00:19:49] Which is an extension of fillable PDFs that adds legal signing, legally binding document functionality on top of it, like AHLA DocuSign, except it's all in gravity forms. All the data stays on your site, and it allows you to capture information from multiple signers to generate a single contract. If you try to do something like that with DocuSign.

[00:20:12] You're looking at spending probably at least $300 a year minimum, and that's before you start adding like multiple users and your business that you need to be able to access that, how many documents you need to send out per year. We're able to do that all for $279 a year starting at, and all that data stays on your site.

[00:20:31] You always have access to those generated documents. It's always unlimited users and we think it's a great value. Definitely more expensive for the WordPress space, but compared to like other

[00:20:42] Matt: solutions out there, listen, if you're listening to this and you're a WordPress freelancer and you're, and you're trying to find your footing, it can't be everything to everyone, but your products really make me think like, wow, I, I could, I could dig my heels into higher education.

[00:20:57] Because my God, God, [00:21:00] I can't even imagine the amount of forms that are passed between big universities with multiple, like colleges of the business college, the science college, like communications college, all these people passing data and forms through one another. Accounting firms, law firms, like, it's like pick your vertical that you think you can get into.

[00:21:18] And man, this suite of products is one way. Of course, gravity forms as well with, with contact forms, but this. Particular product you could walk in with, Hey, we just make your your paper business more efficient. Let me show you how. Yeah. And that could be your, and then, oh, by the way, we sell you a website on the backend.

[00:21:35] Versus most people who walk in and go, I'll be able you a website. And they're like, no, no, no. We don't need you. Yeah. But, but no, I got this thing that I can do and, and that's what I really, really like about your stuff. And to

[00:21:44] TL: kind of like complete that suite, complete that journey. Is our fourth product, advanced Missions, like you're passing all of this data around to different sites, and what Advanced Missions allows you to do is instead of just having, like you set up a role on your website for like some of the people in your business to be able to access Gravity forms data, but there might be certain forms that they don't either need to.

[00:22:10] See the entries. They don't need to be able to change the fields on the form or even see specific entry data, like if this entry belongs to this one department, like they should not see, this person should not see that. That entry data, and that's where advanced missions comes in. It lets you create permission structures at a per form level within gravity forms.

[00:22:34] And it really like enhances your data security there.

[00:22:38] Matt: Travis LOEs, cosmic Giant for Gravity is now Cosmic Giant. At the time of this recording, that banner is still there. I I reckon it'll still be there probably for maybe another month or so. Where can folks go to say, thanks, Travis?

[00:22:50] TL: Yeah, come check us out@cosmicgiant.com.

[00:22:53] As part of the rebrand. We got a very expensive domain name, so I would very much like people to visit.

[00:22:57] Matt: Really fun stuff. Great conversation with tl. Uh, hope you really like it. If you do, go say thanks to him. On Twitter, we're gonna talk, uh, real briefly as we wrap up, uh, this episode, conversational forms Beta five.

[00:23:10] We're moving into a beta five. If you've not yet joined the beta program, it is fairly unique. We talked about this in the last few episodes. Go to gravity forms.com/beta. You can join the newsletter. It's also gonna invite you to the Facebook group. Now we talked about it again in the last episode. We're supposed to have a, a webinar this, uh, this past week.

[00:23:32] It's going to happen the week you're hearing this audio. Uh, you'll have that linked up in the show notes, and if you're on the beta list, you would've been emailed about it. If you were in the Facebook group, you would've been notified about it. Tune in. Uh, today, in fact is when, when the webinar is going out.

[00:23:49] So if you're hearing this and you wanna scramble and you're already a customer, you have to be a customer to be in the beta group. Go to gravity forms.com/beta. We're gonna show off all things conversational forms [00:24:00] beta. Five. Really taking our time with this one, uh, because there's a lot of moving pieces.

[00:24:04] We're gonna have a great demo site set up when this thing is ready to roll. So, uh, if you've been following conversational forms, it's gonna be there really soon. Get into the webinar today if you can. All right. Knock on a lie. It's been a busy week. I've been out of the office. Dustin has been outta the office, so no video of the week this week.

[00:24:26] And, uh, typically what's new with WordPress, I'm gonna give you three links, but you know, there wasn't a whole heck of a lot happening except for WordPress 20th anniversary. It's already passed, but you can go on Twitter and search for hashtag WP 20. Uh, Josepha Hayden Cho c had encouraged lots of folks around the community to share, uh, a video using that hashtag.

[00:24:47] If you, um, you know, have been living under a WordPress news rocker, you're too busy like the rest of us, and you didn't catch all of those anniversary tweets. Go back and check that out. I'm gonna link up. Um, a podcast from the WP Minute where, uh, a whole cast of characters got around a round table and talked about their lessons journey with WordPress.

[00:25:09] Everything that they've done, uh, to kind of commemorate and celebrate WordPress 20th anniversary. If you're looking for that kind of, uh, backlog in the history of WordPress, checkout that link. In the show note, in the show notes. Couple of other important things around the word press world. Again, links in the show notes.

[00:25:28] Gutenberg 15.8 adds page, menus to site editor revisions, UI to global styles. Uh, once again, Gutenberg enhancing its way to. Hopefully more usability, especially around the pesky menu. It's where I struggle the most, um, with the newer versions of full site editing or just, I guess the whole concept of full site editing and building out these NewAge.

[00:25:54] Can I say that NewAge WordPress websites here, uh, halfway, almost halfway through the, the year 2023. Um, but it's always good to see these iterations, these iterative, um, enhancements, uh, to full site editing and especially. Uh, the menu editor, if you're not using the standalone Gutenberg editor, or excuse me, plugin, uh, and you're just using Core, you're not gonna see these updates.

[00:26:15] But if you go and you add Gutenberg, uh, the plugin to your site, you can get a lot of these changes, uh, to 15.8. Everything is better, uh, for every version is just taking a while to get there. Um, speaking of themes, uh, again, I'm gonna link up another post by the tavern. If you're somebody like me and you're always kind of looking at interesting new themes that maybe you can use on your own website or your