Breakdown - A Gravity Forms Podcast

Matt: [00:00:00] Five, four, three, two, one.

Jonathan Jernigan. Welcome to breakdown. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. WordPress tutorials, coaching products, courses, newsletters, premium consulting, YouTube, a plug in. How do you do it now that you have a little one running around little ones running? Yeah.

Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah. 20 bops. Uh, it is extremely difficult.

I will say I have, uh, always been really careful about what projects I'm taking on and how I'm budgeting my time or so I thought. And I've had to get really, really good at that. Like these little windows of time that I have, I've become more productive in two or three hours than I was in an eight hour work day in the past.

Cause, uh, I guess out of necessity.

Matt: [00:01:00] Jonathan Jernigan dot com. You can find out everything he has there to offer. We're going to talk about all kinds of things. We'll talk about WordPress, Gravity Forms, uh, and YouTube creation. Let's start with YouTube. Um, new year, every year, uh, I see people come and go from the YouTube game.

It's not something that is. Well, I, I don't wanna put words into your mouth. I, I think it's something that, uh, can be super overwhelming if you let it, but at the same time, that overwhelming part comes from the machine, right? You need to keep uploading, you need to keep serving your audience. Uh, and that gets you on this hamster wheel of, uh, you know, this constant push to, to create.

Do you approach it like that? Is it, is YouTube a business for you where you must show up?

Jonathan Jernigan: It's a really great question, and I think I go back to what began YouTube for me, which was a total accident. I [00:02:00] started creating tutorials in early 2018 when I was working in Oxygen Builder. And at the time it was this revolutionary tool for me where I kept discovering these neat things that I could do with it.

And I thought, man, I would love to see this, this video out there and I would search and it wasn't there. So I made honestly the most janky tutorials I could, they were horribly lit, terrible mic, you know, all, all those kinds of things. Uh, and for a long time, I didn't even show my own face and then it just grew and grew and suddenly I had people who were figuring out.

My name and email address, even though I didn't have my name associated with the YouTube channel, it took me a long time to realize, wait a second, this is actually a business asset. Like this, this thing people see and they want to come hire you. So for many years, I was treating it as, as something I would be making multiple videos a week.

And then of course, you know, you mentioned the machine I get. Burned out and kind of faded away. And as I've gotten a little older and been [00:03:00] in, in WordPress, um, this past December was, was 10 years that some of the motivation kind of fades. But then I look at, you know, you, you mentioned all that stuff early on courses, consulting, all those kinds of things, every, every ounce of that success has come from, you know, consistently showing up and being present on YouTube, people are, are, are not typing that in.

to Google. They're not typing in WordPress consulting. They're seeing somebody on YouTube and they're like, Oh, I want to talk to that person. So yeah, I mean, I've been inconsistent over the last year, but even then I still recognize it's such a valuable marketing tool for honestly any business. I encourage my old agency clients to like even local businesses benefit from it.

It's so incredibly powerful.

Matt: Yeah, there's a, I put out something the other day and somebody was like, well, you didn't, you didn't sell me in the first minute. Right. So I'm not subscribing. Right. And I just like, man, I've, and this is my own detriment. Right. And even this show breakdown for gravity forms, it's about just having that.

[00:04:00] Real one on one conversation with somebody in the Gravity Forms space. This is for the diehard Gravity Forms user. Like, we're not trying to land new customers. I mean, we would love it, right? For, like, new subscribers to come in and like, Oh, what's this Gravity Forms thing? Some of our content hits that and some of our future content will.

But largely, like, this content is to support the existing customers. Let them know, like how we think behind the scenes, meet new people like you, this is long tail stuff. This is the stuff where like when we're in the marketing room and we're like, I just got off a marketing meeting. Like we're not putting an ROI on this stuff.

Like how much money has this piece of content made? And that's how I've sort of done all of my content. And for the past 15 plus years, and that we're faced with this whole thing of AI and like typical SEO content sort of being served up by, uh, instant answers that you can have a conversation with, with whatever AI platform you're [00:05:00] using.

But it's still not doing that with like this human touch, like with what you and I are doing right now and what you do with your YouTube channel, like that's still hard to replace. It's a long way of me getting to like, do you think that? The future of content making for you is a little bit more like personal and bringing in the human experience versus just the YouTube tutorial.

I'm torn. I don't have the answer. Like I'm torn on what kind of content for myself to create too. But is it is the future going to be more personal in these conversations that I can't replicate?

Jonathan Jernigan: I certainly hope so. And I think that it will because people are going to be able to see through what's like surface level and what's AI generated.

And especially when it comes to video conversations like this, you can't You can't fake it in a way that's convincing enough yet. And with the types of work that we do, people want. To, to trust that somebody they know somebody know, like, and trust that's, that's simple, silly little cliche. They want to know that the thing that they're using or getting involved in is supported and, and there's a community [00:06:00] of people around it.

Like the various page builders that you could pick, like you probably not just going to buy one at random. You're going to go look and see like who's actively using this, who is out there, and that's, that's true too, of like all the content that I make, I try to be as. As authentically me as I can, because I think that that shines through in it.

In the past, I was nervous and hesitant to do that and blend, you know, sort of blur that line of like my offline persona and my online WordPress professional persona. Like there were kind of two different entities for a long time, but I found as I became more me and like a newsletter writing or in YouTube thing, just saying things that I would in real life.

It's like being silly. Interjecting those little bits of personal flair. I almost never had people responding, you know, in the past when I was stiff corporate me, but now it's like over the last couple of years, I've gotten better. People respond to the newsletter and they're like, wow, that was really funny.

Or I love that. Like, thanks for giving, giving me a [00:07:00] little glimpse into your personal life or. You know, just like, I think the, I think we're going to come full circle with the authenticity to answer your question, like the personal conversations, I pretty much don't, if I'm looking for something that I want to make a purchase decision on nowadays, if I go to Google.

I'm almost always appending the word Reddit to the end. I want to go find a conversation that's taken place about XYZ product or service. I'm pretty much not going to go into the search results because it's like half of them are AI slop, especially if it's a paid product, like something on Amazon, you know.

You're not going to get real reviews. And I mean, you could argue that Reddit results could be just a bunch of bots talking to each other, but that it's, it's

Matt: less likely, you

Jonathan Jernigan: know,

Matt: Yeah, that verification process is tough. And when we use that, I mean, I know I use this as a consumer, it's Reddit. It's YouTube, right?

I want to hear and see like people using whatever thing that I, that I want to buy. Um, but then also, yeah, you get that like quick, you [00:08:00] know, because you're reading it on Reddit. So you're just scanning through this stuff and you're, you're getting those quick hits of like it, don't like it, use this instead.

And it just sends you on all these like crazy rabbit holes for better or worse. But like that verification for a human purchasing decision, if we're just talking purchasing decisions, yeah, man, that, that, that stuff is super powerful.

Jonathan Jernigan: And then you build up the, the no, like trust factor on YouTube too. That takes a long time.

You're talking about long tail. I was going to mention, like, I've encouraged people and other peers in the WordPress space to, to, to start making YouTube videos. But the challenge is that it's, it takes a long time. I've told people like, you've got to commit to this for a year minimum and just see where it goes.

But also you can't come into it with the expectation that, you know, your audience is going to be massive and you're going to make. Make a bunch of money off ad revenue and get sponsors and all these things. Like there has to be some other outlet to it, whether it's a newsletter, podcast, consulting course, like there's there has, or, or driving agency clients.

There's a couple of people who I'm friends with that have, have started doing YouTube consistently for years. And now every [00:09:00] single lead they get is through YouTube for, for like website builds, custom website builds, and they've branched out from the. The like website designer near me to a niche that can serve the whole country or the whole world.

Essentially.

Matt: I want to talk about your approach to agency life and how you got into using gravity forms and, uh, like tie this whole thing in with YouTube and how it's helped your business. And then eventually the eventual goal is get to talk about your, uh, PI calendar plugin that you've created as well. When did you start using gravity forms in your agency life?

And do you remember that moment when you were like, Customers asking for this, I see gravity forms does that, uh, if I put the two together, I have a solution that I, that I can sell without having to code it. Do you remember that moment or can you just walk us through that, that beginning stage of, of agency life to where you are now?

Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah, it's such a good question. I mean, I, like I said, I started WordPress professionally in [00:10:00] December of 2014, so a little over 10 years ago now, and I actually don't recall ever using. Any other form plug in the whole time like I think probably what happened was Which is absolutely what I was doing at the time, early, early on, I was buying themes off of theme forest and they probably came pre packaged or if not pre packaged, they had some kind of placeholder for gravity forms.

They're like, you know, integrate styles with gravity forms, automatically make it match. So I just thought, okay, gravity forms is, is the thing that I'll do that. And ever since then, I've stuck with it all these years and been so happy with that, and we can touch on it, but from the most simple stuff, like.

Name, email, phone number to fully custom things with ACF and, and those kinds of things. But early on in the agency, I realized. More so than just generic contact forms, I was using a, this selling point to, to customers for the idea of taking their, their PDF intake forms, like a veterinary clinic. They had this long winded [00:11:00] thing that the people had to sit down and fill out on paper, but I was like, we can take this.

And just put all of these questions into gravity forms and you can go to my vet. com slash, you know, intake, and they can just fill it out on their phone right there. It's less paperwork. It's less error prone and less hassle for your front desk. And they were, they said, really, you can do that. Now, in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, I'm pretty sure I can do this.

And of course. I was able to pull it off and then I just started offering that to all my clients. That was a thing I just was kind of including that I could do. Another one was for a title company, a real estate title company, like filling out their long, you know, like borrower type escrow forms where.

Accuracy is super important, making sure that those things were logged and emailed. And there's so many benefits to that just for local agency customers. They all have some kind of intake form and a lot of them weren't even, didn't even ever consider the idea that it could be digitized. Uh, but that was a huge selling point.

That was like [00:12:00] the first moment where I started to like branch off from like gravity forms is just this basic contact form system for me to like, wow, this is like a powerful tool that I can. Use to increase revenue make clients happier. There's so many things about it

Matt: Do you remember the milestones for your agency and how you thought of?

Changing price. So let me frame it for you. I mean, I remember starting my agency It was just like I'll do whatever you got 500 bucks. Give it to me Build you like whatever you want and then obviously over the years, you know growing, you know, my agency that I ran for a decade Which still runs today. My dad runs it Once I, when I left it, it was, you know, we were doing contracts of 30, 40, 000, you know, for the year, like building out these things.

And, you know, it's sounds greater than, I mean, it wasn't just selling a 500 site for 40, 000, like bigger projects, which were probably still priced too low when I, when I think back at it. Uh, but gravity forms has like this. Sort of stair step approach, right, to pricing, you know, starter, medium, and then elite, uh, [00:13:00] and as you move up the chain of licenses, you are getting more add ons, more features, but it also means that you're leveling up with customers.

So you could start for 60 bucks a year with Gravity Forms, just use it as a nice contact form, stable, it works, it has everything you need in it, but then as you need, let's say, Salesforce or HubSpot, and you're getting Into that level of customer, it's very easy. It is. Spend another couple hundred bucks for the year to support not only that one customer, but many customers in the HubSpot pool.

Do you remember those milestones when you started charging more as you started to get more, I hate to say better customers, but better qualified customers. Like, do you remember those pivot points for you?

Jonathan Jernigan: Better is definitely a factor in it. I mean, it's like that, that meme we've all seen. It's like 500 customer.

It's like, send me your name, social bank accounts. It's like 50, 000 customer. It's like payment sent. Have a nice day. Like. It's so true. The Milestones. I don't exactly recall, but I know that like when I first started really delving into [00:14:00] oxygen builder, I started to kind of branch out, uh, or maybe expand my own capabilities just in terms of like a quasi developer, still not a proper, like, you know, PHP JavaScript and not a, a Brian cords type that can just sit down and bang out some code, but.

With a tool like oxygen, I started to realize how much more I could do and then toss in gravity forms. I think probably the first, the first big like aha moment was the front end post creation add on for gravity forms, where I could allow people for a variety of different, you know, websites to submit posts from the front end, like event websites, or for instance, uh, A client a couple of years ago, like two years ago, they had this kind of document library and they had a couple of different people across the organization that needed to upload documents to the site.

And we just slapped a front end gravity form on there. And so, yeah, I think, I don't remember. I've had the elite license for so long. I don't even know what's included. I just know that I have access to it. Um, and it actually just [00:15:00] renewed yesterday, funny enough. So there's a nice little chunk of change in the gravity forms account, but yeah, there was, there's just a couple of different, uh, situations like that, that I realized, like there's so many pieces, like the user creation add on was a big one.

That's probably the one I use most often since I tend to build membership sites for clients front end post creation. Things like, um, the integration, you know, with sin grid as my SMTP provider. There's just a bunch of things like that, where as you start to get more and more capable and have more and more, um, diversity in the types of sites you're building, or maybe not necessarily diversity, but, um, increased complexity because you're offering more, you just expand with, with gravity forms.

There's just pretty much never something that, uh, I haven't been able to do with it. I'm trying to think just the other day with the. Add-on was that I was looking for, and I just went into the forms add-ons button and control F, and typed in like maybe it was postmark or something like that, but it was just there.

The add-on was just there and ready to go.

Matt: What about on the packaging and presentation [00:16:00] side of realizing, you know what, I should be charging more? Like I just hinted at that before, like we had some big like corporate customers. You know, and we were like, Ooh, 40, 000. I wonder if they'll say yes. It was like nothing, like, you know, in their spend, that was like nothing.

And we're, you know, as a small boutique agency, we're like, God, we hope we get this, this contract because it's a big contract and it can float a boutique agency like mine or what was mine. Um, you know, for a good portion of the year, do you remember when you're positioning and packaging sort of change where you realize, Oh, you know what?

I could have been. You know, I don't want to let me just take a step back for the person who's listening. This is not an agency owner It while it sounds like just add another zero and you hear us say that a lot in this space It's also you you you can say that but it's also like you come with X amount of years of experience Right?

So it's just like, yeah, eventually we just say, add another zero, but it's because we've been doing it for so long and we've realized that there's value in that. Okay. Fast forward to Jonathan. [00:17:00] When did you make that, that milestone, uh, uh, for your agency?

Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah. I mean, I, I kind of have to step back way before WordPress at my old computer job.

I worked for this it company for a number of years and, and we build hourly and the, my boss shout out Cameron would always say, customers don't get. A discount because you're more efficient because you've done this 50, a hundred times, and technically it should take an hour of billable time and you can do it in 15 minutes because you've done it a hundred times.

It doesn't mean you only bill 15 minutes. And that was always ringing around in the back of my head. So as I started to increase my own capabilities, I realized like, Well, yeah, I can create a front end post creation form in 15 minutes because I've done it 25 times, but the value to these companies is massive.

And the eye opener for me was, I just, I will never forget. It's a client I still have to this day, that real estate title company I mentioned there. They've been with me for. I don't even know, probably the whole 10 years, but they [00:18:00] are partnered with this law firm and they allowed me the opportunity to bid on the law firm's RFP for their website.

Huge firm, like 110 attorneys, you know, like a major, major firm. At the time, I think there were probably 50 or 60 attorneys, but to me, they felt absolutely massive. My biggest client other than that was probably six employees, you know. So this RFP comes and my mom works for the college here. So I was like having her help me and we kind of put this thing together.

And, you know, she's of course, encouraging me to charge more. The most I had charged at that point was probably 5, 000. And that was, you know, life changing money, but the number that I came up with for this project was 25, 000. And I thought, wow, if I get this. I'm rich. I, this is the greatest thing ever. Like this will be so incredible.

And I, I found out because of my connection through the title company, I was immediately discarded because I was the lowest bid by like 40%. The next cheapest bid was like 60, 000. And [00:19:00] they just thought, well, obviously this company doesn't know what they're talking about if they're that much lower. And I was like, what are you talking about?

Like I even thought went through all the pages and all the possibilities and thought, how many hours would this take me? A hundred, a hundred dollars an hour, you know, 250 hours. There's no way this site will take me that long. And I was stunned for like days. I was kind of down in the dumps, like. So, what you're, what you're telling me is if I had doubled my bid, I had a better shot?

Like, it doesn't make any sense. Of course, in hindsight, I see the rationale, but that was the moment where I kind of thought like, okay, what I do is worth. So much more than, than what I have and to a company, an organization of that size, like you said, you know, 25, 000 is life changing money to probably all of us listening to this, they took to an organization like that.

It's like, that's not even payroll for like one day, you know, like they're operating on such a scale that it's like hard to comprehend. That was, that was the moment. I think that was probably. [00:20:00] That's probably 2018 ish, somewhere in there, 2019. And then, yeah, that's funny. I have

Matt: the exact same. That was the exact same aha moment for me in my business and my agency was a law firm.

They were sizable. They weren't as big as like 100 plus, but there was probably, I don't know, a dozen plus or 20 plus, you know, attorneys under this, under this brand. And it was the same thing, like go into the room. Uh, into the conference room at their place, you know, and there's like 15 people in the room and you're like, wait a minute, what, wait, what, what's happening?

And it's like, you're presenting this thing and you're like, it's 12, 500 and if you pay me 50 percent upfront, it just like, what are you doing? Like, this is nothing, right? Like our toner. To put the toner in the laser jet printer is more than that, than this website's going to cost us. And that was a huge realization moment for me.

And I think here's, here's what I think. I think anyone who's getting into the agency game, uh, should try to sell a law firm, but never do a law firm [00:21:00] website, just go through it. So you know what that gauntlet is, but never have them as a client because we did land a few afterwards and it was. The worst, largely because it was just not the right fit.

It was going after money, going after the contract, um, and not knowing the business. And if you know the business, you go after it. But there's some big competition out there that know this, this space, but definitely try because you're going to learn a lot from that experience.

Jonathan Jernigan: I mean, that's, that's like, I, I actually never landed a real estate client.

Funny enough, I missed that one. And that, that opportunity never presented itself again. I would never ever do real estate. I did a couple of those early on, and that was a hard, absolute no for the rest of my times, even today, I would never take one on and then e commerce for whatever reason, I just never got into e commerce.

I'll do simple stuff. Like if I can, if I can do it with gravity forms and the stripe out on. We're golden, but anything more than that, it's like, no, thank you for managing inventory and stock and, you know, skews and all that kind of stuff. Not interested. So those were like a couple of [00:22:00] my hard no's.

Matt: When did you start to make the transition into thinking about product?

We're going to talk about a PI plugin and, and, and that in a little bit, but when did you start thinking, okay, I'm going to do courses and augment this business? When did that kick in and how did that work out for you?

Jonathan Jernigan: The

Matt: courses

Jonathan Jernigan: came about kind of like the YouTube channel sort of by accident. I, I created my YouTube channel sometime in 2018 and At that time, I was just making oxygen builder tutorials.

I was in that Facebook group and it was growing pretty rapidly. And I knew just based on how long I had spent, I'd already been in it kind of two years that what I had learned through that time really helped me transform. Like we're talking about the price of projects that I could do, the scale of things that I could do.

And the, I knew that the learning curve was really steep. So I thought, what if I just threw together a start to finish course? And I had no idea. I didn't, I didn't know anybody that had ever made a course. It was totally blind. And like I said, I was doing it legitimately on a 30 little blue [00:23:00] snowball mic, like on my desk, where if I like type too hard, it would be like, you know, like it was shaking in the background.

And I was super, super nervous. I remember laying in bed on Christmas Eve of 2018 with this idea, just thinking like, wow. Like, maybe this will work, just writing down ideas, like unable to sleep, like a kid on Christmas, essentially, except I was writing down tutorial ideas for this course. And I worked on that all through January, the whole month, every single day, like to the detriment of client work at the time and released it.

And I think early February of 2020 or 2019, 2020, I forget the first, the first month it sold like 7, 000 worth. And I was like, wait a second. Like that's two client projects worth to me. That I was able to do. And then it continued selling and continued selling, continued selling. And I started to realize like, wow, the scale of what you can reach with a product like this is so much greater than you could ever do as, you know, [00:24:00] a service based business.

And, and just like kind of one of those times of like. Being out of the office and coming back and there's two sale notifications. Just like, wow, that, that oxygen course was really the wake up call for me to be like, I probably need to be augmenting my, my work, like with product, whether it be a course or, or a plugin or something like that.

And, um, I still do client work, very specific, you know, niche stuff right now, because it keeps my skills fresh. I'm able to continue to come up with tutorial ideas and make. relevant courses and that kind of thing. But yeah, it was, um, it was the, um, that like early YouTube, I had like 900 subscribers when I released the course.

So like almost nothing.

Matt: Wow. That is, you kind of answered the question. The other question I was going to follow up with is what you think about continuing to do service work. Um, because I think it is a great, well, I think it's a great, for like cashflow. Um, you know, if you, if you're dotting your I's [00:25:00] crossing your T's and you've got the right client, cashflow is pretty good on the services side.

But then it's also on that research and development side. Like you understand what's happening in the space. So you're just keeping like one arm over there so you can understand what customers are looking for. And that'll help transition over to, um, you know, courses and other products. 2025. Still possible to have big launch days with courses.

What do you think?

Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah, definitely. It certainly is. I was actually funny enough talking about AI earlier. I exported all of my like sales data, kind of like stripped out the, the info. And I just wanted the, I just wanted the date and the price. And I dropped those into Claude actually, and asked it to plot it on a graph.

So I could kind of see, and you can look at the, the course launches. I did one, uh, like April of last year. And you can see the, the big spike in the presale and it comes down and kind of trickles on for a while, but yeah, it, it definitely is. And I have a generate press course that's done well over the last couple of [00:26:00] years.

And there's people beating down the door, asking me where version two is now that, you know, generate blocks has had a huge update. So it's definitely possible. It's kind of like, it's an interesting one where it's like cart before the horse. You know, you can't. You can't really release a course without an audience, but like, to make the course worth it, you need an audience, it's, it's kind of a, a tricky one there.

Goes back to the YouTube long game. I mean, all that stuff is, is connected.

Matt: Something I was dabbling in before I, uh, I stopped my agency, uh, work day to day was a course. For my customers, right? So I think it in the framing of if you're somebody listening to this going, I want to do this to like, I also want YouTube channel audience course, maybe digital product, et cetera. I think sometimes like if you're, if you're still in that mode where you're servicing clients, like so many of us start with, you can actually start with, A lower offering course that [00:27:00] fills the lower, if you want, uh, you know, if you want, fills the lower end of that service market where the customer comes to you and they say, Hey, how much do you cost?

You say it's 5, 000 per project. They go, I don't have that, but you can buy this. For 500 and that'll help you, you know, get along the way there's an opportunity there. You might not sell tons of them, you know, depending on who you're servicing, but it's also a great way to practice like the pitch, the offering, putting it all together, seeing how much time goes in.

And I, you know, I think that's a nice way to stair step into maybe what Jonathan's doing with, you know, all of his courses and stuff like that.

Jonathan Jernigan: Connected to that, I have a couple of peers and I'm sure you've seen this yourself, the idea of productizing like a monthly subscription website, like a, like a website as a service.

And there are people out there who are doing incredibly well at this and you don't need a big team to scale those. And the, the, there's a lot of people who are resistant to videos and courses and stuff, because it's, it's daunting. You need a camera, you need a light, you need a mic, stuff like that. But the, the thing [00:28:00] about the, the.

Website as a service that's so compelling is it's all MRR based. So if you have 30, 40, 50 clients, all on a monthly retainer, that starts to add up really quickly and it's all template based. So you're not having to start from zero every time. So, um, the ones that I've seen most successful. Are those that are highly focused on a specific niche, like, like home contractors, roofers, plumbers, people like that, or like attorneys, there are, there are ones out there that specialize in attorneys.

And, and that's a, that's a very interesting one. If people just love being in the work, if you're, if you're listening and you just love building websites, you just, you know, for a fact, of course, it's not for you. That's something else to look into as well. It's a very, it can be done, but I think, uh, a niche, a very clear niche is required to pull that off.

Matt: Okay. So you're hyper, you have agency work that you still do in a hyper focused, uh, market YouTube, the, uh, courses, digital product and pie calendar. My God, how does this man do it [00:29:00] all? When did pie calendar come about? Uh, when did you think, you know what? I'm taking on the calendar and well, I'll say, I'll say you said this.

Okay. I'll take on the calendar and event space. When did this come about and how's it going?

Jonathan Jernigan: Great question. I mean, it's, It's yet another point for me not wanting to pull away completely from client work because this idea came about with that title company I was talking about. They asked me to do this calendar date reminder related thing and there was no solution in WordPress that fit the bill.

There are plenty of other. You know, hefty event plugins out there that will do everything under the sun, tickets, QR codes, you know, venue management, all those kinds of things. But this just needed to be some data on a calendar and that's it on their WordPress site. And there just wasn't a good solution for that.

So I started, uh, just kind of building a demo and actually funny enough, it came about because. I was able to pull it off with chat GPT. I was able to go find kind of the bare bones, like one of those [00:30:00] open source JavaScript frameworks of like just a raw calendar that does essentially nothing. You have to bring in everything else on top of it and, and just say like, okay, I have this ACF field.

It's got a date. Put it on the calendar for me and chat GPT. You know, you spin your wheels early, you know, going around, around, around. Eventually I got there and I was like fired up, like, okay, this does what I need it to do now, except it's all this like raw code that's not that usable. So I went to a great friend of mine and said, Hey, can we, can we partner on this?

Like, I just need somebody with the development shops to pull this off. And the idea was that. The actually the name pie calendar comes from what our, our working title was any posts into event. We just thought you're just going to turn any post on your WordPress site into an event. And so we thought, well, that, that name kind of sucks.

So we just took off the a and we're like PIE post into event calendar. And we said, Oh, by calendar. Perfect. And so that came about really out of a need to fulfill a client obligation where [00:31:00] I committed to this thing. And then I got into it and realized, wow, this doesn't exist. So we had to kind of fulfill that and it's just blossomed since then.

And people absolutely love it. We, we have. Uh, well over 1500 customers now, and that has been so tremendous. Every single one of them tells us we love it because it's so simple. It intentionally does not sell tickets. It does not do venue management. There's all kinds of things that does not do, but all of that is, is.

Extremely intentional so that it's just, uh, super simple and easy to use calendar plugin.

Matt: So as somebody who started the concept and like, uh, I'll call, I'll call it wireframing the solution together with AI. How do you feel as a product owner about the barriers being lowered for folks to do exactly what you did instead of going, Oh, maybe I don't need this pie calendar thing.

I'll go just build it myself. What's your gut reaction?

Jonathan Jernigan: Kind of like the gravity forms, you know, you may look at it and say the, at least elite licenses, 259 bucks. It's like, [00:32:00] you're going to spend way more than that in your billable time to try to do it yourself. And, um, I actually listening to you and Brian cords have that conversation like two weeks ago.

You were talking about the, all this stuff you've done and it's the same kind of thing. Like it, chat GPT got me to a version 0. 01. Alpha kind of working proof, but as soon as I started to try to add additional things, like I wanted to, you know, like bring in the source from a different location or, you know, change colors or do that kind of thing.

Once the code started to build and build into something that would actually be usable, then it started to fall apart and it would mess up code in different areas. And, you know, then all the, all the, uh, effort switches from. The code itself to like architecting the product. Like, how do you make this as simple as possible?

And what features do you not do just because it's cool and you might want to. So, yeah, I think, I think the idea that like what it helped me do as a non developer to, to prove this concept is incredible. And [00:33:00] there's some, there's some conversation I think that exists there for WordPress. Like people contributing to WordPress who like me wouldn't be able to write JavaScript code.

Maybe you can make some prototype that you can demo to people that will never actually make it into. to core, but at least you could prove the concept as a, as a piece of functionality. You know,

Matt: uh, I want to ask you some marketing research question. I've never done this on a pod on a gravity forms podcast before, but as a gravity forms user, right, we were just talking about this today in our, uh, marketing meeting, of course, AI, everybody's talking about it.

We don't have so many customers knocking on the door, but we know people are looking at our competition going. Well, your competition already loaded in chat GPT integration six months ago. And that's great. Uh, I would like to say that we're slightly biased and, uh, we're trying to take things a little bit slower in stable.

Do you want AI in your form solution? If so, how would it help you? Most definitely not.

Jonathan Jernigan: Absolutely not. I, if, if it did come, I would hope that [00:34:00] it's off by default or some kind of add on that I have to add in, which I assume that's how it would be. But the gravity forms I think has, um, been such a stable for me because staple for me, because it's so stable and.

That's, that's kind of the whole stack of things that I use, like generate press is rock solid. You can just count on when an update comes, you can just press the button and walk away. You just know it's going to be fine. And I just experienced this. I had an old, old client who was not on any kind of care plan.

They came back to me after like five years and said, Hey, the site doesn't work like, Oh, well, no surprise there. They were on, on gravity forms, like 2. 1 or something. And we're at like 2. 9, whatever now, which doesn't sound like a lot, but there's been a ton of changes in that time. Like 2. 5 was that the whole UI update, it just updated and the form continued working perfectly fine.

And those, those are the kinds of products that I want, not like gimmicky, like, you know, type in your, your form, because it's going to save you seven seconds of dragging in a couple of fields to the thing. So, no, I, [00:35:00] I definitely. I'm much more on the opposite end of the AI hype spectrum. I'm much more reserved and honestly, like the gravity forms, I told you this before offline gravity forms documentation is so good that.

I can just go copy the page that I need, drop it into chat, GPT, and say, write me this function and it can just do it. So it's like, I, I don't see the value in it. It feels like such a gimmick and kind of like the point we were talking about earlier with the personal conversations. Like you're, I think we're going to come back around to where people don't want that stuff anymore.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's, I don't want to speak fully for the product team here at Gravity Forms, but there is, uh, what I do know is like, you know, we watch the market. We have a lot of customers, right? We are not a brand new form plugin that just hit the market where we can just absorb every new piece of tech, right?

For, for better or worse, right? There's a lot of backwards compatibility that we're, um, that we're yeah. You know, task to support, right? Because for the exact reasons you just mentioned, we have [00:36:00] customers using gravity forms and some crazy edge cases, you know, that we just can't be pushing out, uh, you know, open AI integration for everything you do.

It would just, it wouldn't be good. Um, when we hope that people choose us for that reason, but we also understand that people want new stuff. But I, you know, I was installing a plugin the other day. It's not even a plugin. It's a theme and um, which has like companion plugins and it just. It just kept prompting AI stuff and I'm like, I don't want it.

I don't want it. I don't want it. And there was no, like, I don't want this anymore. And I would install the theme. Hey, we've got this AI thing. Close. Install the plugin. Hey, we've got this AI thing. Close. Like, I don't, I don't want it. And this is the thing. This is, this is another thing that we watch here is every plugin and theme is going to request their own way to do AI.

And before you know it. And before you know it. And only a short, like six months from now, you're going to be installing your WordPress stuff and you're going to have all these plugins and [00:37:00] services doing different AI things in different ways with different backend service providers. And we're just like taking a step back and going, is this what we really want?

Like just for the sake of marketing with like 2 percent like productivity boost for the end user. I don't know. And you know, that's a. This is a more like long term question for WordPress, like where does WordPress go with AI? How do you see like that integrating into WordPress?

Jonathan Jernigan: It's, it's a question I haven't given much consideration to.

I think the, the slow methodical approach is, is best for People who are building stable businesses and stable products that aren't chasing the hype money, because I think that that will last, that would be really good short term, but long term, it's not, it's not going to be the way I think about me coming from just like a, a love for all things automotive and like the way that a company like Toyota operates.

They're like one of the biggest players in the world. And yet they're not, they're not chasing the [00:38:00] new fangled stuff. Like they're, they're vehicle hybrid technology. If you look at it compared to like a BMW or an Audi it's behind the times, but it's rock solid. It works extremely well. And you know, Exactly what you're getting.

And that's like, that's kind of the way that I would want to use or, or, you know, pick products like ones that are chasing like the current AI hype. It's not something that I would be super interested in. And also from the perspective of WordPress, like you said, there's such a massive user base. You couldn't just slap in an AI component.

And I'm not sure that I see any form of value in it when it comes to, to WordPress. I couldn't, I couldn't envision a case right now in WordPress where I'm like, Hmm, I wish there was an AI piece to this, except maybe like. Maybe like some basic like demo data for testing, like tell the AI, like create me 10 posts that are themed around like a business blog.

So I have like some real photos, some real data at [00:39:00] like, that's almost the extent of what I could even think of wanting out of it. I would turn it off. If there was a toggle to turn it off, I would definitely disable that thing.

Matt: Yeah, fantastic stuff. Uh, Jonathan, this has been a fantastic conversation. Uh, we ended on talking about PyCalendar.

You can go to PyCalendar. com to check out Jonathan's calendar plugin without AI, FYI. Uh, and JonathanJernigan. com to check out everything else that he has to offer. Links will be in the show notes. Jonathan, anywhere else you want folks to go to say thanks?

Jonathan Jernigan: Also, my YouTube channel is my name as well, JonathanJernigan on YouTube.

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 favorite 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 slash breakdown and click the icon of your app to add us and listen to us every two weeks. Okay, we'll see you [00:40:00] in the next episode.