Breakdown - A Gravity Forms Podcast

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

Matt: Tom Whittaker, welcome to the breakdown podcast. Hey, thanks for having me Matt. You're building something really interesting. It involves two letters that everyone's talking about. It's A and I. We're going to talk about that in a moment. It's everyone's favorite topic. It's one of my favorite topics, although I pushed against that grain for quite some time, uh, but we're going to signpost that for a moment, put that down the road a little bit, uh, for folks who are uninitiated, uh, what does Tom Whitaker do on a day to day basis in the world of WordPress?

Tom: Sure. Um, well, I guess, uh, it goes back, my, my experience in WordPress goes back to about 2014. I was building, uh, websites just like a lot of folks, uh, you know, I was building one off websites [00:01:00] for a variety of different clients. I actually had a client at the time that was in the construction business and I ended up building a, uh, health and safety management.

application, uh, for them. It was when I say application is kind of a miss, it's kind of misleading because, uh, what it really was, was a gravity form. Uh, I started using gravity forms when my, in my site design business. And when this construction client came to me and said they were interested in, in using, uh, an online form to collect some information about health and safety.

I immediately thought about Gravity Form. So, the very, very first prototype of our app was a one page responsive website with a Gravity Form on it. And, uh, that was way back in mid 2014. Fast forward to 2022 and we had become the largest, uh, health and safety management application in the roofing industry in the United States.

As well as a bunch [00:02:00] of other trades, uh, from HVAC to electrical, mechanical, concrete contractors, small general contractors, you name it. And, uh, I ended up selling that company to a larger software company in May of 2022. So since then, haven't been doing a ton on WordPress, sort of took, uh, some time away, but, uh, uh, my former CTO and I Uh, we're still passionate about the WordPress community and we've been passionate about ai and we've been looking for ways to apply AI within the WordPress ecosystem.

And, uh, gravity Forms was a, uh, uh, a favorite, uh, of ours, and we wanted to see how we could do that. And so we're launching a new company called Gravity Builder ai. Which is a premium add on for Gravity Forms.

Matt: That's fantastic. I'm, I'm really, I was a former agency owner for about a decade. Really interested in the space.

I'm, I'm wondering if you can remember and maybe paint the picture of what it was like to make the [00:03:00] leap from, well, if this was, if this is true, were you building websites for these contractors and roofing agencies and then you realize, you know what, uh, maybe the money is in like a more unique piece of software.

And if that was the case, can you, can you illustrate what that was like for you to make that transition? Absolutely.

Tom: I was actually not building websites for construction companies at all. This was my only construction client at the time. Um, I was building websites for, you know, I did one for a restaurant.

I did one for a health club, a golf academy, a bed and breakfast places. I had done a bunch of different things, uh, in the website design space, but I wasn't really thinking about building software. However, when we use Gravity Forms to build this application for this construction client. And a little light bulb went out for us and we thought, well, if this construction company is struggling with this problem of health and safety, maybe lots of construction companies suffer from that same problem.

And I took a pretty analytical approach to it. I actually started just attending construction industry events [00:04:00] whenever I could, both in my local area, which is Toronto, uh, and, uh, in the United States. And whenever I told somebody what I had built from my other client, they were like, here's my card. I love what you're doing.

I'll buy it. And so that's when I really had the, uh, the confidence to say, okay, let's turn this into a product. Let's see how far we can take it.

Matt: Yeah. Uh, I've had another guest on the breakdown podcast and he, his agency, uh, is doing a podcast. I think he was just focused on roofing contractors. And he sort of like, we went down that path and I'll link up that shit, that episode in the show notes.

Cause it's fantastic. Uh, and I love that path of like focusing, like we're, we're really wide. We're going after contractors. That's too wide. Right. And then it's like, I'm going roofing. Uh, and then I'm going HVAC and roofing because I've dominated the roofing market or whatever that path is. Particular market was that he was in, you know, I do love the agency game.

Sometimes I think back and I'm like, ah, man, I, I would love to start another agency again, but like with now that I [00:05:00] know what I know about like how to do this thing, but I also like, I remember that sometimes agencies are just one paycheck away from bankruptcy and I don't want to live that life again. So, uh, you know, the software route is a lot better.

Tom: It's an interesting change. No. I didn't actually make, I would call myself at the time I would, I would have called myself a developer, not a software engineer. Um, and so we used WordPress and Gravity Forums in a lot of our projects because obviously it was, it was a quick way for us to deliver high quality sites to clients, um, and high quality online forums to clients.

And because of my technical limitations, I didn't actually have a way to move off of. WordPress and gravity forms for our software business. And so the, uh, the entire software stack from the day we started to the day I sold the company was based on WordPress and gravity forms. And we [00:06:00] would build an incredible amount of custom forms for our construction company clients to use in the health and safety, And that's actually where the idea, uh, when, when we sold the company and, uh, we were looking at ways to, uh, apply AI, one of the problems that we experienced as a company was that we were building a lot of forms using gravity forms and it's time consuming.

You know, you take a form that exists somewhere else in the world. And as good as the drag and drop, uh, editor is, and it's amazing by the way, and we were so grateful to have it at the time, but as great as it is, it still takes a lot of time and it takes a human to be in that chain to, to transfer that information into Gravity Forms.

And then, you know, when it comes to things like templates, templates don't get our clients. To where they always need to be. So then there's modifications and edits and round of feedback back and forth with the client. And all of that takes time. We wanted to apply AI to that problem and it's doing extremely well, [00:07:00] uh, via Gravity Builder.

Matt: Before we start getting into the, uh, the nuts and bolts of, of Gravity Builder and how are you using it? What, how do you think, why do you think your company was so successful in the space that you're in? Was it because the. There was no other solution out there, or were the solutions so convoluted because they were legacy, monolithic, they were old pieces of software.

Why do you think you were winning, or did it just simply come down to like sales and packaging?

Tom: It's a combination of a few things. Yeah, it's a combination of a few of those things. Certainly there were other solutions out there for health and safety in the construction space. I would lump them into three buckets.

I would lump them into, you know, big legacy softwares, um, sort of newer SaaS offerings. And then really entry level, you know, app store, I would call them app store apps. And we sort of fit right in the middle of that, uh, that group. Uh, we had a very good product that would work on any device, that was [00:08:00] designed well, that, that delivered features that clients wanted.

And, you know, really Matt, like I tell us all the time now that I'm mentoring other entrepreneurs, like a lot of it was just luck, luck, and timing, uh, in the construction space, there had been a move to adopt more software, uh, to mitigate problems with, you know, lack of labor and high costs and this type of thing, and we were just able to take advantage of that.

And then COVID. You know, we launched in 2015, uh, we had achieved a level of success by 2019, 2020, and then COVID, you know, was a global health and safety crisis. And we were in the health and safety market. So, you know, I, I'm not one of these entrepreneurs that would say like, Oh, I'm a genius. And I did all these crazy things.

Uh, it was really just luck, perseverance, timing, uh, and, and, you know, a great product, we did have a great product.

Matt: For the listener who. So, here's that you've built this [00:09:00] software, let's call it software, out of WordPress and Gravity Forms. Was it end to end WordPress and Gravity Forms or was it just a, a little piece of it?

In other words, was your customer able to just go to your WordPress site, sign up and interact with everything and it was all there, uh, thanks to WordPress and Gravity Forms or was there like some kind of custom wrapper, some kind of custom experience that you had to extend for the customer?

Tom: Initially, it was end to end WordPress and Gravity Forms.

As we achieved a certain scale, it became apparent that the front end was not, uh, doing everything we needed it to do. And so we actually, uh, went and rebuilt the front end of our product in, uh, using, uh, the WPGraphQL project, um, that was spearheaded by Jason Ball, a brilliant developer, uh, in the WordPress community.

We use WPGraphQL to extend WordPress to a JavaScript application in the front end in because we used Gravity Forms so heavily, [00:10:00] we, we actually started our own open source project called WPGraphQL for Gravity Forms in which we extend the Gravity Forms schema into the WPGraphQL API so that we could get both the WordPress content and Gravity Forms content back and forth to our JavaScript front end.

Matt: Having been in the space a few years ago and sort of not paying attention to WordPress since maybe you sold the company and maybe when you were initially developing the idea and you were sent in a different direction, do you have a comparison of like what WordPress was like for you back then to where it is today?

Is there something here that you're looking at going, you know, Wow, this is great. Or yeesh, they should have caught up with this by now. Like what's your take on WordPress these days as we're like near weeks away from 2025?

Tom: Yeah. I mean, WordPress has continued to evolve. Uh, I think there's a lot of utility.

In WordPress [00:11:00] itself, I think they've done, the project has, has, uh, added some really, really important things. You know, when we first started using WordPress, there was no, the REST API was not in core. Uh, it was still in, in the plugin development stage, you know, the WP GraphQL project didn't exist. The Gutenberg project was, it was external.

I think it'd been started, but wasn't, wasn't internal to WordPress, the block Uh, full site editing was a dream. There was not, none of that stuff was out there. So to see that now, I think WordPress, uh, you know, continues to be, and rightfully so, the default choice for building websites on the web. I think there are some challenges politically and otherwise in the WordPress space going on that, that will eventually sort themselves out, but the product itself works great.

Gravity Forms specifically, Um, we've been incredibly happy with the evolution of Gravity Forms as a project, as a project, because beginning with improvements [00:12:00] to the drag and drop editor, how data is stored, the add on ecosystem, the certified developer program, it's become easier and easier to do more and more things with Gravity Forms.

And so, you know, on the whole, I think everything's moving in the right direction. And it's why. When, you know, we, we talked about agencies having that broad focus and, you know, if we're, if we're doing everything, are we really doing anything? And one of the reasons why, uh, we decided to apply AI technology back into the WordPress sphere and Gravity Forms specifically was because we were using AI We had this AI technology that we could have done anything, but we really wanted to find something narrow to focus on.

And that's what brought us back in and I'm happy to be back. And I love the people and, and, and, and, uh, you know, attending work camps and talking, uh, talking at events and, and, uh, and interacting with all of my old friends.

Matt: I'm often the guy that, that talks to the end user, the Gravity Forms customer, [00:13:00] who is, uh, really upset that we don't have feature X or feature Y.

And like, where is this thing? And look at the competitive landscape and maybe some of the competitors have stuff that, uh, this person has. Particular person is asking for as long as they're even keeled and level headed when they're, when they're, you know, voicing these complaints, I'll happily get on a call and really explore what it is that they're looking for.

And what I found is we've been able to, you know, lean into the certified developer program and like, ecosystem that Gravity Forms has of third party developers, whether you're a certified developer or you're just making these add ons and making them freely available to Gravity Forms customers. The ecosystem is unlike any other contact form plugin.

And at the end of the day, when I have those conversations, people are like, well, you know, Gravity Forms is, I'm paying 200 a year or 229, whatever our, our elite license plan is. But they're building like complete apps, like you are, right? [00:14:00] And potentially some of them making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, let alone like a year off of this stuff.

Um, and I sort of have to like laugh at that, but when you come, when you combine, let's say the core price of Gravity Forms, and you bring in like a certified developer, Price point right for whichever one of our pool of certified developers you pick from another few hundred dollars a year And you combine those two the value that one gets You know even from like you know Maybe one as we talk about your product and bringing in that pricing the value one gets of what they can do with that Compared to our competitors.

It's just night and day right. It's just like ridiculously more valuable to buy like Like Gravity Forms Core and another certified developer license combine them. You can't compete with our competitors at their highest tier, which is more expensive than us in some cases. It's a, it's a, it's an interesting dilemma that we're in.

It's a good and bad, right? Customers look at us, they go, [00:15:00] Oh, I got to go buy this other thing over here. Yeah, but when you go buy that thing over there, you're getting a ton more stuff than Gravity Forms will, would ever give you from the core. Like rely on us from the core and then leverage our. ecosystem.

No real question there, but I'm wondering if you witnessed that from the outside looking in.

Tom: I mean, I'll tell you exactly. Before we started the WP GraphQL for Gravity Forms project, we thoroughly investigated if we were going to continue to use Gravity Forms. And we looked at a bunch of other form building, form powered libraries out there that we might be able to use, maybe extend the form building.

capability outside of the WordPress backend into our JavaScript environment front end. And not only do we not find something that worked as well as Gravity Forms, everything we did find was an order of magnitude, more expensive, which would have, which would have crippled, decimated our business. I mean, to, you know, [00:16:00] I truthfully believe Gravity Forms as a company doesn't charge enough for, for what it offers.

Now, I'm happy to pay what you're currently asking. Yeah, hold on, Tom. Let me write that down and send this

Matt: email to Carl right now. Charge more, send.

Tom: Um, but, yeah, we, we, we really went down the, I mean, we went far and wide looking for something that we could use, uh, that might be better. And, you know, we really took an unbiased look at it.

But at the end of the day, the economics just did not work as well as the functionality. So, um, We stayed with Gravity Forms. We started the WP GraphQL project for Gravity Forms, a really brilliant developer, uh, named David Levine came on to manage the project for us. And, uh, he continues to shepherd that project today and people are still using.

Decoupled Gravity Forms in their decoupled WordPress websites because of that open source add on for Gravity Forms.

Matt: So let's talk about Gravity Builder. How did you get the band [00:17:00] back together? You're sitting around, you're like, I'm getting bored here. We're headed into 2025. Why start this? Why now?

Tom: Yeah, um, I had been doing a bunch of different things. I stayed after my, the sale of my company, I stayed on for about eight months just to oversee the transition of my employees and product and everything else.

Around the end of 2022, I decided to, to take my leave from the new owners. I really didn't do anything for a while. Sort of did some consulting on the side and, and live life. My former CTO, he, uh, he stayed, uh, on with, uh, the new owners for about another year. And when he was getting ready to leave, I said, listen, like, let's do something together again.

We were, uh, a very good team at Harness Software. I sort of take the lead on product design requirements gathering on the face of our product and service. And my partner, Sean Campbell is the technical lead. Uh, on everything we do and makes the technical decisions. And we, we work very, very well together.

[00:18:00] So it was just a natural fit for us to, to try to do something together again. We initially were going to apply AI technology to the construction industry in some broad way. We developed a product to do that. We, we were in the beta testing phase this past summer with some clients and the feedback that kept coming back was.

It's too broad. We don't know what to do with it, you know, and we still may pursue a vertical product for AI for our AI platform in the future, but we decided let's find something narrow that we can focus on. I had seen some recent AI developments in the WordPress space and we took another look and took another look at Grabby Forms specifically and said, could we make the form building experience, could we unite Some of the knowledge that's sort of in different places, uh, out there for Gravity Forms right now to make the experience even better for Gravity Forms users.

And, uh, very, very quickly we were able to call together a [00:19:00] product that we're calling Gravity Builder AI. Um, it's an add on that can be, uh, put onto any gravity forms installation and allows you to do currently allows you to do two things. You can build a form from a prompt. You can say, I want to build this form, uh, or you can upload a document example.

So a word document, PDF document, or even an image. Uh, and have the AI construct a gravity form from that document or a combination of both. You know, you could say, here's a document, take these fields out of it and generate a form. And it will do that for you within seconds. So we're really excited about how it can transform, accelerate, and enhance the form building experience for both agencies and site owners.

Matt: The website is gravitybuilder. ai. Um, for the last, I don't know, couple of months. Well, I'll take a step back. So, like, when consumer AI started coming out, and by consumer AI I mean like, ChatGPT, Claude, a lot of the stuff started, you know, going, making the rounds. And I think even before ChatGPT got [00:20:00] really big, you saw it, you know, You saw some of this stuff in the, at least in the marketing space, which usually is the first one to come out with something and then the first one to die, right?

Like they're the first ones to like release technology. And then the first ones that get consumed by it. And like content writing was certainly one of those things. You had Jasper AI. I don't know where they're at these days. I have no, you know, horse in that race, but I saw it. I was like, ah, yeah, I don't, I'm not going to use this thing for writing AI.

And then ChatGPT and the Claude started getting a little bit more prominent. Um, and I was just real skeptical, um, still have some skepticism, but over the last couple of months, I started diving into using it as a way to code and build these little apps. And where I'm going with this is I have a new found respect for WordPress as what one might call a monolithic app, certainly just by, it certainly gets that, that label just for its age, right?

20 years, right? It is just a big monolithic app. But what I found initially with AI was. Damn, this is nice. [00:21:00] Like I can build something super quick and this is like, I never could do this. Right. And this, in this language, this, you know, coding language that I, that I choose to have AI right. And like, I could not do this, but what I found was after I build it, No one's thinking about that, that piece of code I wrote.

I'm certainly not right. Like I don't know how to secure it. I don't know how to maintain it. I don't know how to keep this thing moving forward. Whereas WordPress and, and gravity forms, you know, one might say, ah, you can just make a form with AI. Well, certainly, but you're not going to have like this breadth of knowledge from a team who's going to keep maintaining it and, and, and iterating on it and moving it forward.

That's a long way of me getting to like. Never trusted AI and now I trust it a lot more, but I still have some skepticism. I'll always keep that little asterisk there. Um, obviously you're all in with AI, but how do you, how do you build trust? How do you, how did you convince yourself to, to use something like this or leverage [00:22:00] something like this?

Tom: Yeah, I mean, the AI technology has been evolving very, very rapidly for the last couple of years, certainly even in our early tests of a gravity builder, you know, getting it to return the right fields with the right configuration was a challenge. Um, it took a considerable amount of time for us to. To teach the AI exactly what it needed to do.

We still tell people, you know, AI can make mistakes. Um, but you know, in our, call it thousands of tests at this point, maybe tens of thousands of tests, we are achieving a level of success. And when I say success, I mean the right format in terms of how the form is actually configured, the right fields with the right choices, with the right conditional logic, with the right required, not required, you know, all of these types of criteria, our AI is doing an incredible job at creating whatever we ask it to.

And so we [00:23:00] felt comfortable launching it as a product in its current state, and it's only going to continue to get better. I mean, the more that we, the more that we experience usage on the system. We're not using direct user queries to do training, but we will understand what users are building and we can incorporate that into our product development life cycle so that the system gets better over time.

Just, just this past week. I mean, things like conditional logic was incorporated into the products, multi language support. So if you're an agency and you need to build forms in multiple languages. Say it and the AI will do it for you, uh, and, and a number of other things, uh, that are really exciting are still coming down the pipe.

So it's got to the point where I wouldn't launch it as a product unless I was comfortable using it myself. And I did that for a period of time, uh, asked it to build all kinds of different things from construction forms to contact forms to, you know, puppy adoption, questionnaires, a bunch of different [00:24:00] things.

To see how it would do. And once I was satisfied with the results, we decided to launch as a product.

Matt: Do you have, did you take the typical approach where you have some beta, uh, clients or customers already actively using it? What does that look like for you?

Tom: Yeah, a few, a few dozen of our sort of trusted friends and, and, and, and colleagues, uh, gave it a shakedown for us.

We just wanted to make sure that there were stuff, you know, there's always things outside when you're, when you're really close to it, you know, it's There's always the things outside of your, you just don't see things. It's like seeing an extra word in a sentence when you're reading something. Uh, and, and that's been really beneficial.

I actually wanted to give a shout out to, uh, David Smith over at gravity whiz, who was, uh, you know, an early sort of supporter for us and gave some just amazing feedback on the product that we've. Been working on diligently to incorporate so you know just a specific shout out there, but uh, yeah Always with any product and we did that in our old software business as well You know, we had trusted [00:25:00] clients that we would roll out beta features to before anybody else to get feedback That's just it A sort of product management, best practice that I always wanted to adhere to.

Matt: This is my own greedy question here, but what's your tips and tricks to actually get people to engage with you in that beta stage I have found where you give out the betas and you say, you send it out and you say, Hey, please give me the feedback. And I never hear anything. You got any tips for me to get this, uh, get people to respond to me?

Tom: Well, I mean, if, if they've agreed to, first of all, get, get permission up front, right? If they want to be part of that project, that, that, that, uh, initiative, make sure that you get their. They're a blessing up front and then, you know, don't be afraid to be a little bit pushy, right? Uh, come back to, come back to your friends and, and say, Hey, you know, have you had a chance to look at this?

I really value your feedback, you know, make them feel important and part of the process and people will, will tend to carve out some time.

Matt: Yeah, for sure. Tom Wicker, this has been, uh, amazing. I'm super excited to dive into it. I heard I'll be getting, uh, uh, a release license, uh, [00:26:00] fairly soon so I can dive in and, um, maybe even put some stuff up on our YouTube channel or our social medias.

GravityBuilder. ai, you can go check it out. Uh, GravityBuilder. ai, punch that into your browser, that'll bring it up. Tom, anywhere else you want folks to go to say thanks? Thanks.

Tom: No, that's it. Yeah. Gravity builder dot AI. Uh, love to see lots of people playing with the tool and, and, and submitting feedback and, and see where we can take it.

Matt: Thanks a lot, Tom. Thanks for hanging out today.

Tom: Thanks, man.

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 in the next [00:27:00] episode.