What’s New at GravityKit?
54321. welcome to Breakdown.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thank you for having me on.
Speaker 1:You're the you're do I say you're the whole mastermind brain trust of the marketing team at Gravity. Gravity Kit? How what's the percentage of marketing at Gravity Kit you're responsible for?
Speaker 2:I mean, can say that if you want to.
Speaker 1:No. The boss isn't going to be listening to this and or on the same episode as you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the truth is I originally started in a content role where I was focused on, you know, content, SEO, documentation, things like that. But for the last couple of years, I've sort of moved up into a general marketing position. So now I'm sort of overseeing all of our marketing efforts across, you know, different channels. But I collaborate pretty closely with Zach.
Speaker 2:He and I have regular meetings and we collaborate on marketing activities.
Speaker 1:You guys do a livestream as well for the for the company, Gravity Kit. We're gonna talk about more about that in a moment. I've sort of been on this stint of interviewing a lot of our certified developers, which gravitate falls into, interviewing the c d's as they're referred to, the c d's marketing folks. Yourself, Owen, and others that I've had on this podcast recently. Because I think marketing well, I'm I'm generally interested in marketing.
Speaker 1:I think a lot folks listening to Breakdown as well are doing marketing at some capacity and or thinking about how to improve their positioning in this crazy online world that we find ourselves in. And I wanna just like talk about some of that stuff, like some of the challenges and some of the strategies that that you employ at the business. First of all, the landscape of marketing these days, lots of noise, lots of content, lots of stuff happening. When you sit back and you think how does my content break through that noise, how do you define that? Like how do you think about that as a marketer, as somebody trying to get content in front of your audience?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's certainly a challenge. And I think it's becoming more of a challenge now with AI in search, right? So Google has AI overviews. OpenAI have launched like a SearchGPT, their own search engine. So a lot of those, like, informational queries are kind of getting eaten up by AI.
Speaker 2:So a lot of the kind of old school SEO content stuff isn't really working anymore to draw organic traffic. And I think the bar has really been set a lot higher. So I think you really have to focus on, like, building authority in your niche, and that involves, you know, creating high quality content around centered around what your customers are asking and what your target market is interested in and actually answering meaningful meaningful questions. And I think that starts with like audience research. So trying to figure out like what are people's pain points, what are they having difficulties with, and then structuring your content around that.
Speaker 2:And then I think that leads into the next thing that's important to focus on, which is like building relationships with customers. So instead of thinking about your content as like something where you want to just get it in front of as many people as possible, think about it as like a channel to build relationships and partnerships with potential customers. Because customers these days are not just like, we're not just directly selling to people anymore. There's more of like a two way dialogue going on between customers and brands where, you know, customers really should be viewed as collaborators and co creators in a sense. And I think that's the key.
Speaker 2:At Gravitykid, we try to focus on that. We do a lot of user surveys where we get really meaningful feedback from our customers. We do live streams, live Q and A's, things like that. And all of that information that we get from our potential customers and existing customers feeds right back into our marketing and our content and our development so we can better shape that and ensure that we're catering to their needs. So I think that's really important.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The it's crazy to think like, I I think even ten years ago, and I'm not saying you're wrong, but or that you're off base, but ten even ten years ago, people were like, oh, you have to really, you know, connect with your customer, understand your audience, like, be the authority in your niche, but it's almost like people weren't listening to that. It's just like we like marketers said it we're like, yeah yeah. That makes total sense. But then we were still like on that hamster wheel of the typical like SEO things.
Speaker 1:And and then you could also make the argument like if this was on plotted on a graph, that maybe like the tooling, let's say video, podcasts, social to a degree, like livestreams, and just like how how creator tools have improved over the last decade to, like, make that connection to the audience has improved over ten years. It was almost like we were saying it. People were like, yeah, kinda makes sense. But also, like, the tooling wasn't there. I mean, we had YouTube and Instagram and all this stuff and and Twitter slash x and, you all these social platforms.
Speaker 1:But I just think about how fast, like, the tooling has evolved to allow us to have that one on one connection these days is, like, vastly improved over the last decade, which is is helpful, I think, for the cause.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think, to be honest with you, one of the reasons why it felt like people weren't really listening to that kind of stuff is because Google, for a long time, was rewarding pretty bad content. So the kind of things, the kind of content that was ranking well and attracting organic search wasn't necessarily like the authoritative content that demonstrates expertise and actually adds a lot of value. So people were just kind of doing that for many years because it was working. And I think now it's really not working anymore because of changes that Google's made to search, AI, things like this.
Speaker 2:So I think brands are really having to kind of go back to that and figure out like, okay, how do we actually, you know, connect with customers and attract attention without, you know, how do we do that in new ways that actually works? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:In the context of AI, I see oh, listen. And don't have certainly, I don't have a crystal ball other than one year out. You know? Like, the fantasy is like five years out. Like, I I I can't even think about what five years looks like.
Speaker 1:One year out, you kind of you can kind of make this these these theories, theory crafting. But I in the context of AI, I see two things. I see, like, super efficiency. Like, we can get really efficient with some of, our content marketing and even research and analysis. But but on the other half, there's like things that don't scale that are gonna be so important.
Speaker 1:Right? Like talking to your customers one on one in in a higher volume in an in person setting. Like, these are the things that are going to be things that AI won't be able to do anytime soon until you can launch a robot off to a word camp and report back to you at home base. I see it in two ways. I see, like, super efficiencies and things that we're gonna have to do that are not efficient, things that you would never do in the past.
Speaker 1:How do you see the impact of AI on all this stuff?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think in this kind of AI world, it's even more important to establish like real connections with customers. And I kind of view AI as kind of like another layer of abstraction when it comes to building solutions and using the internet in general. So an example is you think of a coding language. Right?
Speaker 2:And this is a coding language that humans will use to write programs. But the computer doesn't interpret that directly. It it has to compile that into machine code, and the computer interprets that. So the the coding language is actually an abstraction layer, like above the machine code. Now we have no code platforms like what we do at GravityKit, for example, other apps where you can build things using, like, visual interfaces.
Speaker 2:And that's like an abstraction, another layer of abstraction above the code. And now AI is just the next layer of abstraction. So instead of, like, actually doing things manually, you're just talking to an AI and it's doing it for you. So that's kind of how I view it. And I think in that kind of world, AI becomes like an assistant where it can kind of make you more productive.
Speaker 2:You can do things a lot quicker. But maintaining that human connection with customers is still super important. So I don't think it should ever replace that. I don't think it should replace writing good content or replace customer support or anything like that, but can assist with those things and, like, help you kind of improve your productivity.
Speaker 1:With your marketer hat on, are blogs dead?
Speaker 2:No. I I really don't think they are. I think there's a lot more content. I mean, there's just so much content getting published every single day. So is it harder to stand out?
Speaker 2:Yes. It has a bar been raised for good quality content. Yes. But our blogs still important? Yes.
Speaker 2:And I know that because I talk to customers regularly and they often talk about how they read something on our blog that inspired them to build a certain solution or they, you know, they saw something in our newsletter and they click through to the article to read more information. So I think when people get interested in a brand or in a certain product, the blog is one of the first places they go to kind of get more information. So I still I think it's so very important to kind of keep an active blog, but also to to curate your content, make sure you're publishing like quality stuff that actually resonates with your audience.
Speaker 1:I was just looking at your blog at gravitykit.com. Gravity view versus formidable views in-depth comparison written by you. And it's long form piece, would say it is distraction free reading experience, which I super appreciate. You have nice, concise tables of comparison. Like, I just I I understand the content.
Speaker 1:And I people listening to this who have might not have analyzed thousands of blog posts from other companies over the last fifteen years might be like, oh, what do you like, what does it matter? It's just like, the content's there. It should be good. Right? It's like, no.
Speaker 1:Because sometimes content pieces like this, like I know what what this content piece means to Gravity Kit, and how it is a resource for like a presales customer, for ranking, like you're doing a really good job with the blog, I guess, at the end of the is what I'm trying to say. And I appreciate stuff that's just not over complicated in a blog post, especially when it comes to a long form piece like this, gravity view versus formidable views. Do you have any tips or advice for people who are like, think, should I even blog anymore? Like, how do you like, is there a strategic piece of advice you can share for folks who might be thinking the blog is dead?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It really depends on what your goals are, if you are someone who's like a creator or if you're offering products. But in general, for like WordPress companies, I think focusing on like product led content is important. So one of the things we do at Gravitykit is we publish a lot of tutorials, in-depth tutorials talking about what kind of specific use cases you can accomplish using our tools and things like that. So I think thinking of your blog as like a resource for your customers and your potential customers is a good way to think about it.
Speaker 2:Make it product led, but then also try to be objective, you know, like in those product comparisons that that you are referencing. I try to be as objective as possible because at the end of the day, the customer has to make the choice whether to invest in our product or not, and they should have all the information at their disposal to make that choice. So I think just thinking about it from that perspective, like what would be most helpful for them? Like if you were if you were researching a product and reading a blog post, what would you want to see? If it's a long post, have a table of contents, have summary tables so things are easy to scan and the information is easy to digest.
Speaker 2:Think about reading a blog post as like a full experience. And then how can you optimize that experience to make it as smooth as possible for the end user?
Speaker 1:I wanna transition to talking about livestreams that you do. We call them webinars here at Gravity Forms. If you're out there listening to this and you're like, hey. How do I get on those webinars? Go to learn.gravity.com/webinars.
Speaker 1:That's the archive of webinars that we've done here in the last few months, three of them now at the start of the new year. You and Zach have been heading your livestream for many years at this point, I feel. What's the benefit to doing these livestreams across LinkedIn, Twitter? I think you also broadcast through your YouTube channel. What's the the large benefit you see out of doing these livestreams?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's really interesting. Actually, we haven't been doing it all that long. I think we probably started this sort of early last year as kind of like a new experimental thing that we wanted to pursue. I think it was Zach who suggested the idea, like, why don't we do live streams?
Speaker 2:Maybe we can make it like a Q and A. That's kind of what we originally thought. And it's kind of evolved since then because we've realized that most of the users who sign up for the livestreams aren't actually new customers, and they're not people who are looking to find out more information about the products. They're mostly advanced users who are really committed to the products already, and they are kind of more invested in what we offer. And so they're more interested to learn about new features and new products that are coming up in the pipeline.
Speaker 2:So that's kind of what we focus it around. We like to we do one every month. We start off with some product updates, and we even talk about some Gravity Forms updates and things that are happening in the space. And then we like to give demos of new features that are coming up or new products that we have in the pipeline. And these are things that we don't showcase on our website or anywhere else.
Speaker 2:So you'll only see them on the livestream, for example. We did one at the March where we showcased a couple of two brand new products that we're bringing out very soon. And, yeah, we haven't showed them really anywhere else. So it's kind of like a fun thing for users to see and they can get a preview. They can ask questions in the chat and it becomes this really nice interactive experience.
Speaker 2:And it's really valuable for us too because we can get early feedback on features and products, which is really helpful. And also, it's just another channel to, like, build relationships with customers because we have some very dedicated users that join us every single month. And they say, hey, and they ask questions, and we interact. And it's just a great way to kind of build that relationship and continually provide them with valuable content. So yeah, it's been a really channel for us to kind of drive engagement and, you know, just interface with our customers and get valuable valuable comments and feedback from them.
Speaker 1:As we wrap up the segment of Gravity Kit, you hinted at a few new products. Is that something that you can talk about here on the podcast?
Speaker 2:I can give yeah. I can give a little bit of info on this. I think you might be chatting with Zach soon, I think he's gonna go deep into this. So I'm not gonna I'm not gonna seal his thunder, but I will say a few things. So, you know, at GravityKit, our kind of value value proposition is building no code applications on WordPress using Gravity Forms as a base.
Speaker 2:So one of the things we're trying to do is sort of fill in the missing functionality that we have because we might hear from users who say, wow, this is so cool. I can build 95 of what I want. But there's that remaining 5% where it's like, oh, I wish I could do this. So we take feedback really seriously, and we're focused on kind of filling in those gaps at the moment. One of those gaps for us has been styling.
Speaker 2:So GravityView, for example, one of our products has this beautiful, like, drag and drop interface where you can create these front end displays for your data. But currently, we don't have a way to style that that doesn't involve, you know, CSS, for example. So one of the things we're working on is an easy way to do that. And the way that we're doing that is integrating with some popular WordPress page builders that already allow you to do that kind of front end styling using a visual interface. So that's been really exciting.
Speaker 2:And yeah, it seems like users are very excited for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anything that somebody like me can put something on a page and go, can I just make this look better without having to dig into CSS is huge, huge benefit, for sure? That's awesome to hear. And something that I know like I I think I would say like WordPress users, whether you love or hate the Gutenberg experience, like or think that it's like feature complete, which is a funny thing to say. But I think once you once folks are starting to use that stuff, they're going to be accustomed to, I just wanna click this block, and I know over here on the right hand side, there's like colors and font sizes.
Speaker 1:And after a while, they start doing that over and over again and they look at your own product and they go, wait, what? Can I have that too in your product? And this is something that we're, well, like Gravity Forms of course is. You know there's the orbital theme and now if you're in the site edit or in the page editor or post editor and you're putting a Gravity Form in it, click the block. And then on the right hand side, you have the new tools to, you know, change, the look and feel of that form.
Speaker 1:And it's obviously a highly requested feature, because one, it makes sense, but two, because that's where, you know, WordPress is headed. Whether you, again, agree or disagree with the Gutenberg stuff, page builders have it and have for the last ten, fifteen years at this point. And Gutenberg is is quickly, you know, getting there to, you know, educating the average WordPress user that these things exist. Fun stuff, Casey. Thanks for hanging out today and sharing more about your marketing expertise here at Gravity Kit and the upcoming features.
Speaker 1:I'm sure in the next segment with Zach, it'll be interesting to go deeper with what Zach has going on. But where can folks find you online to say thanks? Where should they go to learn more about Gravity Kit?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just head over to gravitykit.com. You can find all the information there about our different products. And if you go to gravitykit.com/live, you can sign up for our monthly livestream. And that's really a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:We showcase some some really interesting product updates and and industry updates and things like that. So you can hang hang out with us there and ask us questions as well, and we'll answer them.
Speaker 1:Zach Katz, welcome back to Breakdown.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me, Matt.
Speaker 1:It's been a few months. On the first half of this episode, the listener listened to your partner in crime, Casey. I asked him how much of the brain trust percentage he is in terms of marketing. He kinda said he was it was maybe like a sixty forty him. We'll we'll we'll give him that.
Speaker 3:He is incredible and whatever he says, it's probably 20% more.
Speaker 1:So so he's an eighty twenty. We thank Casey for all of his efforts. A lot of stuff that he and I talked about was, you know, marketing in marketing in general. Right? In the in this WordPress world.
Speaker 1:How to break through the noise. He was much more we were talking much more about, you know, the, the livestream, the blog post that Gravity Kit published. We were talking about one of his blog posts that he recently put out which was the gravity view versus formidable views at, you know, using that as like a backdrop. Like, these are very important pieces, of content, maybe bottom of funnel, customers making the decision. Here's a feature for feature, pound for pound to make your decision.
Speaker 1:But I'm curious from your perspective on marketing as the owner, founder, how do you think about breaking through the noise when you deploy some of these strategies to folks like Casey? We've chatted about before. You've done printed materials. You've done crazy music videos. Like, what's on your mind these days a quarter of the way through 2025?
Speaker 3:We have been very well represented in the AI summaries of when people ask how to do something with gravity forms. Thankfully, the LLMs have scraped our data and identified that we are the best solution for a lot of these use cases. And that's been one of the most successful ways that we've grown our exposure recently. I just talked to a customer today who said that they asked they asked ChatGPT, how do I display and allow users to edit entries in the front end of a website using Gravity Forms? Or maybe not even using Gravity Forms.
Speaker 3:Just how do I do this? And it said GravityView was a solution. So I think chat, GPT, and others like it are bringing people into the fold in a way that they haven't. And it allows us to really capture some of the market that wouldn't have even considered Gravity Forms in in the first place or wouldn't have considered WordPress as an application builder. And with GravityKit being so well represented in in AI summaries so far, it's really been successful in in capturing some of the people who know they wanna do something.
Speaker 3:They have no clue where to start, and and I'm excited about that as a opportunity to break through.
Speaker 1:I wanna unpack WordPress as an application builder because I think maybe on the surface when people start seeing, you know, what they can do with building quickly bespoke React apps as AI's favorite default, language and framework of choice, people might go, well, we might not even need WordPress anymore. Obviously, you and I both love WordPress. Our livelihood depends on it. I have a particular view on that, on that question. But how do you see WordPress versus AI development?
Speaker 1:Like, do you do you see a strong future for WordPress as a tool for application building, or do you think we're gonna need to get a little bit more street strategic ourselves to influence people to continue to use it?
Speaker 3:Matt, at the turn of this year, maybe even last year, like November or so, I got really upset. I started thinking long term about the future of the Internet, and I got despondent. I questioned my entire life. What am I? And I think maybe some listeners have gone through this when when identifying the potential for disruption that AI has.
Speaker 3:And I also broke through that. And in January, I realized, oh, it doesn't really matter what a few years away from now looks like. As long as we keep focused on customer needs and customer solutions now, we will end up in the right place. And as long as we remain responsive to our customers, that's the important thing. And so in response to the dread that I was feeling, I Casey and I put together a survey of our customers and decided to ask people, you know, hey.
Speaker 3:What are you doing with our products? What are you not doing with our products? Why are you not doing those with our products? What are the favorite tools you have? What do you what do you wish you wanna do?
Speaker 3:How are you using AI? And by kind of pulling back into ourselves and asking the questions for how to best address our customer needs today, I found my life worth reinstated. And our focus in the company, I think, been really great. And we're we're just iterating on the ability for people to do what they need to be doing with the tools that they use today, and we're trying to build the tools that they need in order to fill in those gaps where they don't have to use code and they don't have to use ChatGPT to generate snippets that may or may not be may or may not work and probably aren't properly secure. They can just use our drag and drop tools to build powerful applications.
Speaker 3:They get the jobs done they need today. And as we continue to progress, the AI future will be coming for us eventually. And, hopefully, by being so responsive, we will be there with it.
Speaker 1:A quote, the only thing standing between you and your goal is a story you keep telling yourself as to why you can't achieve it. That's Leonardo DiCaprio depicting Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street 2013. And I thought that was a fitting quote It's to help you
Speaker 3:Not Maderos' bible is The Wolf of Wall Street.
Speaker 1:I I I actually used AI right there to pull some quotes. Folks that don't know, sometimes Zach and I go back on on film. We haven't done it in a while. Going back to the AI stuff for a moment, the the there's it's you know, spending time with my favorite sort of tool right now is Bolt to build these little React apps, and what I've seen is, hey, it's great. It's great that I can go from step zero to step six and a half pretty quick when when coming up with a with an idea and coding something.
Speaker 1:However, I have this appreciation for WordPress as this complete tool. And I'm looking you know, I could sit there and punch away at building a CMS and going through all the questions thousands of people have done for for WordPress for the last twenty years going, okay. Database structure, posts and pages, metafields, gallery, user authenticate. Like we could be all of it. Like you could do it.
Speaker 1:But then it's just sort of done in this jumbled mess that doesn't have a lot of human care around it. And I think, I hope that that's the advantage we have with WordPress in the face of of AI. That it can be a great structure that people return to and go, you know what? I could vibe code this thing, but I'm just gonna use this because it makes sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I think that WordPress holds a special place in a developer's mind where if you know of these other options, like, if you want an actual better code structure, you might choose Laravel instead of WordPress. Or if you know that all you wanna do is have a blogging platform, static site generators are amazing and all you really need if you want a blog that has a nice search index even. But WordPress is I think you're right that WordPress is a complete application, and there are so many different opportunities for different CMSs to be used, including maybe, like, Laravel or Ghost is really wonderful if you need that specific toolset that comes with Ghost. One of the things that our customers have been talking to us a lot about is how they really appreciate the stability of the Gravity Forms ecosystem.
Speaker 3:And I think that a lot of our customers, a lot of the Gravity users out there, think Gravity first and WordPress second, which is kind of amazing. Like, the utility that Gravity Forms provides separates WordPress from a CMS, and it becomes an application suite. And our customers trust Gravity Forms to not break their website. They trust the certified developers to have wonderful support and to have good documentation and to have plugins and tools that won't break their website. They trust Gravity because it is the leader in all these spaces.
Speaker 3:And I don't know if that's true for other form plugins or other application builders that may or may not exist on WordPress, but in talking to our customers, that really sets WordPress apart is the the plug in ecosystem. But even more specifically for the people I've talked to, which, you know, is a bad representation of, you know, WordPress as a at large, but people really trust Gravity. And I I think that's a huge benefit.
Speaker 1:Let's put us let's put both of ourselves in the hot seat for a moment. Because one of the challenges for for both of us is folks that use GravityKit need Gravity Forms and maybe customers coming to you go, well, why can't don't you just have a plug in that does this? Or, you know, can't can't we do it, without Gravity Forms? You know, maybe that's a stretch for your solutions. But we're in this position at Gravity Forms where folks go, well, the Gravity Kit should be in Gravity.
Speaker 1:Like, that kind of thing should be in Gravity Forms. And I think Gravity Forms' stance is that we have great certified developers that pursue these awesome features better than our core team would. And that's a difficult thing, as you and I both know, a difficult thing to market and message. Or at least it's it's difficult for me in my head because I know the customers out there going, I don't wanna buy another license. Or I'm already spending a lot of money to do this.
Speaker 1:And I look at the landscape of form builders particularly in WordPress and I go, even if you bought Gravity Forms Elite and the highest end of Gravity Kit, what you can do with that combined software alliance is far greater than what you're getting from any other competitor out there. I you know, and that is a particular marketing angle I think. I know I struggle with. I don't know how how you internalize it or how you see it, but how do we address that customer that goes, no. Look.
Speaker 1:You should want this combined value because you can just do so much more with it without, like, laying waste to our competitors. Like, how how would you how would you answer that or address that?
Speaker 3:In speaking with people recently, I've been realizing that we need to keep on and we've been doing this. Casey and I have been really focusing on trying to get as many use cases out there, as many case studies, also known as casey studies out there.
Speaker 1:Oh, you guys are good.
Speaker 3:Oh, we are. Crack marketing team. And we're gonna be doing things like showcase for showing off what you could do with GravityKit, and people are gonna submit their data or, like, their their website and talk about what they've been doing and just have a user generated directory of what people have built with Gravitykit. Because part of the problem is it's so generic in that you could do whatever you need done. That is a hard thing to market.
Speaker 3:And so and we also at Gravitykit people say, you know, find your find your ideal customer and market toward them not market to them. Gravity Forms, our ideal customer is or your ideal customer is anybody who needs a form because Gravity Forms is the best. Then you can drill down and say people who care about quality, who are willing to pay for, you know, the best support and all that stuff. But in reality, it's anybody who needs forms. So Gravity Forms is the creation of the data, and we are whatever else you wanna do with it.
Speaker 3:Display it on the front end, analyze it, export it, migrate it, like, charts from it, build applications and dashboards and all this stuff. Because Gravity Forms is so generic in what it can do, Gravity Kit also is broad in what it can do. And it is a struggle to to describe that. I think that the answer, thankfully, is AI again because, you know, even Google search results have AI summaries now where people don't know what they want. They just know I need something done, and they describe it using natural language.
Speaker 3:And that used to be really hard to be discovered because what the heck do people mean? But now with AI summaries, AI can say, you know what? Gravity Forms, Gravity Kit. Add in GravityWiz and Cosmic Giant and Gravity PDF, and you have, like, every every application you could possibly think to build is available through Gravity Forms as the entry point. And people are using it for how to step by step how tos, including code snippets for filling in the gaps for things that they don't that aren't possible without code customizations.
Speaker 3:It's a beautiful future that we live in in the next couple of years before, you know, the whole question of what am I doing on Earth comes into play.
Speaker 1:Until I until I have to, you know, pull another Leo Leonardo DiCaprio quote probably from, you know, like, Christopher Nolan's film. What was it that he was in? Where the whole world flips upside down.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. Inception.
Speaker 1:Inception. I had to pull one of those quotes. Here's another anecdote with the AI stuff on the we did a webinar last week. Yes. Last week.
Speaker 1:Gravity Forms, we talked about AI and automation. And I actually brought up your Gravity kit. I think it's called entries importer to import
Speaker 3:Gravity import.
Speaker 1:Gravity import. Brought that in. And I used AI to just create me a generic CSV file to to demonstrate, like, data inside of Gravity Forms. So if I'm an agency and I'm, you know, demoing something to a customer, maybe I'm using, you know, GravityKit suite of, like, displaying entries onto a onto a page, I was just like, well, I can just use AI to make a fake CSV with all the fields, all the columns and fields that, you know, I would need to populate into this form to demo to a customer and it generated in whatever two seconds. And then I use your tool to import it into to Gravity Forms.
Speaker 1:So it's not always about, you know, again to your point about like how these efficiencies are are pretty good right now is, it's not always even about coding in in the snippets. It's about all these other things that we can do with our data inside gravity forms in or out. And in that situation, like, AI was fantastic for that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I just spoke with another person who's they moved from WooCommerce to Shopify because they didn't really wanna deal with all the implications of of selling things on their website, including security and all that stuff. So they moved their their store to Shopify, and they wanted to find a way to sync the data between Shopify and their word WordPress installation. That is something that you can do with Zapier or Make.com, for example, but that's not something that we support out of the box. And that type of integration, I think, is where AI will help facilitate it.
Speaker 3:But I I think that if we're responsive to and move how the data where customers want the data in the ways they want it, I don't see any reason why WordPress is going to go away as long as we're not too strict in how we're thinking about what is WordPress.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One more question about the the WordPress stuff. When I joined Gravity Forms, I was actually talking to Dave, from Gravity Wiz, and something I had never really thought of before because I just just didn't require it in my brain. But I'm curious on on on your take on it is, a lot of the stuff that Dave makes the thing he said to me, and I'm kinda paraphrasing here, is, like, I just look at we just look at Gravity Forms as the database. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, we look at that as a database. And it never really, like I mean, I knew it. I knew it was I I knew entries were in the database, but I would I never thought of it like, oh, you could just treat Gravity Forms. Like, not everything has to be in a custom post type, custom field. It can be in Gravity Forms.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm wondering if you can illustrate how you perceive that and, like, how somebody developing WordPress sites can leverage that without having to think, like, maybe not everything goes custom post type and custom fields like we're so attributed to doing. It can kinda live and then create out of the Gravity Forms ecosystem, if that makes sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I it makes a lot of sense. And Gravity View part of the reason Gravity View, I created it, is because I was so despondent from looking at the way people were treating the Gravity Forms post field types. And people were creating creating whole posts from entries just because they needed to display them and that that the way they knew best to do that was through a custom post type. And it creates a lot of craft in the WordPress back end when you create a an entry and that entry creates a post.
Speaker 3:And then that post is also kinda separated from the Gravity Forms entry. So when you update the post, it doesn't currently, as far as I understand, update the entry. I think things might be in the works to to change that, but it is disconnected and is no longer related in a way that gets really complicated and really confusing. And it also triggers when you create a post. Guess what?
Speaker 3:Your post is now, like, connected to to comments, and it has all sorts of rules that are run when a post is created that you might not want run. So let's say you have a directory, and you have the directory is powered by Gravity Forms. You don't need to have all this custom post type stuff. You can just power it from the Gravity Forms data directly. It is faster.
Speaker 3:It's easier for users to come in and update. And Gravity Forms has all the security stuff baked in as well. So you can just run a directory powered by Gravity Forms data using GravityView without considering all this other WordPress custom post type stuff. And it's a lot a lot less cruft, a lot more direct, and I think more maintainable. It's easily searched.
Speaker 3:It's easily exported. All the stuff you wanna do in WordPress with the custom post types is possible without doing all of that and without duplicating data.
Speaker 1:In the first half of this conversation or in the first half of this episode, I sat down with Casey as I mentioned at the top of our interview, and he said, Zach might talk about some new products or at least hint at them. He didn't wanna steal any of your thunder. I was like, come on, man. Just give me the insight. And he's like, no.
Speaker 1:I gotta
Speaker 3:Give me good
Speaker 1:stuff. I gotta wait for the boss to tell you. So with that, what do you have on the horizon that you can start to tease out to the breakdown audience?
Speaker 3:Hey, breakdown audience. Do you use Elementor? Well, if you do, then we have widgets for you. Gravity Forms Elementor widget, number one, is already out there. It's ready for you.
Speaker 3:If you've ever wanted to have a really great way to embed a Gravity Forms widget in Elementor, this is it. Sometimes you have to install these compound plugins that have tons of widgets and a lot of deadweight if you just wanna embed a Gravity Forms widget. And so we added we created that, and we are adding a bunch of cool customizations coming soon to be able to style it the way you want as you might expect from an Elementor widget. So Gravity Forms widget, that's already out there. By the April, GravityView is going to have an Elementor widget that is fully customizable, and you can design it in Elementor, make it look exactly how you want.
Speaker 3:It's gonna support all our different layouts, and it's really, really cool. We displayed this currently recently in a Gravity Kit live episode, and our customers were kinda losing their minds. They were really excited about how how powerful it is, and that's coming soon. So you can create an application and style it exactly as you want and and embed it in Elementor.
Speaker 1:The gravity and and we're also talking specifically the Gravity Kit product. Right? So, like, if I have a view of a business directory, they can punch into that and style that natively in Elementor. Elementor. In other words, they don't have to back out and go to the WordPress editor to do it, or in maybe writing lines of CSS code or whatever.
Speaker 1:They could view it as they're dynamically designing the site in Elementor, change the look and feel of that gravity view right there in the Elementor editor. Favorite?
Speaker 3:You wanna change the number of columns for the repeating grid that you have that displays the Gravity Forms entries on the front end, you can do that. It live previews immediately. It looks great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Elementor, a really powerful choice for folks that wanna just get designing and building websites a lot faster. And maybe sort of that that implementer type of person who's who has both sides of the brain, designer and developer. They're leaning towards Elementor. I know this is kinda weird to say in 2025.
Speaker 1:I mean, they are the biggest, I think, page builder. If you don't count Gutenberg, in or or the site editor in that in that, in that, chart. They're the biggest page builder out there and and for good reason. As much criticism as they get about maybe not having the the, you know, whatever, bleeding edge features, I think what they've been able to, to build with their product, and their community is is quite fascinating and should be applauded in the WordPress space.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so that's one of the cool things we've got going on, Matt.
Speaker 1:You have a
Speaker 3:second? I have three.
Speaker 1:Trench coat opens. Here's pick which gold watch you want.
Speaker 3:Whatever gold watch you want, and this is a sparkly watch. So GravityView, when you create a directory or a publicly, you know, visible view from Gravity Forms data, sometimes you wanna allow people who submitted that entry to edit it. Currently, people have to have a WordPress account, and that WordPress account needs to be assigned to the entry when the entry is created. And that can lead to people not using the ability to edit entries because they don't wanna have people create a WordPress account. And we are releasing GravityView magic links later this week so that you can allow people to edit their own entries by clicking a magic link and having it automatically take them to the edit entry screen in GravityView.
Speaker 3:You can also allow list wildcard emails to allow anybody from your organization or anybody from a specific, you know, domain name to edit an entry as well. So we're really excited. There's there's auto expiration for links to allow the links to only work for fifteen minutes or however amount of time you define it after the email is sent. And, also, we have the ability to say only allow editing an entry if it's within a certain amount of time. So let's say you want the edit entry to be editable for a year after it's created and then no longer allow edits.
Speaker 3:You can shut off the time when people are able to make edits to their submissions.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We're really excited about that.
Speaker 1:What's the I mean, I get it. But what's the best use case for that? Somebody listening to this going, okay. Sounds cool. Why would I use this?
Speaker 3:So for, let's say, a business directory, if you have a business that submitted a a listing and you want them to be able to edit their listing or maybe only a certain fields in their listing, like, you can submit the you want people to be able to edit their business hours. You can allow people to do that as long as their email matches the email that is on the entry. So that's that's a really simple example. But user profiles allow people to edit a team directory without having to manage it yourself. And every time somebody wants to change something in your team page, you don't necessarily wanna give them access to the team page in the back end.
Speaker 3:You don't wanna necessarily give them access to everything in Gravity Forms or edit entries that other people have created. Now you can make it so they can edit their own entry. It updates live and it's secure.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Third thing you said, yes, no, you can share that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Absolutely. We have released last month a dynamic lookup field, which is really awesome. So y'all might be familiar, if you're listening, with the incredible GravityWiz populate anything plugin. It is wonderful, and it's so powerful.
Speaker 3:And it's often not it's it's often more powerful than our customers need, which is just a basic way to connect data to other data. And so if you need all the cool things that populate anything does, I encourage you to go get populate anything. I recommend it wholeheartedly. But if you just wanna list a few if you wanna list entries from another form so you can choose entries from a list and populate a field dynamically with the values from a form with WordPress users, like list existing users on your site filtered by role, for example. So you can list all the administrators in a in a radio button field, and you can choose the administrator that something is connected to.
Speaker 3:Or coming out soon, we are releasing the ability to display posts and pages and custom post types and list those as the choices in a Gravity Forms field. So if checkbox radio field, you wanna list posts with in a certain category or taxonomy, you can do that and have it dynamically populate. So this is actually a free add on. It's free at on gravitykit.com, and we are going to be adding some of the basic functionality that we think should be available to everybody. And anything beyond that, please go get populate anything.
Speaker 3:But we wanted to offer this to our customers because it was recurrently, it keep kept coming up as something that we need we're needing to offer to our customers for them to build these powerful applications that you could do with Gravity.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was gonna say, like, probably business directory itself. Right? Like, they have a form. They okay.
Speaker 1:I wanna pull up this. I need to edit this post and somebody's giving, like, the end user that access. You probably wanna be able to populate that, right, in the Gravity form. So those probably very, like, I don't wanna call it low hanging fruit, but I guess it was sort of easier tasks to to share that data is makes sense, right, to have that in your own add on than getting all of of populate anything for that.
Speaker 3:And our customers kept on asking for it. And it's they've they've been asking for it for years, and we've just been pointing them to populate anything. But then I had a call to somebody who said, okay. I've I manage a an event, a sports event, and this has it has the competitors are the athletes have a form, their trainers have a form, and then the gyms have a form. And we need a way to display and connect all these in all these different forms.
Speaker 3:And I realized there was no way to do it without populating anything. And I thought that that was a real shame because we otherwise could have done everything with GravityKit, with GravityView, and displayed only the athletes that were associated with the trainer, that was associated with the gym, and there was no good way to connect it. And so now dynamic lookup is available for free on gravitykit.com, and it is quite powerful, but it's also quite simple.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Looking forward, to all of this stuff available at gravity kit. Last question I have to ask. How is that printed newsletter doing? Still doing it?
Speaker 1:People still getting it?
Speaker 3:Oh, it was a lot of work, a labor of love. And it also I don't know if y'all know this.
Speaker 1:Insert savvy. Real world yeah.
Speaker 3:The real world is expensive. Like, having physical things that get shipped around the country and put into people's mailboxes is not free. So it is on hiatus currently. We haven't ruled out doing another, and we might we might change to postcards, which are a lot less expensive than a a folded four color edition. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, Matt, it's on it's on hiatus, think. Gravity Kit Inc. It was beautiful while it lasted, and it's still it's in it's in stasis at the moment.
Speaker 1:That's what I love about you, Zach. You're not afraid to experiment and try outside of the box thinking with this stuff. And I applaud your effort. And maybe one day Well,
Speaker 3:and if anybody has questions about doing unique unsubscribed codes for printed materials, get in touch with me. Okay. Because I I did a little did a little merge tag thing with Gravity Forms, and it got complicated. But I'm here if you have any questions.
Speaker 1:Thanks for hanging out today, Zach. Where can folks go to say thanks?
Speaker 3:You can find me on blue sky at zach, z a c k dot k a t z dot me, or I'm on Mastodon@Mastodon.socialslashatZach,zackkatz, Zach Katz, or just send me an email, zack@gravitykit.com. I'm really happy to talk to you with you. I wanna I wanna learn all about what you're doing, and let me help you achieve your goals.
Speaker 1: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/breakdown and click the icon of your app to add us and listen to us every two weeks.
Speaker 1:Okay. We'll see you in the next episode.
