Breakdown - A Gravity Forms Podcast

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

Cole Frazier, part of the marketing engine at Gravity Whiz. Welcome to, um, Breakdown.

Cole: It's good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Matt: We've chatted multiple times in the past, uh, largely on livestreams and some other educational pieces that we've done here at Gravity Forms. Uh, but for the folks who haven't seen those pieces of content yet, who is Cole, what do you do at Gravity Whiz?

Cole: Well, um, yeah, so I'm a marketer. I'm from Vancouver, Canada.

My, my background's kind of in tech software marketing and a lot of it in WordPress as well. But it gravity was specifically, I started here in 2021 and, uh, I basically [00:01:00] oversee all of our marketing efforts here. So, you know, we're doing content, a bunch of different areas. We have video content, blog content, and then we have, you know, email marketing, the lead nurturing that comes with that automation stuff, you know, uh, ads, social media, retention efforts, pretty much everything.

The way that I like to sum it up is pretty much anything that's public or customer facing is probably something that I'm.

Matt: Um, you know, running marketing, uh, from a founder's perspective is, is, well, it's fun and it's an exciting, it's, it's sort of like what you do. You represent the brand, but you're also, um, you know, in Dave's.

Uh, position. You're the guy who built the software. You had the vision for the company. So you kind of know what you want to say and how you want to represent yourself in the product. So from your years of experience, maybe you're behind the scenes with Dave, what was he like or what's it like for you to take that [00:02:00] vision from somebody?

And, and try to, to replicate it, where you say, you know what, I hear your vision, boss man, but I want to sprinkle some of my own, my own, uh, artistic value across this. How does that all break down at Gravity

Cole: Whiz? It's such an interesting question because it is something we've dealt with, uh, over the course of the past three years.

Like, firstly, I'll say Dave is, he's so passionate about what he does and he's. You know, had the experience not only working at Gravity Forms, but building every single product. So you have someone who's kind of, he's calling himself, you know, the product marketing lead right now as well as in addition to being the founder.

But Dave has the expertise when it comes to building all of these products, marketing them, knowing exactly what to say. He's also, you know, in the support queue, fixing the products. So there's nobody that knows the products better than him. And then there's, you know, me coming in from a marketing perspective and trying to understand everything, get oriented with it, and then also represent it.

So. Him and I have worked very closely over the [00:03:00] past three years to try and create a very clear kind of cohesion between what is Dave, what is brand, you know, and what is marketing and representing the brand, because on the one hand, you're going to have people that are going to come into your company and maybe have a personality or a way that they go about things, but the best way that we can address that problem, or even if it isn't a problem or not, I'm not sure, but the way that we address it is by just being super aligned on it.

It's core values really of the company. So Dave, you know, from an early point set out to establish some core values that we all kind of abide by no matter what area you work in, in the company. And so by kind of aligning on the values first, you know, we have things like voice documents that we align on how we want to talk about our products, how we want to represent the brand.

Obviously people know us as the wizards, but it's, it's beyond that, right? It's like. When we coming down to everything as simple as like how we post about our products online, you know, we have some very clear core values. You want to lead with value when we approach. talking about our products. We kind of [00:04:00] have a very specific voice that we approach.

So this allows us to have a little bit of room, uh, in regards to each of us and our own personality. But at the same time, stick with that larger vision that we all kind of share at Gravity Wiz.

Matt: Before coming to Gravity Wiz, did you have experience with WordPress? Did you understand the space, understand just the software of WordPress before you even looked at like Gravity Forms and stuff like that?

What, what was your experience like with WordPress?

Cole: Man, it's, it's funny. WordPress has been like, in some way it's been in my life. nonstop throughout my entire career. It's like I have been able to avoid it, whether it's, you know, in previous roles, uh, at other, you know, software companies I work at, we'd end up working with WordPress.

But also in my own, uh, like I ran my own company 10 years ago and also during COVID. And, uh, in both of those instances, I was working very closely with WordPress. So luckily, I've been, uh, pretty, uh, acquainted with the ecosystem, not so much Gravity Forms, but just WordPress as a whole and kind of maybe the The kind of people that use WordPress, you know, the kind of builders and that, that target market that we're dealing with.

Matt: I'm probably 10 to [00:05:00] 15 years older than you. One of the challenges with WordPress these days is, uh, well, it's just, it's, it's old software and it's from folks who started using it. Um, like I did again, 15, almost 20 years ago at this point. And it's, it's been hard to. on board, younger folks into the space with fresh concepts, with fresh ideas.

Um, do you see that in your marketing, um, when you're addressing, uh, the, the market of your users and how do we solve this? How do we get more people interested, especially in the face of AI, which I guess we'll talk about in a moment.

Cole: Yeah, that's definitely been top of mind for us. I think. We are still seeing a fair amount of adoption with new people building in WordPress.

I think the biggest challenge that we're going to face over the next couple of years is going to be AI and something that we lean into, um, when we talk about gravity forms in particular, like we have this very interesting marketing challenge at GravityWiz because we provide plug ins [00:06:00] specifically for GravityForms.

So on the one hand, we target, you know, GravityForms users, but we're also championing GravityForms as a platform and talking about how you can use GravityForms and how it's beneficial for your business and why you should be using GravityForms. So we come back to these ideas of like, you know, GravityForms has, you know, amazing backwards compatibility.

You know, it's super secure. It's super accessible. It has a lot of these things that even newer platforms don't have. And through us trying to champion Gravity Forms, it ends up leading them eventually to GravityWiz, we would hope. But as part of that message, one thing that we talk about a lot is the customizability that we offer.

So where Gravity Forms shines with, let's say, you know, backwards compatibility, security, accessibility, GravityWiz can take, you know, if you're building with WordPress, it allows you to basically turn Gravity Forms into anything. And we've already seen some really exciting examples of people building with AI specifically in the gravity form space.

So there's been a couple developers that are building these tools, but, um, I think that where we will continue to see really solid use cases is in the [00:07:00] customizability and how important that is for people. I think that like, it's, it's really hard to predict what it's going to look like, you know, five, 10 years down the road, like that's for sure.

But, right now we still know that people have very customized needs when they're building in WordPress. And we know that we're able to solve those in a way that AI can't.

Matt: One of the things I've been dabbling, um, in some AI, uh, learning how to code outside of WordPress with AI, doing things like building React apps.

Uh, integrating other API services, you know, just like bundling all these technologies together and using, uh, AI as my assistant to do this, right? Effectively doing what I did with WordPress many years ago. And then, of course, then the inception of, of page builders. Basically I'm looking at AI these days as the page builder for any software.

I do hope it's gonna be the page builder for WordPress and I, and I hope people build more solutions, um, with WordPress through ai. But here's what I'm getting at. As I stumble and fumble with this AI technology and build [00:08:00] these bespoke applications, it's taking many hours. Yeah, it's easy for me to do this stuff, right?

Like, yeah, I can go to a prompt in, in like under 30 seconds Bolt will make me what looks like an app. But there's like a gazillion more things I got to do after that to actually make it work, right? Like it looks cool and it's fast and there it is in the browser and you're amazed. It's a quite the parlor trick, but then you have to actually develop software.

And what it has brought me to is uncover this new. Appreciation, not just for WordPress as a whole, you know, many people look at that and they go, Oh, you know, Oh, it's this 20 year old app. It's monolithic. It's old school, man, MySQL. What are you talking about? This is, this is old stuff. And then I see people on Twitter like, Oh, I can build a gra, I can build a Gravity Forms replacement and save myself a few hundred dollars a year, uh, because I can just build it with AI now.

So you think, right? Until you actually try to [00:09:00] do it. And I'm hopeful, I don't know if this is a big, sort of preamble up into like getting your thoughts out of this world, but I'm neither like half glass full, half glass empty on this stuff. I don't know where I land yet, but I think that what it's actually going to do is make the price points of Gravity Forms, of Gravity Whiz, um, suites of products.

And somebody look at that and go, well, you know, six months ago they said, Oh God, I got to buy 200 there and 250 there to get this to work. I'm just going to do it with AI. And then they realize it's many, many hours in AI where if you just Drop 500 bucks on Gravity Forms and Gravity Whiz, your project would be done.

Yeah, exactly. Right? And I think people are going to find a new appreciation for the few hundred dollar a year price point and be like, Oh yeah, that makes sense to get reliable software done for me. Cause if I do it over on this AI thing, it's going to take me hours. I just, just give it to me, done. So anyway, that's a long preamble, but lots of threads there.

What's your thoughts on this AI world and comparing what we do. [00:10:00]

Cole: It's a super interesting thing to think about, like just coming back to one of the examples that you had, you know, for me working in marketing, I noticed that when I do the same thing, maybe it's not building an app, but maybe it's even just like with content.

I wanted to write an article. It's like, okay, yeah, you can write the article for me, but then I spend. Nearly the same amount of time editing it and working with it. So I think in our case with Gravity Perks and, and something that I notice when I'm working with our customers is the, the builds that they're, they're going for.

Like we, we write these spotlights where we try and talk to customers, what things they're doing. And the overwhelming indication that I get from them as I'm doing this is it's like you have Gravity Forms, you know, whether it's even just if you look at it and position it like a simple form builder, that's, you know, super extensible, customizable.

What they're doing with it is, is insane in a lot of cases. They take it and then they start building on top of it, they incorporate it into some existing workflow they have, often some WordPress [00:11:00] oriented workflow that they have, and then they just start customizing because it's for a very specific use case.

And one thing that I've noticed that AI is just not able to handle yet is that very specific use case. It's good with the generalized stuff, it's good with, you know, hashing out some kind of, maybe it's an app based on some very specific, uh, or rather general kind of inputs. But then once it gets there, like really in the weeds, often for a use case that benefits the business, it's just not able to deliver, it's not able to deliver in a way that's meaningful, just like you said, like you have to go through and about the work and spend all this time.

So at the end of the day, the developer ends up spending just as much time trying to, you know, proof the work and go through everything. And usually we'll come back to our products in the end anyway. So, yeah, I think like, again, I, it's still hard to speak for what the next two to three years looks like because it's changing so quickly.

We're seeing how these. Foundational models are shipping and kind of ramping up their, uh, their acceleration in terms of the ability to improve. We're seeing all these new wrapper, you call them kind of wrapper apps, but it's really just like, [00:12:00] you know, they're built in the application layer. These kind of applications that allow you to interface with models, I think these are continuing to get better as well.

But we still see so many use cases that are extremely customized to the customer. They're extremely unique. And there's just no way to go about using AI to do that efficiently yet. And I honestly don't know if that's going to change because our customers are agencies often. They're like kind of these solo developers, you know, indie builders type.

things, and they're, they're building for another customer, and then they come to us and use our products, and so they're often building a bunch of different things for a bunch of different customers, and each of those customers has super specific needs. So from, from their standpoint, it's not even scalable to try and use AI to do all those things because they have such unique requirements in each case.

So, yeah, again, I would like, honestly, I would like to see AI be able to handle all of that stuff in five years because it's gonna make everyone's lives easier. I don't want to be against that idea, right? It's a, you know, a net benefit, but ultimately. [00:13:00] It's still just I can't really see that end in sight, right?

Matt: There's certainly the advantage there there is speed there is like multitasking. I mean there are points of my day Where you know, i'm, you know, I have like half a dozen Tabs open, doing all kinds of AI things, over here it's like writing a script, the other one's writing code for me, the other one's creating show notes from a transcript of a podcast that I did, and I'm just going through, and it is, it's extending my ability to be a lot more productive, you know, but it certainly doesn't know the nuances, and it makes me wonder, this is a bit of an aside, but it makes me wonder like, If it's happening in our industry, which is like marketing and tech, where one could argue this is, uh, I, I, it's, I'll say it's like ground zero for a lot of this AI stuff.

'cause we are generally the early adopters. We're generally look, as marketers, we're generally looking for the [00:14:00] advantage and or the shortcut to like get something done. But the point is, is like, I think if, if we're seeing still the areas where it falls short, it's gotta be doing it for. industry with, you know, a varying percentage of, uh, of difference.

Right. So like in the plumbing industry, I'm sure they're like, yeah, great. It knows what a 90 degree elbow pipe is, you know, but, but it doesn't know how to do it. And it might know how to do it in your home. To fix your home plumbing, but you know, not in a commercial grade steam, you know, furnace in a school.

Right? Like just random things. I, it just doesn't have that capability. So I'm just curious of like, yeah, we're all saying disruption and we're all going to be out of jobs, but sure. There might be a slice off the top. But I think those of us that, that are trying to figure out how to cooperate with it and use it in a sane capacity, um, it's the best we can do because I agree, [00:15:00] we can't predict five years from now.

Like you're really predicting one or two at most

Cole: these days, just to add to that thought, I think. Right now, the practical use case that we see, and I think the end benefit, is still one of just productivity improvements. We see like, as you said, you have it open. I think everyone, in that way, especially kind of the early adopter space, will have ChatGPT open at some point.

And it's helping make things move faster. Like, we can't deny that it's helping improve that. Maybe it's like, just vetting code. Maybe it's checking for bugs. Maybe it's checking writing. But I do think that we're seeing the average person who's working in this space. improve their productivity and speed, and then with that, you're able to accomplish a lot more.

And I still think that's going to be a value use case for us and even for our customers as well. But as far as it just like replacing everything, you know, maybe we can build faster, but I don't know if it's going to be replacing it in the next. At least two years, let's say

Matt: let's talk about some of the exciting [00:16:00] things happening at Gravity Wiz. Uh, speaking of AI, uh, up on, and I'll, I'll make sure that this is linked in the show notes, uh, for you dear listener, but, uh, if you go to learn. gravity. com, uh, there is a course, which is, uh, quite frankly, just that breakdown of, uh, no pun intended of the, uh, 2024, uh, no code needed event.

That I hosted, which Cole appeared on, talking about how he used GravityWiz AI add on to filter and improve his productivity for screening, uh, applicants, job applicants. Uh, so check that out, learn. gravity. com, I'll link it up, um, but you click that and you can watch a sort of hands on demo of Cole putting this together.

So we have this AI add on that you all, uh, have created at GravityWiz. That's exciting. Um, anything else that's super exciting that, that you want to talk about from the GravityWiz side?

Cole: Well, I will say just, you know, in relation to that, that open AI add on is part of that new Gravity Connect products we put out.

So we put that [00:17:00] out last year. We've been seeing some people build some really cool stuff with the AI integration. But in addition to that, we also are just like churning out these new, um, integrations as part of Gravity Connect. So we recently put out Gravity Connect Notion, which is kind of the same deal, but it allows you to interface with Notion, send Gravity Forms data to Notion.

And then we also just put out Airtable. So Airtable is kind of like a beefed up Google Sheets. That's a very oversimplified explanation. I'm sure Airtable would resent that. But, uh, you know, you can send Gravity Forms data to Airtable. A lot of people use it for like, you know, no code app building. It's kind of a relational database.

But, um, like just to give you an example, we have a customer that used a combination of Airtable or Gravity Connect Airtable and Gravity Connect OpenAI to They have like a, uh, a natural goods store in Paraguay and they, they use a combination of these apps so that they have one gravity form. They kind of write a product description into it whenever they receive a new product at their store, and then it goes through to Airtable, which then automates through, uh, OpenAI, and then generates these [00:18:00] descriptions of the products that get shared socially, and so he's like automated a lot of the marketing for his company through a combination of these, these, you know, integrations that we have.

So we're, we're putting out new integrations all the time with gravity connect. The idea is it's just, we're just kind of like connecting gravity forms with some well known services that we know people like. So, uh, there's more to come there.

Matt: One of the things that, uh, I was chatting with Dave about the other day is, um, you know, it's.

You all have a lot, right? And you're sort of, and I've talked about this with Dave on previous episodes, but you're all sort of, uh, reshaping the way that you package your suite of tools, right? And one of the things that Dave and I were talking about was like, man, I need a, I need a quick way to search all these cool add ons and figure out, like, Out of all these add ons, how, which ones are going to benefit me the most, right?

Like, I was looking for something the other day on the site, and I was looking for something for the address field, you know? But because you guys have so much, it'd be like, oh, you know, get the [00:19:00] address field, and don't forget to get this add on too, because this would help your use case. And it's like tying that all together, which I'm sure is a challenge.

For you all in the, in the marketing, uh, side of it is, like, have you, have you, I, I know what, I know, because I know this, but for the listener, I know you're trying to, to silo these things into these new branded offerings, um, but it, is there a best way to approach all of, let's say, the 47 plus perks that you have to figure out what you need from a project other than just buy the unlimited license?

Is there a way for one to look at all your stuff and say, this is exactly what I need?

Cole: That's a super good question. I think we've tried to come at this in a few ways, and that's actually pretty good feedback. I think it would be interesting just in the context of AI to try and build something that allows someone to interface and ask, hey, here's what I'm trying to build.

How can I use GravityWiz plugins to do it? Um, but I think right now a lot of the traffic that we get will go through documentation first. We have like, we're trying to make our onboarding campaigns a bit more robust to like help [00:20:00] people once they get in. Get an idea of how they can use exactly, you know, each of our products.

Cause you're right. We have like 50, you know, 55 plus, you know, different. We also have over a thousand gravity form snippets. We have a bunch of free plugins we offer. So, um, we, we have put out some tools and we've tried to, I think, help make our documentation super robust to allow people to understand exactly what they're going to need.

And that tends to be where people end up the most when they're trying to solve problems. And then if not, they will come hit our support queue and we have. Uh, yeah, just an amazing support team that will pretty much get you started with no matter what you need, you know, if you have a problem you're trying to solve, they'll help you out.

That's been working for us super well, but, um, it is definitely a problem that I'm faced with as a marketer is not only positioning all of our products, but trying to communicate the value of each of them when you have so many. It's, it's the problem of my, my career here at GravityWiz. Yeah, I'll let you know when I can solve it.

Matt: Yeah, you, you, you all do a great job at getting a real world user, [00:21:00] um, case studies, right? People that are using this stuff to actually build, like you mentioned before, uh, either online shops or these like unique sort of ways of storing data. Uh, do you have like, A product you love the most and somebody's like, Hey, I use, I use populate anything for this.

Like do your eyes light up? Like what's your favorite way to approach, uh, writing these case studies or addressing the case studies that folks are using? Is there a favorite combo that you see is like, Oh. This combo of perks and stuff that we build is like the best thing for me creating use cases or case studies, right?

Cole: Yeah, that's a good question. Uh, I mean, it really depends on what they do, because I'm always surprised and impressed by what our customers build using different products like they'll take one plugin and use it for a different use case that I'm expecting. Um, populate anything and nested forms, I'd say are some of our most popular products, part of the gravity perk suite.

So they're really well known and a lot of people are building with them, but they're using them often in a utility means that allows them to just make their forms like a million [00:22:00] times better and, you know, send information between their forms and something else. But I will say, uh, coming back to AI again, man, it's been really interesting talking to our customers that are building with open AI, like just.

Three examples off the top of my head for use cases that I've recently been reading about from our customers. One of them was like, he has a super, you know, um, a large scale event happening in the UK. There's like, you know, three dozen events happening over the course of a weekend. It's a conference. He takes, uh, one of these kind of like displays that you have.

I think it's like, the equivalent would be like when you go in and, you know, maybe a self checkout machine or like you go in and like purchase movie tickets at those kind of kiosk things. But he puts this at the front of this conference. And then when people walk in, they can use gravity forms to be like, Hey, here's what I'm interested in at this conference and that it interfaces with open AI and delivers like a customized agenda for each, uh, person that's there.

And they literally send it, send it to them, send it to their phone. So I'm like, that sounds amazing. That's a really cool use case. Uh, I see someone, [00:23:00] uh, I think it was just recently I was reading someone that was using open AI too. have like specialized curriculum for students. So they can go to a website, kids can get, you know, a unique curriculum delivered based on how Gravity Forms uses OpenAI.

There was also one other case of an animal shelter that was using it to help people write adoption letters. So I will say probably by far and large, some of the coolest, most unique, maybe creative use cases we're seeing are often with, uh, Gravity Connect OpenAI in my experience. But it's worth saying, man, like with so many plugins, People are using, uh, the Gravity Perks suite in a lot of really incredible ways, uh, just to improve their forms.

So I feel like I could go on for hours about this.

Matt: So one of the great things in the Learn video, uh, that we recorded together, uh, again, like you showed folks how to build, uh, these interfaces. And that's where Gravity Forms and of course Gravity Perks, uh, with your OpenAI add on. But it just makes total [00:24:00] sense because what you're doing is you're building this the sort of user input the I guess the first layer of one might be chatting with open AI Right here in gravity forms and then putting it on your WordPress website and you can do some like really cool things.

I get it I'm falling short for words because I don't know how to like technically explain it. But like in your video Showing, uh, like the data and the merge tags that you can send to OpenAI without, like, the customer who's interacting with the form even realizing it. Like, you can pass data to help shape a chat GPT prompt so that the result is even better, and you're not even asking the customer, the user, to input that stuff.

You could be capturing this from, like, YouTube. Referral URL, right? You could be capturing like IP address, geolocation, and like forming this prompt in a dynamic way that quite frankly you couldn't do, you know, if you just like, I don't know, did something with like. A competing hosted form like a jot [00:25:00] form or something like that, like, because you don't have the control of that data.

It's not, it's not your website. It's not all this other stuff. There's like a particular advantage in my opinion. I know I'm biased, but there's a particular advantage for using gravity forms in WordPress and be able to scoop this data up and build it your way to interface with AI. No real question there, but just like a thought process, uh, you know, thinking about all the stuff we're chatting about.

Cole: No, absolutely. It's actually really impressive to look at what they're doing under the hood. When you look at the back end of these forms, it's like a perfect testament to how Grabby Forms can help you achieve that use case. As you said, they're using merge tags sometimes to send information, but there's also a lot of hidden fields they're using that are sometimes sending information populated from like, The user's information or, or sent from just some other, you know, entry they might have sent through previously, or maybe the, uh, the forum person who's building the form is fine tuning the response ahead of time.

And you'll look at a simple form that might just be asking the user 1 question, but behind the scenes, there's like 3 or 4 things happening, uh, in the back end that are really [00:26:00] creating a super customized dynamic output. So, yeah, it's, it's really impressive to see. And I do feel like it's the. Kind of extensibility of gravity forms that allows that to happen.

Matt: He's Cole Frazier You can find gravity wiz at gravity wiz Calm you can check out gravity perks the 47 plus gravity forms add on gravity connect to do things like Notion and air table that we just chatted about and gravity shop which bridges gravity forms with woo commerce I will say I As of this morning, installed the Gravity Forms email validator that you all recently shipped, version 1.

0. 3. Uh, to help me with some, uh, with some spam coming through my, uh, subscribe form on my, on my own personal website to validate those emails. So that's a fantastic Perk, uh, extends the email field, uh, I'll just read off some of the features here. It extends the email field that, that we built here at Gravity Forms.

You can validate these emails, domain validation, uh, it's really cool to help, [00:27:00] um, sort of cut down on those false, uh, or fake emails that, uh, one might use for whatever, wherever you're using your email field, either it's a subscribe form like me, or you're doing like a contest thing, um, you know, it's going to really help with, uh, the utility of Gravity Forms.

So. Gravitywiz. com. Cole, anywhere else folks should go?

Cole: Um, x. com slash gravitywiz. Check us out on socials.

Matt: And this cadence you guys do the live streams, what's the cadence of that, is it? Once a month, twice a month. We're trying to go for

Cole: like one to two per quarter. Uh, we have another one coming up actually about email validator that you just mentioned.

So we will, we will be doing a workshop on that probably in February. So keep your eyes peeled. Uh, we'll be sending out some communication about that soon.

Matt: Fantastic stuff. For those of you listening, check out gravitywiz. com. Check out the email validator field. I just did a gravity SMTP webinar, so I'll make sure.

That that's linked up the replay anyway, uh, is linked up, uh, in the show notes and we'll be doing another webinar [00:28:00] in March. Stay tuned. I haven't pinned it all down yet, but, uh, but I'll have it readily available for you and you'll hear, hear the date first, uh, by following the breakdown podcast here in your favorite podcast app.

See you in the next episode.

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