WDD LIVE 069: Etch Planning & Switching to Bento (Inside Look – Leaving Convertkit)

Hello, my friends.

Sorry, I’m sprinting around.

I was about to hit go on the stream, realized I have nothing to drink, so ran upstairs, got some water, catch my breath here.

How we doing, Sarah?

D123 in the house.

Ham is here.

Hola, Paige.

Matt Brooke.

Good to see you.

Ross.

Cool web design says hello.

Hola from where?

From Norway.

Excellent, excellent, excellent.

Grant, good to see you.

John Deaton Clinton in the house.

Andrew Schaefer.

Case.

Ruben says chat is on fire already.

Good, good, good, good.

Glad to see you guys.

Okay, so what are we doing here today?

What is the agenda?

The agenda is we’re going to talk a little bit about what it takes to promote a product, like the general state of products and product announcements and product launches and product releases in the WordPress ecosystem.

We’re going to talk a little bit about leaving ConvertKit and going over to Bento.

We will take a look at Bento’s website as well.

And I’ll talk a little bit about why I made some of those, why I made that decision to go ahead and switch from ConvertKit to Bento.

And, you know, what attracted me?

What attracted me to Bento?

What helped me make that decision?

I think a lot of these lessons are super valuable, right?

We are web designers, but as I’ve said for a very, very long time, it’s really, you have to see yourself as a marketer.

You have to see yourself as somebody, at least somebody who really understands marketing, because you’re working for people who need to market their thing.

You’re doing work.

Like, you can’t just be like, oh, well, this is just my piece.

Like, I just do what I’m told to do or whatever.

Especially because that doesn’t, that’s the pixel pusher mentality.

It’s not the mentality of a consultant or an expert where somebody would hire you and say, hey, we need a new website.

But like, do you know how to make this website get us more business?

Do you know how to make this website sell our products and services?

Do you, if you can’t wear that hat, you’re not going to be super valuable to the people that you are doing this work for?

And so, yeah, I just, I’ve constantly talked about this.

You, you have to have the mind of a salesperson.

You have to have the mind of a marketer.

Of course, marketing is a lot of different disciplines all wrapped up in one.

There’s copywriting.

There’s advertising side of marketing.

There’s the technical side of marketing.

There’s a lot.

There’s a lot to think about and consider.

And that’ll segue us into, well, this whole entire discussion will kind of be about that.

I want to start by saying, well, first, let’s, let’s go down and see.

Okay.

I got to get to the right part of my chat here so I can see new stuff as it, as it comes in.

So let’s, let’s talk about a little bit about Etch.

Over the weekend, I posted in the Inner Circle and I gave the Inner Circle a little bit of a, of a heads up.

Let me, let me share my screen here.

And this is a little bit of prompting of why I’m talking about this on the live stream.

But I did a pre-announcement.

Okay.

It was some details here.

That’s neither here nor there.

There’s some interesting things about this though. there’s currently, this was like, we’re on the third day since this was posted.

There’s 300 and almost 350 comments, right?

And pretty much all these comments are exactly the same.

They’re, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in.

It’s just, I’m in like all, you know, it’s, there’s people selling kidneys in this thread.

There’s somebody had assaulted a grandmother to take her purse at one point.

Okay.

Now, does the inner circle know what etch is?

No, no, no, nobody, nobody, no, only my team knows what etch is.

This kind of thing doesn’t make sense to some people.

Okay.

People will look at this.

I, especially somebody who may be new here.

They look at something like this.

Uh, and I, and I’m, I’m actually confident.

Like, um, I, I could, I could just do, I could just not even announce it.

A lot of people would, would just, would just buy a product.

Like they don’t even know what it is.

And that, that definitely doesn’t make sense.

That doesn’t make sense to a lot of people either.

Uh, but it actually does make perfect sense.

Um, so let’s like, let’s, we need to talk about that a little bit, but there’s, there’s a couple of people who will chime in and be like, uh, why, like why the hype?

Why the, what, what, just announce it now.

Just, just give us all the details.

There’s no reason to wait until early September.

That’s when, that’s when, um, this is all going down by the way.

Uh, and I’ll flip over to, if you’re not on the edge waiting list, go to digitalgravy.co.

This is the best way on it.

By the way, this is Bento now.

Okay.

Which, which we’re going to, we’re going to test this out.

So a few people are about to go here and put in their email address and, uh, we’ll see if I knew what I was doing when I hooked this up in, in Bento.

Now, this is not a Bento form.

This is a WS form.

It’s the exact same form that was there before.

But the integration goes into Bento now.

You’ll actually probably get a confirmation email from ConvertKit and you’ll get a confirmation.

Well, you might get it from ConvertKit.

That’s one of the reasons why we’re switching away from ConvertKit.

You might get it from ConvertKit.

That might, it might show up.

Um, and then you’ll, you should get one from Bento as well.

So if you don’t get two, uh, let me know.

If you already joined the waiting list, don’t, don’t join it again.

There’s no, there’s no point.

Um, but okay.

That’s, that’s neither here nor there.

I just wanted to, to point that out.

Let’s go, let’s go back in here.

Um, okay.

So what people are buying and buying into and saying, I’m in for, uh, and I, and I tried to explain this to the person is they’re buying a track record.

They’re buying, um, deliverance on what, what we’ve already, like we, we make promises and then we deliver on them.

We make promises and deliver and promise and deliver and promise and deliver and promise to deliver.

Combined with hundreds of hours of free education, putting forth ideas that are shifting the land.

Like, and I’ve said that our mission is to fundamentally change the landscape of front end development.

Right.

And so the content that we put out, the education shifting that landscape, the level of customer service, the attention to detail, yada, yada, yada.

So when you’re ready to do the next thing, and when you have a track record of, we don’t just do little things.

We don’t just do things that are just slightly better.

Like we do things that are fundamentally different and better.

It leads people to, to say, oh, I, I, I’m in, I’m just, I know the track record.

I know the reputation.

I know that’s what I’m in.

That’s what I’m in for.

I, I’m sure I’m almost positive. the next thing you’re going to do is going to make perfect sense because all the other things have made perfect sense.

So that’s really what we’re seeing.

Okay.

Um, which is really important to do the hard work.

Like you have to do the hard work of showing up week after week, after week, after week, after week, after week, after week, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of content and videos and teaching and, and, and responding and replying and liking and participating and on and on and on.

You have to do that hard work and then creating the product and creating the product and delivering on the product and delivering on the promises and then serving the people who use those products and staying with them and being attentive.

You have to do that over and over and over and over and over again.

And if you do that enough, you get to enjoy a little bit of like, okay, I actually trust this guy right here.

They, they, they never met in person.

Like I’m just a guy on the internet.

That’s what I am.

I’m just a guy on the internet, but you develop that level of trust to where when you’re ready to do the next thing, people are already in, they’re already in.

Okay.

Um, now that kind of leads us into why not just announce it now.

And when people ask that, I don’t think they understand two things.

Okay.

One is the amount of work that goes into planning, even just an announcement, even just, this is what this is at the, at the beginning of September, this is an announcement.

Okay.

But the amount of work that goes into planning the announcement, the amount of work we’re having, we’re having constant discussions on the backend with our team about the, all of the technical side of what we’re doing, but then somebody, you can’t just have a technical discussion and it’s not just technical execution, right?

You have to have a mess.

You have to have messaging.

Okay.

What, what is the announcement going to say?

What, how, how is the announcement going to be said?

And then there’s the technical side of, okay, are we going to put this out as an email?

Are we going to put it out as a video?

Are we going to do the series of live streams?

That’s what we’re doing is a series of live streams.

And how do we ensure, here’s the key part.

How do we ensure that we can maximize attention?

Okay.

Because marketing is a game of attention and it’s a game of momentum.

And some people choose to see this as a bad thing.

They’re like, oh yeah, wanting attention is a bad thing or building hype is a bad thing or, or FOMO is a bad thing.

Or like, why does it have to be a live stream that people have to sign up for and show up for?

Why can’t you just give us a video on YouTube?

And it’s very, very, very simple because the best product, like, let’s just say we just technically execute the best possible version of this thing on the backend.

Okay.

And then we release it and we go, here it is guys.

Here it is.

Here’s what we’ve built for you.

Okay.

And by the way, this is what almost every product does.

Every, every, especially in the WordPress ecosystem, especially in the WordPress ecosystem, they build these things and you should hate this.

You should fucking hate this.

They build these things in the dark of night without a single question for you. like they don’t, did anybody ask you how this thing should look or behave or feel or what it should do?

Did they ever ask you?

No.

They go build it in the dark of night and then they just show up on the scene and they go, Hey, look what I built.

Hey, you want to buy it?

You want to buy it?

And it’s like, is that, was that built for me?

And by the way, who are you?

I don’t know who the fuck you are.

And I don’t, you never asked me if I wanted this thing or any part of what’s inside of it, right?

You should hate that.

You should hate that.

Okay.

And if you know anything about our track record, we, we don’t, that’s not what we do.

So automatic CSS was pre-sold and then I built the product with the community that bought it.

That’s what I did.

I built it with them.

And then frames was pre-sold.

And then I built the product with the community that bought it because it’s, it’s imperative that people that you’re building the thing for are somewhat involved in the process.

Not to mention that there’s tremendous risk.

There’s, there’s risk in, there’s financial risk involved, obviously.

Uh, and the size of the product, uh, is amplifies the size of the risk in these cases.

There’s, there’s a risk that if you build it in the dark of night, you build it in such a way that it doesn’t really resonate all that much.

Okay.

Um, but even, even if you just magically nail, like you hit the nail on the head.

Okay.

And you come out, what we have to understand is that there is a absolute graveyard of products in the WordPress ecosystem, a graveyard.

Okay.

And so we’re getting ready to announce something new.

And we’re like, imagine we’re in a plane and we’re like flying over this fucking graveyard of products in the WordPress ecosystem.

And somebody is like, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re up here, like we’re planning and we’re getting ready.

Cause we want to maximize, we want to maximize attention.

We want to maximize momentum.

These are not bad things.

These are not bad things because the people in the graveyard didn’t have any fucking attention and didn’t have any momentum.

That’s why they’re in the graveyard.

Okay.

You, if you believe in your product and you believe in your purpose and you believe in what you are doing, it is your job to maximize attention.

It is your job to maximize momentum.

And by the way, if you’re a customer of a product, you better like, and this is what this is, if we’re going to, you know, be somewhat critical of bricks, for example, okay.

Um, you, you, you need to know that the people working on the product are also doing the absolute best that they can to promote that product, to get it out there, to build attention, to build momentum, to build a user base.

Why?

Because without users, the thing is going into the graveyard.

It doesn’t matter how much you love it.

It doesn’t matter how great it is.

If it goes in the graveyard, it does nobody any good.

So it’s our job to build momentum.

It’s our job to maximize attention.

It’s our job to get as many users as we can, because that’s the only way the thing survives.

The other misnomer that is so big in, um, well, all, all product development is this idea that the, and we don’t, we don’t have to share the screen anymore.

If I, if I need to share the screen, hopefully I will remember again.

It’s this idea that the best product will win.

That’s, that’s, and I, I, I, I fundamentally believe that’s what all these people think.

Okay.

That’s why they work in the dark of night for however long.

Okay.

All of, so many of these tools, they just show up out of nowhere and they’re like, look at my product, look at the features, look at the benefits, look at it.

And it’s like, but we don’t know who you are.

You’ve created no content.

You’ve created no value in this, in the ecosystem.

Now you want us to buy this product.

They’ve done nothing to really build it.

They think that the product is the thing.

They think, they think that, but guys, it’s a good product.

Guys, look how good the product is.

You got, don’t you recognize how good the product is?

It’s not, the product has to be good.

Obviously you, you hit a home run when, and let me, let me back up.

Here’s what I was getting at.

It’s not the best product that wins.

It’s the best known product that wins and you knock it out of the park, grand slam, when both of those two things are combined.

That’s essentially what we feel and what most people feel automatic CSS did.

As an example, you’d be the best product, but you also happen to be the best known product.

And they don’t always go hand in hand.

Okay.

They don’t always, sometimes when those two things go hand in hand, you feel like you, this is where the misnomer comes from.

You feel like, oh, it became the best known product because it was the best product.

I get it.

That’s like a natural, you’d think that’s a logical conclusion, but in order to come to that conclusion, you have to ignore all of the best products that were legitimately, I mean, you could, you could say, man, that was a really fucking good product.

I’m, it sucks that it’s not here anymore.

Why isn’t it here anymore?

Because they thought that was what was required to win.

They thought that’s all you had to do.

Just build the best product.

They didn’t focus on marketing.

They didn’t focus on messaging.

They didn’t focus on attention.

They didn’t focus on momentum.

They didn’t focus on building a user base.

They did.

They just focused on product.

That’s all they did.

And that’s what a lot of these producers do.

They sit there at their desk and they just product, product, product, product, product, product, product.

And that’s why there’s a graveyard.

Okay.

Now there’s also a graveyard because there’s a lot of shitty products, but there’s a lot of good products in that graveyard.

And it is our job.

If we don’t want to be in that graveyard with them, it is our job to build, to, to use marketing, to leverage marketing.

And you have to like, if you see that as a bad thing, first of all, if you see like marketing as a bad thing, and I, and I get it, there’s two types of marketing.

But if you see marketing as a bad thing, you’re in the wrong industry, my friend, you’re doing the wrong line of work because you have to believe in that to do the work that you’re supposed to be doing for your actual clients.

You get out of this industry.

You’re in the wrong industry.

Okay.

Nobody in this industry should hate marketing.

Now you should hate bullshit.

Okay.

There is a lot of marketing that’s bullshit.

What will often happen is somebody will have a shitty product.

They’re just trying to capitalize.

They see an opportunity.

Oh, or they see, you know, two other people did this thing.

Oh, I’m going to do it too.

I’ll just do another version of that thing.

And then I’ll just try to sell as many as I can in the shortest amount of time that I can.

And they don’t actually care.

But these are not the people that are thought leaders.

These are not the people who are dedicating hundreds of hours to education.

These are not the people that are putting a lot of detail into, Hey, here’s how to use the product and get the most out of the product and documentation of the product and yada, yada, yada.

They’re not really committing to customer service.

They’re not, you can tell these people from other people.

Okay.

So they’re easy.

They should be easy to avoid.

But what they will do is they’ll, they’ll try to capitalize short term or they know they, you know, they don’t have the greatest products.

So they’ll oversell it.

They’ll just hype it up a bunch with fake hype.

There’s a difference between, Holy shit, something amazing is coming.

It’s going to be transformative.

And then this thing over here that they know that’s not true, but they say it anyway, because they are just trying to capitalize on bullshit.

Right?

Obviously we don’t want that side of it, but I go back to, if you have a great product, if you believe in its mission, if it has a mission even right, because products have to be more than just the product, they have to be, they’re built for a cause.

Like if you can’t tell me why you built the product, that’s a fundamental fucking problem with your marketing.

Why did you build the product?

You, you, you had to have some sort of like vision for like how the future needs to be different than it is now.

That’s the source of all, if you’re, if your answer is like, well, I saw an opportunity, a financial opportunity.

Well, that’s, that’s a bullshit reason.

Okay.

Products need to have a larger vision that they are serving a purpose.

Okay.

That larger purpose has to be talked about and discussed.

Well, guess what?

Talking about that larger purpose is fucking marketing.

Okay.

Um, that’s why I, I just, I can’t stand it when people like try to criticize, uh, just market like basics, just basics.

Okay.

If you had a charity, if you had a charity, like you don’t care about the money at all.

If you had a charity, the charity’s mission is to help X, Y, and Z type of people or whatever.

It’s your job to market that you, you still have to be a marketer.

If you don’t get that message out, if you don’t build attention and momentum and everything else, nobody’s going to be helped by your fucking charity.

Right?

So everything is marketing.

Everything is marketing.

If you just want to be like, Hey, I want, you know, people in my community to know I’m a, not a shitty person.

Right?

A lot of that is marketing.

It’s how you talk.

It’s how you carry yourself.

It’s things you do in the community.

Okay.

You could see it at, at many different levels.

So again, it is our job.

Why can’t we just announce it now?

Because if we just announce it now, none of the infrastructure is in place yet.

So think about like, I’m doing, I’m doing live streams.

What, what comes with this?

I mean, I’ve got to, I’ve got to create the whole presentation for the live streams, right?

I’ve got to get a bunch of, there’s a bunch of stuff happening behind the scenes with other people that are not finalized yet.

Not a hundred percent finalized yet.

Well, we can’t just, we can’t just like go forward willy nilly without having those pieces in place.

Right?

There has to be emails.

There has to be a series of emails that happen after you sign up.

There has to be a general confirmation email.

There has to, the technical side of the webinar.

When somebody signs up on the email list, how do we make sure we get them the webinar link correctly?

Right?

What happens after the webinar?

When it’s ready to buy, they got to go to this checkout.

Is the checkout ready yet?

The checkout’s got to integrate back here with this licensing system.

It just goes on and on and on.

There’s a lot.

There’s a lot involved.

You can’t just, anybody who thinks, oh, just announce it now.

Just tell us what it is now.

Okay.

Well, again, a game of momentum.

You announce it.

Big buzz.

Oh, where is it?

How do I get it?

Oh, sorry.

That stuff’s not ready yet.

This guy fucking Jimmy one, two, seven told me I should just tell everybody about it now.

And how do I get it?

Well, that’s not, that’s not ready yet.

And so while we’re getting that ready, what’s happening in the momentum, the momentum dies down, down, down.

You want to have a good experience.

You want it to be seamless.

And by the way, when you’re doing something like this, this is our third, fourth time doing this.

And you know, I’ve been a part of many different product launches and marketing campaigns and on and on and on.

A lot of what you’re doing is a theory, right?

You want to see how people are going to respond to certain things.

And it’s also, while very exciting, it’s terrifying.

It’s terrifying to do this.

You don’t, it’s not like you just, oh, I wake up and yawn and stretch.

It’s like, oh, there we go.

A little, a little launch, a little product launch out there.

No, no, it’s, there’s a lot of boxes to check.

There’s a lot of, for as many things as I think I know and understand about people, the people in that we’re serving, right?

There’s, there’s twice as many question marks, right?

So, and so I’m constantly talking to more people and getting more insights and collecting more data and da, da, da, da, right?

And then what do I know about myself?

What do I know about the content that we’ve created and the comments that people have left on those?

It’s, it’s on and on and on.

It’s a huge thing.

It’s not easy, right?

It doesn’t matter how easy some people may look, make it look.

It is not easy.

It’s not all smiles.

It’s not all excitement.

A lot of it is terrifying.

A lot of it is, okay?

And you, because you want it, it wouldn’t be terrifying if it was just like, yeah, just crack my knuckles.

Let’s see what we can cash in on today, right?

And you just put out whatever and you just bullshit people.

And you, because what you’re thinking about in the back of your mind, when you really care about the product and you really care about its mission and the vision, and you really care about your reputation and you really care about your customers is like, we have to do this right.

Cause I don’t want to let anybody down and I don’t want to let myself down.

And I don’t want this, this vision that we have to blow up in, in a cloud of smoke, right?

There’s, there are things on the line.

And when there are things on the line, it’s not all excitement, right?

It’s, there’s a lot of stress.

There’s a lot of anxiety also.

And so we have to make sure, cross your T’s, dot your I’s, check the boxes.

Let’s make sure we can make this as seamless as possible.

Let’s get the attention that we need to have.

Let’s get the momentum that we need to have because we want it to be successful.

We want it to work.

And the users who are going to buy in also need to know, right?

Here’s part of being, especially of being an early adopter.

When you’re an early adopter in something, you want to know, and you want to believe that the team leading that thing knows how to go get more users.

Cause if they don’t know how to go get more users, your fucking money is going up in smoke with it, right?

There’s a risk to being an early adopter.

There’s a risk to being, and I tell people that up front.

I said in this post, can we, can we go right here?

Let me share the screen.

What did I say right here?

Um, uh, okay.

Okay.

I said right, right here, um, this kind of thing can captivate and motivate people to spend money.

They don’t actually have.

And I’m not in the business of taking food off your family’s table or passing on your electric bill to my team.

If you can’t afford it right now, you’ve got a month to figure it out.

But what it also says is if you can’t afford it right now, don’t fucking buy it.

Okay.

You got to be in a good place to do it.

It’s got to make sense for you.

Every, we’re not, again, we’re not in the business of just like, just get, get, and I, I don’t know why I have to say this.

It’s because the, you know, the fucking trolls, I’m going to start calling them Poppy.

I, my kids like the troll.

Well, they don’t really like the trolls movie.

I don’t know.

I think the trolls movie is not that, it’s not that fantastic.

It’s not a great franchise.

Okay.

Um, but I only know one troll.

That’s Poppy.

I’m going to start calling all these motherfuckers Poppy.

Okay.

Um, that’s their, that’s their troll nickname.

Anytime I call somebody Poppy, that’s the new inside thing.

You know what I’m saying.

Okay.

You know what I’m saying when I, when I, when I say Poppy.

Okay.

We’ll just get on the same page with that.

So, um, now we’ve talked about that.

Um, if you, if you’re on the waiting list, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re good to go.

Okay.

Definitely be on the waiting list.

Um, it’s going to happen.

It’s going to happen kind of quickly.

Uh, things are going to move very fast.

Um, I told my team, I actually just reiterated this today just to give you guys an idea, right?

It’s, it’s a highly competitive, it’s a highly competitive market.

As much as there’s a graveyard, there’s also a lot of, you know, really, really successful players.

Right.

And, um, you know, we’re, there’s a lot of stuff flying back and forth about what we can do and what we, what we, what we can promise versus what we should say is a goal, but not a promise.

And then the, you know, like there’s different levels of, of, and I’m, I’m trying to communicate this without giving away anything.

It’s very difficult.

It’s very difficult to communicate all of this without actually telling you what is going on.

Okay.

Um, but I told them, I told them cause I, sometimes I will see a little, well, we could do this a little bit better and a little bit better and this a little bit better.

And I keep stressing and reiterating, we don’t do anything a little bit better.

We don’t do anything a little bit better.

If it’s not fundamentally different, like it is, it is literally like you go big or you go home.

That’s it.

We don’t, we might as well pack our bags.

If we’re just going to say, Hey guys, look, we built a little bit better.

This thing, right?

Just fucking pack them up now and just go home.

That’s not, we’re not in the business of building something that’s a little bit better than something else.

It’s never been what we’ve been in the business of, and we’re not going to ever be in that business.

Uh, and so reiterating that over and over and over and over and over again, very important.

Okay.

I don’t even know what you guys are saying.

Uh, let’s look at the chat here.

That was my, that was my initial, uh, rant.

Cause I can’t talk about anything else.

I can’t give any details.

So I just, um, I, I, I can just rant about this.

Um, okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Mm hmm.

Okay.

Good, good, good.

Uh, all right.

There, there is, um, you know, there’s going to be a lot of speculation.

There’s going to be a lot of excitement.

There’s going to be a lot of, and that’s, and that’s great.

That’s fantastic.

Um, it’s, it’s what we need because there is an actual larger mission and vision tied to this.

Uh, and it is, it is not small implications.

Um, just continue to reiterate in your mind, the mission of digital gravy is to fundamentally transform the landscape of front end development in WordPress.

Um, and that’s, that, that is the mission that we’re on.

And so we have to do things that, that align with that mission.

Um, I’m going to go on to the, to the next thing, which is convert kit and bento, which ties into the, the whole marketing side of this and, uh, stuff you should know and be aware of and be thinking about when you are working with your clients and, um, you know, stuff that is necessary to do the work that we do and really deliver.

Um, I was thinking about maybe there was one other thing that I wanted to hit on.

Uh, but I can’t remember right now.

So maybe we will come back to that.

As Grant says, hit that like button peeps.

Okay.

Um, let’s find Tony and interrogate him.

Uh, Tony does not crack.

Okay.

He may be retired, but he does not crack.

All right.

Let’s go to convert kit.

I was with convert kit, man.

I think I’ve used every single email marketing platform in existence.

I was with convert kit many, many, and I’m terrible with dates.

So I’m not even going to try to give dates of when this was, but like many, many, many years ago, I was actually in a, um, community and online.

It was like a business community.

When convert kit was launched, like when convert kit was created.

Um, so I, I am familiar with like version one of convert kit and I really liked it at the time.

And I, uh, was an early user and I kind of saw its evolution.

Then they went through this kind of redesign thing, which it was like, okay, like, I don’t know, whatever.

It was a little bit of a, you know, it was a little, it was a little kind of botched.

Um, which I was like, all right.

I mean, it’s, it’s still fine.

Like they’re a startup.

It’s fine.

Um, they, you know, they were quick to fix things up and yada, yada, yada.

Um, one thing I did, I, I started to notice that they weren’t putting a big emphasis on was like support.

It was really tough to get like any support at all.

Uh, and then they had this chat bubble for support and that was like your lifeline to the support team.

And then the chat bubble was just never there.

It was, it was like, they like, I guess couldn’t handle support.

So they just like turn the chat bubble off.

And it was like, and then, so then you went to the Facebook group to try to get support and it was like users trying to help users, but there was nobody like officially there to provide support.

And it was just kind of like support was never a great thing with convert kit.

Um, but then, but then, uh, they went, why I initially left them.

Well, first of all, I, I did, what did I leave them for first drip?

I think.

Uh, and convert kit came after I had been using many other email platforms as well, but I, I left to go to drip and drip was, um, I love drip.

I really loved drip.

And this was drip before drip was e-commerce.

And that broke my fucking heart, man.

Drip was so good.

So good.

And I was rocking with drip.

And then out of nowhere, they, they announced this shift and they were like, by the way, uh, we’re going exclusively e-commerce.

I was like, I was like, I’m not a, I don’t have an e-commerce store.

Like, that’s not, that’s not me, but I love drip.

And so drip like left me.

Okay.

Uh, which was really unfortunate.

And I try, I tried to stick with it for, it just got to e-commerce.

Um, they just, they wanted to go compete in that niche, I guess.

And that, like I said, heartbreaking.

Cause like drip drip was my favorite email marketing platform.

It did everything I needed it to do.

It did it how I wanted it to like, it was just, it was just awesome.

And then they just up and were like, Oh yeah, we’re not for you anymore.

We’re for this e-commerce people over here.

And so I had to stop using drip.

So that’s up.

I think that’s when I went back to convert kit.

Then convert kit.

This did this.

It would, I may know.

I still don’t understand it to this day.

Um, most people don’t even know this happened because you would have had to been paying attention in like a 90 day timeframe.

They announced that they were rebranding and, and convert kit, I think is a phenomenal name for email marketing software.

I don’t see anything wrong with it.

It works for me.

Um, and by the way, I’m a, if you don’t know anything about naming and branding and all of that, like I’m, I’m huge in the camp that brands make names and brands make icons.

It’s not names and icons that make brands.

Okay.

So like, I actually don’t, I don’t think icons are really all that important.

And I don’t, as long as your name doesn’t suck.

And as long as it isn’t like hard to spell and antithetical to what you do or something like that, you can make it work.

You can make it work.

I mean, we can, we can see countless examples of this, right?

Um, like Apple, like it does, it fucking means nothing.

What’s a Google?

Nothing.

I don’t, it doesn’t mean anything.

And so the, the, what the brand does ultimately turns it into an icon, right?

It makes it iconic.

It’s your behavior in the market.

It’s the products that you offer, yada, yada, yada.

Okay.

Uh, there’s a big, there’s a big chain here called, um, best buy.

Okay.

Like the most basic name, best buy.

What is it even, if you were like, Kevin, you’re going to start an electronics.

It’s an electronics store.

Kevin, you’re going to start an electronics store.

Well, what should we call it?

Well, we should call it best buy.

Do they, that didn’t even speak to what they’re buying, Kevin.

Well, it doesn’t just go, just go, just trust, just go with it.

It’s called best buy, right?

All right.

Well, what’s the logo going to be?

It’s going to be a yellow price tag.

Like, like anything special about the yellow price tag?

No, no.

Just write the words best buy inside the yellow price tag.

That’s all you have to do.

But how will they know it’s electronic?

They don’t need to know it’s electronic.

It’s like, it doesn’t make any fucking sense.

It doesn’t, like, if you were going to learn about branding, they, there’s no, there’s no, there’s no teachable moment there.

They can’t point to be like, well, because we had the yellow price tag and because we called it best buy, obviously that’s what made this a successful electronic store.

There’s no tie-in.

There’s no connection.

They could call it anything.

It doesn’t matter.

They could have called it anything.

If they had executed in the same form and fashion that they executed for their electronic store, whatever name and whatever icon they had chosen would have become iconic in that regard.

Okay.

That’s, that’s my philosophy about branding.

Um, so back to, I’m trying my hardest not to get like lost in these tangents.

My brain will just get, will just get lost.

Um, I will stroke out and then I won’t know what we were talking about.

And, uh, it would be bad.

ConvertKit decides they are going to rebrand and their new name guys, their new name, they’re going from ConvertKit, which kind of sounds, you know, conversion.

Yeah.

It’s kind of email marketing or whatever.

It works.

It works.

They’re going to go to, does anybody know?

Can we do a pop quiz?

Did anybody know?

Brendan says rip Circuit City.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would argue that Circuit City is a much better name for an electronic store than Best Buy.

And they still lost.

They still lost.

See the name couldn’t save them.

They had a name that aligned better with their product.

The name couldn’t save them.

Rob.

There you go, Rob.

I wanted to give people a little bit of time.

There’s Rob chiming in.

Seva.

No, no, no, no, no.

Kit.

Kit is their new thing that they’re going to.

That’s not the other thing that they tried to do.

They, they tried to rebrand to Seva.

Seva.

Seva.

I don’t even know.

I don’t even know how to pronounce it.

I think it was Seva.

It was S-E-V-A.

Seva.

And they put out this new, they, guys, they spent, they spent, I believe if I remember correctly, they spent like a million dollars rebranding to Seva.

And when it came out, people were like, the fuck, what does that mean?

And they were like, what is the, and they, they had this long, like messaging about, about this shift to being Seva.

Justin says, Seva is at least a cool name, right?

Guardians.

Yeah.

Okay.

So they put out this messaging and nobody really knew what it was and it, what, or what it meant or why.

And nobody had a problem with ConvertKit.

Okay.

Now it didn’t matter.

It did not matter that people did not resonate with it.

Didn’t really understand it.

Didn’t, maybe it did, maybe it did matter, but there’s more to the story and you have to hear this.

This is just, it speaks to the world that we, that we live in.

This crazy upside down place.

And so it didn’t resonate and they were pushing forward anyway, though.

Like they were the, the Nathan, the founder was getting on calls with people, was releasing more emails and more messaging.

Guys, you just, you got to understand our bigger picture, understand it.

And they just keep doubling down.

Seva, Seva, Seva, Seva, Seva.

That’s what we are now.

Quick, trying to call us ConvertKit.

We’re seven now.

They changed their whole website, the whole website said Seva.

The website you go to right now at one point in time said Seva all over it.

Okay.

I think they even released a product or something.

Isn’t that where there was a ConvertKit that came out with a product where it’s like, Hey, you can create this branding package for your website and it makes your logos easier to change.

I don’t know if that’s tied in, but I remember that my brain connects that at being at the same time as the seven nonsense.

Okay.

Here’s what happened next.

Here’s what happened next.

He’s small.

And when I say small, I mean a relatively minuscule amount of people came out of nowhere saying that Seva is so tremendously insensitive.

It turns out, it turns out there’s this like, I don’t know, long lost African tribe or something linked somehow, some way to the word Seva.

I don’t know.

Now, if you look up Seva, it, you know, they went with the known meaning of Seva, right?

But there’s this long lost African tribe somewhere.

I don’t even know if they’re African.

I don’t even know where the fuck they’re from.

I don’t know about it.

But I do know that people in 2020 or whenever this was 2018, 17, 16, I’m terrible with dates.

It was well before 2020.

Uh, they, they make it a, their, their life’s mission is to be offended by fucking everything.

And it was a tiny group of people and they just came out of the woodwork like Seva’s racist.

Seva’s this, Seva’s that.

And it was like, how insensitive were you that you didn’t spend your million dollars investigating the long lost community of Seva and how dare you name it Seva and you’re culturally appropriating Sevians or I don’t, I don’t know anything about it, but it was like, come again.

And, and here’s the thing that they, they apologized and abandoned their million dollar rebrand, which by the way, it didn’t like, they, they could have just gone.

It would have worked.

They would have found it because it’s, it’s again, it’s a product thing.

It’s a, it’s a, the name doesn’t make the brand.

Okay.

The name doesn’t make the icon.

They could have made it work.

They abandoned, they abandoned the million dollar, whatever investment that they made in that total rebrand, everything gone, all the logos, all the design, all the, the name, all, all everything gone like that because a couple of people decided that they were going to get offended.

And, um, and when they did that, I was like, I’m sorry, I’m out.

Like, that’s just, it’s just, this is just, well, hold on.

This whole thing was just bad from front to back.

It’s like, I was out because of a lack of judgment at that point.

I’m like, I, I, I’m, I can’t, I can’t have faith in this, in this, in the leadership here.

There’s a leadership problem.

First of all, to make the decision to go from a perfectly workable name, that’s already gaining tons of like brand recognition, convert kit.

And then out of nowhere with nobody’s input, go to Seva.

And then because a couple of people cried, you go, you just abandoned all that money.

Like, why am I giving you money to do these games, to play these games?

This is not what I want my money going to.

Meanwhile, I can’t contact anybody in your fucking support system.

All right.

Cause you’re the little chat bubble.

You, you won’t show it to me, I guess, cause you don’t have anybody to talk to me on the other end.

So you see this money just going up in smoke on this nonsense.

And then you also can’t get something.

It was just like, I, I got to take a break.

I got to take a break from the convert kit world.

And I, I went to active campaign, which also sucks.

And, um, and then I, you know, I just kind of roamed around for a while.

Then I was like, it had been, I guess, many years.

And I was like, okay, I will, uh, I will try to go back to convert kit and I’ll see what’s up here because it is a simple platform.

Like active campaign is so over-engineered and, um, it’s, it’s really for like agency, small business kind of thing.

It wasn’t for what I was doing with software.

It wasn’t for what I was doing with Geary.co.

It wasn’t really, it’s not that great for any of that stuff.

Very clunky.

The editor’s absolute trash can.

Um, it’s, it’s just not, it’s not great.

It feels old.

It feels like technical debt.

That’s what it feels like when you’re using it.

It feels like, ah, there’s a lot of, a lot of technical debt.

That’s why they can’t make any of this better.

It’s just, it’s just gotta be tremendous technical debt under the hood here.

Um, that’s the vibe that you get when you’re using active campaign.

So I went back to convert kit because it’s simple, you know, it’s like, all right, it’ll, it’ll probably get the job done.

Let me just, let me just go back.

Uh, and they’ve done nothing.

They’ve really done nothing to innovate since I left.

So I came back, nothing, everything is as it seemed when I was there the first time, uh, after their initial redesign and they’ve, they’ve shifted and put all this money into telling the stories of creators.

And it’s like, all right, I don’t really care.

I don’t, I don’t care that this guy that plays guitar uses convert kit.

I don’t, I don’t play guitar.

I’m not, I’m not that kind of artist.

Okay.

Doesn’t really resonate with me all that much.

I’m glad you’re spending a ton of my money on that.

I’m doing that.

Um, and telling these stories, but it’s really not for me.

And it’s like, look, you can sell your little guitar program through convert kit.

And I’m like, I would never do that.

I would never, um, sell courses, programs, or anything else through an email marketing platform.

So it’s not something that, but I, again, I’m glad that you’re spending tons of money on that.

Um, and so it’s just, I’m like, I got it.

And then people were like, Kevin, I’m not getting your emails.

Kevin, when I click on the confirmation link, it gets a 404.

And I’m like, okay, okay.

Once again, I have to take a break from convert kit.

So I’m going to bento.

Let’s go take a look at bento. 300 and live, 305 live views.

Oh, that’s, that’s nice.

That’s great.

I don’t, I don’t even, I don’t look at the numbers all that much.

Um, okay.

What, what is etch an email editor in WP?

I would never do that, Patrick.

I would never do that.

Um, and yeah, I don’t know why they’re going to, uh, kit now, uh, over, over convert kit.

I don’t know.

What are they, what do they secretly hate about the word convert?

I don’t, they, they’ve done everything they possibly could do to try to get the word convert out of their brand name.

And I don’t know why, cause it’s the one thing that speaks to what they actually do.

Um, does somebody make it make sense?

That’s, I find myself in modern life constantly just asking people around me, can you please make this mix?

Can you, can you please make some of this makes sense that I’m looking at right now?

Not a lot makes sense in this day and age.

Um, okay.

Let’s go, let’s, let’s screen share.

Let’s go to, uh, Bento.

I think it’s bentonow.com.

Um, now a couple other creators that I know, uh, you know, shout out Dave Foy.

I think Mark Zemansky is, is on Bento.

Sunny, uh, is on Bento.

And so, you know, I was like, let’s take a little peek.

Let’s take a little look, see, see what we got here.

And, um, let’s just tell, let’s talk about what some things I liked, some things that I liked about it.

Number one thing that I heard, which resonates with me because it’s literally what I do is people would say over and over and over again.

This is why I resonate so much with like Mark Westgard, WS form, right?

It is having a founder that is accessible and available, uh, doesn’t see themselves as like above all of that of like, Ooh, I don’t talk to the customers.

You go do that.

You’re the customer support rep person.

I, I’m going to go do better things with my time.

Right.

Um, which is, that’s the kind of vibe I, a little bit that I got with ConvertKit, especially after a while.

Um, so the fact that they were all always saying, you know, Hey, this guy, he, he’s always, he’s tremendously involved.

Um, so there’s, they’ve got that going for them, uh, which I liked.

So I really, I really liked it.

And I’ve said many times, you need, you need product founders who talk about their vision, talk about what they believe in, in terms of their products, where the product is going, why it’s going there and on and on and on and on.

Right.

And then, um, you know, somebody that is, is amongst the people, right.

That’s very, very, very important because they do.

It’s so easy as the product grows and grows and grow.

It’s so tremendously easy to lose touch, right.

With, with, with the people.

And I actually talked to my team about this.

I talked to Mateo about this, uh, last week, late last week, uh, because we’ve got Tony retired and, um, Tony retired.

Alicia just had a baby, right?

So shout out to Alicia.

Congratulations.

But she’s, she hasn’t been here.

Tony hasn’t been here.

And so there’s been a lot of, a lot of slack to pick up.

Right now.

I always am doing support.

I’m always doing, but only certain types of support.

I am very heavy in the support community, uh, answering people’s questions about how to use the product, about bugs, about things like this.

People know that, right.

Something that they know the support I don’t do a lot of is account level support, like doing refunds or changing people’s email addresses or whatever, you know?

And so I’ve, that’s some of the slack that I’ve jumped in to pick up.

And then I started to see emails that I don’t normally see.

And this brought me to be more back in touch with that little piece of things that are going on.

And what that triggered in my mind, I went right to Mateo and I was like, you know what, Mateo, because there’s, you know, we, we’ve got so many people on the backend that they don’t do anything with support there, you know, like they’re just, that’s the development team.

And I told Mateo, I was like, you know what we should do?

Every single person on the team.

I don’t even, even if they don’t have great people skills, even if they don’t speak great English, whatever, anybody, which there’s really nobody in the team right now, but we are expanding a little bit.

So that might change.

Um, but it kind of, as a principle principle is every single person on the team, let’s say once a quarter should have to spend a week of their time just for that week, you’re on the support line.

Here we go.

You go in, you go in the support community, you answer questions.

You see what people are talking about.

You see what people are having trouble with.

You see the tickets that are coming in.

You respond to the tickets.

You, you got to spend a week, take a break from what you’re doing on the backend, spend a week in support, be amongst the people because I’m always like relaying to that.

Here’s what people are thinking.

Here’s what people are saying.

Here’s what people are asking.

Can we do X, Y, go see it for yourself.

I think it’s even better.

Okay.

Hey, take a break from what you’re doing.

Go, go to the front lines.

Right.

I think that puts people in touch with, um, you know, the user base much better than anything else.

Um, so that’s, that’s one thing that we are going to, uh, start implementing.

Um, especially when, when, when etch is here, uh, in the works.

All right.

Let’s talk about my screen sharing.

I am screen sharing.

So there is that going for them.

Next thing I look for certain things.

Okay.

Um, what kind of the, what kind of automation system is there, right?

How are contacts treated?

Is there a tagging system?

Um, what is the logic like?

Because if, if you’re missing logic and automation capabilities, it’s just dead in the water.

It’s dead in the water.

It’s why I, I, I said probably a decade ago that MailChimp is irrelevant, right?

Um, people that use MailChimp, it was always like the, you’re in the 1990s newsletter game.

Like that’s that MailChimp was designed for the 1990s email newsletter game.

And platforms came out, um, early 2000s, late 2000s that all went tag based.

And they were like, no, no, no, no.

Cause Gmail kind of introduced people to this kind of, guys, we don’t have to put things in folders anymore.

It ends up to just live in a folder and it can’t live anywhere else.

The fuck are we?

Like we’re not using the technology to its fullest potential here.

Um, so people changed the game.

They were like, why are we doing the folder thing?

We could be doing the tag thing.

Tag thing is obviously much better.

Um, and so email marketing went to tag based and funnel based and automation based email marketing, but not the old platforms.

The dinosaurs couldn’t really pivot that fast.

And they struggled with that.

The idea that I have somebody on a list and then it’s like, I can’t have them on this other list.

Why are we even talking about lists?

Like, it’s just put everybody in a database and add tags to them about what you know about them and add custom fields to them based on what you know about them.

And you know, custom fields are for binary things and tags are for a collection of things that we know about people.

And then we can use conditional logic to send to who we need to send to at the time we need to send it.

And it’s a wrap.

It’s a wrap.

This whole list base.

Oh, they’re on this list and you can only email that list.

And that’s, oh my gosh, that’s nightmare.

Right.

Can’t have any of that.

Um, but there’s, you know, email marketing has come so far even since then.

And there’s so much more that we can do with it, but it’s gotta be easy.

It’s gotta be intuitive.

There’s gotta be a lot of stuff, uh, like that, that we look for.

So, you know, I was reading on and on and on and on and on.

And I was like, all right, I’m, I’m kind of liking what I see.

I’ll go into the backend for you guys a little bit.

This is all, um, literally my, my account was approved overnight.

Okay.

So I set it up yesterday, started to get everything configured.

Sorry.

I like to move in pieces.

Okay.

Let’s bring the people in.

Let’s get the actual DNS side of this set up.

Let’s try maybe one automation.

So I did like the etch, uh, waiting list automation.

Okay.

Cause I wanted to see, all right, how, how that’s an easy automation.

Let’s go ahead and set that up.

Um, there’s this concept in email marketing of sequences versus like broadcasts, obviously.

So you have broadcasts, you have sequences, but then inside of an automation, you can have like one-off emails and there’s some email marketing platforms.

If you don’t know a lot about email marketing, you should definitely like be in touch with a stream right now.

You’ve got to know this stuff for, to help your clients and understand how this all works on the backend.

You got to know about these things.

Okay.

Um, so don’t be like, Oh, I’m not interested in email marketing, dude.

You’re in the game.

You’re in the game.

You have to know about email marketing.

Like you can’t serve your clients.

If you don’t know anything about email marketing, you don’t have to be an expert at it, but you got to know some stuff.

You got to know some stuff.

Um, so you have, you have sequences, you have broadcast sequences are email one, two, three, four, five, you space them out.

However you want, whatever broadcasts are one-off emails.

Like think newsletter, but not really traditional newsletter.

There’s multiple types of email marketing, by the way, that we could get into.

I’m a big fan of, I send emails as if I was emailing my friend.

I send an email like that’s just text-based right off the bat.

And this is another thing I hate about MailChimp.

MailChimp was the, put the idea out there that every email has got to be pretty.

It’s got to be beautiful.

Oh, it’s got to look like a little brochure.

Get your design going.

You know, here’s all of these templates.

Look at all these templates.

I don’t give a fuck about a single email marketing template ever.

Don’t care.

Don’t care what it looks like.

You know what it needs to look like?

It needs to look like an email.

Imagine that.

Okay.

That’s actually like a, first of all, when you send me a beautiful email, I know you’re trying to sell me something.

I know I’m like, what, what are you, you want me to look at?

Why is this so flashy?

Is it just, if you had something important to say, you could just say it in the email.

It actually works really, really, really well.

The minute people get these beautiful email, they know it’s like, okay, this, these are some e-commerce bullshit or it’s an ad.

And then you obviously get sent to spam or you get filtered out or people ignore you.

And then people are like, why isn’t my email marketing working?

I’m like, why are you sending them billboards?

Like quit doing that shit.

Talk to them.

Talk to them like you’re talking to anybody.

That would be a good start.

That’s kind of like one-on-one of marketing, by the way, is just talk to people how you would normally talk to them.

Tell them the things that are actually important.

It’s like, if you have a product that you just found, you just discovered, it’s not yours, but your friend comes along and you go to, you go to dinner with your friend and you’re like, dude, I think this would, my friend would love this product.

How are you going to talk to your friend about the product?

Like, okay, that can just be a lot of the copy and marketing, right?

You wouldn’t like go design a brochure and be like, Hey, Hey friend, take a look at this.

Take a look at this thing I cooked up right here.

You wouldn’t do that.

You wouldn’t do that.

You would just talk to them in plain language and then it would work.

And your friend would be like, Oh, that sounds fucking amazing.

Let me, let me go try that.

Right.

You just got a conversion.

Look at that.

You just got to convert.

You didn’t need any flashy shit.

You didn’t need a brochure.

You didn’t need to send them a beautiful email.

You didn’t, you just talk to them.

You just tell them the things that they need to know.

You’d be persuasive.

That’s it.

Okay.

So that’s, that’s, um, broadcast emails.

Then there’s flows like automations.

And one thing I hate about email marketing platforms that I’m out immediately.

I’m out.

If you forced me, I can’t remember which one it was.

Was it, it might be active campaign.

It might be active campaign that does this.

You go to create an automation and it forces you to like email one in the automation, email two in the automation, email three in the automation.

And it’s like, Oh, you don’t have sequences.

You don’t have like groups of where I can say in the automation.

Okay.

They come in, they enter the automation through a form, add a tag, start a sequence.

That’s what I want to be able to do.

I want to add a tag, start a sequence, do something else.

I don’t want to have to piece my sequence into this automation.

And then you’re ending up like, you can’t read any of the emails because the automations, I’ll show you what automations typically look like.

Um, so if we go into, I don’t even know, I don’t even know where to go in here.

Here we go.

Etch waiting list.

Okay.

This would be, this is very conventional, typical thing, right?

Yeah.

Okay, good.

So imagine that each of these was like an individual email.

Now this one is right here because I don’t need a sequence for this.

It’s just, I just need to send a confirmation email, shut it down.

That’s it here.

They come in, send them a confirmation, confirmation email, shut it down.

That’s it.

But if I need a sequence, I want this block right here to say, start sequence.

I don’t want 17 of these blocks.

And then I got to put a separate timer on each.

I got to interact with each block individually to actually build out my say, it’s just terrible.

It’s awful.

So I immediately am out if that’s the case.

Um, so Bento gives you sequences, uh, which are, which are great.

Um, let me go back to here.

Let’s go to emails.

You’ve got broadcast sequences.

So broadcast, let’s see.

I haven’t even started one yet.

Let’s go to get started.

New broadcast.

Um, here’s the, here’s the thing right here.

That’s very interesting and important.

You know, Bento, another selling point of it was they know a lot about email marketing and they know about things like, Hey, if you have a new domain, a new email sending reputation, like you’re starting from scratch, uh, you can’t just blast your whole list, but you have to send in pieces.

You have to warm up the list.

Otherwise the, um, ESPs, they freak out and you go right to spam and it’s like, okay, this is obviously marketing and promotion.

Like let’s, let’s market a spam.

And so they have a built in way to warm up the list, which is really cool.

And I, I believe that’s only there because it’s a brand new account.

So they’re kind of handling that side of things for me.

You’ve got all of your logic and stuff for who you want to target with this email sequence.

I’m just going to hit save and continue.

And then there’s, I don’t, I don’t know why they call them these things up here, but I’ve learned that I just need shoji.

That’s all I need.

That’s all I’m looking for.

You see, I go, let me go back here.

See this library, uh, as it, as it loads in.

Okay.

See all that.

You know how many, you know how many fucks I give about that?

See that many, that many right there.

Um, they can just hide that.

I, I, in fact, I might just, I might just message Jesse and be like, can you just hide the library?

Just my install.

Can you just, I just don’t need the library.

Just take that out.

Um, so I’ll go to show.

This is the only thing I need.

Um, and it’s, it’s, I, I am able to craft an actual email.

They use liquid, which is a, like a, think of it as like a short code system, which is fantastic.

Liquid allows you to do a ton of, um, stuff in, in email marketing with like dynamic data insertion essentially, uh, and some logic and things like that within emails, uh, which is fantastic, but it’s a nice, clean editor.

Um, it doesn’t have any, I haven’t run into any formatting issues with it, which I run into formatting issues all the time with ConvertKit, right?

Formatting issues galore with ActiveCampaign.

So far, so good inside of Bento.

Um, so it’s nice.

It’s simple in terms of that.

And then here’s the sequences area, right?

Um, so we can go look at the ACSS new purchase, uh, sequence, and I can open this and you can see your email right there.

And you can see all the list of the emails that are in the sequence right here, which allows me in an automation to be like, okay, they came in, let’s tag them.

Let’s start a sequence.

Let’s do this thing.

And I don’t have to be in that automation building out every individual email.

They actually have a dedicated area where that sequence is.

Um, yeah, it’s, it’s, uh, so far so good, right?

But they have a lot of other stuff that I haven’t even explored yet, uh, in terms of their automations, in terms of, uh, tracking behavior on the website.

So Bento integrates with your website.

When people are on your email list, it can see that they’re visiting your website.

It monitors their behavior.

You could even start automations.

For example, let’s say somebody is on my email list, like the waiting list for etch as an example, and they make it to the pricing page.

Okay.

They do the webinar, they make it to the pricing page, but they don’t buy.

So I can start an automation.

That’s like, okay, they, they visited the pricing page, wait 72 hours.

They didn’t purchase.

If they don’t have the purchase tag, let’s start this automation.

And then you can go start sending them a series of emails.

So you can do behavioral stuff that is linked to how people are using your website.

They have chat.

There’s like a lot of stuff that I haven’t even gotten involved yet, but I know what to look for in terms of the ingredients and the pieces and how they all come together.

And I’m liking what I see.

Uh, but convert kit made some gigantic missteps in terms of their branding decisions, in terms of their support decisions, their overall platform just feels like it’s lacking innovation.

They’re spending all their time apparently trying to attract guitarists and authors and whoever else.

It’s not me.

Uh, and so I was like, you know, and then I started having technical problems like 404s on link confirmations.

And, um, also, also while we’re on convert kit, the, you know, it takes a lot to start to call something like a trash can.

The trash can side of, of convert kit is the reporting.

Uh, if I had to like isolate one area, it, the reporting is awful, awful.

Like the one of the, some of the worst I’ve seen, which boggles my mind.

Cause they have gazillions of dollars.

Like convert kit is a very successful platform.

They have the money.

The fact that they haven’t fixed the reporting and analytics in, it’s just another mind boggling thing.

Um, and it just shows that, uh, they don’t really care about that side of things, I guess.

I don’t know.

Um, so I, and you guys know if you’re, you know, anything about marketing, like you rely on data, you need numbers, you need and specific kinds of numbers.

And if those numbers aren’t available or they’re very hard to get, it just makes your job so much easier and it makes it really hard to make good decisions.

Right.

And so that was yet another thing.

And so it’s just like when it’s one thing and then another thing, and then another thing, and then another thing, it’s like, all right, I gotta take a break.

I gotta take a break from this.

Let’s go, let’s go look at something else.

Um, so that’s kind of what led me to Bento.

So far, so good.

I will give an update on this probably 90 days ish from now.

If I forget for, or we’re onto something else, remind me and say, Hey, Kevin, can you go back and what do you think about Bento?

Are you still with them?

Uh, do you still love it?

I’m not a Bento affiliate.

I’m not a, uh, you know, I’m not trying to sell you on Bento.

People ask these questions.

They want to know how all this stuff comes together.

And this is some of the stuff that I’m currently doing.

Cause like, I can’t go through a giant launch in the beginning of September with an email marketing platform that’s having technical issues.

And then I don’t really believe in all that much.

Like now is the time to make the switch.

So we can’t make things available when we’re not technically ready.

This is part of the, what goes into being prepared and being ready and maximizing and capitalizing on attention and momentum.

All right.

Uh, Mike Delgado says, loving this session.

The topics are really important.

Thank you, Mike.

Um, let’s see.

Mark says I’ve learned so much about email marketing from Jesse and the Bento team.

The important tech compliance stuff that no one talks about is insane.

Yeah, I think absolutely.

Um, okay.

Yeah.

And I mean, the interface is, um, it’s, it’s cool.

Like it’s, it’s different.

It’s fine.

There’s, there’s a couple of things like I’m not big on the all users screen right here because there seems to be a bunch of, I don’t know what all the anonymous stuff is.

Um, there’s some, you know, real, you know, I guess we probably shouldn’t poke around in there too much.

Um, but there’s a couple of real people on the front, but there’s a bunch of, I don’t know what the anonymous, I got to go through the documentation.

Like what are the, what are all these anonymous people?

I don’t know what this is.

Um, so still some stuff I got to make sense of, but overall it’s looking, looking really good.

The form side is another side of email marketing platforms that I try to not like, I don’t care all that much about.

I try my best to not use them.

And this is another reason why when you’re using a form system like WS form that their integrations are so critical because I have found when I try to use the native forms for email marketing, I, there’s always limitations because they’re email marketing experts.

They’re not form experts, right?

And there’s a lot of stuff that I want to do with forms that I can never seem to do with native forms and email marketing platforms.

And so I don’t even pay attention to them.

I rely on the Mark West guards of the world to, Hey, let’s give me this fully featured form system.

And then let me integrate it really easily.

I’ll actually show you guys real quick how that, how easy it was.

Uh, let’s go to dashboard.

So there is a, let’s go to plugins.

Uh, here’s the bento plugin right here.

Bento helper, uh, which is, well, I can’t show you that cause it doesn’t, it doesn’t obscure my ID.

So I don’t think you can see the whole thing, but whatever.

Um, it’s all, that’s all it is, is it gives you an ID and then you’re done.

Your site’s hooked up.

You’re good to go.

And then under plugins, under WS form, you’ll see that there is a bento add-on.

This is just for the bento integration.

And if I go to WS form forms and go to etch waiting list as an example and go to here, uh, can you guys see this?

Let me zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom.

Okay.

So here is the convert kit.

Let me just put these next to each other.

So here’s the convert kit integration.

So essentially, and this is why like here, here again, if I want to pipe people into convert kit, I have to go into convert kit and make a form that I’m not actually going to use.

So it’s extra work and it’s extra things to manage in the form in the, in the convert kit dashboard.

So I got to go make a form.

I’m not actually going to use just so it can show up here and I can choose it just because of the way convert kit system works.

And then it’s like, do you want to choose a sequence?

I’m like, no, cause I use automations.

Okay.

So we’re not doing that.

And then you can field map and you can tag map and all of this.

Um, but you don’t do the tag mapping here because it’s really not great for that.

It’s like, you got to go into convert kit and do that.

All right, whatever with bento, it’s a little bit different.

So, um, it says bento list.

Well, it’s just a person.

There’s really no list.

Um, and then you come down and here’s the event type.

Okay.

So you can start an automation based on the type of event that’s coming in from an external source.

And so I say etch waiting list.

And then I go start an automation based on if the event etch waiting list occurs, we’re going to start the automation and I map the email field.

And then I can actually do tag mapping right here.

I could do it in bento with the automation, but I can also do it right here.

Um, it’ll put the tag on them as well.

So you can do it either way.

But what I eliminated right off the bat was the need to go in and create a form in this system that I’m not actually going to use.

I already created the form right here.

We convert kit.

You got to create two forms, the form you’re going to use and the form you’re not going to use.

Isn’t that fun?

How exciting is that guys?

Don’t you just love doing that work over and over and over again all the time?

Um, I don’t, I can skip that step.

Now I can just literally pipe them into bento and then do things with them.

So right off the bat, there’s an added, a big added efficiency step.

Oh, you guys can’t see that part.

Okay.

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

Right there.

See, uh, it’s not exciting.

I mean, it’s, it’s just a tag.

You just put the name of the tag in and you’re, and you’re good to go.

Um, the, okay.

Mark says the anonymous users are people that have visited your site as I understand.

Okay.

So yeah, it’s tracking visitors, uh, but they’re not in the email system.

So it’s not able to link them up with an actual profile.

Makes sense.

Okay.

Um, all right.

Uh, what a monstrous plugin.

Uh, yeah, except well, Ben, yeah, bento is not a plugin.

Uh, it just has an integration plugin that loads their code on your website.

You could just put the script.

I mean, I, it’s pretty much all it does.

Okay.

Let’s go on to Q and a what time are we at?

Yeah.

I’m going to try to make this more of like a 90 minute stream.

People don’t, I, I, I’ve been saying it for years.

People do not grasp if they’ve never used WS form.

They don’t grasp the power.

They don’t grasp the ease of use.

Okay.

And I am a WS form affiliate, but I literally don’t care if you use my affiliate.

Like I’m not giving you my affiliate link.

It’s not attached to the bottom of the screen.

It’s not in the description of the YouTube video.

If you want to just go buy WS, like just, I don’t care.

I don’t, I don’t, I don’t affiliate, like affiliate revenue is like it’s peanuts.

It’s not, it doesn’t matter to me.

Um, so I’m just going to tell you what the best thing is and then you can do what, with that information, what you, what you want.

Uh, and I, and I get, okay, let’s, let’s take a little trip.

If we were going to do a WDD live and Mark knows this, um, but you know, it’s working, whatever.

It’s not, you know, it’s not an exciting website.

And so you might look at the website and be underwhelmed.

And, um, this is an area where, you know, I’ll continue to try to convince Mark.

I’m like, Mark, come on, look, we got to capitalize on this.

You’re like the product is so great.

Let’s make sure people know how great the product is.

Um, I’m trying to do some of that, that work for him, right?

That’s me helping out.

Right.

Um, so I can see why people wouldn’t get it right off the bat, which is why you just need to believe me when I say like, it’s just insane.

Uh, especially if you do e-commerce stuff, like there’s some e-commerce shit that WS forum does.

That’s like what, um, with like product, um, customization, customization is I’m not even an e-commerce guy.

And when I saw it, I was like, okay, okay.

Um, and I actually did use it on, on one project.

Uh, that was before I jumped off the e-commerce bridge face first and decided that I would never do e-commerce ever again in my life.

Um, it’s just not, it’s not for me.

Okay.

Let’s go to questions.

All right.

Let’s go.

Let’s, let’s bring up.

Cause I know some people are probably going to ask maybe some questions for dev side of stuff.

Remember Q and a is open for anything you can, you can ask about anything, but I will pull up a dev environment real quick.

Why am I not?

Why is that one not pulling up?

Okay.

Let’s go back into here.

I try to leave these open, but sometimes they close themselves.

Let’s go back to here and let’s spawn.

What is it?

July, 2024.

I need to make an August one, but this one will do for now.

Should I update?

Should I update?

Oh, you never know.

You never know.

Let’s go ahead and update real quick.

Okay.

Questions.

First of all, random note, Mark W recently added a feature in the form actions to auto Mark submissions as read.

Nice to have in some cases.

Yeah.

Yes.

Sam says support from Mark is almost instant.

Yeah.

Mark is, um, he kind of sets the standard for, for support for sure.

Okay.

Let’s get to the Q and a, how do I get there?

Hashtag Q.

Cool.

Um, okay.

Why that pricing on etch?

What sets it apart from similar, uh, plugins?

Well, I mean, when we talk about it, you will know, hopefully know.

Um, but I, I will say this and I’ve said it time and time again, WordPress is notorious.

And I, and I’m, I’m again, let me, I just gotta be careful.

I just gotta be careful.

I can’t, can’t reveal too much.

Um, WordPress is not, is not leading the pack anymore.

Let’s just say that word for many reasons, for many reasons.

Uh, one is we are losing the coolness factor too.

We are losing on cool and cool is kind of an, it’s a very important thing, right?

You don’t want to be the dinosaur.

You don’t want to be the, uh, you know, that was cool at one point.

It’s not cool anymore.

Um, you know, they haven’t kept up with the times, that kind of thing.

You also don’t want to be associated with like things like if I’m going to give a specific, a specific example, poor design.

Okay.

WordPress.

If you compared WordPress with web flow, who wins on coolness factor, who wins on design talent?

Okay.

If you’re just going to make a general, like generalities about the ecosystem, which one would you say, oh, that’s where all the great designers are.

That’s where all the best and better designers are.

Which one are you going to choose?

Let’s just, why don’t we just do it?

Just put your answer in the chat.

I got to get out of the questions to look at this, put your answer in the chat, which one wins on design and, and coolness factor, right?

Let’s see.

Get to typing, get the fingers moving.

Let’s see.

Uh, someone needs to slip Kevin a roofie.

So he spills the etched beads, man.

They got to try to roofie me.

Who, uh, who’s that artist?

Who’s that artist that used to roofie people?

Nicholas says, uh, Nick R says framer.

It was between web flow and WordPress.

All right.

Let’s be fair.

Um, and framer is just the new, it’s the new kid on the block, but yeah, everybody’s saying web flow, web flow, web flow, web flow, right?

Web flow.

Everybody knows this.

Okay.

This is not, you don’t go to WordPress for like design talent.

Okay.

So we’re losing on that.

We’re losing in a lot of different areas.

There’s some areas you just don’t really want to lose in.

Right.

Um, and so there’s an, there’s an overarching vision, like the things that the impact that we want to have, um, we, we’ve got a lot of work to do.

We’ve got a lot of work to do.

One other area that we’re losing in is the value that we give to the tools that we use.

And I think part of this is because WordPress is free.

WordPress is open source WordPress.

And therefore everything in WordPress should be free.

Everything in WordPress should just be available.

Everybody should just work for free and support for free and, you know, innovate for free and contribute for free and on and on.

It’s so exhausting.

Um, because the truth and the reality is we are trying to do serious work for serious businesses.

And that work comes with serious value and serious value deserves to be given value back for it.

Right.

Um, and that’s not to say that WordPress should be paid or shouldn’t be open source so that there isn’t tremendous value there.

What I’m saying is the ecosystem needs to get over it.

And the ecosystem needs to realize that everything in WordPress, that’s a generality.

It’s never a hundred percent of cases, but it’s an easier way to talk.

Okay.

Uh, so don’t come at me with those.

It’s not a hundred percent.

Okay.

It’s pretty, it’s pretty close.

Uh, is underpriced.

It’s just a dramatic, there’s like an epidemic of underpricing things.

Um, and I’ve, I’ve talked about it from a standpoint of page builders, from form systems, from, uh, like, I think, I think I underpay Mark Westgard for what I get as value for his form plugin.

Um, I’ve made, if you, if you added all the, just the agency side of stuff up seven figures using bricks, I’ve paid Thomas $149, $199.

Do you, what, what world are we living in where that is like a, um, a good trade, like a good trade right now?

Um, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s tools are dramatically underpriced.

Uh, and we live in a world and I try to make this comparison over and over and over again, where if you were doing business in any other industry, in any other world, right, we’re in the upside down in WordPress.

Um, you know, what, what do I need to start a painting business?

Well, I mean, I need a lot of painting equipment.

Okay.

That would be like a page builder, a forms plugin or whatever, but to be a painter, I also need like a van, you know?

Um, so to start any other business, I have to go out immediately and spend like 20 grand on like a painting van or something.

Um, and then I need people.

And then I, and this is a service-based business that doesn’t even need really a location, but probably at some point you’re going to need an office, office space, not super cheap, right?

Um, there’s, and then you pay for marketing and billboards.

My God, just to get a billboard on the side of the road that barely anybody pays attention to, it’s a thousand dollars a month.

It’s $2,500 a month.

That’s not even to run the business.

That’s just to put a irrelevant billboard on the side of the road, right?

Um, money, right?

Business requires money in the real world, in the upside down of WordPress.

Everybody’s like, Oh, well, it should be free.

I mean, it should be just make that awesome fucking plugin.

Just spend loads of time.

Just dedicate most of your life to that plugin just so I can use it.

Uh, and I want it to be $49 and then I want you to support me by the way.

Uh, and I want a lifetime deal for it.

I mean, we live in the fucking upside down.

Okay.

So part of it is starting to recognize that.

And I, I don’t think that’s helping WordPress by the way.

I don’t think that helps WordPress win.

I don’t think that that attracts more top talent to WordPress.

Um, I, I think that we have to be more realistic about, about where things need to go in a lot of different ways in not losing the design war, not losing the, um, the cool war, not losing the pricing war.

Okay.

Because we could, we could become irrelevant.

We could all lose that.

That’s the other option.

We could all lose.

Um, the one thing that we have obviously, uh, being in an open source ecosystem, that’s not to say the WordPress and WordPress is again, community built, right?

Isn’t it?

There’s just a bunch of people who decide to contribute.

Uh, that doesn’t have to be how open source is though, by the way.

And there’s various different ways to monetize open source.

So we don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking that the WordPress way is the only way.

Don’t, don’t make that mistake.

It’s not the only way.

Uh, and some of the limitations that they claim are because of the open source, that that’s not, that’s, that’s, um, that’s a narrative.

It’s not necessarily true.

Okay.

So I’m just being realistic.

I’m looking at it like, Hey, we’re losing in a bunch of different arenas.

Let’s, um, stop losing.

I’m not personally in the business of losing.

I hope you’re not personally in the business of losing.

And so what do we need to do to, to help not lose?

That’s kind of the things, uh, that, that I’m, that I’m, you know, asking the questions that I’m asking and I’m putting forth different scenarios and, uh, avenues for, man, this is so, it’s so difficult.

It’s so difficult to talk about it without being able to tell you anything about it.

Um, but we’re, we’re going to, we’re not going to lose anymore.

Okay.

We’re done.

We’re done at least for my side of things.

You know, I I’m going to do everything that I can possibly do, uh, to be done losing because we are, we are currently losing.

If you’re keeping score, we are currently losing.

WordPress is currently losing.

Uh, we need to stop the bleeding.

We need to turn things around a little bit.

We need to go the other direction and we’re going to help.

We’re going to help with that.

We’re going to help in a tremendous way.

Okay.

Uh, I don’t see the price is the problem.

The problem is not knowing what those thousand are going into.

I guess what?

Yeah.

I mean, you will know you will, you will absolutely know.

I’m not, we’re not going to ask somebody to buy something where we’re not giving any, any details, but the other reason why, um, capitalizing on going back to the edge thing, capitalizing on momentum and attention.

That’s very important to understand is when I talked about the graveyard, what did I also say?

There are a lot of successful players and a lot of those successful players have a lot of money.

Okay.

And if you put all of your details out before they’re ready to be out, all you’re doing is handing them the playbook.

It’s like, Oh, here’s the playbook.

We’re about to run.

It’s like, if you were going to like, I’m a big, I’m a big college football fan.

All right.

I’m pretty sure the Georgia Bulldogs, that’s my team.

Okay.

Like I said, I’m not in the business of losing.

All right.

Um, you can’t win everything.

All right.

But by and large, I’m not in the business of losing.

Uh, you think Georgia shows up ahead of the game with, uh, Alabama or LSU or the Gators?

And they’re like, by the way, uh, here’s all the plays we’re about to run.

Okay.

Uh, like a week before, just like, yeah, just handing the playbook a week before.

Here’s all the tape that we’ve been looking at.

Here’s all the plays we’re about to run.

You know, we’re not quite ready to announce it yet, but we thought we’d just give you this right now.

Right.

That’s a real thing.

That’s a real thing.

Uh, why, why do that?

Why, what, who does that help?

Does that help us?

Does that help the mission that we’re on?

Not really.

Okay.

So there’s things like that involved.

Now, some of these players can’t possibly pivot to what we’re doing.

Right.

So some of the playbook, they can’t even run.

They’re not able to run it.

Okay.

Um, but some of the playbook, they can run, they can run part of the playbook.

So, and why give them any, why give them any headstart?

Why give them any advantage?

Because they’re all going to start sweating bullets.

Okay.

They’re all, they’re all going to be the pilot on the movie airplane.

Right.

And they’re in the cockpit and they’re not supposed to be there.

Right.

And they’re just, it’s just pouring off of them.

Um, I just, I really, when I was a kid, I liked the movie airplane.

I don’t, some, some, it’s not humor for everybody.

Uh, but I just, I got a fucking huge kick out of it when I was a kid.

Right.

I’m sure maybe if I watched it now, it would be dumb.

But when I was a kid, I thought it was fucking hilarious.

Um, but yeah, they’re, they’re going to be sweating.

And when they start sweating, they’re going to immediately, like, it’s going to be, um, an emergency.

Like we probably need to make some adjustments.

We probably need to pivot.

We probably need to do some things, whatever we can do.

And then, you know, it’s going to be a whole campaign of like, uh, Oh, we do that too.

We do that too.

We do that.

No, no, you don’t, you know, yeah, you don’t have the whole playbook.

Right.

Um, so, you know, there’s going to be a lot of that.

I’m gearing up for, there’s going to be, there’s going to be a lot of poppies.

Okay.

There’s going to be a lot of poppies.

Poppies don’t like, um, they don’t like, uh, the, the method that we’re going to be doing.

Okay.

They don’t, they don’t like some of the aspects of this.

Uh, they’re not going to like the offer, the poppies, the poppies of the world.

Uh, they are, they’re going to hate and more than anything, they’re going to hate that everybody else is in.

They’re going to hate that everybody else is in.

The poppies are going to lose their minds.

Okay.

Um, that’s a little bit fun, but it’s also, it’s also stressful because I don’t, I don’t enjoy hearing all the poppies yap all the time.

Um, it’s, that’s not a particularly fun aspect of it, but it is life.

It is life on the internet.

Uh, so yeah, there’s going to, there’s going to be a lot of poppy talk.

There’s going to be a lot, a lot of poppy talk.

Uh, so just brace yourself.

And by the way, the poppies, they’re going to try to make you feel bad.

Like if you’re in the poppies are going to try, they’re going to so, they’re going to try so hard to make you feel bad.

Right.

You’re the bad guy for participating.

Right.

How could you do this?

How could you do such a thing?

Oh, the poppies, they’re going to, they’re going to be so loud.

Uh, so just, just brace yourselves for that side of things.

Uh, that, that is coming.

Okay.

Um, all right.

Let’s go back to questions.

Have we gone through one question so far?

Is that, is that where we’re at?

All right.

Um, how do you configure here’s a, here’s a technical one.

How do you configure the content section hotel frame to work with a query loop?

I thought I knew, but my images are stacked on top of each other in the Z axis. content section hotel.

Hmm.

Uh, well off top of my head, I don’t even know what that section is.

Let’s say content section hotel.

We, are we screen sharing?

We are.

Okay.

This is good.

Let’s go take a look.

I don’t know anything about this install that I’ve pulled up here.

We’ll, we’ll see what happens.

Is frames even there?

Okay.

I gotta, we gotta fix things for this new, uh, layout.

Um, Oh, this is going to be a, do we even have images in our library?

Okay.

Well, for, Oh, I see what you’re, you’re just trying to pull media into here.

Okay.

Uh, yeah.

I mean, what I would do is just delete all these media wrappers.

Um, it looks like we have media items as the container and then the media wrapper with the image probably loop the media wrapper, probably loop it from media.

I don’t even know if I have any.

Um, let’s go back.

Let’s go back to here.

Man, wouldn’t it be nice?

Like, do you see?

I have to, I have to leave.

This is such a bike.

I just take a rock and just bash it against the side of my face every time.

I, why do I have to leave the environment I’m working in to go look at my media?

Like, do I have any media on this?

Okay.

Well, let me stop everything that I’m doing and let me go check on the archaic media library over here.

Um, okay.

I have, I have one Nike shoe.

That’s good.

That’s going to get us very far.

Uh, I think I can still loop it though.

Uh, let me put it in.

Oh, you know what?

This doesn’t have happy files.

See, I’m always on the happy files train.

Uh, does this have happy files?

Let’s go to settings media.

Uh, okay.

Okay.

Okay.

We can, we can, we can resolve this.

Let’s go to this, this website’s not important, right?

Let’s, let’s go into this one.

Uh, see if I can go into media, media, media.

Okay.

Here we go.

Happy files.

Okay.

Let’s go to uncategorized.

Actually.

Uh, yeah, let’s go to uncategorized.

Let’s go add a folder.

Okay.

Just loop.

This is just going to be temporary so I can delete it.

And let’s go to, unsplash.

Let’s grab, we only really need one.

We need like one photo.

All right.

And I think tall ones work better in this frame.

This girl’s doing a handstand.

Let’s grab, let’s grab that one.

Okay.

Uh, we don’t actually need to be in here or in here.

Yeah.

Okay.

Good.

Uh, media library loop.

Let’s drop it.

Add new media file.

We probably should have squooshed it ahead of time.

Okay.

Let’s go to downloads.

Bang, bang, resize height 1920.

Drop that down a little bit.

Okay.

Select downloads number one and good.

Okay.

So now let’s just check it real quick before we leave.

So we have a loop.

Now see, that’s why you check it before you leave.

Uh, it’s not in the folder.

Let’s put it in the folder.

Okay.

Cause I think you can fake loop these an unlimited amount of times.

Let’s get out of all of this stuff.

We are tabbed to death right now.

Okay.

It’s always good when you close the site that you’re working in.

All right.

Now let’s go to add new page.

Easy to delete.

Delete me.

Publish, publish.

Edit with bricks.

Okay.

Content section hotel, right?

Bricks.

Content section hotel.

Insert.

Okay.

Media wrapper.

Media wrapper.

Oh, this is going to be, it’s going to be even tougher on this install because hold on.

Uh, I, I overwrote the content width here.

I’m using a super slim content width.

Um, let’s go main.

Maybe we can just override it back again.

Content width 1366 pixels.

Got to love some ACSS just on the fly.

Like, Hey, we’ll make whatever content we want on whatever page we want.

Media wrapper.

Loop it.

Query, post type, media.

Uh, include.

Uh, I think it’s in terms that it puts it in.

Loop folder.

Uh, post per page.

10.

Will it, will it, will it please loop more than one version?

Let’s go in and go post ID.

I believe it is.

Okay.

So we’re going to get her.

And usually it loops more than one.

Let me, let me go to the front.

It’s not looping more than one.

Okay.

So there’s that.

Now if I, let’s just add another, we’ll add another photo.

Okay.

Let’s go back to unsplash real quick.

Um, that was squoosh.

All right.

Let’s grab this one from this guy, this guy here.

One more.

We’ll just see if the loop works.

If the loop works, we’re good to go.

We answered the question.

Come on.

Squoosh.

What are, what are we doing?

What are we doing?

Now squoosh has lost its mind.

Oh, there we go.

What’s okay.

All right.

That makes sense.

1920.

20.

Dang.

55 K drop that one down.

Good.

Okay.

Back in media, media.

See how many screens you got to be in just to do some shit in WordPress?

Like loop.

Let’s see if it puts it in the folder this time.

Okay.

And let’s go back and check library loop.

Nope.

Nope.

Okay.

Fantastic.

Okay.

There’s two in loop now.

Let’s go to the front end.

There they are.

It’s looping.

So that’s it.

That’s the answer to your question.

Now for this particular frame, it’s expecting there to be like six, seven, eight images, something like that.

Enough that they will hit the top and bottom edge.

And then they will be hidden beyond that.

So it’ll look like they’re going, you know, underneath other content or whatever, however you want to describe that.

But that answers your question right there.

So I deleted all the media wrappers except for one.

I looped the media wrapper and post type is media terms.

If you’re using happy files, it’s as easy as that.

You choose the folder that you want to loop within and it’s a done deal.

Okay.

Let’s go to the next one.

How’s the weather in Atlanta?

Absolutely.

It is a frying pan.

It is a frying pan.

Mixed in it with an oven.

It’s like if you were standing in a frying pan and then they stuck you in an oven, that would be Atlanta right now.

Okay.

Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm.

Would love to use ACSS outside of WordPress.

Any easy way to export the compiled CSS file?

No, there’s not an easy way.

It’s been done.

People have done it.

You need to know about SAS and you, it’s really, it’s an up to you kind of thing at that point.

We don’t really provide support for ACSS outside of WordPress.

Not saying it can’t be done, but it’s not official and we don’t provide support for it.

If you’re technical enough to figure it out, then you’re welcome to do it.

But, um, that’s a, that’s about all I can say.

It’s also going to depend on the environments you’re working in and a bunch of other stuff.

Okay.

We will be heading, uh, headlining F2W if Edge is a new WordPress page.

I’m saying it, uh, now.

Okay.

That’s shysty.

Uh, headlining F2W, F2W, F2W.

I don’t know.

You can’t hit me with all these, uh, acronyms.

There’s too many acronyms in my life already.

I don’t know what that, I don’t know exactly what it means.

Somebody clarify.

I’m not going to, I’m not going to say, um, that it, it, it is this or not this or any, or anything.

I’m just not giving any, any, any details.

Do you know if ConvertKit did any kind of research with their existing customer base?

What we would want to see differently?

Um, I don’t know.

I don’t, I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I assume that they did research.

I assume that they’re always doing research.

I don’t know how that research is being, maybe it’s very possible that I’m not their target market.

Like, I mean, I don’t play guitar.

Uh, I’m not using it for my, my, my book writing business.

I don’t, I don’t, maybe I’m just not their target market.

I don’t know.

Um, but the, the, the rebrand thing was a disaster, uh, on two different fronts.

So now if I’m not their target market for their software, that’s fine.

That’s, that’s one thing.

But, uh, there were, there were other problems as well.

Why not use a WordPress plugin such as Fluent CRM instead of Bento?

As you always say, it’s better to have control and own your own data.

Um, because it’s forcing a square peg into a round hole.

Like WordPress can’t be everything and shouldn’t be everything.

Uh, I also don’t want my entire CRM living on a domain.

Like, first of all, this is a cross domain thing, right?

Like this Bento is, is for three different domains.

It’s for digital gravy.co.

It’s for automatic css.com.

It’s for get frames.io.

It needs to track users across all three of those domains.

It needs to be able to use logic between tags based on products across those domains.

Um, and, and I, I just feel like, well, one is, you know, Fluent CRM.

I’m not, I’ve never been a big Fluent product fan.

To me, Fluent feels like a lot of 90% completed products.

Um, I don’t know.

It’s just my, this is my take and my assessment on it.

But I just, I, I don’t like the idea of a CRM living in WordPress.

I don’t.

Hmm.

Okay.

Question.

Matt Zemansky.

Who’s that?

Mark’s a brother.

Mark, you got a brother you didn’t tell me about.

Uh, did a live stream with grade, uh, page builder, weird name.

Were you able to see if, uh, see it?

If so, what do you think of that approach for WordPress page?

Well, first of all, uh, shout out to Mark’s brother.

I’m sure he’s as great as, uh, as Mark is.

Um, I, I did, I think I saw maybe part of it.

I saw grade being used on, um, what is, what is that series called?

The build, the build live, the build live series.

I saw it.

I saw it being used on that, but you don’t see much of it.

You don’t really, it’s a lot of blur.

It’s a lot.

There’s a lot going on.

You know?

Uh, I don’t actually mind the name all that much.

That does sound like a comic book character or something.

Um, but yeah, I, I, I don’t know it in detail.

I’m not, I’m really not like block, block themes.

Don’t excite me all that much.

Um, it’s, it’s just, it seems to be a little bit part of the, part of the problem.

I don’t know.

Okay.

Would love to use ACSS framework.

All right.

You already, somebody already, already asked that.

Maybe it was the same person.

I don’t know.

Uh, please avoid hurricanes in Florida this season.

I will for sure.

Right now there is a monsoon down there and it has been pouring.

I’ve, people are sending me photos of my backyard with like the lake.

The pond is, is, it’s a, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a little too close for comfort.

The water is getting a little too close for comfort, but there is literally just a storm system hovering over Sarasota and just dumping loads of water on it.

And so there’s floods.

There’s, it’s not a good situation.

Hmm.

When was WordPress leading the pack?

Ooh, good question.

Um, I think WordPress was the de facto stand.

I don’t know.

I’m again, I’m, I, my brain mixes up like decades and years and it’s very difficult to like recall accurately, but I would say like 2010, uh, 2014, 15, 16.

I, everybody was like, when they were starting new projects, it was like, yeah, we’re going to do it on WordPress.

No question.

Uh, we know that WordPress got to 43% of the, like 43% of the active websites being built with WordPress is a phenomenal number.

Okay.

You only get there by being the dominant player.

So we’re going to talk about WordPress dominated.

They had to dominate at some point to get to 43%.

And people will still say, well, Kevin hasn’t changed much.

WordPress is still at 43% or over 40% or whatever the stat is.

But what I’m talking about is you have to look at new projects being started with WordPress, right?

It’s a lagging indicator.

Okay.

So you can dominate and then end up with years later, 43% market share.

You got there because the percentage of new projects being started with WordPress was so dramatically high.

Well, guess what happens when the percentage of new projects being started with WordPress is dramatically low.

It doesn’t take our genius to look ahead five to 10 years and go, we’re not going to be at 43% anymore.

Are we, we’re going to be way lower than that.

So you dominate by being the percentage of projects being started with the platform.

That’s an indicator of future dominance, right?

That’s the thing we’re losing at right now.

We have the current state of dominance because of what was done in the past, but the future is going to change.

And we can see that based on the indication of new projects being started.

I think a lot of people, um, some people choose to not look ahead.

Some people aren’t able to look ahead.

We had the same problem in oxygen when oxygen did their whole thing.

People were like, it’s still here.

It’s still great.

This was weeks and months out.

They’re like, look, it’s still here.

Look, it’s still getting updates.

I’m like, are you, are you incapable of looking ahead or are you just, you just don’t want to look ahead?

Right?

Which one is it?

Is it, is it, are the things not computing or you just, it’s too painful to look ahead, but I could always just look, just look ahead.

Look, we can do it.

It’s simple calculations.

Okay.

The thing’s dead.

It’s done.

It’s a wrap.

Move on.

Um, and, and when, when the developer gets on a live stream and goes, guys, this legacy software, it’s like, he called it legacy software.

And then, but then a percentage of the user base was like, Kevin, you’re so dumb.

It’s not, it’s not dead.

It’s still here.

Look at it.

And then you go in there and there now, and it’s like, where are the updates?

It’s like a ghost town.

It’s like, and it’s like, I mean, this is not, y’all didn’t see that coming.

You didn’t see that.

I thought it was pretty obvious.

Um, so yeah, I, so I’m doing the same thing with WordPress and people are going to, same thing’s going to happen.

Kevin is not, we’re not losing.

We’re not looking at 43%.

They’ll just keep the poppies.

Okay.

They’ll just keep, uh, you know, they’re, I guess some of them are technically not poppies, but some of them are, uh, but they’ll keep parroting the 43% thing over and over and over again.

They don’t want to pay attention to the other stat that actually means something.

Is it cause they don’t want to look ahead or is it because they’re incapable?

I don’t know which one it is, but I’m just looking ahead again and I’m letting everybody know it’s not a good stat.

It’s not, it’s a very bad stat.

Okay.

Doesn’t bode well for the future.

So we need to do something now.

Let’s not wait for the future to be here.

And then we can all go, what happened?

What happened?

Like the people who are still in the oxygen community go, well, what happened?

Where did my oxygen go?

Right?

Well, I tried to tell you, I tried to tell you.

Uh, but you wanted to tell me that I didn’t know what I was talking about.

Uh, okay.

Let’s see.

Now do I need to watch the trolls movie to understand the poppy reference?

It’s just, um, no, it’s, it’s not that deep.

I don’t know anything about the trolls franchise all that much.

Um, all I know is that there’s a movie about trolls and they have names and I live in a world where there are lots of trolls and I need a way to name them.

And so I might as well use the names from the movie.

Give me some other names from the, are there any other cool troll names from the movie that we can use?

Um, cause there, there can be some poppy.

I mean, maybe there’s another kind of troll.

Uh, we need to give them a name too.

I, I think it’s, it’s important.

It’s important to give these people an identity.

The reason they troll is because they don’t have an actual identity.

They don’t, they’re all anonymous.

Most of them, um, you know, it’s, it’s, uh, they, they don’t have, they don’t have business URLs.

They don’t have profiles.

They don’t, they don’t want you to know anything about them.

I think that’s for very good reason because they want to act the way that they act.

And, um, you know, they, they, it’s just feel safe to them.

So they don’t have a real identity.

They are, they are, they are trolls.

We should give them an identity.

I think a poppy, you know, is something they maybe can identify with.

Um, what else is there?

What else is there?

Let me know.

Okay.

Uh, let’s see.

What was your workflow stack before oxygen since elementor, elementor, divvy, et cetera.

It was, um, so I started with, uh, we had to do, does anybody remember in the classic WordPress editor using literal, like layout system short codes?

Like I did a stint with that.

I was in that prison for a while.

Uh, I did a divvy stint.

I was in the divvy prison.

Never did the elementor stint though.

Never did that.

Uh, just really, that was like the one I would not touch.

Didn’t want to touch.

Wasn’t interested in touching.

Um, I I’ve tried them all obviously, especially like coming into, uh, more of building frameworks and, and all of the education and like, it’s my job to use them and know them.

Um, even, even elementor.

I, I showed you guys on a stream a couple of, a few streams ago where I went in and showed you the blog article that I’d started and it was just like 4,000 words and it’s not even done in detail, just like taking apart elementor.

Um, and then I, I realized like by the time I’m done with this, I’m going to have to rewrite half of it cause they keep releasing updates, fixing this shit.

Cause, cause people are yapping about it.

Um, it was just, that was a losing cause.

Uh, so I just, I, I called it quits on that article and I called it quits on just doing page builder reviews in general.

It’s it’s, it takes so much detail and so much time.

And then at the end of the day, the conclusion of the article is going to be something that I could have just put in a sound bite like elementor’s a trash can.

That’s it.

That’s all you need to know.

If you want the detailed version, I could spend hours and hours and hours writing it up, but why it’s going to be the same conclusion that I just told you in one sentence.

Uh, and if people don’t want to believe me, that’s, that’s their fault.

Um, okay.

Um, last question, maybe then I need to jump back to chat here.

Have you already set the time at which etch will be launched on September 3rd?

So these are a series of announcements.

Um, and the reason there’s three of them is because, uh, there’s, there’s, there’s going to be an offer made at the end of the announcement.

Okay.

And every time I do this, there’s, we have a worldwide audience.

Okay.

There’s people in Japan, for example, lots of them.

Uh, there’s people in Australia, lots of them.

And I do love, I don’t want, first of all, there’s going to be no recordings.

Okay.

So there’s going to be no recordings.

What I don’t want to say is, Hey, you guys in Tokyo.

Hey, you guys in Brisbane.

It’s a Brisbane, Brisbane.

What is it?

Brisbane?

I don’t know.

Hey, why don’t you guys get up at 3am and join this live stream?

You know, make yourself a cup of coffee.

You don’t need to sleep.

Um, I want people to be able to join live.

I don’t want them to feel like they, uh, have to make a bunch of concessions to join live.

Um, I want them to be part of the experience.

And so I could do one announcement and then just release a recording or something like that, but it’s not as special as them being there.

I, I feed off of in, especially in presentations like this, I feed off audience.

I feed off energy.

I feel like I don’t want to just talk to a camera and I want to talk to people.

I want the people to actually be there.

Um, and so I want to do three different streams and, uh, that way I can do one at, you know, 1 PM Eastern.

And then I can do one at 9 PM Eastern, which the Tokyo people can come to.

And, uh, I, I structured it the way it is because it kind of hits all time zones, right?

That way I can talk to everybody and I can be with everybody.

And I also want to answer questions at the end.

Uh, cause there’s going to be a lot of questions.

And I don’t want to just be like, oh, check the fact, check the FAQs.

Uh, I want to be there to answer the questions.

It’s, it’s part of the experience.

It’s part of the whole, the whole thing.

So, uh, and by the way, this is, um, what I will tell you is this is WordPress wide.

Okay.

So up until now we have been essentially playing within sub niches of WordPress.

This is the first product that is a WordPress wide product.

Everybody in WordPress is going to be invited to come to this, which is another reason why you can’t just willy nilly start putting details out and announcing things and not have everything ready and in place.

Cause people are going to come from other parts of the WP ecosystem that aren’t necessarily familiar with me and my work and the things that we’ve done.

And we want them to have a good experience.

We want them to have a good first impression.

And by the way, um, you know, they’re going to rely on people like you, people like you have been around the block who come to these live streams constantly, who have interacted with our products.

They’re going to need you to be like, no, no, no, no, no.

You, you, you’re going to want this.

You’re going to want to be a participant in this.

Okay.

Uh, I know you don’t know the guy yet, but you’re going to need to be, just trust me.

You’re going to need to be a participant in this.

The other thing I hate hearing, um, it’s unfortunate.

It’s unfortunate that it’s, but it’s every single time it’s always going to be the case.

But I, I try my best, like if this doesn’t happen, I, I know that we didn’t do our job.

We didn’t do our job.

We need this to happen.

But what I, I warn people every single time I warn them when we did the ACSS launch, when we did the frames thing.

Okay.

And you guys know, if you’ve been around the block, how those processes went, the people in the beginning get the best deal by far guys.

There are people that bought automatic CSS for $69 LTD.

Like that is phenomenal, right?

Those happen to also be the people that helped build the product, right?

That we built the product with and for, um, because we don’t build in the dark of night because we don’t build in the dark of night.

But what I tell people all the time is very, very simple.

You’re going to want it.

Like you are going to regret not buying it.

Now, anybody can say that.

And people do try to say that we’ve talked earlier in the stream about bullshit marketers and then just the facts like that.

That’s the facts.

So was that the facts of automatic CSS?

Yes.

We know that because at every stage of the game, people said, no, no, no, no, no, no.

While everybody else was saying, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

They were like, nah, nah, I think, I think maybe I’ll put it.

And then they come crawling back.

Please, Kevin, please give me that other deal.

I know it expired already.

By the way, this is the third one that was already expired.

This is the third best deal that already expired.

Please, Kevin, please.

I, I, I’m so, I’m so upset that I missed it.

Just come on.

Let me back in.

Let me back.

Why?

Why?

Well, don’t just, you should have just listened in the beginning.

You should have just listened in the beginning.

I try to warn them every single time.

This is going to happen again.

People are going to be like, I’ll hold off.

I’ll wait to see what happens.

I’ll wait to see.

I’ll wait to see.

Oh wait, they’re going to, they’re going to come crawling back.

Okay.

Please, please, wait, wait.

Let me in on that original, that original.

Oh no.

You, you didn’t want to take the risk for whatever reason.

That’s fine.

Whatever.

You don’t want to take the risk.

You didn’t want to be an early adopter.

You didn’t want to trust what I said.

You didn’t want to buy in at that time.

You didn’t want to participate in the process.

So no, you can’t just be let in the back door.

Okay.

That’s the situation we’re going to face again.

But here’s the thing.

I know that we, that we have a phenomenal product when that happens.

And it happens every single time.

Okay.

Um, because people don’t come crawling back for bullshit.

They don’t come crawling back for stuff.

That’s not good.

They don’t, right.

You know that it’s good because they’re, they’re coming to crawl back for it.

Right.

Um, but I’m just going to tell you that’s going to happen again.

So don’t let it happen to you.

With that said, if you don’t have the money, like, and when I say don’t have the money, I mean, if you can’t afford for that money to disappear.

And I’m not saying like, it’s not really that risky.

Okay.

Cause we have a, you’re, you’re buying into a track record, right?

We, and we have a team.

Okay.

A lot of these plugins are developed in the dark of night by like one guy.

Okay.

I’ve got a phenomenally capable team.

And, um, so it’s not, that’s not going to be a problem, but, but with that said, the psychology of buying into something like this, I would tell it, whether it was my product or somebody else’s product or whatever on a launch, if you can’t afford for that, that $500 or $1,000 or $1,500 or whatever they’re asking you for, if you can’t afford for that to just go up in smoke, then don’t buy, don’t buy in the early adopter stage, right?

The early adopter stage is for the people who want the benefits of that, who want to participate in the process, right?

And who can afford to do it, who can truly afford to do it.

I said in that announcement, I’m going to say it again in all the announcement, uh, live streams that we do.

If I, I’m not in the bit, like if this is, if it’s etch or feed my family, feed your family, dude, like that’s not even a question.

Don’t, don’t buy this.

Okay.

Buy it.

If you can truly afford to buy it, that’s it.

All right.

Now I, and some people, they, they come to me like, Kevin, ah, ah, I’m scraping it together.

I’m trying to, and I’m like, ah, I hate that for you.

Like, I don’t, I don’t want this to be like a thing you could bear.

Like if it puts you at risk at all, then don’t buy it yet.

Don’t buy it.

Figure it out.

Get it in the future.

There’s going to be ways to get it.

It’s not, this is not the only deal.

It’s not the only time.

Okay.

You’re not going to get the best deal, but you don’t have to get the best deal at all times.

And that’s just, I’m just, I, cause I don’t want it on my back.

Like, I don’t want to feel like that’s what’s happening.

That’s it.

I don’t want to feel like that’s what’s happening.

So there’s plenty of people in WordPress that like, we have a goal in mind.

We have a goal in mind, and there is plenty of people to hit that goal without anybody having to sacrifice feeding their, you’re not doing it for the cause or the movement or anything else.

Okay.

Um, but it’s a personal decision.

It’s, it’s, it’s up to that individual.

So I just try to put that out there.

Um, see, this is, this is, so this is one of those comments right here. 500 to a thousand is insane.

It’s insane.

Um, well, I mean, you don’t even know what it is.

You don’t, you don’t know what it is.

You don’t know what value it brings.

You don’t know the impact that it’s going to have on your business, much less impact on maybe the entire WordPress ecosystem.

At some point, we don’t know anything about it.

So the idea that you would say that this price isn’t, which is not, it’s not, I mean, there’s so many things that are that price point.

So many things that are that price point, um, with no, with no information about the impact that you can’t, it’s not, you know, basic economics is a, I think a fundamental skill that everybody should have.

Um, so yeah, Manny, ah, we got our first poppy there.

It’s going to be a lot of them.

I told you, baby, there’s going to be a lot of them.

There’s going to be a lot of them.

Um, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Uh, yeah.

I mean, you don’t even know that the terms of it really yet.

Right.

Um, okay.

I, we got to get out of here.

It’s 1257.

We’re, we’re at our time.

Uh, we will be, let me think, there’s going to be one week this month.

I can’t remember if it’s next week.

I think it’s the week after next week, uh, where we probably will, will not have a live stream.

And then the week of the etch live streams, we will not have a WDD live.

I will be in shambles that week.

Uh, I’ll be, I’ll be dead tired.

There’s so much to do.

There’s a thousand things that I have to do to be ready.

And then to the actually do the streams at various times and the follow-ups and the, it’s going to be crazy when the dust settles a little bit, like the week after we’ll do a live stream.

Then I’ll be at word camp us.

If you’re going to be at word camp us, uh, hit me up.

Let me know.

You’re going to be at word camp us.

Probably maybe hit me up on Twitter, hit me up in the inner circle, either of those places, Facebook messenger.

Um, I’m going to, I’m going to obviously every word camp.

I try to meet as many people as possible, but what I mainly want to do, what I’ve started to think about doing, we’re at the point and maybe, maybe now that etch is going to be here and the ecosystem is going to grow even bigger.

We need to put together a little inner circle or just ecos.

It’s like an ecosystem meetup at this point, right?

It’s not just inner circle.

I do have something planned just for the inner circle really.

Um, but we need a larger ecosystem thing.

And so maybe we just, you know, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, uh, buy out a bar or something and we’ll, but I need to know, I don’t know how many people in the ecosystem actually go to word camps.

That’s the thing.

There’s a gazillion people in the ecosystem, but if they don’t go to word camps, I don’t want to be the guy twiddling my thumbs like, Oh, no, no, nobody, nobody from our ecosystem comes here.

I guess I don’t want to be that guy.

So I need to know if you’re coming and if you would be up for doing some sort of like little get together, hang out kind of thing.

Right?

So you got to hit me up.

You got to let me know, uh, and do that, you know, relatively, relatively soon.

But even if we don’t do that, everybody is welcome to come up to me.

Uh, if you see me at a word camp, I’ve said before, I have a little bit of a resting asshole face.

I don’t always look as, as nice as I am in person.

Uh, so don’t hesitate to like, I’m not going to jujitsu you or anything like that.

If you come up to me, uh, I want to meet everybody and talk with everybody.

Uh, so yeah, make that happen.

I probably like you’re going to recognize me before I recognize you most likely.

So you’ve got to kind of let me know that you recognize me and, uh, come say hi.

All right, guys, I’m out.

I love you.

Thank you for the support.

Things are going to get very, very exciting.

Very, very quickly.

Buckle up, buckle up, um, buckle up.

That’s all I got to say.

All right.