In today’s LMScast Chris Badgett of codeBOX discusses how to connect your learning platform to your CRM with Jack Arturo’s WP Fusion. You’ll also learn about the benefits of doing business as a micro, multinational, digital nomad.
Jack Arturo has been a web developer for five years. He created WP Fusion when he saw a need to simplify the process of interconnecting WordPress to CRMs and other marketing automation tools for his clients. Jack’s WP Fusion works with LifterLMS to send your user data to your CRM. That includes contact information and tags that you can use to enhance your user’s experience with your courses, services, and other products.
Unlike most competitors, WP Fusion is an open source solution that you purchase one time, and it’s yours. The only recurring cost is for support and updates at three pricing levels based on your usage and needs, but there’s no commitment for that. It’s also more optimized, lightweight, scalable, and user-intuitive than most.
Basically when a user creates an account, WP Fusion can apply various tags that prompt your system tools – the CRM, the LMS, the shopping cart, automated emails, and forms – to take integrated actions. It also bridges a lot of WordPress plugins in innovative ways and provides extensive reporting capabilities. Plus it’s possible to dynamically add on new capabilities like special coupons and software integrations.
Jack’s vision is to help systems become more standardized. Being part of the digital nomad community gives him access to an organic network where people are working together on advancing technologies, tools, and methods, like optimizing existing PHP using JavaScript and REST APIs to integrate more tools and resources together. These non-hierarchical transient groups are opening up the way global business is done, solving the problems of the future, and keeping up with the rate of change through relationships and mobility.
We’re living in interesting times. The economy is changing, as is the way we work, and that rate of change is accelerating. If you’re willing to learn and evolve with it, you’ll be doing business in a more exciting and scalable way than has ever been possible before.
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Episode Transcript
Chris: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and today I’m joined by Jack Arturo, creator of WP Fusion, and we’re going to get into what that does and how it can help you as an online course creator or digital entrepreneur. And we’re also going to talk a little bit about the digital nomad lifestyle. Jack, thanks for coming on the show.
Jack: Yeah, thank you.
Chris: Where are you? Where are you coming at us from today.
Jack: I’m in Lima, Peru. It’s finally summer here. We’ve got the inverse weather of the Northern Hemisphere. Pretty great today. I’m liking it right now. In about three months when it gets foggy again I think I’m going to head up to Europe as it starts to get warmer, but we can talk about the nomadic part of my life at the end of the call. Yeah, it’s a nice place to be. There’s actually a lot of people working in tech here. I’ve got a few friends from Canada who do major, like from scratch systems for airlines and banks and stuff like that because you can get a very talented angular JS or PHP developer down here for much cheaper than you could in the states. Believe it or not there’s actually kind of a cool programmer community down here. Yeah, it’s a cool place to be.
Chris: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Jack is the creator of WP Fusion. I first came across Jack at LifterLMS because we created a learning management software that makes it easy to create online courses, but a lot of times people want to get those contacts and get some data over to a CRM. We have a MailChimp integration, we have a ConvertKit integration, but there’s so many different ones out there, like for example there’s Infusion Soft, there’s Drip, there’s Active Campaign, which we actually use ourselves and love as our personal favorite CRM of choice, and then there’s also Ontraport, and what jack was able to do at WP Fusion is made it so that you could connect your LifterLMS Users and send that data over to those CRMs.
In the past we’ve used some kind of hacky systems where we do these Zapiers and things like that, but when I came across your product at WP Fusion, I was just blown away by how clear the thinking was and how it’s really, what it does to connect WordPress to different services and things. It was really just amazing and I think you really nailed it on the market need there.
Jack: Thanks, yeah. Sorry, go ahead.
Chris: Just tell us, like where did this whole idea for WP Fusion come from?
Jack: I’ve been a web developer about five years, and doing a lot of client sites. They get more and more complex and started doing a lot of API work, and I ended up doing a lot of sales sites where we’d be using Infused Woo, we’d be using the Gravity Forms Infusionsoft add-on and then we’d be writing a ton of custom code connecting advanced custom fields over to Fusion Soft and every single time it was reinventing the wheel, and also you might need four different plugins to connect the stuff you need on our site to this one system. You’re doing a lot of duplication there and you don’t know how well they’re going to be supported or maintained, and so what it originally started as, was we needed a system to connect User Pro to Infusionsoft which was just impossible at the time, just to have a new user register and make a contact record. There’s nobody that can do that.
There’s nothing out there. I was like, “All right, well well start with that,” and then somebody’s like, “Well, if you do user pro can you do Ultimate Member.” Yeah, okay. “Could you throw in a little bit to make LearnDash apply tags when this happens?” From the beginning, we started thinking like there’s a lot of different CRM solutions out there, and depending on the size of the business and how comfortable you are, and what you’re looking for there’s no perfect one, but they all basically revolve around, you’ve got a contact, and that’s got some data, you know, some fields that are information, and then you’re segmenting your contacts with tags. If you just boil it down to that, you can pretty much do anything you want in your CRMs. There’s some other systems out there similar to ours that are more like all-in-one membership systems where you set up membership levels and restrictions and that sort of thing. We wanted to keep it really simple.
Basically once you connect your WordPress site to whichever CRM using data diffusion, all of your WordPress contacts get mashed up with CRM contacts, and there’s a link, and the tags flow back and forth between them. If a WordPress user gets a tag applied by enrolling in a Lifter course, then that tag goes up to the CRM. Instead of trying to create … a heavy overblown interface in WordPress, now you’ve got all the power of something like Active Campaign, where you can say, “If this customer used a coupon to enroll in the course before September, and then he finished the course two weeks later, and referred a friend, send him another coupon.” Active Campaign’s all ready built that. They’ve put millions into that. I think we’ve come up with a very lightweight, elegant solution for letting you just take that WordPress data and hook it into the awesome power of those marketing automation tools.
Chris: That’s awesome. It’s like a really focused Zapier is one way I think about it. How are you different from Zapier?
Jack: Well Zapier just kills me. I actually use it a little bit myself. If I was rich I would use it for everything because it’s fun connecting stuff together. Basically, my whole career has been on WordPress and I’m a big open source person. I think code should be free to, not, I mean, WP Fusion is free. When you purchase it you’re purchasing support and updates, and I really believe its important for customers to be able to see what they’re buying, to understand the effort and qualities we put into it, and there’s no commitment. You don’t have to pay us every month or we cut you off. Like you know, with Infusionsoft or something like that.
Those guys aren’t trying to be WordPress, so that’s fine, but if you’re going to run it on WordPress, I think that you should stick to the principles of WordPress. Zapier is awesome, but if I was going to automate my life the way I would like to with Zapier, then I’m going to end up paying hundreds of dollars a month. I wish I had thought of that first, I wouldn’t be here right now. Also, we had a lot of benefits too because Zapier is … It’s not really, fully tied into anything. You can do some tricks to get it to notice when WooCommerce makes an order. It’s kind of sitting between two systems and it’s watching one and then going, “Oh, hey something happened.” And letting the other one know. Whereas we’re a lot more optimized, lightweight, and I think user-intuitive, because when you create your LifterLMS course, you can say, “When the user begins the course, apply these tags. When the user clicks the complete button, apply these tags.” It’s just done in one go. There’s, I don’t think even Zapier does Lifter, do they?
Chris: They don’t.
Jack: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Jack: A lot of things you just couldn’t. We’re able to actually hook into your code, and where your code says, “This guy just completed a course.” Then WP Fusion’s like, “Okay, that happened. Let’s let Infusion Soft know.” It’s just more integrated, and I think more streamlined system, and easier to understand too for other people who want to build on top of it later.
Chris: That’s awesome. Well tell us a little bit about WuCommerce as an example. A lot of people who are listening to this, some of them don’t start with courses. They may all ready have products or services that they’re selling with WuCommerce, and then they want to add courses later. We have a WuCommerce integration for that, but if you’re using WuCommerce as your store, how does that work in terms of connecting to the CRMs?
Jack: Yeah. We actually, we didn’t really think of this at the beginning, but because all of our integrations are tied together through these tags, so for example our WuCommerce subscriptions integration. You can apply a tag when the subscription begins, but you can also have it removed if the subscription fails to pay, or expires, or whatever. With our Lifter integration you can enroll somebody in a course based on a tag. Right there without any extra work you can just say, “Apply my cool course tag.” As soon as WuCommerce applies that tag through their diffusion, the user gets enrolled in the Lifter course. If the subscription expires, the user is removed.
Also, because the tags are getting sent to your Crm as well you can send that automated email a week before or something like that. “Your payment is a week overdue, click here to update it.” That kind of thing. There’s a lot, like we have Gravity Forms integration so you can submit a form like a survey and then apply a tag at the end of the survey saying, “Survey completed.” Then have a page on your site with a special coupon that only shows if you completed the survey. With some creativity, it’s not only a connection between WordPress and the CRM, but it even can bridge a lot of these different WordPress plugins, and make them interact in ways that maybe the original authors didn’t think of. Some fun possibilities there, yeah.
Chris: That’s really cool. The next question I’m going to ask you is about your pricing and the addons. I’m in the exact same boat, where we have single site or more money for a five site license. We have all these addons, and even though I know in my head how everything works and what the offer is and you can get this package, or you can get this package. Sometimes people need a little bit of education around what the addons are, what they do, or what in general are they. How does the pricing work, how does the licensing work.
Jack: Sure yeah.
Chris: Can you walk me through, it looks like you have the three pricing levels, you have personal, plus, and professional. With plus and professional you get four pro addons, and then in your addons there you’ve got Abandoned Cart Tracking, E-Commerce Tracking, Media Tools, Birthday Tools. Help the first time person who’s never heard of you before understand your pricing and the offer there.
Jack: Sure, basically the price … We just started off with personal and professional. I wanted to keep it really simple. I’m a big fan of easy digit downloads and Affiliate WP, and I think their model works well, so I just copied what they did. You pay, it’s no automatic or recurring billing. At the end of the year you’ll get an email. If you wish to renew your licence you get a 30% discount and then you continue to have free support and automatic updates. Obviously we recommend you to renew because WordPress updates, WuCommerce updates, something might break, and if you have an active licence you’re guaranteed to get the fixes right away. It’s free software. Once you buy it you own it, and we can’t cut it off or anything like that. We had a ton of people about six months ago saying, “Well I really would like it, but you don’t do what Infuse Do does, which is sending e-commerce data.”
I started thinking about what I really wanted to focus on is users, tracking users, segmenting users, and contacts. If we start to add in, and especially since we were expanding as new CRMs, Infusionsoft has a very complex and very different e-commerce system. Active Campaign has a interesting one, but quite different, and the other CRMs don’t really have one. We started thinking about, well we don’t want to include this massive feature if three quarters of our customers aren’t going to use it, and it’s going to take a while to develop. So that’s what we launched with the e-commerce add-on. With our basic plugin, if you purchase, if a customer purchases in WuCommerce, the tag gets applied, the contact record gets created, but your sales data is still being run in WuCommerce, and that’s how I do it myself.
I think WuCommerce does a great job of reporting and that kind of stuff. Some people in enterprise situations they need to get all those sales also into Infusion Soft so they can assign sales reps and that kind of thing. With or e-commerce addon it actually creates the products in Infusion Soft based on the WuCommerce products. It creates an order record. It applies the products ordered, and then it logs the order to the customer’s record. You can use Infusion Soft’s reporting tools. The other addons grew out of that. It was things that customers asked for.
Chris: Like cart abandonment.
Jack: Yeah, cart abandon tracking. It’s something that if it’s running it will slow down your checkout a little bit, because of course we have to notice when they start checking out, and then we have to do something else when they start checking out. Even if it only adds two thirds of a second to somebody’s checkout, I wouldn’t want to push that on all our customers if only a small subset of them are going to use it. Yeah, and it basically, the way WP Fusion without the addons works, if you’re running Gravity Forms, our Gravity Forms options show up. If you’re not running Gravity Forms that whole part of the plug-in is just not there.
You can really be running, it’s really very fast and lightweight. It depends on how many things you’re integrating with, and anything that’s not directly fitting into that spider’s web of plug-ins and then back out to CRMs, we decided to do as addons. We get to do experimental things too. The birthday coupons was a customer who just really wanted to try that out, and we’re like, “Oh, yeah sure why not.” There’s only a few people using it, but it’s kind of cool. It’s out there if you like it.
Chris: What’s the media tools?
Jack: Media tools was fun actually. I don’t think anybody else is really doing this. For example, if you have a, you could have a video in one of your lessons, like an uploaded video, either in an MP4 or a Vimeo video, and when you click on the video we add some new options there that say, “Apply tag when the user begins watching the video. When they reach a certain time-code, and when they reach the end of the video.” For example, with our course progression, you have your own built-in one, but say, for example, you wanted to use tags to manage course progression, you could say the user has to begin watching the video and make it at least two thirds of the way through, or else when he clicks on the next course it’s going to send them back to there to finish the video.
Chris: That’s very cool.
Jack: Yeah, even outside of you learning. I’m doing another big site right now where we’re doing a huge training platform for a large company, and employees get bonuses by watching replays of their training seminars in video form.
Chris: Oh that’s really cool, incentivized, but there’s a way to actually track that, that’s cool.
Jack: Yeah, and they don’t know we’re tracking it.
Chris: It’s a surprise.
Jack: It’s kind of a mystery thing, yeah. It’s like they get awards and bonuses for being the most engaged and I don’t remember what the business terminology is for all that stuff. We can see which employees are actually watching the replays after they attend the seminar. At the end of the month, because we have all the tags there, we can see if this group of employees has watched five of them they get this, if this group has watched two they get this, and if this guy didn’t watch any maybe we’ll send him an email, and we’ll also get a task for a supervisor to follow up and be like, “Get on the ball there.” I don’t get too much into the marketing automation side of it, just because it’s so overwhelming, but I’ve seen some amazing stuff done by people who know what they’re doing in that area.
Chris: That’s really awesome. For us, we use Active Campaign as our main CRM. For LifterLMS, which is a software product, the number one thing that where people are before they buy LifterLMS is our demo course. I’m going to be setting up WP Fusion on there to get our users into Active Campaign. I have it set up in a really hacky way through Zapier, but now that you’re on the scene I can’t wait to play with it in detail and try some of these more advanced, messing around with the add-ons and stuff.
Jack: Yeah, I get a kick out of pitching in and helping you out with that. We could do a little like, when the video button gets clicked we could have a bubble pop up and say, “Tag applied.” Something you know?
Chris: Okay, yeah.
Jack: A little interactivity just to get them a sense of where the data is flowing out. That kind of stuff, whatever. I like playing with that kind of stuff.
Chris: That’s really cool.
Jack: Let me know, that’ll be fun.
Chris: Yeah, I’m super excited to go deeper with WP Fusion. You’re just hitting such a big need for people and doing it in an intuitive way.
Jack: Yeah, I’m glad we found you guys too, because I’ve done so many LearnDash sites over the years, and it works, but I train clients on it, and it’s like you have to explain in all this course progression, and then the points and the quizzes. The quiz is kind of a different plugin that got shoved in their later, and from a developer standpoint it’s not much fun, and like I was saying to you, I got this Brazilian TV show that we’re setting up a big Lifter site on, and I showed it to them. Even just the fact that it’s a little more colorful or something like that. They’re like, “Yeah, okay we get this, so this is price, right? We put our stuff in here?” I was like, “Yeah, that’s pretty much it, and I’ve got a little custom field here for your video, and oh, you’re good to go.” I’ve been made a convert for sure. It’s finally nice to see an alternative.
Chris: That’s awesome. I appreciate that. Thanks for saying that. Well let’s close it out and just talk about something that’s near and dear to both of us, and the listener, perhaps, which is the whole digital nomad thing. I just got off of seven months on the road with my family living out of a travel trailer, visiting national parks in the US, but also running my business from the road. I was just down in Mexico for a conference with some other WordPress business folks, who do similar things. Just because you have that freedom to be location independent it doesn’t mean you always are living out of a backpack on a plane and in a hotel. It sounds like you’ve been in Peru, or Lima for a bit. You move around, but it’s not like you’re traveling every single day. Tell us about your digital nomadism.
Jack: Yeah, I’m easing into it. I’ve been freelancing on and off. I haven’t really had a real job so I’ve been doing websites probably since I was like 15 …they weren’t very good back then. Yeah, but still I work part time as a contractor with real companies, you know you have that security and that kind of thing. Probably four years ago my wife and I were like, you know, we just want to go somewhere for six months. Before we just get sucked into people who never leave this town again, and at least try that. We love where we were, but we wanted to at least see something completely different. It was almost literally a dart on a board. It landed on Peru, and ended up here, and actually kind of hated it the first three months, but we realized I wasn’t making quite as much money, but I had my laptop. I was helping a woman publish her e-book and do print on demand stuff, and it all pretty much worked. She thought it was cool that I was traveling.
I thought clients would be like, you know wanting me in the boardroom. I talked to her every morning, and she’d be asking, “Where’d you go yesterday? What’d you see over the weekend? How was Machu Picchu?” It almost made the, in becoming less professional made everybody have more fun, which I was surprised at. Then, it kind of grew from there. I’m now, like, my skills and rates are going nuts, so I tend to take on clients who are doing interesting projects. Like I was saying earlier I’ve now started to get involved with these sort of digital nomad groups. I was surprised that they have these kind of co-labs, or co-working houses.
It’s kind of like a hacker house, but a little more classy. Yeah, you can live like on a beach in Bali. It’s like 140-200 bucks a month. Private rooms, very clean, and with say 60 other designers, developers, marketers. There’s a chef there that caters everything. Free surfing lessons, yoga classes, a pool in the middle, very nice, and then they’re in a shared office space. A lot of people I’ve met who are doing this say it’s actually better than being in a fixed environment, because you might roll in and meet somebody with a great app idea, as rare as those are, but maybe stuff just clicks over a drink. Then great things happen.
I’ve met a few people on this cruise I took. A nomad cruise, we took from Cartegena to Lisbon, and they were just sitting … We had like a hack-a-thon to develop four prototype businesses in 48 hours. They were kind of silly, but I was amazed at what a group of strangers who are all kind of independently minded and just willing to get out of their comfort zones could come up with on a boat with a lot of alcohol and laptops and 48 hours. We had a, what was Michael’s, about phoning your mom? One guy had a, he created a app within a day that on your mother’s birthday it would start yelling at you, “Phone your mother! Phone your mother!”
Chris: That’s good, I could use that actually.
Jack: Yeah, you could see, even a 99 cents sale. I got really inspired by that, and I started thinking maybe next year I might, I like having an apartment, but it might almost be fun to do four weeks here, four weeks there, and soak in some ideas and meet some people with mentalities and different cultures and backgrounds and stuff like that. I’m a real programmer type guy and if I could meet a great marketer, who knows what would happen, or designer. It’s an exciting new frontier. A lot of people don’t really understand it. Some governments are actually … I heard that the-
Chris: No, like how do you tax that? Is that what you’re-
Jack: Yeah, well and actually the other great thing is as long as I spent less than 30 days a year in the states I get a huge tax deduction.
Chris: Are you supposed to do Peruvian taxes or something?
Jack: No, because my bank accounts are all in the states, but if I don’t reside there for any more than 30 days you get a foreign-earned income tax deduction.
Chris: Then digital products are, I don’t know. I’m going to go off my expertise and I don’t know it’s kind of confusing.
Jack: Exactly, so I have customers in 160 countries. That actually makes that a lot easier. Even I have nomad friends in Europe now who are relocating their businesses to Estonia. Talk about Estonia you can get your, they will make you a electronic resident of Estonia over the internet and create your bank account, your business licence, and you get this, I’ve even seen some super fancy bio-metric card you just hold up to your computer and it certifies you for doing your banking activity.
Chris: Okay.
Jack: They want entrepreneurs and creative types to come to Estonia, establish their residency and business there, and the tax rates are super low. I think it’s Malaysia now that’s just started offering seven year visas for entrepreneur types, if you want to come there and do that kind of co-working thing or something and you like it and you want to stay for a few years they’re fine with that. You can’t work legally, but they’re realizing a lot of people are working for European and North American companies and spending that money in the local currency. It’s kind of cool to see some countries are starting to make allowances for that, or being more welcome to people like that. It’s a cool, evolving scene. It’s an interesting time to be in it for sure.
Chris: Yeah, Dan Andrews from the Tropical MBA Podcast, he calls that the rise of the micro-multinational.
Jack: Yeah.
Chris: I don’t know if he’s, he was going to write a book about it. Dan if you’re listening I’m of just what happened with the book. Yeah, so interesting times, and when we work in this space, whether you’re a software creator, a marketer, you’re an expert and you’re creating digital products like online courses or e-books or whatever, it may feel like the party’s over, but in reality I think this is just the beginning. The economy is changing rapidly, more and more people are coming online, there’s parts of the world that are just now coming online. They’re skipping the whole desktop thing and going straight to mobile. It’s a really exciting time, and the tools have never been more powerful.
Jack: With the web technologies now too, especially because we’re moving towards so many open APIs and stuff like that, it’s no longer, “I’m an Oracle guy and you’re a Microsoft guy.” It’s like there may be ten of us with odd little web services sitting at one of these co-working retreats, but if we’ve all got the same REST API, we can just make those work together in ways, or even let our customers blend our tiny components however they like. I guess that’s what we’re trying to do with WP Fusion in a way, is like for every plugin we give you a little bit of power, and then you can do what you like with it, and I think that that’s, yeah I think that’s a … I don’t want to get too philosophical. But you could go into small, good systems that all talk to each other in effective ways, that would be a good future to move into.
Chris: That’s awesome. Well, let me ask you a question related to that for the non-technical person out there …
Jack: I get a little technical sometimes, yeah.
Chris: No, it’s okay, but we hear about it in the WordPress community, or whatever, about the rest API, and moving all to JavaScript. What does that mean for the layman? How does that open up the opportunity?
Jack: I’ve got to actually start studying again. That stuff’s confusing. It is exciting because, I mean, PHP is actually, PHP is the language WordPress is written in, and it’s an old system. It’s been optimized a lot, but you can’t really change the groundwork there. You get some limitations like when you go on Facebook, you never really reload a page. Your notifications slide in, and everything slides in, so that’s your JavaScript layer. Facebook is still built on PHP. PHP’s doing the like, it’s figuring out who your friends are and what pictures you want to see. On top of that, they have pretty shiny layer that makes it cool and hip. What WordPress is doing right now is it’s not getting rid of that powerful under-layer, but it’s just opening it up so that if you want to sit your shiny, pretty layer on top of it you can. I’ve seen some interesting stuff done with it.
Like you theoretically, when all these things come together you could build a Facebook copy on top of WordPress and have it run just as well. That’s, I think, where they’re really focused. Also where we’re moving into mobile applications and things like that your website could behave just like an app. No real reloading, everything available all the time. I don’t fully understand it and it scares me a little bit, but I do think it’s the right direction. It’s also, well, in layman terms, when you click on a page in a WordPress site, the whole page gets thrown away, and the server churns up and figures out what the next one’s going to be, and then it gives it to you. The way things are moving now with these new technologies is if you like your friends photo, just the like button changes. Instead of rebuilding all the stuff, so we’re saving on electricity, we’re saving on data storage space, and it makes it more modular and easier to understand, and easy to stand upon later too. Efficiency, yeah.
Chris: That’s awesome.
Jack: Yeah, it’s exciting and terrifying for me.
Chris: Yeah well I mean the rate of change is accelerating. That’s one of the reasons why I think, like you mentioned in the digital nomad community, when you’re in these networks of other people, in the future, going forward having good relationships and not trying to do it solo, or just having a network is going to become even more important to solve the problems of the future and to keep up with the rate of change, and all that sort of thing.
Jack: Yeah, and I like that because it’s not … I grew up thinking you have to be a businessman, wear a suit, and go to official meetings and contracts and stuff, but you could meet a guy who’s a really good interface designer when it comes to pet websites, or something like that, and have a good time. Two years later you happen to get a, I don’t know, government contract for a animal rescue. You’re like, “Hey, yeah, how are you doing man?” There’s this cool, like organic network of we all have our interests and our focus and our strengths. It’s more organic.
There’s no, “I’m the boss, this is the project, you guys do it.” It’s more like, “I’ve got an opportunity, but I can’t do it on my own and I know some people. I’ll bring together a team, make it happen, and the team disperses.” I think even that’s more efficient in a way too, because you’ve got interested people doing what they want to do instead of a rigid hierarchy of people being told what to do.
Chris: Absolutely, and if you haven’t read the book-
Jack: I like the future, I’m optimistic about the future all the time.
Chris: If you’re listen to this, and you haven’t read the book Rework yet, go ahead and check that out. It’s a good book about remote teams.
Jack: Yeah.
Chris: Well, last question, what is the future for WP Fusion? Like where are you going? What’s your strategy? What can people expect down the road?
Jack: I’m not really sure. We’ve gotten to the point now where it works really well. I got really into making it faster a couple of months ago, and just … Well I won’t even begin to talk about that. It was complicated and I’m happy with the way that it turned out. Now really, it’s just somebody will email and say, “I’m interested in this.” Somebody emailed this morning and said, “I’d like to buy it, but I need it to work with MemberPress.” So we did MemberPress. Because of the way it’s written we could add a thousand integrations and the download size would be a little bit bigger, but it doesn’t affect your site performance at all. Eventually I’d hope, I’m even talking to some other businesses right now. I’m hoping that this might become a standardized framework for communicating with these CRMs, because the CRM industry is expanding.
Chris: They’re all different. There’s no standard, right?
Jack: Yeah, there’s no real standard, but what you want for the most part is pretty much the same. WordPress has just made an announcement. They want to get 51% market share of all new websites in the next ten years or something like that.
Chris: They’re currently at like 27% or something.
Jack: Yeah, so it’s ambitious, but they’ve got a dedicated team called the 51 Team.
Chris: Okay, sounds like WordPress.
Jack: WordPress, I think they could do it, is pushing in that direction. CRM is market, or like total sales, and that kind of thing year over year is growing 20-25%. I think they’re great. When I first saw Infusion Soft I was like, “Why would you need this?” Now that I see how, if you’re running a huge business you can’t have a one-on-one relationship necessarily with a customer, but if you don’t let a customer feel taken care of you lose them. By creating these rules and automations, you can make sure that you get notified exactly right before that customer needs you. You can still have that close, personal relationship, but not be driven insane by it.
I think with WordPress growing, and CRMs growing, one day if we could become a standardized framework so that there doesn’t have to be this fragmented ecosystem of different people trying to connect different things in different ways. If you created a new CRM and wanted to connect everything that we work with to it, you could easily do that as a separate plug-in just interface with ours. If somebody creates a new plug-in that we don’t want to support, but they want to connect to our CRMs they can just attach that in there. Maybe one day it would become kind of a hub that just standardizes. Like what we were saying with rest APIs for example how now services that couldn’t talk before can now talk. Maybe just be like a baby version of that for WordPress. For just getting data out of the website and into the marketing system.
Chris: That’s really cool. Well, Jack Arturo, ladies and gentlemen. WP Fusion. You can find him out more at WPFusionPlugin.com.
Jack: Check it out.
Chris: Check it out, and thank you for coming on the show.
Jack: Yeah, thank you so much. It’s been a great time talking to you.
