Learn how to build the best WordPress LMS websites for clients for maximum fun and profit through effective visual communication with Vito Peleg from WP FeedBack in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. If you build WordPress LMS websites for clients and you’re trying to make the feedback process easier when working with revision requests, this LMScast is a great conversation to listen to.
Both Vito and Chris started out in the WordPress space as freelancers and have since moved on to the product entrepreneur side of the space. Vito shares his progression from starting out building his first website at 14-years-old through his 20 year journey to where he is today running WP FeedBack.
Vito decided to pursue a career in music, and he and his band ended up touring the world and all over Europe with two albums worldwide. But when he found there was not a lot of money in the industry for him, he ended up falling back on his skills with building websites for clients and started an agency doing that. He was able to build up to six figures in his first year with his business, and by year three had 12 people in his agency.
The largest issues his agency faced all came down to client communications. This led Vito to become obsessed with finding a solution and sprouted the idea for WP FeedBack.
Chris also shares his story of how in 2007 he started blogging in his niche around outdoor leadership in Alaska. His blogging skills eventually developed into his skill set for building websites for clients. As a non-developer Chris was able to build great websites for clients using WordPress and eventually started his own agency focused on membership websites, online courses, training platforms, and coaching websites. And then he and his partners ended up building LifterLMS on top of that as a solution.
Vito and Chris talk about some best practices for freelancers and agencies building websites for clients, how you can best position yourself and your clients to get the most out of your interactions by simplifying the process, and how that can save a tremendous amount of time.
To learn more about Vito Peleg and how you can make your process of reviewing websites and getting client feedback easier, be sure to check out WPFeedBack.co.
At LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us!
This episode was sponsored by WP Tonic Managed WordPress LMS hosting. Click here to learn more, and use coupon code wptonichosting50 to save 50% on any annual plan.
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett:
You’ve come to the right place if you’re a course creator looking to build more impact, income, and freedom. LMScast is the number one podcast for course creators just like you. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of the most powerful tool for building, selling, and protecting engaging online courses called LifterLMS. Enjoy the show.
Chris Badgett:
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest, Vito Peleg from wpfeedback.co. It’s a visual communication tool, so if you build WordPress LMS websites for clients and you’re trying to make it easier for your clients to communicate with you and do revision requests and have better conversations, we’ll get into that later in the episode. But first, Vito, welcome to the call.
Vito Peleg:
Hi. How are you doing, Chris? Thanks for having me.
Chris Badgett:
I’m excited for this conversation, because we’re going to go behind the curtain a little bit. I wanted to start with Vito and my story, how they’re kind of similar. We’re product people. I’ve got LMS software. You have a visual communication tool for people building WordPress sites. But, at the end of the day, we started as freelancers and it’s been a journey. What was your progression into getting into this whole website thing and how long has this journey been for you?
Vito Peleg:
Actually, the first website that I built, I was a literally 14 years old, just at home in my parents’ place.
Chris Badgett:
How long ago was that?
Vito Peleg:
That was 20 years last month. It was a skateboarding website for my crew back in the day, on GeoCities, if you remember that platform. Then I left that aside because I wanted to be a musician. So I pursued that for a lot of years, and that one actually got me back into it eventually.
Vito Peleg:
I had band and we were touring the world. It was doing pretty well. We were touring all over Europe. We did two albums worldwide and stuff like that. But the problem was that there was no money in it. We were touring and playing in front of people, but still, we couldn’t make ends meet. So, I started building websites for clients, literally from the back of the van while we were touring the world on the road. That was my start. That was the beginning of my web design business as a freelancer.
Vito Peleg:
Then, once we turned 30 and it wasn’t really cool to hang out with four other smelly guys in a van anymore, that’s when we stopped that part. Then I said, “All right, let’s see how big I can make this thing.” I started growing that agency. I was a freelancer at first. Within the first year, we got to six figures in revenue here in London. Within year three, I already had a team of 12 guys in my agency.
Vito Peleg:
Through our problems and through my struggles of scaling past 10, 12 people, I found that no matter where I looked, all our problems came down to client communications. That’s what was wasting most of the profits within the agency. I became obsessed with finding a solution for this. We tried everything, and then we ended up building our own, which exploded now. That’s what is WP FeedBack.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. And just for the listener, if you don’t know my story, the quick version is similar to Vito’s. In 2007, I started blogging, just for myself and a niche outdoor leadership. I was actually living in Alaska. A lot of the stuff I did, there wasn’t even a cell phone signal where I lived. And over time, I wanted to be able to live anywhere in the world and have location freedom, so I developed the skillset of building websites for clients.
Chris Badgett:
After I learned, “Hey, this is not that hard. I’m a non-developer. I can build sites using WordPress.” I evolved from freelancer into agency owner and then we focused our agency on the membership site, online course, training platform, coaching industry and really focused there and grew, and then later built a product off the back end of that. So it’s a very similar story.
Vito Peleg:
Yeah, very much.
Chris Badgett:
But these two gentlemen that are talking to you today aren’t product people. I mean, we are product people but we didn’t just start with product. Our DNA is in the freelancer and the agency.
Vito Peleg:
I would even say that this is the natural progression if you want to scale things up. I see a lot of product people that jump to these stages. They didn’t serve people, they didn’t do the agency part of it. They have a lot harder growing the product and getting that traction compared to us, because product is like the easy life compared to the agency world.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Vito Peleg:
So, once you go through that day, this is just a walk in the park.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. I can hear in my head. It’s almost like, from working with so many clients, you develop this empathy and you kind of feel the pains and the frustrations and that really informs product. So if you look at Vito with WP FeedBack, it’s had a lot of success quickly. But I know you have all these voices in your head and real conversations that you have with that.
Chris Badgett:
You really understand the pain points that some of these people building sites for clients and having it become a successful project, it’s not something you have to go out and research because you live and breathe it for so long.
Vito Peleg:
Exactly. You are the target audience.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. Yeah. So especially if it’s your first software product, that’s super helpful to scratch your own itch. I see people that do that, have higher odds of success than, “Oh, I see an opportunity over here to make money.”
Vito Peleg:
In a different market, yeah.
Chris Badgett:
But I don’t really … I’m not zen with the problem.
Vito Peleg:
Exactly.
Chris Badgett:
That’s a big disadvantage.
Vito Peleg:
I’ll say more than that. We only have one life, so you better do something that you enjoy doing. If you’re solving a problem that you had, it’s a lot more powerful. I’ve been there before. I tried to jump into an industry and do whatever I wanted, try to make it work there. But then you find that there are people like us within this industry that has been there for more than 10 years and have the level of expertise and the level of knowledge within this unique niche that we will never have going into it from a fresh start.
Vito Peleg:
So yeah, I would say always look into your own experience to see what you can learn from there in order to take you to the next level, instead of starting something completely new.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, that’s a great point. Well, for those people listening that build websites for clients that are thinking about doing that, especially in the online training niche, there’s this pain point when you work with an expert … and I’ve worked with a lot of them from like yoga to real estate to business to personal development, all these different niches where there’s …
Chris Badgett:
There’s a cognitive bias, to get a little geeky on you, called the fundamental attribution error, which means that if I am good at something, like building websites or dog training or yoga or real estate or whatever it is, that I think, since I’m good at that I’ll, I’ll be good at this other thing too and be able to do it. There’s this tension between-
Vito Peleg:
The Michael Jordan effect.
Chris Badgett:
What is it called?
Vito Peleg:
The Michael Jordan effect, where he thought it can do everything.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. There you go. That’s a good name for it too. But the website builder, is good at building websites and marketing and stuff like that, and the expert is really good at their thing and they’re like, “I just want a website. I want to be able to sell my course online or my membership site.” But then there’s this conflict that happens. Can you talk about that intersection?
Vito Peleg:
Yeah, sure. So this is actually something that people experience across the service industry or the sector even. It doesn’t really matter what you do, but when you’re serving people that are new to the topic that you’re actually delivering the service in, you’re going to find that the difference in reality is creating a lot of frictions. What I mean is that, when we look at a website, we don’t just see a website: we see the color scheme, we see the layout, we see the functions, we can the code through the screen. We basically see the matrix.
Vito Peleg:
But when one of our clients is looking at a website, all they see is a rectangular box with some colors inside, and that’s the beginning of … We need to start from there to really understand how to communicate with someone. If we realize that that’s how they see what we’re seeing in 3D or through the matrix, as I like to call it, then it’s a lot easier to communicate with that. Because then, all of this nonsense about, oh my god, this guy doesn’t understand what the hell I’m talking about. He’s got to be stupid or something like that.” You kind of take on that responsibility, as the service provider, to understand that it’s something that we need to deal with and we need to eat that complication for the client so that it’s a smooth process for them.
Vito Peleg:
Instead of forcing them into some kind of a technological process that we create … as techies, we like to complicate things. We love complicated systems. That’s part of our thing. But on the other side, like you said, there is a real estate guy or a yoga instructor or like we talked before, a dog trainer that’s doing an online course, why would they know how to approach this project from the beginning? So, that is the initial essence of what our tool is trying to solve. This is where we started this, and then we started looking at the two types of people: the clients that have no idea how to look at a website and the developer that has a lot of technical needs to actually deliver this project.
Chris Badgett:
I just wanted to talk about, there’s two types of people out there. You have a choice. To make it really dramatic, you have to choose hate or love. If we take it out of this industry and look at something different, just as an example, if we look at building houses … or let’s say you’re building a house with a builder or you’re doing a remodel or something, you’ll hear people say things like, “Oh, everybody hates their contractor by the time it’s done.” Or, if you’re in the building industry, you’ll hear people say like, “Clients, homeowners are terrible. They’re awful.” In between these two, a business exists.
Vito Peleg:
Yes.
Chris Badgett:
If you have good clients, and as a freelancer agency, if you have love in your heart and there’s this big divide between our different realities, there’s a huge opportunity.
Vito Peleg:
Oh, that’s so true.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Vito Peleg:
Now it all clicks. Like what you mean there, because if you start from the hate, then the entire process is just a nightmare. Why would we do it to ourselves? Why would we not love the other side? You know? That’s a great point.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. It’s easy to … In the web industry, you’ll hear people complaining about clients. If you’re a freelancer or agency owner, you’ll hear people coming in to your services asking questions, and they talk about how they had such a bad experience. Their trust is down. They’re a little jaded. They’re upset. They need a little more help from you to trust them, which is actually a big opportunity in how you can position yourself in an industry just like home construction, when you build websites where you can have a better way and present a better future and a better working relationship.
Vito Peleg:
I agree. I think that if we look at it, even from the contractor point of view, it all comes down to the communication. So, if you have a contractor that tells you that things will be late before they are late, then it wouldn’t be as hard as to hear it like three months after you missed the deadline. That’s a miscommunication and that’s usually what happens with contractors, right?
Vito Peleg:
Or if something is not going to be delivered on time or if something needs a little more attention than it should have, that lack of communication is what breaks down most relationships in this world. I even like to look at this, if you bring it down to the most basic aspect of it, it’s a game of catch. If I throw the ball at you and you don’t catch it, you’re going to blame me that I threw it wrong. Right? “You don’t want me to catch it. You just threw it over there.” You get upset, I get upset, because we have no game and everyone is pissed off at each other.
Vito Peleg:
The point is to try and get to a scenario, a system, where when you throw the ball to the other side, they want to catch it and they can catch it because they can actually see it and it’s within their reality.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, that’s awesome. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about the problem of lingo and words. If you’re building a house, the contractor’s going to know all the names of all these parts that you have never ever heard of. Same happens with a website where, if the web person starts talking about PHP and CSS3 and all this stuff and what they’re going to do with the templates, the client doesn’t necessarily have the skills or they don’t have the lingo. They don’t understand it.
Vito Peleg:
Yeah. And why would they? They shouldn’t.
Chris Badgett:
No, that’s why they’re hiring you. But they also may need some help figuring out what they want, so you kind of have to anticipate … You need to ask them questions in ways that they can understand to help pull out, so that your best guests becomes the website. And then you need to have a conversation over that. Can you tell us about visual communication versus verbal? Like words?
Vito Peleg:
Sure. So, that’s what we found. When we did all of these testing around all of the different options which are to communicate with clients, we found that visual communication works best, because you can explain something not only with words, like you’re describing. You can something. So, sharing your screen or having a video call … Even us, even now that we’re doing this conversation right now, even though it’s going to be recorded mostly for sound, it’s nice to see you. It brings a lot into this conversation, the fact that we can see each other and have that communication visually.
Vito Peleg:
The idea is to take this concept into the website and bring it to the point where the client can actually point at something and tell you what they need changed and what they want to do. That’s why, when you have that delivery process that has the sitemap as the architectural event at the beginning, if we’re going back to the construction example, you start by communicating that basic aspect of what the structure would be. That’s the blueprint or the site map in our case.
Vito Peleg:
Then you go on to do the prototype, which are the foundations of the building, so they can also see another step of what’s been going on. Giving those visual stimulations is a lot stronger than telling them, “Listen, we’re going to have a home page and we’ll three custom post types with two taxonomies and it’s going to have five categories in each.” The guy already lost you. But when they see it as a flow chart in the visual side map, that just all clicks instantly.
Vito Peleg:
So, bringing a lot of visual aspect into the relationship definitely helps in communicating any aspect of that process to the client. I would even say more than that, that when it comes to a, these small bits and pieces that we have to ask for, like what is the screen size that you’re on? What is the browser version that you’re on? So you ask what the browser is and they tell you, “Browser? Yes, I’m using a desktop.” Right? That’s the answer.
Vito Peleg:
So, trying to not get into these conversations, not needing to ask these questions, actually will help you a lot in your relationship. Asking for screenshots, asking for URLs, this is not something that most people that don’t sit in front of a screen all day long know what the hell we’re talking about. So, we’ve got to start from there and keep the lingo out. It’s not for them. It’s for us in these kinds of talks where we can openly talk about custom post types in the LMS, even that’s term, I guess.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. When you have love for a client as opposed to hate, you realize that it’s going to be a process, not an event, to deliver a website for a client.
Vito Peleg:
Sure.
Chris Badgett:
If you navigate the client expectations of, “Hey, we’re going to have these revision cycles and it’s going to be an iterative process, where the website evolves, but I need your feedback as we go to make sure that we’re heading in the right direction and I’m getting insights from you. You’re learning from me how I think about building a great online experience through a website. But we need a better way to communicate.” So, WP FeedBack, just to get away from the lingo right now, go to WPfeedback.co to see what we’re talking about.
Vito Peleg:
Yeah. I would say, if we’re getting away from the lingo, I would describe it in a sentence as post-it notes for the live website. The simulation is like you’re pointing at the screen and telling the other side what’s up. It just binds that request to the deal so you know exactly where the request is.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, and there’s two ways you can do it, too. You can just have the client do it as homework, like asynchronously, not at the same time. Or, when you’re having that review call with the client, you or somebody on your team can also be on the call, on the Zoom or however you’re communicating, and as the client is talking, you’re dropping these post-it notes or these pins to capture the feedback visually like, “Oh, they don’t like this.” You might even be translating what they’re saying: “Oh, we should add this over here. There’s a lot that can go on there.
Vito Peleg:
Yeah, and that can be passed on if that’s the process and the project manager, let’s say, is doing that, that can be passed on to the designer then to sort out, without having it in a spreadsheet or a list. But what we recommend is actually, asking the client to do this. We designed it in a way that would be approachable for the most illiterate technological clients, so that when they see the website, they see this big plus button and we train them with just one sentence, “Please click the plus icon and choose any element on the website to tell us what you need.” That’s it.
Vito Peleg:
So even though I said that videos work best for us, the disadvantages that we found there is that when you have this conversation face to face, usually what happens is that after you do a few changes, if you do the changes in real time, then the client quickly becomes the navigator of this conversation, and his hand is basically placed on yours. He’s moving the mouse and you’re just doing the work. That’s really bad for creativity. We wanted to get that out of the way.
Vito Peleg:
So, you can tell them, “There is a revision. Okay. Now we’re done with the initial design, go to the website, click the plus icon and choose any element on the website. Tell us what you need.” They’re going to sprinkle those stickers all around the site. Then you go back, you close that process, and then you go through all the changes in one go. It’s just super efficient from that aspect, because you have it where you need it instead of looking for it in fragmented emails and stuff.
Chris Badgett:
Keep listening. This podcast is not over. This is just a special message about this episode sponsor WP Tonics, managed WordPress LMS hosting. Think of it as everything you need to have a professional online course training platform right out of the box, ready to go. Find out more about WP Tonics, managed WordPress LMS hosting by going to lifterlikes.com/tonic. Now, back to the show.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, just to highlight that efficiency, if you don’t do it this way, the painful way to do it is to send a link to some development site by email to your client, like, “Hey, let me know what you think.”
Vito Peleg:
Yes.
Chris Badgett:
And then you get back paragraphs of stuff or-
Vito Peleg:
Nothing.
Chris Badgett:
… you ump on a call and do it live and you do it at the same time where they’re just talking about it and you’re trying to figure out what they mean by that, that’s really painful. But if you do it asynchronously and you do it visually, they may take an entire week or weekend to slowly and methodically go through. There’s no pressure, like all right we’ve only got 30 minutes or an hour for the call. They could take as much time as they want and then the feedback lands. When there’s not that pressure of where meeting and like you said … I love that analogy of having somebody’s hand over your hand moving the mouse.
Vito Peleg:
Yeah.
Chris Badgett:
It can go too fast, and maybe it becomes harder … Sometimes, as a web professional, you need to push back and be like, “I hear your feedback there, but have you considered that making your logo 10 times bigger or whatever might actually hurt the user experience on your website.”
Vito Peleg:
Exactly. It’s not about accepting everything, it’s about giving them the opportunity to be heard. With every customer service. That’s what people want. They just want to be heard, even if you don’t do what exactly what they ask for, because you have a different way, a better way. So, I agree. This is kind of the essence of it. In terms of the timing around the revision round, what we found is that if you don’t put a time cap on it, it just lingers. It just stays, for sometimes even years. Now, with our customers, with our users, we heard of stories that people waited years to get feedback back, just because they didn’t give them the right process or the right system. They didn’t give the client the right system to actually deliver the content in an easy way or the revision.
Vito Peleg:
Do limit this. What we like to do is we give it seven days because like you said, a lot of people like to do it over the weekend. They take the time with it. So we give them seven days. That’s the revision round. If there’s nothing after the seven days, then it’s done. We close this step within the build, because there’s still deadlines to maintain, so you can’t just let it go forever.
Vito Peleg:
But having that timeframe actually activates the client, because we all need deadlines in life, in order for us to do actions. That’s a great way of nurturing that. Yeah, once you get the stuff, you just get the notifications saying that people have done it, that the other side has done it, then you just turn it off for them, you start working on your side.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. I have a question for the advanced user out there who’s like, all right … They’re trying to put together their package. We do this type of membership site for clients. It comes with, this is our like discovery process. This is our build process. This is our revision process. This is our deployment process. Once you become advanced as a freelancer or agency, you start developing these clear systems that you use.
Chris Badgett:
But when it comes to revisions, I love that idea of, we’re going to go through a revision cycle. Your project came with three, or two or whatever it is. We’re going to go: week one, revision one, week two, revision two, whatever the cadence is. What happens or what advice do you have for people in terms of quantity problems where, let’s say, they get way, way, way, a lot of feedback that’s like almost like we have to start over, versus somebody who gets like no feedback.
Chris Badgett:
It’s not like the perfect amount of feedback. We either … They don’t like it at all and everything’s just kind of on fire, or I have a client who’s being quiet, maybe I knocked it out of the park, or maybe they don’t know how to communicate or they’re scared to critique my work or something.
Vito Peleg:
Those are two great points and these are concerns whenever you go into a project. Having those systems in place, having discovery, our steps were, you do the discovery, then you do the sitemap, then you do prototype, then you do the build. Then you launched. This was the framework. So, each one of these had a deliverable and a signature by the client so that you can move on to the next step. This really helped us solve what you described, which we call the scope creep, right? Someone that just wants more and more stuff as the project goes along, and it never ends.
Vito Peleg:
We all fell into this hole at some point or another. It’s going to happen. But having these steps in place will … Okay, when you do the sitemap, you agree that these are all the pages. Any other pages are out of scope. It’s out to the project. You already agreed on what pages you’re going to have. Then when you do the prototype, you already agree what the layout is going to be like. So then, once you get to the actual revision process, the design revision process, then it should only be small bits and pieces.
Vito Peleg:
We never limited people on how many stuff they can send us, but like we said before, it doesn’t mean that we’re going to do all of it. If they want a massive logo, eh, that is taking 50% above the fold section, then no. If they want some colors that have problem with contrast and all these kinds of stuff, then no. There’s a better way of doing this and we’re going to provide a solution. I see us as, if the client presents a challenge or challenges the design, it’s not that this is what we need to do. It just means that something is bothering them there.
Vito Peleg:
But also, going to the beginning of understanding that their reality is different, probably the way that they describe it or the solution that they have in mind is not as good as you would have if you just put your mind to it for just a few minutes. We’re taking feedback, but we’re giving our own solutions. This is actually something that I see now in the product world as well, Chris, when we get feature requests all the time.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Vito Peleg:
You don’t do what they tell you. You think of the concept of what led to that problem of them needing this feature, and then you build it within your own vision or your own North style, is I like to call it. So yeah, we’re just solution givers at the end of the day. That’s the game. I think that answered the question.
Chris Badgett:
That’s good. I had an idea pop into my head as you were talking as well, which is, you could say, “It’s going to be this week up to 10 hours of development hours revision.” That way, you’ve literally capped the downside of that. But then that leads to the next question, which goes back to love versus hate.
Vito Peleg:
Yeah.
Chris Badgett:
Do you love scope creep? Most people would say no. Do you hate scope creep? Most people will say yes. It’s the bane of my existence.
Vito Peleg:
Right.
Chris Badgett:
If you put your stuff in the right parameters as a freelancer or agency owner, you love it, because that means more money.
Vito Peleg:
More work. Exactly.
Chris Badgett:
And if you navigate a client early, like this is how it works, you’re going to discover things and later you’re going to be like, “Hey, can you move this wall over here in the house?” We’d be like, “That’s scope creep, but that’s extra $30 thousand dollars or whatever it is.”
Vito Peleg:
Exactly.
Chris Badgett:
That way they’re not surprised when it happens. That doesn’t mean you don’t throw in little bonuses to just delight them.
Vito Peleg:
You want to deliver a little bit.
Chris Badgett:
But if you do it too much, it becomes a big problem.
Vito Peleg:
I totally agree. These steps are there to just define, this wall is here so that when this comes, you can confidently charge that extra 30K like you said, eh. So yeah, it’s very important to have this, but you actually want these clients. You want people that are using their own website and that are engaging with you and that are on it, because these are people that will actually build a business online, compared to the other people that … A lot of people think that you just splash a website on the Internet and that’s it. I’m a millionaire the day after. Right?
Vito Peleg:
So, getting the people that understand that it’s work, that you’re building, like building a physical shop, just online. It will be a digital school instead of a physical school, then these are the ones that will come back and build more landing pages, add more features to the membership area, create multi-lingual or create multicurrency functions in the future. All of these awesome upsells that we’re looking for when we’re trying to run a business longterm.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, because what people really want, especially if they’re already moving and successful with their expertise, is they want a technology partner, not just somebody to throw up a website. I mean, if done well, they could be with you for a long time.
Vito Peleg:
Yeah. For years. We have clients that we did their first website and we’re growing together. They were just a guy in a room and now they have offices and stuff and so do we. Yeah, that’s the fun part of it, when you look back and you see those clients that stuck with you, and that relationship didn’t go bad at some point, which unfortunately you will have some that it will.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. Part of that too is just a qualifying or leads or figuring out who you want to help and serve. For example, this is why the opportunity is so awesome in the online learning industry, is because the website is the business, or at least a part of the business. It’s not just a brochure. So this is something that’s very valuable to the client.
Vito Peleg:
Yes. They have to generate revenue.
Chris Badgett:
It is, which makes it really valuable. And if you have expertise in that area, and you can remove friction and help them … be their technology person, that’s there’s a ton of value and mutually beneficial for you, them, and their client or students or whatever.
Vito Peleg:
I agree. It’s such a growing industry as well. The online courses is just exploding at the moment isn’t it?
Chris Badgett:
It is huge. If you focus on a niche, like dog training or yoga or a business, whatever it is, if somebody is already, let’s say, a speaker or running these workshops or live events and they’re tired of living on planes and sleeping in hotels or whatever, and they’re trying to automate and bring things online, that’s a really good client, because they’ve already got money, they’ve already proven they can help people with their expertise. There’s a lot of value you can add to each other.
Vito Peleg:
For sure. I think that comes to what we just said right in the beginning, where if you find those people that you know that they are legit, that they leave their niche and they, this is what they, they live and breathe, then you know that there is an actual potential there. You see that with clients through an agency all the time, the ones that just try to jump into something that they’ve never touched before, or the people that swim within this industry for decades before they took that step of going on their own. It’s a clear path to success when you do that.
Chris Badgett:
Another great thing too with working with somebody who’s already moving and making money is, in their way, they’re an entrepreneur as well. It’s not just an idea. They’re already moving. There’s going to be a, some mutual understanding of how the process works. Even things like, it’s not about what I like or you like, it’s about what the customer likes and what they want and need. Entrepreneurs figure that lesson out. It’s not about our preferences.
Vito Peleg:
Yeah. It’s not our preference or what the neighbor’s wife said.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. There’s more of an open mind there. Well that’s awesome. Tell us anything about WP FeedBack that you think makes it super special. I don’t know, any other final thoughts for the people that are building LMS websites for clients? They want to use WordPress for that. What are your thoughts for the people whose curiosity we’ve peaked in this conversation?
Vito Peleg:
I think that the first thing to really consider is the fact that 94% … We did our research before starting this thing, and we surveyed 600 WordPress professionals to see how they run their own business. We found that 94% of the ecosystem are using emails still to do all of these communications with clients. It’s either emails or spreadsheets or Word documents, but it always goes back to that email, to that inbox.
Vito Peleg:
Email is a 30 year old tool that we’re using as our main driver of business. We don’t have any other tools in our toolbox that are 30 years old. Something needs to evolve from there. The point about WP FeedBack is that we’re trying to look at that communication process from the web designer, from the WordPress web designers, point of view.
Vito Peleg:
So, a lot of the features are there to systemize the way that you communicate. Even small stuff like the one click log-in from the dashboard, when you’re doing websites at scale, and when we have in the agency, every team member who goes into five to 10 different websites every day. Logging in is two or three minutes each. Then it adds up to a few hours every single week. When you have a team of 12, then it’s already a salary by the end of the month, right, of people logging in and out of websites. That’s how crazy it is when you really think about this.
Vito Peleg:
But also the back and forth and wandering around the websites trying to figure out where that page is that the client described, what that section is, that misprint that they told you that there is on the third page somewhere. Bringing it into the website is a completely different way of doing this that just solves this problem as a whole.
Vito Peleg:
I like to look at this like … Chris, we started building websites a long time ago, before we had page builders and a host and these kinds of tools. We did everything manually. We actually wrote the code, the HTML, we added the CSS, we added the metatags to do the SEO and all these kinds of stuff. Now, these tools have systemized the process, and that’s what WP FeedBack does to your service delivery. It systemizers that entire process in the same way that before page builders, we built a site with a page in 10 hours, now it takes 30 minutes. That’s the kind of impact that we’re seeing here, which is …
Vito Peleg:
It was mind blowing to me as well, when we actually started using it like that. So yeah, we’re seeing about three hours saved per week, per team member, and reducing two weeks from your project completion time, which means that you’re getting paid faster. It’s just the right way of doing it, as far as I see. In a couple of years, there’s not going to be any other way.
Chris Badgett:
Man, I wish I could take you back in time to an earlier version of myself with this tool. Go check out of you. WPFeedback.co. Vito, I want to thank you for coming on the show, and it’s great to be on the journey with you.
Vito Peleg:
Thanks a lot, Chris. Well, when we started the process, I reached out to you when I just, just started and asked you some questions about the product world, and you were super helpful. So yeah, I’m proud to be here on the show and thanks for having me.
Chris Badgett:
You bet.
That’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I hope you enjoyed the show. This show was brought to you by LifterLMS, the number one tool for creating, selling, and protecting engaging online courses to help you get more revenue, freedom, and impact in your life. Head on over to lifterlms.com and get the best gear for your course creator journey. Let’s build the most engaging, results-getting courses on the Internet.
