Learn how to increase B2B SaaS customer success and reduce churn rates with LifterLMS in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett. We’re joined today by a repeat guest, Vito Peleg from WP FeedBack, which is an amazing tool for collecting feedback from your clients on websites you’re building for them as a freelancer or agency.
WP FeedBack is a software company much like LifterLMS, and Vito uses LifterLMS to create a repository of knowledge via courses on their site to help onboard their users and educate their market on how to get the most out of the WP FeedBack tool. Vito shares what challenges they’ve faced at WP FeedBack regarding educating customers, and how LifterLMS can help serve SaaS companies with educating customers.
In doing interviews with customers, Vito found that a lot of users were using the tool the same way they did when they initially joined. So whatever was there when they signed up, that’s why they stayed with the product. The feature list of WP FeedBack had 10Xed itself since the last time they checked in on what was available, so the team started brainstorming about ways they could train their users without spamming their dashboard with notifications about each new set of features
They ended up creating a series of videos to walk through step-by-step what each feature was and the thought process behind each feature. Then they wanted to create a sequence of videos as a recommended series to help users learn the full scope of what WP FeedBack has to offer. And that’s where LifterLMS works to have the course progression set up and allow for seeing how students move through courses and which lessons they watch, where that’s more anonymous with something like a YouTube or Vimeo playlist.
Be sure to check out WP Feedback at WPFeedBack.co. It’s going to supercharge your ability to communicate more effectively, faster, save more time, and increase your profit margins on sites you build for clients. The WP FeedBack approach is to act as the project manager to help projects move from start to finish, automating all the things Vito and his agency used to do manually. Vito really emphasizes a smooth experience for you and clients when using the WP FeedBack product. You can also find Vito on Twitter at @VitoPeleg and on LinkedIn.
At LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Thank you for joining us!
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett:
You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.
Chris Badgett:
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a repeat guest. His name is Vito Peleg from WP FeedBack. That’s at wpfeedback.co, which is an amazing tool for collecting feedback from your clients. So if you build WordPress LMS websites or really any kind of website for clients, check out WP FeedBack. It’s going to supercharge your ability to communicate more effectively, faster, save more time, increase your profit margins, all that. Welcome back, Vito.
Vito Peleg:
Well, Chris, great to be back. Good to see you, man.
Chris Badgett:
In this conversation, I want to talk about what you’re up to with LifterLMS. And really investing in your company into creating digital learning opportunities that serve different purposes. Before we get into what it is, and what you’ve made, and what you’ve built, what challenge were you facing as a company or challenges that led you to wanting to invest in creating online training materials?
Vito Peleg:
Sure. So, we’re a software company very much like you guys. And as you build more and more stuff, you realize that the users are just not following. Not in terms of not following what to do, but they’re just not aware of the new things or the new possibilities that they have within the product. And we’re built really fast. So, we kind of built, we created this huge backlog of knowledge in terms of our users on how they can leverage the product properly.
Vito Peleg:
And what we found is, and as I was doing these interviews with our users, I found that a lot of them were using it in the same way as they did on the day that they joined. So whatever was there then that’s where they stayed. Not realizing that the feature list has quadrupled or 10xed itself since the last time they checked. So, we started focusing a lot or started brainstorming in terms of how can we really train our users without spamming their dashboards with notices like some product makers do. So, we figured the best way to go about it is just create a full on tutorial series that will just walk them through not only the features, but the logic behind it. So they can understand from a project management point of view, and from a website creation point of view why each feature is there. And if you understand the logic behind it, you can actually leverage this way further than just clicking it or turning it on. Just making it part of your system.
Vito Peleg:
And so, we started with creating a few videos just to see how it goes, to close on time. We went through the process of scripting the whole thing out and then recording it just like a microphone, and record just plain sound. And then do like a screencast example of what was being said. Then you edit the whole thing together, adding music, the whole thing. It was a production, a lot more than what I was expecting going into this endeavor. But we did a few and they were very much well received by our users. So, we said, “All right. Let’s do it properly.” So we ended up listing out 50 different topics that we wanted to do short, snappy videos. One to three minute videos of each. And once we did that, we started figuring out, okay, now how… We knew that we needed to create them in a certain order so that they would make sense. And they would be watchable from start to finish, even though they should also work if you just watch video 37, video 17, video 45, and so on.
Vito Peleg:
Yeah, and Lifter was just perfect. I know you for a while. So I had no doubt which tool I’m going to be using when we were going into this process. And so, that was the beginning of it. But then we did a few other bit of innovative stuff to actually enhance the experience as well.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. And this might sound like a funny question, but let me give some context to it. The question is why did you choose WordPress for your LMS or your training site? And I know you’re a big WordPress guy like me, but a lot of software companies, for example aren’t. And I’ve seen WordPress companies use hosted LMS and membership site tools to create courses and they have different reasons. But for you Lifter aside, we’ll talk about that in a second. Why did you want WordPress to hold your learning management system?
Vito Peleg:
So, first of all, the main website is already on WordPress. So we have all of our customer data stored in there, all the users and everything. And as well as all the checkout processes are done through easy digital downloads on WordPress. So, when we decided… To me it’s just like the obvious choice. I’ll just spin a WordPress install and I’ll start from there. But even more than that, it’s logical from the point of view of we’re running our business from different WordPress websites. So, that was just another layer there. Going into this, we didn’t install Lifter on our main website. We decided to create a full on learn platform that will carry out documentation. Instead, up until now the documentation was listed inside the main website, but we wanted to get it out, and put it on the designated platform to increase the speed of the main platform, first of all, because it’s the marketing platform. But also to create that kind of separate environment that is focused around getting our users to learn how to leverage the platform its max.
Chris Badgett:
I love that. So you ended up using a subdomain.
Vito Peleg:
Yes.
Chris Badgett:
So, the learning site is at learn.wpfeedback.co. And that’s interesting you also pulled your documentation out because learning is not necessarily just about courses. I mean, documentation is there to help learn, and you also before we talk about… go deeper into Lifter, why did… You also did a virtual summit. And then you captured all that content. Right now, for example, summits are hot during the pandemic time. People are doing challenges for marketing. And there’s all this influencer stuff for connecting with other experts and helping your customers be successful by connecting them to ideas that other best in class folks have. And that takes a lot of organization and management. You might as well capture all that content and put it in an LMS. So what were you trying to achieve with the summit and then ultimately, turn it, putting it inside of a LMS?
Vito Peleg:
Right. So, with the summit, first of all, this was our way of giving back to the WordPress community because I’m a huge fan of WordCamps. And I [inaudible 00:07:55] the US one last year. I’ve been touring those WordCamps for a while. And when this thing hit, when COVID hit us, I was like, “Okay, what can I do to actually support this thing?” And summit was just already working on creating something like that. So, we were already leveraging this opportunity to give back to the community.
Vito Peleg:
So, we created a free event that people could actually go in and watch a more than 30 different speakers from our ecosystem talking about how to improve, how to create a better agency or how to systemize your services, or how to automate some of the things. What are the things that you need to think about when you’re starting to hire? Or should you hire? All of these questions that you and I know very well that is just running through our minds all the time. So, we tried to get the answers. That was the point. Just to get the answers all in one event like a full week’s in.
Vito Peleg:
What we ended up with, first of all, it was a huge surprise to us when we were expecting about three to three and a half thousand people to visit. But we ended up with 107,000 people that paid us throughout that event. And so, that already kind of like, okay, there’s something massive here when it comes to the value that we’re giving to people because it just went viral compared to the marketing that we did. We shouldn’t have 107,000 people. But that happened. So, people started sharing this around. A lot of media coverage within the ecosystem. So, that was awesome.
Vito Peleg:
And what we did as a way of recouping the cost as well as generating some profit out of this event. We gave people the option, everything was free to watch live. But if you wanted to access this awesome vast amount of knowledge after the fact, you could buy a lifetime access to this content. So, like 30 hours of expert talks, very similar to what we’re doing here. Like a popular topic and just someone sharing their knowledge, sharing their experience with the community. So, we had this 30 plus talks. And we also added hundreds of people that were already needed to get access to this on a lifetime basis. And they had it, but in a pretty basic way just like a static page that had all the videos listed one after the other, and you could just push play and watch it from Vimeo or something. It wasn’t fancy.
Vito Peleg:
And so, when we created this platform, and we started with the idea of, okay, we want to do this video series, a series, and we also want to move out the documentation. That’s when we came up with this learn, learn.wpfeedback, and the brainstorming around this term, learn. What is learn? Like you said, rightfully so, it’s not just about the course. It’s about enhancing the ability of your customers to do more, not only with your product, but in general, in life. And if they can do more with their business, they will credit that to us.
Vito Peleg:
First of all, they will never leave. But also, I did on my part in terms of giving back to the community and making sure that the struggles of trying to figure out what is what for my own journey being an agency owner is going to be just a little bit easier for people that will come after me because of stuff like this. So, within this platform, we decided to bring the WP FeedBack mastery course that we talked about, as well as giving people the option to buy all of those 30 plus hours of discussions that happened on the event.
Chris Badgett:
So, that’s an upsell?
Vito Peleg:
Yes. So, now that it’s in here, it acts as an upsell for our product. So, if people buy WP FeedBack, we give them a deep discount to buy those 30 plus hours. So they can actually not only improve their project delivery to our platform, but also improve the general business skills across the board when it comes to their agency or the freelancing business. And yeah, and that’s what you see here. And then it was already on this platform, so we added the option to just buy it straight up. And a few people did actually. It’s a very new platform that’s learned about WP FeedBack. And we’re not getting vast amount of traffic going into here. But still, people decided to just click the button, and buy it directly from here.
Chris Badgett:
I love it. This is so cool because I have a similar philosophy to you. I like to put my customer at the center of my business, not my company. And your customer is the agency, the freelancer, the agency people.
Vito Peleg:
And the websites, exactly.
Chris Badgett:
And you created a summit that is more than just all about your tool. It’s all about everything they need to be successful and you add it in life too, which is cool because that’s how you really love on your customer and it does prevent churn. Just because you’re adding massive value you’re building goodwill you’re connecting them with good people. There’s so much in that and you’re getting… You are, you still get expansion revenue like you said. People can upsell or they just come in cold and they just want the training or whatever. That’s so cool.
Vito Peleg:
Exactly. So, you get the benefits all around, but it just starts from the point, and I love what you’re saying, love on your customer because I think that’s the core of business. If you love your customer, really feel value and grateful for that relationship. It comes back tenfold.
Chris Badgett:
If someone is thinking about doing a virtual summit, and then capturing the value into a learning management system, what was your amount of preparation time from idea to execution or whatever? Was it massive or was it like-
Vito Peleg:
With the summit itself?
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Vito Peleg:
Yeah. So, we knew that we were going to do a summit at the beginning of this year. Already going into January we knew that it’s going to happen. And then in February, the end of February, I was planning to go to WordCamp Asia in Thailand. I was so looking forward to this. I wanted to visit Thailand for years now and that was my opportunity. I had everything booked. Not only that, we booked flights for 10 team members to come and just have a bit of a company retreat over there because we’re a distributed team that was perfect. So, we had it all lined up. And then a week before the event it was canceled.
Chris Badgett:
That’s too bad.
Vito Peleg:
We lost loads of money. Firstly, that was a huge… That was my first, okay, something big is happening here with this COVID thing. We lost 10s of thousands of dollars on this WordCamp we tried to go. We were sponsoring and all of that. So right as we came back, I was like, “Okay, I got to take action.” First of all, because I lost a lot of money. And also I saw my own frustration with this event that I wanted to come and meet some friends and learn something new and just engage and that didn’t happen. So, we started reaching out to the organizers of WordCamp Asia telling them, “Let’s do it.” We were already starting to develop this platform to accommodate this event. And you guys already have the talks. All the speakers have presentations lined up. So let’s just do it. The same time, same date, just online.
Vito Peleg:
And of course, it didn’t happen. But we were left with this feeling, okay, if they don’t want to do it, we’ll do it. And so, between the end of February and mid April, a month and a half, we ramped it up, build it up, found the speakers, but took an extra step with the speakers. We wanted to make sure that it’s balanced in terms of gender. And we wanted to make it a very inclusive event. So, we took the extra mile of trying to figure out to make sure that it’s a representative kind of a group that is speaking, and not just a group of men talking like usually, talking to themselves.
Vito Peleg:
And so, yeah, that actually, that was the only thing that was making this even harder. Just making sure that it’s diversified, and yeah, and we were up and running it. By the end of April, the event opened its doors. First day 30,000 people hit us. The whole thing broke. The website broke completely. And so, it took us a full night of pulling hell and running in circles in this room. [inaudible 00:17:21]. I didn’t do much. The developers were on it. And I was just running back and forth here. But by the end of the night it was up and running, and yeah, it was… So, the whole thing I would say, to organize something like this three months is a good time to do it. Some people do it a lot slower, I guess. But three months full on you get it done.
Chris Badgett:
Nice. Well, good job on that. And good job just pivoting with the situation. And I mean, that’s real entrepreneur tenacity there to not just capture an opportunity, but also work with what you have and turn lemons into lemonade and all that.
Vito Peleg:
Exactly, exactly. And from those few thousand, we recouped the entire loss of the WordCamp, and left with a nice profit out of this event as well.
Chris Badgett:
And you have an evergreen asset that you can continue to leverage inside your LMS which is cool.
Vito Peleg:
And the biggest online summit in the WordPress space by far, by like 10X the next one.
Chris Badgett:
Wow. That’s an incredible accomplishment.
Vito Peleg:
Thank you.
Chris Badgett:
So, go back to Lifter. Why did you choose LifterLMS for your technology?
Vito Peleg:
It was just an obvious choice because I know you, but also because [Astra 00:18:38] is my theme of choice. And I know that there is a full on integration with Astra, so it was just a super easy process. Yeah, it just worked for us. I don’t mean that it worked for us. I mean, it worked for us, you know what I mean?
Chris Badgett:
That’s cool. So, what makes the project a win? How do you see the success with this LMS? What are the top wins from [crosstalk 00:19:10]?
Vito Peleg:
So, first of all, seeing our users going in and finishing it is something that I couldn’t track on a YouTube playlist, which is what most product makers do. You just throw it on… We have it on YouTube. It is on a playlist on YouTube. But people can’t track the progress. I can’t track the progress, which is something that is really interesting to me to see how engaged our users are.
Chris Badgett:
Otherwise, you’re flying blind, you just can’t-
Vito Peleg:
Yes, exactly. Exactly. So, you see the hits. You see the views going up on YouTube, but you have no idea who it is and you have no idea what their mindset was around this. So this just gave us a nice kind of experience throughout. Also, we are a collaboration, and a communication platform. So, it only makes sense, and we just set it as one of our values that we will always take the extra step for our users in terms of making sure that our comms are awesome. And that they can actually reach out to us or don’t reach out to us, but find that information super easy through various different tools. And this is definitely a huge step up when it comes to that value that we have within our business.
Vito Peleg:
More than that, there’s no financial outlook on this thing more than getting our users or reducing churn like you said, but it’s very hard to quantify if the churn has decreased just because of that, or because of the 20 other things that we’re doing at the same time. But I just think it’s an awesome experience for a user. I would love every product to do this for me. So that’s why I did it for our users.
Vito Peleg:
One more thing that I would say is that some big SaaS companies do that. So, for example, I’m a big fan of ActiveCampaign. And so, when I really started understanding the value that I can get from this tool, I found that they have this kind of certificate thing, but a certificate course. And some people do those certificate things. It wasn’t so much about the certificate for me like being a certified WP FeedBack user or something like that. Or a certified ActiveCampaign user. It was just a matter of I want to learn everything that this tool can do for my business, so that I can leverage it. And it was organizing as an LMS as well, which was awesome to see it over there. Obviously, we’re far off from being ActiveCampaign in terms of the size of the company, but tools like LifterLMS and WordPress allows you to do this very quickly.
Chris Badgett:
I’ll just say interesting note there for you that’s listening or watching this on YouTube, there’s another WordPress company called Groundhogg who uses LifterLMS for similar reasons as you but they also have a partner program where like Groundhogg certified partner. So, if you’re ever trying to develop a… If you’re a software company and you’re trying to develop a partner program of experts that can fulfill client service requests or whatever, it’s an interesting thing. Kind of like you mentioned ActiveCampaign has something.
Vito Peleg:
Yes. There’s a few other companies in our space, specifically in WordPress that do this kind of a… Yeah, like [inaudible 00:22:57]. I know Toolset has something like this. WPML which is the same company also invest a lot into learning materials, which I think is a very, very smart move for a new company.
Chris Badgett:
Let me ask you, what gave you the motivation because I notice… I mean, I’m trained as an anthropologists and sociologists. So, I see culture even digitally and stuff like that. When I look at software companies, a lot of software companies, SaaS, B2B SaaS companies, the documentation is really low priority, and it’s often crisis… It doesn’t get a lot of investment. What really drove you to not only did you start making videos, which is a level up. Like, okay, we’re going to invest in video production. It takes time, takes resources, they go out of date quickly or whatever. But a lot of documentation for SaaS companies is pretty underwhelming and could be so much better. You went all in. What was the motivation for that?
Vito Peleg:
We still have a long way to go when it comes to [inaudible 00:23:59] to be. But the reason for that is because we started this company from the mindset that we are going to change the way that people run projects from start to finish. And then that mission drove us to take action in all kinds of different areas. One of the biggest thing is that if you actually want to change people’s behavior, from your sociology kind of a background, you must know that, then you’ve got to train them well, and you’ve got to convince them. It’s not a matter of just showing… So, I can tell people [inaudible 00:24:40] tomorrow that our tour will take them from five weeks to five days. Literally, it will take them from three weeks projects to three days projects. It’s crazy, but no one will believe me. It just sounds too good to be true.
Vito Peleg:
So, the way to actually get them to achieve these results, which most of our users are achieving these results is by drilling it in again, and again, and again, and again. And you’re basically framing their mindset to first of all believe that they can achieve something like this. Because I wouldn’t believe. If someone would have told me that back in my agency days, that one thing can do that kind of impact I wouldn’t believe it. But now from the place that I see these results, I started contemplating about other products that get me the same level of results. Stuff like Zapier or like a full on project management that you connect with all kinds of… It’s very rare that you would find something. So, a page builder. A page builder took us from the days that I was there. I was building in HTML and CSS, and something that would take you 10 hours now takes one hour. The same ratio of time saved.
Chris Badgett:
It’s a quantum leap.
Vito Peleg:
Yes. It’s a quantum leap. I love that. Yes.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Vito Peleg:
Yeah. So, it’s exactly that. Because we started this company with that mission of delivering projects like we should be, not like they used to be 30 years ago. So, we had to think of ways of framing this properly for our users. That was one thing. Then the other thing is the speed of build because if you stay as a small product, then fine, you don’t need more than three pages of documentations, and you can expand the product in sentence in most cases.
Chris Badgett:
I call it like a one trick pony. Some softwares just do one thing really well, which is awesome. But others are like platforms, and they do a lot of things, right?
Vito Peleg:
Exactly. So, I think this is the difference. It’s the platform thing of it. If it’s a platform it has to have training come along with the doors, we wouldn’t know what to do. No one can jump into WordPress, and be as expert as you are or as expert as I am at manipulating this platform. It takes years of learning and practicing and doing it to actually get to that level of expertise with the software. So, I look at it in the same way. If someone really wants to get a project from there to there they got to be immersed with the product.
Chris Badgett:
I love that. Well, let me ask you an instructional design question. You named your main course WP FeedBack pro mastery, so software company name and then mastery. And like you said, like if someone’s going to be a pro at your tool, you got to train them. And then that way you’re looking at documentation and courses and training as a feature, not a cost center. [crosstalk 00:27:50]. This is something we got our people need to be successful. But as an instructional designer, who’s looking at your software product, by instructional design just in simple language what I mean is you come up with, “Well, what am I going to teach? How am I going to organize it? What are the lessons named? What are the sections named?” How did you come up with the breaking out what each lesson would be, and your framework for teaching?
Vito Peleg:
That’s a great question because we changed it a lot before it ended where it is now. And so, when it comes to the name, first of all, that’s what I want people to be. I want them to master the tool. Because I’m a musician as well. If you master a tool, you can do everything you want with it. Coders, as a coder if you master that tool of language you can do a lot of stuff with it. So, that’s where the name came from WP FeedBack Pro Mastery. It sounds good as well, you know.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, it does. I like it.
Vito Peleg:
But then inside you’re right, there’s all kinds of different… And our platform is consisting of different aspects to it. And we started logically saying, okay, we just get people started from the beginning of installing the tool, and then starting to use it straight away. And so, I can explain our product in… I’ll explain the main blocks of the product. So, there is the front end story, which is that feedback tool is you choose any element on the page. And then you have the dashboard, which is the management area where you can manage the entire project. Then you have graphic feedback, which is for images, not on websites, but for images or any kinds of graphics of that sort. And then you also have admin stuff and settings which are kind of going deeper, going behind the scenes, checking out the functionalities there.
Vito Peleg:
So, these are the four categories of the course itself. And we started this by taking people actually, intuitively how you would install it. So you install it. And then you go to the settings screen and start manipulating the settings. But so the videos were organized like that, like people would use it, but then we changed it completely to get them to the aha moment as quickly as possible. So the game was to get them to install it, and then take them to the dashboard straightaway. So they can see the huge quantum leap. I’m going to use this term now forever. So they can see the quantum leap in front of them of how are we doing this? How are you getting five weeks to five days? And this is just from the organization point of view, and removing layers of back and forth. That’s how the tool does it.
Vito Peleg:
So, the dashboard and seeing it compared to the tools that you’re using now. Seeing the dashboard compared to email or seeing it compared to Google Docs or whatever the random ways that people deliver projects nowadays gets you to do. “Oh, okay. Okay. Now I can see how I can do it in my own business.” So, that’s then what ended up being the driving force. Just getting people to get them to drop those coins in their mind as quickly as possible and as often as possible in the beginning. And then once you got them hooked, then you can talk about settings and you can check just this checkbox to do this, this checkbox to do that. You go really deep, but you got to get that fascination first. And so, this is how it’s structured at the moment.
Chris Badgett:
I love that, and I just want to… I think this is such an important point. If you’re watching this, and you’re a software company of any kind, it’s tempting to do, organize a course around these feature buckets or aspects buckets. But if you think about your customer and I love that you use the word, wow. So, what are the fastest drop the mic moments or wow moments. And then they happen in a series. Like, okay, first there’s this mic drop moment. And then there’s this mic drop moment. And then after this third mic drop moment I know scientifically if I’ve instrumented my software product this person is very unlikely to ever churn or leave. And if you can get them through those gates, quickly, not only do they get super excited, but it really increases motivation and success with your products.
Vito Peleg:
Yes. And this is exactly what we saw. As soon as we launched these video series, and we started sharing these on support tickets as well. People are coming in with one question, we give them that specific video, but also tell them just make sure that you watch the whole thing because you’re going to discover a whole lot worth more than what you came with first with the support ticket. So, the responses were exactly that. Wow. Like, I can’t believe that so much was done in such short amount of time. And yeah, just get them excited, and if people are excited, they just want to do stuff. That’s just how things work.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, that’s awesome-
Vito Peleg:
This is sociology, isn’t it? If they’re excited, they want to do stuff.
Chris Badgett:
I mean, if you think about it learning is like a fundamental thing that makes us human. It’s why babies and they copy the faces and all this. It’s what we do as humans. We’re a learning machine.
Vito Peleg:
We’re learning, yeah, that’s true. Yes, we are.
Chris Badgett:
What kind of feedback or what have you heard from your customers who have taken your courses? What are you hearing from them?
Vito Peleg:
Right. So some issues with the logins first of all, and then that’s sorted already. That was some of the first feedback that we got. But altogether, it’s just a matter of, yeah, the main thing is the excitement that they have after. So, usually by the time now that they join, we’re pushing them to this course as soon as possible, the new users. With new users, they see the… How can I say this? They see the power before they experience the power firsthand.
Chris Badgett:
Well, that’s a challenge of you’re a great marketer. So, you sell the benefits, but then there’s that buyer’s remorse, right? Or they still got to set things up and get it going, right?
Vito Peleg:
Yes, that’s true. They got… Everyone got… Everything good you got to do a bit of work, at least a bit of work to get it to working. And that’s the same thing. That’ll change your system a little bit too so that you can actually run in that level of efficiency or was it just going to break if you’re not going to do it properly. So, the point I’m trying to make is that they watch the course before they have the opportunity to get that awesome experience with their own clients. Because our tool has a bit of leeway between the time you buy it until you can experience the result. Because you got to run a project. And so, that already puts you at a couple of… Some time until you just first decide that you’re comfortable enough to use something like this with a new client or something.
Vito Peleg:
So, there is a few weeks until they start experiencing the game change. But this video series or this training has shortened that time. Even though it’s not the personal experience that happened, they can experience this thing within an hour after they bought the tool because they can picture how they can do it. Because I’m showing them how it can happen. They can see from previous experiences that, okay, if I do this, instead of this, how I used to do it, then I would probably get the result that I’m seeing right here on the video, which gets them excited, get those butterflies going in the stomach. So that pushes them to action even further when it comes to getting confident about [inaudible 00:36:18], getting the first client to use it. And then getting the second client to use it and really starting to see the benefits as opposed to at the beginning when you said I’m a… We were very much focused on marketing in the beginning because we knew it was a game changer concept. But you still got to sell, right?
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Vito Peleg:
So, you sell the benefit. You sell the benefit. People buy because of FOMO. They buy because of pressure around. They’ll buy because of whatever. A lot of reasons why people bought from us in the beginning is not because they even needed the product is because of the marketing that we were running. And so, what ended up happening is that they bought it, they got that initial satisfaction of buying something, and then they never used it. And then what’s the point? There’s no point of people paying you money if I can’t give them awesome value for it.
Vito Peleg:
So, when now year two started, and we started seeing all of those people. And in EDD you can actually see if someone used it or not. You can see if it’s active. If there are any active websites on their license or something like this. So, obviously, the people that never use it just dropped. They never downloaded it even. So, I can’t blame. There’s no reason why you would get excited about something you never use. It’s like buying a pair of shoes and keeping them in the closet for a year. And then the company wants you to pay for it again. So, it’s not going to happen.
Vito Peleg:
So, now a year or two, learning this. Learning that the people… It was kind of a mystery to me. Why would people do it? Now, it’s kind of my day to day, so I accept it. But it’s weird. You spend like a few hundred dollars on something and then you never do anything with it. So it just didn’t occur to me until we started seeing the reasons why people were not renewing on year two. They were saying, “I never used this.” Like, okay, what can you say to someone that said that? So, we decided to fix the problem at its core by adding stuff like this training and all of these things.
Chris Badgett:
That is awesome. And since we’re talking about anthropology in this episode I’ll just add that human beings are stores of value. They collect things. And it’s only really recently that we’ve had extra time, extra capacity, that we weren’t just hunting and gathering all day and that kind of thing. And so, do it just focusing on survival tasks, but it’s human nature to collect things that we perceive as valuable. [crosstalk 00:39:01]. I love your approach to helping make sure as a software creator that I need to not just sell them the value but help them activate into it and experience the value. Experience the confidence that comes. Like you said, even if they haven’t used it on a client project yet, after the course they have a I got this moment. I can do this. It makes sense. I can see the trail that I need to follow to make it happen.
Vito Peleg:
Yeah. And I proactively because I’m a huge fan of online courses myself, I always have an online course that I’m going through. And through that process, you learn the manipulations that course creators do on you. Like they keep telling you, you can do it, you got to do it, you have to do it, you’re doing it now, you got to do it now. Take out your notebook, and do this. So, they operate you all the time, and get you to experience energy. Highly level energy that then is then being transferred to the value and the results that you can get from anything that you do. If you’re doing something with high energy, it’s always gonna be better than without.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. What would you say to someone else who’s considering and let’s say a software company that’s considering using LifterLMS or installing a learning management system to help their customers experience what we’ve just talked about, but they’re not sure about the investment of time and doing an LMS project or the cost or choosing Lifter as an example. What would you say to them if they’re on the fence?
Vito Peleg:
Right. So first of all when it comes to Lifter, it was just such a smooth integration and experience working with a software. So, that it wasn’t even… It was so smooth that it’s kind of transparent to me. Do you know what I mean?
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Vito Peleg:
It’s just there. It works. It’s done, but I would take this question from the point of view, which was a huge a mental struggle for me at the beginning is creating videos. And I think that this is the discipline. You mentioned before that it’s something that goes out of date really quickly [crosstalk 00:41:26]-
Chris Badgett:
Especially for software.
Vito Peleg:
Yes, exactly. So, that was… So, we had videos created with the launch, and then we had… And then a week after the launch it was irrelevant. And it was like a 40 minute video of walking through the product, walking through this thing. And you change one thing and the whole thing breaks. Then a couple of months later I did the same thing. Again, another 40 minute video that just walks through the product as it was at version 1.15, and after a few iterations of this I just gave up. I said, “All right, I can’t do this thing. It’s crazy. Every month I need to do a full on video.”
Vito Peleg:
So, what we did now is different. We listed out all of the different features, and we broke them down to one minute videos, which means that if something changes, all we need to do is replace that one minute, and we still are left with everything else. Not only that, now it’s so organized inside the premiere that I can just crop a bit of sound. And people might see it on some of the videos already there. Some of them are patched out. [crosstalk 00:42:39].
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. But it’s current.
Vito Peleg:
Yes, but it’s up to date, always. And even an example is that on Monday, on Tuesday, because Monday there is a bank holiday here. On Tuesday we’re releasing a new update, and it has a couple of new features on it. So, I don’t need to do a full video. I just do one more one minute video and the whole thing is up to date again. I’m just going to squeeze it in where it makes sense for that new feature to be featured.
Chris Badgett:
So, for your software mastery course, would you say that it’s kind of become part of the release cycle like, hey-
Vito Peleg:
It is. Yes, definitely it is. It’s literally part of the flowchart for the release. You do the blog post, and then… Not me, Jehrome does the blog posts. And then he also writes the script as he describes it on the blog post as well. He writes the script for me to film, and do the video around it as well. So, yeah, we’ve done two releases over the past two months as this thing came out with new features that required additional videos, and it worked perfect. Yeah, just additional videos being added. So now it’s like almost 50 episodes, probably by the end of the year, it’s going to be like a 70 episode series. But again, each one is like one to two minutes long, that’s it. Straight to the point. Because you know that there is everything around. So you don’t need to repeat yourself and do introductions and do that. You go straight to the point. It’s 10 episodes instead of a full training.
Chris Badgett:
I think that’s super cool. And that’s one of the great things about a learning management system is the progress tracking. So, if somebody comes in, and they’re like, “Oh, this is a complex software tool. It has a lot going on. A lot of features, a lot of things I can do with it.” Not everybody has to finish everything. Maybe you just need to do this part. And then oh, yeah, last week I already did these 12. So then I’m going to go over here and maybe do it in a different order then step by step. So, it’s flexible, and it’s efficient [crosstalk 00:44:43]-
Vito Peleg:
And I loved that I could categorize the things. That I could give topics to do. So, for example, our graphic feedback tool that allows people to collaborate on images and stuff. Not everyone needs that. It’s not something that within my agency we didn’t do any graphic stuff. Everything was in the browser. So, we didn’t need that. The only reason why we built it is because our users asked for it. And people are leveraging it successfully for their own use case. People that do deliver logos and brochures and whatever. So, the ones that don’t can just skip that entire week, if you will. Like, how they call it in courses.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, module or section. Yeah, that’s a thing. And there’s a lot of talk in e-learning about completion rates, and how low they are online. But there are cases like we’re talking about here where it’s getting everybody to 100% complete is not necessarily the goal. The goal is to get people to all those wow moments, the aha moments, the mic drop moments, and be successful with your product. That might mean going through every single thing or even just one part of it. It just depends on the user.
Vito Peleg:
That’s true.
Chris Badgett:
Very cool. Well, Vito, I want to thank you for sharing your story and what you’re up to, what you’ve been building. Before we go is there anything… You have a brilliant, visionary mind. Is there anything else besides as you update the software, you’ll add new components to your course? Is there anything else you have planned for your LMS in the future, or just ideas you’ve been shaking around in your head?
Vito Peleg:
And so, I would actually love for integration for EDD because we had to build something ourselves. As well as there’s a few advances that we created that I think might be interesting to a few users.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, you did the one click login, what is-
Vito Peleg:
Yes. So, we already have all of our users, thousands of users connected on the main website, on the .co website. So, it was illogical for me to ask them to register again into that subdomain platform. Not only that, but keep logging in and logging out as they visit different places that are in their mind is the same product. We know it’s different installations, but it doesn’t matter to the user. And so, what we ended up doing is we actually took a feature that we created for WP FeedBack itself. We have our one click login in the dashboard. And we implemented it into this platform, so that when people click a login button on the top, it just checks if they’re already logged in either to the dashboard or to the main website, and full tokens and APIs just boom, you’re logged in. Just you see that you’re logged in.
Chris Badgett:
So, you did create, that’s like a single sign on kind of tool, I think.
Vito Peleg:
Yes, but it checks if they already are. So, it doesn’t log you in unless you’re logged in elsewhere, in other places. So, you’ve got to be logged in on the main website.
Chris Badgett:
Gotcha.
Vito Peleg:
And then it looks into the thing over there and matches it in here. But then we took it a step further in matching the users table. So, all of the users are enrolled to the course by default. When you’re joining the software, you’re enrolled automatically to the course, which means that you’re already seeing your progress at zero percent. That was what I wanted. I wanted that someone would come in. They don’t have to do anything. They can always say, “Okay, I’m zero percent. It’s going to start itching them to finish this [val 00:48:30] and get it to 100. So, that’s a cool thing that we did there when it comes to the login experience. As well as, we’re not using any of the… Because it’s a subdomain we’re not using… And we wanted the central aspects of sales. We’re not using any of the sales functionality of Lifter, so we had to adapt it a little bit to make sure that it’s sold on the main website then redirect into here already logged in, and ready to rock with the logins that you gave on the other website.
Chris Badgett:
I love that. That is super cool. Super cool. Well, thank you, Vito, for being a shining example of using an LMS to help you be successful, but also more importantly help your customers be more successful with your software.
Vito Peleg:
It’s why we’re building it, man. It’s thanks to you.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, you bet. So, if you are a freelancer or an agency owner or you know one, send them over to wpfeedback.co. This is a game changer if you work with clients, and you need to communicate around how a website that you’re building together looks and what you want it to do. It’s an amazing innovation, a super cool product.
Vito Peleg:
Thank you.
Chris Badgett:
The learning site, if you buy it, you’re going to get auto logged in, and you’ll be at zero progress. So, step one, buy it. Step two, learn how to use it. Step three, be successful with your clients and turn five weeks into five days in terms of delivering a project-
Vito Peleg:
Yes. [crosstalk 00:50:10].
Chris Badgett:
… through better communication.
Vito Peleg:
Yeah, the way that… We look at it kind of a… I think you’re going to appreciate our approach to the product. And like you said, it’s not just that one feature. The way that we build is that we look at a WordPress project from start to finish. And the platform as it is now, it’s not a project manager, and it’s not supposed to. What we like to say is that it is the project manager. It manages the project on its own and moves it from one place to another. It’s just magical. We just took all the things that we used to do manually and systemized the hell out of it. Like with this login thing, I don’t accept anything that is less than smooth. So, that’s the experience for your projects and for your clients. Yeah, it’s illogical to still use email. It’s crazy that people still do.
Chris Badgett:
So, that’s wpfeedback.co. How else can the good people of the internet connect with you, Vito?
Vito Peleg:
You can find me on Twitter. That’s where you can find me personally on Vito Peleg on Twitter as as well as connect with me on LinkedIn. There’s loads of people there. If you want to reach me directly, Twitter I think is the best option. And of course, send a message on the website. I’m always happy to get on a demo call. This is something I learned from you, Chris. No one does it except for us in the ecosystem, at least that I know. But I love getting on a call, listening to the users, talking about workflows, and talking about my experience, and thousands of other users’ experience on how they run the WordPress project, so I can help you guys as well.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. Well, thanks so much, Vito. We’ll have to check in end of the year and do another one of these.
Vito Peleg:
I’d love to. I’d love to, man.
Chris Badgett:
And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
