We have today Adam Preiser, creator of the very popular Presto player for WordPress as the guest for this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett. Presto is the most advanced video player on WordPress and recently it was integrated successfully with LifterLMS, the best learning management system on WordPress. Videos are an essential part of the learning experience, bringing the best of both worlds together.
Adam was one of the early adopters of LifterLMS when the plugin first came live in 2017. He has been an avid user and advocate of the platform ever since.
Being a long-term WordPress entrepreneur, Adam had first-hand experience with where video technology was moving in the entertainment and learning industry and what needed to be in his plugin. So, Presto is literally everything that was on his wish list over the years and more.
Now more than 40 thousand sites are using Presto player!
There are some exciting features included inside Presto that are beneficial for LMS creators and students. With it, you can mark chapters, and track view progressions down to each user and the user interface is really aware of where it is being embedded. So it adapts. For example, if you play back something on a course, and then scroll down to read something on the screen, the player transforms into a bar and offers the control at the bottom of the tab. You can also fully customize the branding of the player, unlike Vimeo where it is just a link embed. You can also generate time stamp links to exact parts of a video in Presto player to split a video into different lessons. Presto can also autoplay video with subtitles so that even when you are not listening it still has your attention, just like you see on Facebook. Presto also has an audio player for course instructors like language teachers for their course creation websites. You can also add lead capture popups in the video at specific times so that if you are running a demo course, you can gain leads directly from the video wherever it is placed.
A lot of people ask Chris how is Presto player different from Vimeo Pro? So this is where the differences begin to surface. You can use Presto player in WordPress or any site in ways that are not possible with Vimeo. Presto player solves two main issues for anyone who needs to host videos. Firstly, it converts the videos into optimized formats (through bunny.net hosting) so that the playback is bufferless. Secondly, it keeps the cost low, like really really low.
How does Presto manage to do that? Before answering that let’s dive a bit deeper into the problems first. Videos are sensitive files to work with. The video files your cameras or production software render are not optimized for streaming. So, when hosting videos for learners or for entertainment, the video needs to be converted into a format that works on all devices. Moreover, if not optimized, these files can get very large in filesize. Buying such large storage on a server is very expensive. With bunny.net integration, you are addressing two problems at once. It is strongly advised to have dedicated hosting for your videos separate from your web hosting. With bunny connected, you can also directly drag and drop your videos directly into your website’s backend and not have to deal with multiple platforms and settings. Everything just gets formatted and distributed automatically.
That is just one part of the cost. Presto manages to keep the cost low by charging only for the view bandwidth. The hosting charges are metered through bunny.net if you are using it. So that is why, if you are hosting a lot of videos and sometimes the traffic is low, you are not facing a huge recurring bill unlike Vimeo, which impacts your profits.
Catch up with Adam at prestoplayer.com. Adam is also the Co-founder of CartFlows Inc. His mission is to produce excellent how-to videos for the digital entrepreneur.
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. I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. 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 LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest, his name’s Adam Preiser, he’s from Presto Player and many other projects. You can also find him on YouTube at WP Crafter. Welcome back on the show, Adam.
Adam Preiser:
What is this, like the third time?
Chris Badgett:
Something like that.
Adam Preiser:
It’s for sure the second. I’m thinking it could be the third.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, I’m super stoked to get into it with you today, because we both share a love for video. We’ve been around video doing stuff, courses, making videos, doing video marketing, trying to help other people use video. Tell us at a high level, what’s the elevator pitch of your video product called Presto Player.
Adam Preiser:
Oh my gosh. See, now you got me on the spot. You’re supposed to prep me for this stuff in advance. Presto Player is so much, but Presto Player is actually… Elevator pitch, oh my gosh, you’ve got me stomped in how to express this. Okay. But I love Presto Player, Presto Player is a video player for marketers and online course creators, those are the primary users of it, that adds some spectacular functionality to videos and really takes all the pain out of displaying videos on your website, or in this case inside of your online video based courses. And there’s spectacular functionality, customization, options, tracking all of it’s in there. It’s the complete package.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. And I hear the voice of the course creator, my customer in my head constantly. And I have some specific questions for you that I know they would want to know as Presto relates to online courses. But first I want to thank you for you and your team integrating Presto Player with the LifterLMS Advanced Videos plugin, which has stuff like making sure people watch the whole video and auto advance and things like that, so thank you for that. I know the first question I’m going to get when I start sharing with people about Presto Player is, “Okay, well, you said to use Vimeo Pro. So how is Presto Player different from Vimeo Pro?”
Adam Preiser:
Yeah. So let me get back into just a little bit of the origin story of Presto Player and how it came to be. So I was probably one of the earliest users of LifterLMS, right?
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Adam Preiser:
I think I was probably an early adopter.
Chris Badgett:
An early adopter.
Adam Preiser:
Yeah. I was the early adopter when it hit the WordPress plug-in directory, I was the early adopter of it. And I had online courses of myself and the biggest pain point was always related to video, the cost of video. Obviously, you could use YouTube for free, but who in the heck would do that with the paid course, right?
Chris Badgett:
Right.
Adam Preiser:
With all the branding of YouTube. The pain point for having an online based video course was always video for me and there’s solutions that either didn’t have a lot of features. And they would be maybe like… I think Vimeo, I don’t know, it was 200 bucks a year, something like that [crosstalk 00:03:44].
Chris Badgett:
And think it’s $300. Yeah.
Adam Preiser:
Keeps going up. And then there was other services I would try that would have some more functionality, but they would be unreliable and also very expensive and I didn’t like this myself. So one day I’m like, “Yeah, I’m going to solve this problem.” And we released Presto Player in February of 2021. Right now, it’s been 13 months and it’s on 40,000 websites. So people are loving this thing, 40,000 websites. Now Presto Player is in its most basic sense, a video player, meaning you can bring any service you want to it. You can say, have your videos on Amazon, AWS or whatever. I don’t like that, it’s too complicated for me.
Adam Preiser:
But there’s lots of super affordable services to place your videos and we have integrations with those. For example, one of them, an average user that has an active video based course, it might cost them like one or $2 per month in actual usage. You’re paying for the storage of your videos and the amount of bandwidth that someone is consuming when they’re watching your videos. But all in all, it’s fractions of a penny for each of these. And it ends up costing a user one or $2. So it totally solves the cost issue of having video courses and the reliability issue.
Adam Preiser:
But then with Presto Player, we add in a ton of functionality that you’re not usually getting. So for example, in the online course example, you might want to be able to see who’s watching what and for how long, not from a global aspect, but from the individual student, we’re tracking that. So if Chris logs into the website and watches half of your third video, you can see that users exactly what they’re watching, how long they’re watching it for, you could do some really cool things like this. And it goes much deeper than that, but that’s an example for the person that has an online course.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. And before we go deeper on that, why should somebody avoid hosting the video actually on their WordPress website itself? Because that’s the other dream, is like, “Well, can I just upload it to my website?” It’s probably a bad idea. Would you agree?
Adam Preiser:
It’s actually a really bad idea.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Adam Preiser:
So there’s two problems there and one of them you could solve yourself, but then the other problem still remains. So what happens is whenever you’re creating a video, maybe it be an exported out of Final Cut Pro or ScreenFlow or whatever someone’s using, your iPhone. These files are not optimized for web delivery, so what happens is there’s a process that needs to happen where it gets transcoded and optimized so it’s a lot smaller of a file and it’ll play back more reliably, so that’s number one. You would have to self transcode if you do that and you’re still not going to hit all the formats, right? The second thing though is the bigger thing, is video is very sensitive, meaning if there’s a hiccup with your hosting, you’re going to get a buffer and no one in today’s day and age has the patience for any buffering at all with anything, we have no tolerance, zero tolerance for it. And unfortunately, that is very likely to happen when you self-host that there will be a degree of buffering that occurs and it will create a really poor impression of your online course.
Chris Badgett:
So a way to think about it for the end user, it’s better to have a video place storage, hosting kind of thing, and then a player on your website that makes the experience of consuming the video awesome, right? Separate those two things out?
Adam Preiser:
Yes. And then also integrates into everything that is going on, on the WordPress site. So for example, if you just go do the Vimeo thing and then take the link in to the Vimeo video, there’s not contextual aware on the WordPress site.
Chris Badgett:
It’s just an in embed, right?
Adam Preiser:
It’s just an in embed, yes.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Adam Preiser:
So like that tracking I mentioned, where we can see who watched what, for how long, that’s just one tiny example of one of the features that we have. We have some spectacular features. So you don’t get that, you just totally lose that. So Presto Player being a WordPress plugin, we integrate it with everything. We want to integrate it with all kinds… Automation tools it’s integrated with, it’s integrated with LifterLMS so we can do some really interesting things.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. And I know in my own research of Presto and being around this video challenges of course creators for a long time, I’ve seen you really surface the bunny.net platform for hosting. Can you explain to people what that is? Because I know when people first hear about it, they’re like, “What is that? I haven’t heard of that.” But it’s actually really cool and it’s actually really affordable. Can you describe it?
Adam Preiser:
Yes. So bunny.net is what’s called a content delivery network. I shouldn’t get all technical like that. All that people need to know is it’s a service and what you can do is you… Presto Player was made to seamlessly work with it for unbelievably reliable and affordable hosting and delivery of your videos. And it’s all seamlessly done on your WordPress site. So essentially, what a user does is they just go and set up a simple account at bunny.net. You don’t have to pay anything for it, but you do have to give them $10 to start and it’s like a credit that it draws down from. And then there’s a little code that they put into Presto Player, Presto sets everything up. So now if you want to upload a video, you go into Presto Player on your WordPress website and you just drag and drop your video and everything is done for you.
Chris Badgett:
So we don’t even have to go to… We just set up bunny, make sure the accounts funded, but actually now we’re just using our website, which is what people want to do.
Adam Preiser:
Yes,
Chris Badgett:
They just want to set it and forget it, right?
Adam Preiser:
Exactly. So to make it easy for some people to imagine, imagine if Vimeo let you do that, right? I’m sure a lot of the users of LifterLMS use Vimeo, but they’re going to start being interested in Presto Player, but I’m sure there’s ton of those as well. Imagine if Vimeo allowed you to first just cost one or $2 per month based on usage, number one. And number two, you would just log into your LifterLMS lesson and then just drag and drop your video it would automatically get sent off to Vimeo and it’s all done in this one place without you having to go here. And then there’s a million settings here and then you got to copy and paste this over. You don’t have to do any of that, so imagine that.
Adam Preiser:
So there’s bunny.net, you just create an account there and then you take, it’s called an API code, we walk you through it, it’s just a one time thing, paste it into Presto Player and now you can just manage everything from WordPress. And really the main advantage is cost, the cost is astronomically low. And that’s why the cost of your the video for your service, it just ends up being so tiny. So it’s a metered service, so you pay per month for them storing your video and you pay per the amount of bandwidth that’s used, but everything’s like half a penny, right?
Adam Preiser:
So if you have a gigabyte of videos, for example, one of my video courses, it’s two gigabytes. So with bunny.net, I’m going to have the whopping cost of one penny per month just to store it there, one penny per month, okay. And then the users, as they’re watching it, that might be about a dollar, maybe $1.10 per month. So I’m in it for such small amounts of money. In also pairing that with the convenience of having it all, where you are in your website, you never have to log in there at all.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. And especially for course creators, often they want to validate, keep costs down. It just makes more sense than some giant video hosting bill up front. That’s awesome.
Adam Preiser:
Yeah. And that’s not me… Normally, in some things I don’t like metered, but for video hosting, metered is great. So say I’m excited about making my online course today, I go and get my Vimeo and I’m paying $25 per month, but I’m not launching this thing for four months. Well, I just paid $100 for what? Nothing. And then say the other scenario, maybe you have a course and it’s the hottest thing for a year, but then it’s not hot anymore and then you want to leave it up, because people have paid for access, but people aren’t really consuming it as much. It happens, right? You’re still locked into that Vimeo bill. But when it’s metered, the cost go dramatically down.
Chris Badgett:
And just to clear up for people too, you can still use Presto Player if you’re using YouTube or Vimeo for your hosting, right. Can you explain that nuance of the conversation?
Adam Preiser:
Yeah. So we have also, you can if you want to… And ironically, we have a lot of users that still use Vimeo because they were already on Vimeo, they’re not starting with Presto Player and choosing Vimeo, they already have Vimeo, but they want the features that Presto Player gives them, so they use the two together. So you just literally take the URL or the link to your video on Vimeo, it gives it to you and you just paste it into Presto Player and then you can take advantage of all the benefits that Presto Player offers. We hadn’t really gotten into some of those, I just talked about the one, right? The tracking, we’ve got timed overlays, we have calls to actions throughout the video. There’s just so many things that we have. We got a ton of stuff.
Chris Badgett:
You have something that somebody was asking me about the other day who was doing really long form content, is they wanted chapter markers. So if you’re doing giant videos, the lessons are really long and maybe people want to go back or find something, what does that?
Adam Preiser:
Yeah. So actually, we introduced a new way of doing that or an alternative way. So we have chapter markings and what that is, is you could put in a time code and then a sentence and you could put a series of these and these will be chapter markings. And then when someone’s viewing the video, on the timeline of the video, there’ll be little circles, these are to mark these chapters. And then the student can just hover their mouse over one of those circles and see what that chapter is. They can click and go straight to that point in the video. And there’s also a view to see a list of chapters. I like that feature. We launched with that feature, but we have something even better. What we have is, timestamp links inside of your content.
Chris Badgett:
Cool.
Adam Preiser:
So say you have a lesson in your LifterLMS course and you want to just put your own little list of timestamps, right? I talk about this, this, this, just like on YouTube, right?
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Adam Preiser:
If you’ve ever gone to YouTube and you go into the description and they see that, you can put your own timestamps in there or hyperlinks, that will take someone directly to that point in the video.
Chris Badgett:
That’s pretty cool.
Adam Preiser:
It’s really cool.
Chris Badgett:
Let’s talk about marketing a little bit, because every course creator has to sell the course. And one of the best ways to sell is to have a video sales page or whatever. What are some of the more marketing style features of Presto Player?
Adam Preiser:
Well, I’m glad you ask, because one of our marquee features is for marketing style sales page videos like that. And as a matter of fact, when you go to the Presto Player website, you see it right there. So that particular feature is, we don’t have a fancy name for it, you could tell the developer came up with this name, it’s called muted auto-play. And so, one day I was on the Click Funnels website and this was before we launched Presto Player. And I’m like, “Wow, this is so cool. The video is playing, but then the play button is there and then there’s subtitles and I haven’t pressed play and I just can’t keep my eyes off of this video. I want to click on play.”
Adam Preiser:
It’s like when I think Facebook does this automatically, right? You’re scrolling in your feed and then you’ll see a video automatically playing with no audio. And then there’s some captions there and you’re just reading and watching the video. Well, that’s our muted auto-play. So you can have your video playing, but it’s muted. And if you upload a closed caption file it will start showing those in the video, so it’s captures visitor’s attention. And then you can put, we call them overlays, so we have one that’s a little arrow pointing to the play button. It says, “Click here to play.” I tell you when I see people using that actually all over the internet with Presto Player, I go to their websites. We’re going to be putting a list of our users. Everyone loves that feature, because it’s going to accomplish the first thing you’re trying to do, is getting someone to just push play on the dang video, to find out what I got to say. So that’s the first thing that we’re doing or that we bring to the table.
Adam Preiser:
And then we have some basic stuff, like when you scroll down the page the video we’ll shrink to a corner if you want, any corner that you want. We have email opt-ins, so say you want to pause a video and force someone to give you their email or something like that to maybe continue watching the video, we’ve got that as well. We’ve got call to action, so maybe at a timed spot, you want to have a headline and a button that says, “Click here to get this discount.” Or, “Try the first lesson for free.” We’ve got that in there. We also have what we call the action bar.
Adam Preiser:
And so the action bar is a little thing that will appear underneath the video on a specific time in the video, so you could say, I want this to only appear at this specific time and you can have a message in there and a button, call to action type of thing. So we’ve got the features, man, we’ve got the features. As well as some of the basic stuff where we drop a cookie on the viewers, when the viewer clicks on play, we drop a cookie on their computer, so when they come back, they can continue where they left off.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. And it just shows this is so well thought out, because you’re a course creator yourself, you’re a marketer selling with video, so you’re building all the stuff that you wish you had from 10 years ago or something. Also, you haven’t mentioned audio yet, there is people that do language learning and they’re not really doing video or for whatever reason, they just have audio only content, what can we do with Presto on audio?
Adam Preiser:
Yeah. So that’s one of our newest things we released in January of this year, 2022, we released an audio player. It was actually always in the plan, that’s why we named it Presto Player versus Presto Video Player or whatever. We called it Presto Player, because we knew we always wanted to have an audio player as well. And so my co-founder-
Chris Badgett:
Is it an audio specific player or does it still look like a video with…
Adam Preiser:
Oh no. It’s audio specific.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Adam Preiser:
And it is a thing of beauty. My co-founder, you know him, his name’s Andre Gagnon, I always pronounce his name wrong. I think you might have met him at the last WordCamp, excellent at user interface design. So our audio player is just a spectacular thing of beauty. So we took all of these features that we have already built into our video player and we made an audio player and we brought all those features into it and people are loving it. That’s where, for example, the timestamp inside of your content feature came from, we did it for the audio player, right?
Adam Preiser:
Because you figure for podcasts and stuff like that, someone would scroll through and there’s a transcript and it’s nice to have a hyperlink to take the listener exactly to that spot. So that’s actually why we built that feature. But there’s plenty of online courses that either are a mix of video and audio or they’re just audio. And so all the great features of the action bar, the timed calls to action, all of these things have been brought right on over into the audio player as well. It’s great for podcasts too.
Chris Badgett:
What’s the sticky player, is that like, if you want to stick an audio player to the bottom of the page, like a hello bar kind of thing?
Adam Preiser:
It’ll do that when you scroll, yes. So if you have lessons that are a mix of written content and the audio, a listener can click on the play button, scroll down and then it becomes a little sticky player at the bottom. So the listener can still have access to the controls to mute it, pause it, fast forward it. Change the audio, things like that.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. Well, go check out Presto Player. That’s at prestoplayer.com. What do you see Adam, as the future for courses? Or where are they going? What does the market want and need? You’ve been in the space for a while, what are you seeing as a course creator and also someone building tooling for course creators. Where are we headed? What are the challenges? What are the opportunities?
Adam Preiser:
Well, I think the most successful online courses from a student perspective, not from the course creator’s perspective, right? Course creator, obviously you’re in it to generate revenue or something like that, if it’s a commercial course. But the students, I’m talking about the students, because that’s really what a course creator needs to care about, the student. How do I get them to get the outcome? Really, I see the very clear direction that it involves community, right? Building community inside of the course. That is the clear direction of where online courses are going for sure. They call them cohorts or something like that.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Adam Preiser:
That’s another style of courses where you bring them in groups, they’re interacting, you get that interaction going and then there’s all this value created there. I believe LifterLMS has a few features to help that along. So that is absolutely the future of online learning, is replicating the in-person classroom, I think, that’s my perspective. Obviously, that has nothing to do with video, but video does have a part to do with it, right? Through having say live streams, having a live stream for your students, where there’s this engagement in this community going on, which would include a live chat. I think things like that, if you ask me.
Chris Badgett:
Community’s a big topic on this podcast. Just at a high level, I’ve seen you build community like Facebook groups and really engaged audience on YouTube. What are some of your less obvious counterintuitive tips around building community? Because you’ve definitely demonstrated that across multiple different channels.
Adam Preiser:
Yeah. I’m so grateful for the community that has been built around my YouTube channel and the Facebook group has 48,000 people in it now. And so everybody wants a sense of community, right? Everybody wants to be a part of something, belong to something. We’re in a day and age where you go buy a piece of gym equipment and they say, “Join our Facebook group.” And they’re building a community, everybody’s trying to build a community, build a community. It can be a challenge, I will be honest and transparent, it can be a challenge if you’re a smaller course creator, you know what I mean? And you might not have a lot of students inside of your course. It could be a challenge to get people going back and forth.
Adam Preiser:
I think though, if you’re the course creator, you have to create opportunities for community to be built. And I think those in what I’ve done, has been like when I used to do a lot of streams, right? And they might be real unstructured and casual, I’m going live. I don’t recommend this, depending on your brand, I’ve done live streams where I start with a martini or something like that by the end of the live stream, I don’t even know what I’m saying, it’s very dangerous, I don’t recommend it. But I guarantee you, everybody that participated and was there that day remembered that, you know what I mean? Because it was funny.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Adam Preiser:
You know what I mean? I’m sitting there and I’m getting more relaxed as I go along. So I think it’s really being proactive in creating opportunities for people to interact, because what ends up happening there, is there’s a live chat, right, and people are chatting. So really what community is, is getting it to go from people asking you things to people asking each other things, that’s really where community comes in. But it has to start with you setting up those opportunities for people to ask you things and have spots on your website where people can engage with each other. But that engagement is being encouraged and suggested. Did you have a specific comment or a question about this? Enter it below. LifterLMS, you can enable comments on the lessons, right?
Chris Badgett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Adam Preiser:
Yeah. So in your lessons, you should be saying, “If you have a question specifically about this, just ask it down below.” And then people will start answering people and then they might recognize each other’s names and then you have a live stream and then they recognize each… “Oh, hey, I know that guy. Oh, I know this guy.”
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Adam Preiser:
And you can even… It’s so easy now to have live events where you pull people in, right? Just Zoom is as basic as you can get, there can be many people on Zoom, they can see each other. I’m in Zoom meetings all day long and I’m sure you are too. So I think use the tools that are out there and create the opportunities for people to build a connection with each other.
Chris Badgett:
I love that. The last question in the land of playing here. One of the things I admire about you is your ability to focus, but you also have shown to be a serial entrepreneur, where you do multiple projects. So you’ve demonstrated the ability to successfully do a project and then do another one. So what else are you working on that’s related to course creators? And more broadly, how do you stay focused when you need to stay focused, but also feed your desire or need or creativity, to work on whatever interests you and create more innovations and partnerships and things like that?
Adam Preiser:
Yeah. That’s a big question.
Chris Badgett:
I know
Adam Preiser:
That your Larry King question, remember Larry? I think he’s passed away a couple years ago.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Adam Preiser:
Larry King, the world’s best interviewer. So I think for me, well, today I’ve got a lot of people around me, right? I didn’t maybe three years ago or especially four years ago, but today I have lots of people around me. I have some of the best people around me. And I think I’m pretty good judge of who’s good, who you want to align with and who do you not want to align with? You know what I mean? To make sure you choose the right people to surround yourself with. So with all the projects that I’m involved in, I’m heavily involved in everything, but I have a role to play and there’s other people there that have a role to play. And as long as I play my role doing what I love, they’re going to be able to do what their job is.
Adam Preiser:
So an example is, it’s so funny, I saw a… Being on YouTube, You just have people write mean comments, right?
Chris Badgett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Adam Preiser:
It’s society. And they’re like, “Oh, I don’t like Adam’s products, because he’s not a developer. He’s not the guy that makes them.” And so I was sitting there and I’m thinking, “I would want the product from the person that isn’t the guy sitting there and making them, because that’s a developer and developers make things for developers.” I’m like, I’m just going to claim it. I mean, this is how I see it. I see myself as like the Steve Jobs. Steve jobs did not know how to solder things together and write code or anything. But Steve Jobs said, “We’re going to make an iPhone. It’s going to have a touch screen, there’s no buttons on it. And this thing’s going to be dynamic and it’s going to be…” He’s the guy that said, “This is what we’re going to build.”
Adam Preiser:
And you had a liner developer said, “No way we could do that.” And he’s like, “This is what we’re going to do, now get it done.” He set the vision. So my role is to set the vision. So with Presto Player, these features I’m setting the vision. This is what we need to build. I don’t care. This is what we’re going to build. Of course, build a user story around it to make sure it’s what our users want. But I’m able to… As I call myself the ultimate user, meaning after four or five years actually spent seven years now on YouTube reviewing products. I’ve seen every product, my gut tells me what is right and what’s wrong in it. What could be better? Beautiful user interface, user experience. These things are a must in my book. So for me, I set the vision of the product. This is what we’re going to do.
Adam Preiser:
Another one of my products, CartFlows, we have a big release coming out in a week. So if you’re watching this later, it’s in the month of March and it’s totally going to revolutionize this product. And it was me, that’s setting the vision. This is what we’re going to do. Our developers know how to develop, but every product needs a visionary to be able to say, “This is what is going to delight our users. This is what our customers want. This is the problem they’re experiencing. We’re going to solve of it and it’s going to be beautiful inside and out.” You’ve heard all the stories about Steve Jobs’s dad, how he would do cabinets in homes and things like that. And he would finish the inside part that no one would see that’s up against the wall and people would say, “You’re crazy. Why are you doing that?” That’s like the software I want to make, I aspire to make, it’s beautiful on the inside and the outside. And people love using it.
Adam Preiser:
So that is my job and that allows me to set the vision for lots of different products. And so I’ve got other projects coming out, a new e-commerce platform that when people see it’s going to be the most beautiful e-commerce platform they’ve ever seen, from a user experience perspective and easy to use. So that’s what all my software that I end up making must be super easy to use without having to watch an hour video or read documentation and the user enjoys using it like, “Wow, I love this product.” And that’s the experience I want people to come away with always.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. You mentioned the word delight and whether you’re making a course, a service or a product of any kind, for a course, it’s not just about them getting the content, it’s that experience of being delighted. That’s often the most important thing. I want to thank you, Adam, for coming back on the show, go check out prestoplayer.com. If you’re a course creator, and you’re looking to take your video to the next level, to make it more polished, to use video in more creative ways to get sales and make a more engaging learning experience, check out prestoplayer.com. Adam is at WP Crafter on YouTube. Any other place to connect with you or final words for the people?
Adam Preiser:
Yeah. I also have a Facebook group, if you want to hop in there. It’s facebook.com/wpcrafter or groupswpcrafter, lots of products, CartFlows is for WooCommerce, it’s amazing. It’s going to give you that Shopify like experience for people buying stuff. Presto Player, even though we’ve talked about it, we never said if it was free or pro, there’s a free version and a lot of the features we talked about are absolutely free. So if you want to use your YouTube, your video, your Vimeo video, it’s free. Those timestamp links in your content, that’s free. The audio player, it’s free. We have a very robust experience there. Maybe that’s why it’s on 40,000 websites in only 13 months, right? Because we try to be super generous with everything that we do and the pro version’s cheap anyway, it’s only like 59 bucks or 60 bucks, I forget.
Chris Badgett:
Awesome. Well, thanks for coming back on the show, Adam. We really appreciate it.
Adam Preiser:
Thanks. I appreciate you, man. I’m going to see you at the next WordCamp, the US one. We’ll have to hang out and get a beer.
Chris Badgett:
San Diego. We’ll see you then.
Adam Preiser:
Yep. I’m an hour away. Okay.
Chris Badgett:
And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. 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.
