Episode 3
· 34:40
First time on air. Nice. That's the kind of show we wanna run here. Hey. Welcome to Product People, the podcast for people who want to build beautiful products.
Speaker 1:I'm Justin Jackson, and I'm joined by my cohost in Edmonton, mister Kyle Fox.
Speaker 2:Hello there. How's it going, It's going quite well. How about you?
Speaker 1:I'm doing well. No snow here in Vernon.
Speaker 2:I knew you were going to bring that up, Jackass. Bet your Instagram photos aren't teasing enough.
Speaker 1:That's right. Took all those in the summer and I just keep uploading them to Instagram now. Yeah.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 1:So what's going on this week? We've got something new.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So previously, it's just been you and I kind of babbling and ranting for our last two shows, which actually I think went pretty well. But I think today is kind of the first step towards becoming a real podcast as we have our first guest. Exciting. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So yeah. So our guest today is Dalen Woods. Wait a sec. Is it Dalen Woods or wood?
Speaker 3:Just wood. Yeah. Just wood.
Speaker 2:Okay. Dalen Wood. Singular.
Speaker 1:Yep. Alright. He's possessing something like Dalen Woods microphone.
Speaker 3:That's right. With the yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yes. The podcast for pedantics. That's us. So, yeah.
Speaker 2:So we've got Dylan Wood on the show. Hey, guys.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Hey. Thanks for thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 2:So I've known known Dylan. I think Justin, you kind of have met him maybe previously before. He's kind of a fairly well known web developer designer here in Edmonton. And he's one of those guys that kind of, I think it's fair to say, sort of sits on the fence between development and design. Like, you don't just code, you don't just design, you kind of dabble in both and are adept at both.
Speaker 2:And recently, there was an event here in Edmonton WordCamp. So it's kind of like a WordPress weekend conference, but most of the things are not actually WordPress specific. They're just kind of general to the web. And you gave a interesting sounding workshop there about building prototypes and minimum viable products using WordPress as a platform.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think that's So when I saw that on the schedule, immediately
Speaker 3:I was like,
Speaker 2:Oh man, we should get Dylan on the show. Because this is actually something that Justin and I have talked about in the past about when you want to get when you have a product idea, you wanna validate it or you wanna get something off the ground quickly, WordPress is kind of sneered at by a lot of, I guess, elitist developers. Yeah, for sure. And it's pretty easy to dismiss it as just like a way to build blogs and websites, but it's kind of really gotten sophisticated in the last few years, I think. And I think maybe a lot of people don't really know how powerful of a platform it really is.
Speaker 2:Like, you know, it's probably bordering on almost like an application framework like Rails or Django, maybe not quite that far, but getting there. We thought it'd be interesting to have you on the show and basically give us your two hour workshop that you gave, Edward.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In less than thirty minutes though.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a talk fast.
Speaker 3:Everyone open up Internet Explorer.
Speaker 2:Maybe actually before we get into it though, Dalen, do you want to just take a minute to just introduce yourself and talk about your background, how you got into web stuff and and what you do what sort of got you interested in this whole WordPress thing?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. So I've been doing this for quite a while, it's almost been twelve years now I think which makes me a bit of a dinosaur. So I started out doing Flash development believe it or not, that kind of dates me right there. That's how I learned how to program was with ActionScript.
Speaker 2:Like that from a go to and play days?
Speaker 3:Exactly. Absolutely. ActionScript four, man. That's where I started and I learned how to use director like a macro media director and do all kinds of crazy stuff with that And that's kind of how I got into the industry. Back then, if you could sort of build like a flash website and have stuff kind of moving around and music and stuff, people thought you were like amazing.
Speaker 3:And I was able to sort of fool a bunch of people into hiring me and kind of worked my way kind of up and I mean obviously the industry changed along that path and I got into HTML and I got into JavaScript and then the whole sort of CSS thing happened and I got into that and then eventually I kind of wound up discovering PHP and got into actually building like building sort of database driven websites and that sort of thing. I didn't actually get into WordPress until I started I actually got a job as an instructor at NATE here which is the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton. And basically, got hired to teach Flash because they needed someone. One of the instructors went on sick leave and they needed someone really quick, so I kinda got thrown into that. And that gig kind of evolved into me teaching web development and this and that and I kind of discovered WordPress along the way there and got just started teaching it to my students as sort of a here's like a here's like a simple solution for you to sort of build like data driven websites or like content managed websites for clients and stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah and so I taught at Nate for a long time for about six years and the whole while I was still doing web development on the side. I had a kind of a company that I did kind of freelance stuff with and then about two and a half years ago I decided to leave Nate and take it full time. So I started another company called North Republic and I do web development and web application development, that sort of stuff and I've been doing that now for about two years. I use WordPress for a lot of my projects, not everything but it's definitely something that I use or have used quite a bit and yeah, that's the quick version of that.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. Cool. I'm so excited about this topic because I think about this all the time. Because I'm like, I'm not a hack at a lot of things. And WordPress, for me, like, I love WordPress because it's one of those things that you can just you can hack in it really easy.
Speaker 1:A couple of times, I've kind of hacked up product prototypes. And for example, even with using Gravity Forms, there's a lot of startups out there that are building products that you can basically copy their functionality just using Gravity Forms, which is one plug in.
Speaker 3:Gravity Forms was the best $200 I ever spent for sure. Yeah. Paid for itself like fifty, sixty times over easy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm super excited about where you're going to go with this. So what originally got you interested in maybe building products in WordPress? Where did that start?
Speaker 3:Well, you know what? It came out of sort of like I do a lot of custom web development for people. But what I found was like I'll get hired by an organization and they need to build whatever, like a job board or something like that. Something that whether you're taking input from people, saving it in a database and then filtering it and whatever, right? I mean there's a thousand different examples.
Speaker 3:And what I found was a lot of times a lot of these clients already had existing websites and a lot of them were already using WordPress so what I started doing was instead of sort of starting from scratch because I'm a PHP developer, right, I would which WordPress is written in PHP, so what I would do is I would start I would start with WordPress and I would kind of use it as sort of the bottom or starting point, right? I mean WordPress gets kind of a bum rap because it's not really a framework, it's a CMS, but what it does is it has like, it has a really solid sort of, especially with user management, like I mean, out of the gate you install WordPress and you've got a full sort of user management system and it's got this crazy API that makes it really easy to manage users like programmatically, I mean, through the admin and with plugins, you can do it, but if you're a developer, it makes it really easy for you to get in there and actually create user roles and different levels of users and give them access to different things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well even for a non developer can do that too. That's what's great.
Speaker 3:And that's the other side of it. I kind of looked down and this is what my talk at WordCamp this year was. It wasn't a developer talk by any stretch. What I did was I sat down and I showed people who have no experience programming how to build a data driven sort of web applications. And I just use plugins, right?
Speaker 3:Like I use Gravity Forms. I used a plugin called WP Types, which basically I think that's what it's called. It lets you create custom post types and custom fields and then it lets you create views, which basically lets you take this data and without writing a line of code, like place it inside of themes and control how it gets displayed and stuff. So it was a two hour talk and I was able to show these people how to like take that user input like using a form and save it save it in WordPress as a custom post type. Save it save it as like data that WordPress can actually understand and then display it and be able to filter it on the front end, right?
Speaker 3:So we built this like little quick classified ads sort of Kijiji style thing in two hours without writing a line of code, right? Which is pretty amazing if you think about it and these are people that not all of them are programmers and they were all kind of the wheels were just spinning like wow, can build amazing, all of a sudden I can build these amazing things, right? And I think if you're a developer, that's one thing. WordPress lets you hit the ground running and get started quickly but I think the real power is if you're not a developer because the plug in architecture and the amount of plug ins out there, it's like if you can conceive of some sort of functionality, it's already been built and it's just like a few clicks away, right? Which is pretty powerful I think.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And It's kind of like it sort of seems like this it's kind of like the next step in application development evolution almost. Like, if you think way back to the start when guys were flipping analog switches to program vacuum tubes, you know, then Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then
Speaker 2:they invented
Speaker 3:even all that stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. And then, like, they invented machine language. And then there was Kim Assembler, which made it a little bit easier. And then Kim C and, like, keep building, like, these layers of abstractions to actually move bits around and stuff.
Speaker 3:And Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now it's to the point where somebody with no background in computer science or development can, like conceptually arrange building blocks into like a working useful application.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I think what's great about that and I mean, is a lot of what you guys have been talking about is what that does is it gives the power to the people who actually have the idea and the sort of the understanding of how products should be built and what's important rather than the programmers, right? Which don't know what I mean. Mean, a lot of programmers sort of walk both lines and they can do that but if you've got an amazing idea for something and you're thinking, Wow, how the heck am I going get this built? Right?
Speaker 3:I need to find someone who can write Rails or PHP or whatever it is and that's a huge stumbling block. Whereas really, I mean, you could set up a WordPress site, you could install some plugins, install a theme and I mean, you could get something that at least functions and works and does what you want it to do and actually test your ideas out really quickly. I mean, obviously you're not going to build an insanely robust system unless understand development and can write up some code. But I think at least for getting like you guys said, the minimum viable product out there, makes a lot of sense for sure.
Speaker 1:I actually have an example of this. Maybe we can talk about that a little bit later. Yeah, have built MVPs with WordPress and then taken it around to people and said, Would you pay for this? And having that feedback right away is, that's exactly what you need. I spent an evening working it out, but then I can go and show people something that works and find out right away like, Do you want to pay for this?
Speaker 1:Is this something that solves legitimate pain for you? And you can get that real, you know, yes or no.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like an example of this is a number of years ago, it's been a long time now but I built a I launched a website called digitalmediajobs.ca which is like a job board for digital media people. I did it as kind of an exercise, I just wanted to build something and I built it from scratch using just like vanilla PHP, MySQL and it was an insane amount of work. It's a really robust sort of app, it does all kinds of notifications, people can post jobs, it's like a fully functional job engine, right? And I built it from scratch and it took me hundreds of hours and it was good. Mean I learned a lot about development and all that stuff and launching something, but honestly now if I was going to redo it, I could probably build the exact same thing and probably much better in weekend using WordPress and literally have the same website.
Speaker 3:It just makes it so much quicker, right? Think about the process of and Kyle you're a developer, know this like writing HTML for forms and like validating forms and the whole CRUD thing where you're saving stuff to database and bring it back and then like it's forget about like something simple, just building a simple form to send an email is a bunch of work.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 3:Like this huge intricate or intricate product and then with WordPress, it's like, yeah, install Gravity Forms, drag and drop, some custom post types, boom, boom, boom and it's done, right? Like it's crazy.
Speaker 2:Like even the user, the fact that it does like user management stuff out of the box, a huge step because if you, like, start an app from scratch Yeah. Even like you said, even if it's the simplest thing
Speaker 3:Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 2:Once you once you start diving into that user management and authentication code, you realize, like, wow, there's a lot of stuff here that I've gotta do just Oh, to
Speaker 3:for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Things to a point where I can actually start solving the interesting problem that originally got me building this in the first place.
Speaker 3:For sure.
Speaker 2:And I think like, you know, with some of the developers and people I talk to who have an idea and they maybe start pursuing building it from scratch, that's where a lot of people kind of get hung up and burnt out is like, you know, I built an authentication system and users could sign up and stuff and then it just kinda hangs there because, like you said, you invest hundreds of hours into building this thing
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just to get users signing up and then it's kind of like, well, this might not be worth it.
Speaker 3:Whereas, WordPress,
Speaker 2:you can just, you know, you're good to go right from the start.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I mean, you've been there where you get, you're building something and it's kind of like this stream of consciousness thing where you're like, okay, now I need to do this, then I need to do this. And you start realizing like every everything you add just adds this other another layer of complexity and it's like, Okay, so users can sign up, but what happens if they forget their password? Okay, I gotta build a password for choose
Speaker 2:Exactly. This
Speaker 3:How do I make that so it's actually like legitimate? Oh Christ, then I gotta send them emails and I gotta do this and that. What happens if they wanna change the password? Gets out of hand real quick. Whereas that's just like you do the twelve second install with WordPress and that's done already.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Yep, for sure.
Speaker 2:Cool. So I guess sort of leading into the next question. So why might somebody want to build a product with WordPress? So we kinda talked a bit about getting quick feedback and and and you know, getting your idea out there as quick as possible with as little work. But what are some of the other benefits that you might get from building your first version of your product with WordPress?
Speaker 3:You know what, I think it depends where you're at. Like if you're someone who is a developer, I can totally understand because I've been there where it's you know how you get you choose sort of a framework or some or and I find this with WordPress a lot where especially if you're using plugins to do certain things, right? Like say you decide, okay, don't want to write this from scratch, I'll find a plugin to do it. And what happens is you find fairly quickly that you start changing the way you want to do things to sort of accommodate what these plugins will allow you to do, right? Whereas I think with like if you're not a developer then you have the other side of it where you can just really quickly sort of get to speed with.
Speaker 3:So that's super attractive for people. But if you're a developer I can totally see why you wouldn't want to go with WordPress. Although I think to be honest, like it the biggest thing is and this is something that takes a while to sort of get to understand like WordPress on the surface is one thing but the whole way that they built, like they have this insanely huge crazy API behind it that lets you really do so much stuff, right? You're not stuck with like install a theme, install a plugin, you can generate your, like you can build your own, even just from the theme files. It's like you start adding stuff to that functions dot PHP file and you can do these crazy things with the whole system, right?
Speaker 2:Totally. I I didn't really have like I don't really actually have much hands on experience with WordPress but this summer I rebuilt a pretty big site for some friends of mine using WordPress. And it was sort of my first foray into the WordPress world. And I couldn't believe, like you said, the API, how thorough it is. There's And hooks for everything.
Speaker 2:Anything you can possibly want to do Yeah, there's it's already a fairly well thought out hook for you to just plug your code into and and do it.
Speaker 3:I think that, what you just said there cuts into what is why I think WordPress is so strong is the fact that it's been around for so long, so many people use it and there's such a huge community. Like you like the thing I love about WordPress is any it doesn't matter what project I'm working on, if I come across a hurdle and I don't know how to implement something, all I have to do is type a simple Google search and I'll find the answer within two clicks And it's always there. Whereas with others, like if you're just building something from scratch, it's like, well, how do I even verbalize what I'm trying to do? I mean, you spend six hours going through Stack Overflow stuff and it's whereas with WordPress, it's like, it's just there's so many people using it and there's I mean, and there's so many people trying to do crazy stuff with it, right? Where it's like you think you're some crazy edge case but there's like 50 guys trying to do the same thing, right?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:And I find that all the time where I come across something like, Oh, there's no way I'm gonna be able to figure out how to do this. I figure it out in a few seconds just from Googling something, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And the same is true for non developers. Like I was trying to I was looking for a Stripe integration for Gravity Forms. The same thing.
Speaker 1:You just type in a Google search. And they don't have one yet, but you can find people that are working on that and reach out to them. And sometimes they're willing to do the work for free. Sometimes they're willing to do the work for like a donation to the project. And sometimes you can just hire them for the project.
Speaker 1:But just finding
Speaker 3:those people. Yeah, even speaking to that exact example, like this last week, I had a project where it's an e commerce site and we were using the WooCommerce engine, which is like the WooThemes guys created or they took an open source sort of e commerce thing and they kind of customized it and it's pretty good if you don't want to get too crazy with customizing things, it's pretty solid. We were using PayPal as the payment processing which and it was giving us all sorts of grief and it was not working well. I was like, I knew about Stripe and I knew it was in Canada now and I wanted to use it so I did a Google search and like in literally in like twenty minutes, I had Stripe up and working. And it just like found a plugin, cost me like $20 or something, installed it, boom, and it's working.
Speaker 3:I mean, that's pretty, like that's, like for anyone who's actually tried to integrate with like a merchant account and a payment gateway, like using code, it's insane, right? Yes. And just to be able to get up and do that with a couple clicks and I mean, anyone could have done it. Like it's not like I didn't have to write any code. Like anyone could have done that and it was amazing, right?
Speaker 3:And that's been Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think that really like illustrates like just how like, the order of magnitude of time saving that WordPress gives you. It's not just a little bit of time saving, it's a lot. Like, you can implement a billing system in twenty minutes. Like, in the past, it's taken me up like up to a month to build a billing system for products. Know, you're building against the API.
Speaker 2:Like, it's again, and there's so many edge cases and all those use cases that you've
Speaker 3:For sure.
Speaker 2:You've gotta figure out. And Yeah. Like, to go from a month of development full time to twenty minutes, that's not even in the same ballpark.
Speaker 3:And the end result, what the users see is just beautiful. Boom, it just works. If they put their credit card information in, we had to buy it like an SSL certificate and all that and boom, it was done, right? It's just so much better than PayPal where it's like, I don't know if you've ever integrated stuff with PayPal even if you're doing like the Website Payments Pro stuff where you're actually using their API and I mean it's a nightmare, right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Or using their IPN system, the instant payment notification, it's just so flaky. Right. And never mind the flip side or the other side of PayPal where like you hear these horror stories of people like getting having like $20,000 worth of revenue like held hostage by PayPal because all of a sudden they sold some stuff one day and PayPal thought they were fraudulent. Right? It's not good.
Speaker 2:I was really sweating out this summer actually when I put on that font design workshop because I had never used PayPal hardly at all. For like, I had my account for years, but never used it. And then we planned this event and sold all the tickets within, a really tight one month span and, you know, went from, like, no PayPal use to $20,000 all in the course of a few weeks. Then a couple of weeks later, all these payments went out to all our instructors who are all over the world. I was a little bit terrified.
Speaker 3:You hear horror stories for sure. I had a client last week who was actually on the Dragon's Den at the CBC show. Their whole site that I built saw this crazy e commerce nonsense and it's pretty neat but it's all PayPal, right? So I was just waiting for it to get an email. They've lost this out.
Speaker 3:But it didn't happen.
Speaker 2:Sorry, go ahead, Justin.
Speaker 1:No. Was just going to say on the subject of what you can build with WordPress, one thing we haven't talked about yet is multisite. And I've used that already. So basically multisite allows you to, it's kind of like what wordpress.com uses to host all of the, you know, like sub blogs, like your own blog network. And so one I mean, one way to prototype with WordPress is to have just a a vanilla install and people can, you know, like, create user accounts on that install.
Speaker 1:But I've also used it where you can create a whole new instance of WordPress on a network. And if we're talking about prototyping SaaS apps, like recurring revenue where people can go in, create an account, and they have their own defined account where they can have multiple users within that account. It's multi site. We've talked about how much time just a regular install of WordPress saves you, but think about creating a whole system where people can create you could replicate Basecamp easily with sure, yeah.
Speaker 3:And even the way it works with sub domains and stuff, like I've built stuff where it's like a user can register and boom, they have their own sub domain. It just happens like that and there's no configuration. Like that's super, super
Speaker 2:Yeah. Again, you're talking weeks cut out of a development cycle, like if that was built from scratch. And it's not like that stuff is easy to do in Rails. Like, know, it's a couple lines of configuration, but that's just wiring in the basic mechanics. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, once you start tackling those edge cases and everything, there's still a ton of work to do in a sub domain based app. If you can get it working in a matter of hours, it's again a huge win.
Speaker 3:No, for sure. And there's even like the plugins that you talk about for user management where you can have like, what's the one WP member or whatever. There's a couple of them where it's like, you can create a whole member, like where people can sign up for membership and pay for it. And it's subscription based and there's different payment options and then you can give them access to different content and there's sort of tiered levels. You can, this level of member gets this level of content.
Speaker 3:Like that's a plugin and you can install that. Exactly. That's like a whole membership system inside. Like you could, someone could build a business off that if you've got something of value, Oh, hey, I've got some videos that I created or tutorials or I've got this or that. I mean, like you click 12 times and you've got your system set up to make that a viable business, right?
Speaker 3:Which is crazy. Yeah. So what I think I've said that seven times now.
Speaker 1:It's crazy. Is crazy. Anyone that's a product manager out there, like when you know how long it takes to develop things and billing systems is one like it takes forever but even to like get if you're starting an app or you have a startup and you're just working to get kind of your initial thing built your MVP built I mean that can be that can take months and months and months. So people want it to be about three months and usually ends up being about six months. And then by the time you get feedback, might be eight months.
Speaker 1:So these things just keep going out and by eight months you might have built the wrong thing. This could be a way for people to build something. And I mean there might not always be a plugin available, but you might be able to get 70%, 80% of the way there and then maybe build what you need to build and then at least start showing it to people and seeing if it actually solves a legitimate problem.
Speaker 3:Okay, definitely. In a real world example of that exact thing. I'm working with a company right now called Poppy Barley and they're doing it's fantastic. There's two sisters and they're creating made to measure boots. So basically women who have trouble buying boots because their feet are all different sizes and stuff which is pretty common, they can go on this website and they measure their feet and their legs and stuff and they get these custom measured like down to the micro centimeter or whatever boots, right?
Speaker 3:So they came to me like a number of months ago and we sat down and they had this idea and they wanted to build a site where people could do all these measurements and submit them and pay for them. So full e commerce, all that sort of stuff. But they're a startup and I mean they're part of the whole startup Edmonton. They're involved with all that and they wanted something quick that they could sort of just, we want to see if this is viable and we don't want to spend $50,000 building an insane custom system to do that, which makes a lot of sense, right? Like why would you want to throw that money away?
Speaker 3:So what we did is we used WordPress and we used most of it. I had to do some custom stuff, but most of it was WordPress, WooCommerce. We used Gravity Forms. There's actually like a tie in. There's a Gravity Forms WooCommerce plugin which actually lets you like create these crazy intricate forms and tie them into like a product as part of WooCommerce and it did everything they wanted to do.
Speaker 3:There were some compromises like they had these big grand ideas of things that they wanted to do but that just weren't really viable. It would have been just way too much work to bend WordPress or WooCommerce to sort of do what they wanted. But in the end, they got what they needed for like a fraction of what they would have if they'd gone custom. And now they're up and selling their boots. Right?
Speaker 3:And that was all WordPress. Right? And so it's a perfect example of that.
Speaker 2:That's very cool because Poppy Barley is probably one of my favorite startups in Edmonton right now. I just think they're doing such a great job with everything with their branding, with their product, with their story. They're kind of like a textbook case of a startup that's doing everything right. Yeah. No, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And that's
Speaker 3:not a mistake. Right? Like very smart.
Speaker 2:It's all by design.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they really know what they're doing, which is fantastic.
Speaker 2:So it's cool to see that, you know, they're also on the technology side, taking this very pragmatic lean approach to building something to test the idea and get it out there. It kind of fits with, they're doing everything else right. I should have probably assumed that they were approaching the web strategy part the right way as well.
Speaker 3:And the whole time it was like, okay, they came to me and they said, we want to test the waters and this is version one of what our vision is, right? So let's make it happen and we did. And have no doubt that they'll be successful. And when they are, they'll come back and they'll say, okay, we want to up this a little bit and maybe go with something a little more custom, makes sense, right? Because then they can justify it because there's a business case for it, right?
Speaker 3:But if you're just starting out, like you have no idea if your business is going to fly. And I mean, anyone out there who's ever started a business knows that like you don't want to just all of a sudden dump a bunch of money if you don't have to, right? For sure. If you're bootstrapping it, right? I mean, you want to be able to get in as quick and as lean as you can.
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