Interviewing Elementor about the competition

let's be honest we've all seen the critical comments people have been making about Elementor in the last one or two years people are saying that other page Builders are way faster with releasing features and Gutenberg is also on the rise but constantly switching to another page builder when there are a few more features here is also not a good idea because then you have to change your whole workflow but just burying your head in the sand also isn't a good idea because we should be critical sometimes of the tools we're actually using so to get a better understanding of how Elementor sees these issues I thought why not ask Elementor themselves because this summer I met the CPO the chief product officer of Elementor at Work Camp us and I asked him if he wanted to do an interview with me and since Elementor is trying to be more transparent with the community he told me he thought that this was a good idea as well so now I'm gonna hop in the zoom call and ask him some critical questions about the future the progress and the competition amitai is the CPO of Elementor which means that he is the man in charge of making the biggest decisions about the product hi amitai welcome to the show and it's awesome that you are here yeah thanks for having me Arena it's uh it's awesome to be here well thank you for doing this interview as well okay let's let's start the conversation let me first start off by saying that I really really love Elementor it has actually changed my life I mean before Elementor I was not able to actually convert my designs from back then Adobe XD and now figma to an actual website but now I can just deliver the whole package to a client so I'm just really really happy with Elementor but I'm gonna be a little bit critical here as well of course yeah and it's uh it's awesome it's uh it's great it's great to be here and you know we love your channel right like I you know I I watched I watch many of the videos and you know we take a lot of the feedback that uh you know we get through your channel through your users and their comments very seriously and uh yeah I'll be happy to answer some of the questions and so I'm I'm very thankful for the opportunity to you to be here and uh to talk to you all right so thanks yeah you too okay let's let's start with with the first point that I'm making and Elementor is the biggest and best by far in my opinion but as time moves on more players entered the market and now some people are starting to look at other page Builders a little bit more I think that's that this has a lot to do with Elementor Focus or more specifically the lack of certain features um because for quite some time Elementor didn't release a lot of features that were considered core but more on the fancy side do you also think that this is the reason why essential features like the container took so long and doesn't this make you guys worried a little bit about the competition when this progress is maybe not so fast as you want it it's a really good question I think that when you experience the sort of growth that that we're experiencing in Elementor in terms of uh of the of the user base and the scale uh you know you have to deal with with a multitude of challenges and I think what you're asking relates to to two of those challenges that we had to contend with the first one is how do you uh you know cater your product to uh just a huge variety of different user types right like when you start up you have your code users you just build the features and everything's great but as you grow all of a sudden you get many more different types of users uh using your products right like it could be uh you know beginners in advance it can be designers marketing persons and then you kind of find yourself in this place where you try to design a feature and you try to make it work for everybody because there's just you know so many different types of users that are actually using the product so that's the first Challenge and the second one uh has to do with the fact that when you become a platform and you get more products building on top of your product it sometimes makes changing the core much more challenging than just a product that you know just a regular product because those products are actually using your code in ways that you can't really anticipate this is awesome right it's great to you know to become the platform but it makes the development of certain features uh you know specifically core features that in many instances happen to be you know the most requested features much more challenging and you know when we had to figure out figure out ways how we can address those challenges uh it required us to to first kind of really understand who the user who the user is and and how we can cater to those different types of users and I think we have a really good understanding now of how we can do that and the second one is to really put in the time and the effort to make sure that your infrastructure infrastructure can support those changes to the core without kind of you know breaking the entire ecosystem whenever you make change and those core features were more challenging but we figured that one out as well we put in a lot of time and that's I think the slowness that you're referring to has to do with the work that we've done on the infrastructure but now that we've done that we can finally move much faster and I think you can see that with the with the last two releases that we can that we really start to build momentum in terms of the velocity and you start getting those features that everybody has been asking for but I think those are those are the challenges that are sometimes more difficult to see from the outside uh and and you have to put in the time and effort to make sure that you can do you can address those okay well that's very interesting to hear because you know from the outside as a user who just uses the platform you only see the product releases and and then you don't really see that there's also challenges that the company like that has to deal with challenges but let's just be a little bit more specific because you're talking about infrastructure what does this mean is this like support because I think with more uses comes more support or is it how you run the company or how you do I don't know product updates like what is that infrastructure oh so it's actually true what you're saying when you when you say infrastructure you know we had to do a lot of a lot of work on our support infrastructure and our company and the way you structure the teams but what I mean is the actual product code right because when you when you build a product you don't actually always think about how that product how that product code is going to be used by others so you just build the product and you just keep adding features once you start to be more like like a platform you have to think about uh the architecture of the code differently it needs to be more modular you need to make sure that when you change something in the core it doesn't necessarily impact the the apis or the contract that you have with uh um with the the add-ons or the other products that are using the code you have to manage those changes right let's say you do have to change something you know we want to make sure that we communicate those changes so that our partners can react to those changes and make the updates that are necessary on their end uh in you know in a timely manner and and because as we operate in an open source kind of environment it adds to the challenge because those there's you can't really enforce those changes you can't really like it's it's open that's that's the the great thing about open source right like everybody can do anything um so you have to structure your code in a way that that you can make those changes without impacting uh the users and those are not necessarily things that you think about early on when you're just gonna keep adding features to the product but at a certain at a certain scale a certain size uh with you know so many users so many websites so many different versions so many plugins and add-ons you have to start thinking about those things because you you get to a place where you started every little change that you make to the code you know just creates uh you know problems and issues and compatibility problems so you have to take the time and just sometimes do a complete re-architecture of the code base in certain areas but once you do that you pay the price of of not having being able to ship features really fast once you make those changes you can start building back momentum and this is kind of where we're at right now which is it's it's awesome it's nice you know after this fairly long time which we kind of feel like slow and you know you you get all those comments and you get the feature request uh but you have to do the work uh and now you start kind of ripping the rewards you know and we can start kind of shipping those features really fast and this is awesome it's an awesome feeling okay so that's that's really cool to hear like that that progression and uh I don't can you answer this one shortly hopefully is this it has this a lot to do with the container because it has to it has the container been impacted by this story yeah the container is the perfect example for kind of like this core change that you make to the product that you know it just you know it can have like huge implications about everything you do on the other hand you really want to build that feature because it's the basics for so many features that that are coming now right like you know the nested tabs that we have released right like in a bunch of you know the loop Builder like everything is building on on top of the container but to make that change you know moving from you know sectioning columns to the container is a is a huge change just think of the the number of plugins that are using section and columns they're using the classes in the code in the HTML right like you have to account for all those changes and uh this is the reason why we're making that change so gradually right like you kind of really want to make sure that you get it right we had to actually build ways to deploy the code in a way that when we ship code it doesn't necessarily activate on you know all the millions of websites that are being powered by Elementor um this is why we introduced the experiments right so you can just you know kind of open that functionality uh when when you think it is safe and then we kind of promote that to a place where it only runs on new websites and not existing websites uh so these are all tools that we kind of had to build ourselves um and kind of really reinvent the processes for making those core changes without creating a lot of damage to our uh our users and customers okay so is it fair to say that Elementor then wasn't really prepared for the responsibility that comes with an open source plugin that maybe started you know really enthusiastic and but but now like the company has learned like oh there's actually a lot that goes into building a product like this and maybe that's also the reason that's my interpretation that other plugins that don't have this open source structure can therefore move a lot faster uh do you do you agree with any of this the I think there's a there's a bunch of questions in in that question so I'll try to kind of break it and and reply separately I think that when you build again when you build a product it's it's it's difficult to anticipate you know uh success as as big as as Elementor has and anticipate that that scale of growth it was it was crazy and and still you know what but now that we have the infrastructure you don't feel that as much but uh if you if you go back you know like months or or in the last uh few years um you could see that in other areas of the company right the the Elementor support uh when the kind of the momentum started exploding uh we just wasn't able to keep up with the number of customers that that we needed to support and we had to do a lot of changes and iterate uh in adjustments and you know we tried different structures of in different layers of the organization we brought different tools you know to to be able to handle that challenge but we were successful there right like and now if you if you look at the support uh you see that you know the the response times are super quick uh the csat is really high you know and we're building like uh uh very positive uh sentiment when it comes to support and we you know we intend to to keep on improving that and and we have a lot of new ideas and uh we keep working on that service but again it was very difficult to anticipate early on and that that the same applies to the product right like you build a product you know we built a page builder you know then it expands a little bit but uh and then you know we created the API so that other add-ons can build on top of that product and again that that grew up really fast and and again these are some things that you only figure out later I think this is part of the experience but uh uh in the in the last what you asked about um you know being open uh I think that yes of course I think that you know closed Source Products you know don't necessarily experience the same challenges that we experience but I went for uh for a minute I think I win for a minute to trade trade places I think this is uh I think being open and you know kind of fostering that Innovation and having all those products building on tough Elementor is is a huge contributor to you know to to our growth and I think this is it's also it's you know we can't cover everything and you see the things that you know partners and and other uh products that are adding to Elementor you know the functionality that is being added and the things that we can cover is amazing I think this is the this is the Beauty and the magic of Open Source uh and yes of course it provides for certain challenges but uh but I think this is uh this is absolutely what what we believe in I think this is the right way we have no regrets and uh okay I I think I'm comparing it in my mind with how Google and apple operates like apple is more closed system and of course they also have apis in the App Store but uh Google is more like open source everybody can build everything that they want and therefore uh new products are added faster but at the same time this also is a challenge and it's it's not always that you know one company is better than the other it's just a different approach and I think if I can can say like this is this is actually also what verb press is and yes of course WordPress itself is also trying to create Gutenberg and which will maybe become more close I don't know but I think this is yeah also the the beauty the blessing and the courage of Wordpress um because there's so much possible but that also sometimes creates uh create some problems but it's great to hear that you guys have now been preparing and you know learned from all of that and now it seems like from your story much more prepared for the future and also working with with add-ons because one of the questions that I got in my Facebook group was from Croaker block itself and they said I wonder what their strategy is working and collaborating with Elementor add-ons because when you guys introduce the loop Builder I thought like okay well maybe they're also gonna build a custom post type feature and custom Fields like why not integrate all of that so let's just focus on that question what is the strategy with working with with those add-ons are you guys really going to build a lot of more features to kind of make a more seamless experience or is it always going to be like this like what is the what is the vision yeah so first of all you know we try to work as closely as we can with our with our partners with our add-ons um you know go going back to the to kind of like the responsibility of being a platform and you know making changes to the core and you know risking breaking those apis we try to communicate that as best as we can and in advance and and we will be improving that we we're actually putting together now a dedicated team that will be kind of responsible for managing you know those relationships and making sure that the communication is Flawless and and that everything is more stable in terms of the product strategy the way we look at it is that we try to create the best core so everything that we deem as core uh and sometimes you know we we it's not it's not it's a fine line and you know look Builder initially you know there was a lot of other products that were uh providing that that sort of functionality but we got so many requests and so much uh kind of pull from our users that we need to make that part of our core that that we ended up making that decision and making the loop Builder part of our core and we tried to make it as integrated as possible and as clean and and really kind of part of the containers and everything that's so that it is a core feature uh but in terms of the strategy we want to invest at the core and we want to allow the ecosystem and our partners to keep adding things and products that we sometimes can't even imagine or think about I think this is where uh open source kind of encourages creativity creativity and Innovation so yes our goal is definitely to help our partners succeed there's a ton of pleasure watching you know a partner succeed by doing your product and you know obviously when our partners succeed and there's more add-ons it's good for Elementor it's good for our users and our focus is really to try to make the core as best as solid as possible so that we can open more apis and add more functionality so that more products can be built on top of Elementor okay and and now I'm just thinking of a new question like is do don't you have a problem then with these plugins having the same functionality because then there is some competition right for example with the theme build or a loop Builder like they can both promote the same thing how do you see that because an add-on should be an add-on it should not be a replacement so I think this is again this is the going back to the beauty of an open platform and open source you have kind of like it's like a free market right like you have the open uh you have the ability to write anything you want and if a partner comes and you build a product and is better you know then possibly what we're offering at that point in time and gives more values to our users you know this is great you know I think the the main thing is that we figure out how we can work together and I think this goes back to transparency the more transparent that we can be the more that we can uh tell our partners our plans and you know this is where we're going to be focusing on uh in the coming future you know this is important for us and there's an open communication flow that goes between us and uh the add-ons and uh and I think we will also be working on improving that communication because that transparency is the key to making sure that we can uh just keep adding more value to the user and not kind of just you know uh get our kind of everything crossed I see okay so more transparency is is the focus for from here on and I actually I got a question from the community which is uh in the swear of transparency and uh it's from Jen and he said why don't you have a public road map I think we will I think that um we will have a public roadmap I think in in the in the last few years you know when when we were really heads down working on making sure that we can actually build that momentum build the velocity and making sure that we can deliver what we want to ship you know fast and the high quality and as you can see you know we've had instances in the past when uh you know I myself personally said oh we got this feature coming up you know really soon and uh you know it took us about a year and a half to ship that feature so uh I think we we wanted to kind of build that confidence that we're really the place where we can plan and we can ship and we can do that in a in the standard that we wanted to ship those features and we got to that place now we're building that momentum and I think the next phase these will be in fact to start opening more of our roadmap make it more public so that everybody can see that going back to the conversation we had about our partners so that our partners can see that I think in general it would be much better to everybody so that know where we're heading and I think we're at a place that uh we're we're just about ready to do so uh so you can expect that in the in the in the near future oh that that's that's really cool to hear because uh I I really love that from some other plugins that I've seen because then you know like okay you don't have to worry if it's if it's coming you just know that it's coming and it doesn't even have to have a date I mean we all understand like some things get delayed and you know but just knowing that it's on the horizon or it's in progress that that like like that is super super cool so I'm really happy that that's gonna be here okay and um then I want to talk about the thing you said in the beginning of this uh is if this talk and that is about the audience that Elementor is serving and you're you said that um it was a challenge because you know different users have different needs um and that's a point that I wanted to touch on because I feel like Elementor is trying to serve many audiences and this also maybe creates some problems it's just my view because at one side you guys are trying to Market to beginners with marketing like it's easy to use you don't have to know code but at the same time you're adding more and more features for pros to work more globally and the tools had has quite some few coding references so those Elementor want to go into the direction of webflow and bricks that almost expects their users to understand the basics of code or does Elementor want to become more like Wix and Squarespace I know these are extremes and it's not maybe it's somewhere in the middle but um from my perspective Elementor has already advanced so much that it's more leaning towards a professional tool than it is a super no code Wix Squarespace tool so how do you see that this is a this is a one of the was one of the biggest questions that we've had um internally right inside the product and talking about who is the who is that user because that's a super relevant question and I think that initially you know one of the factors contributing to Elementor success is just being able to kind of walk that fine line and being able to kind of provide professional features to users you know and enable users that maybe have access now to features that or capabilities that were not available to them before they started using Elementor but but again as we expanded the user base we've got some really high-end professional users using Elementor as well as you know beginners you know like uh and and we get more and more of those you know on our Cloud platform where you get like users that are just you get one click you get your website and you can start building all of a sudden you get that really high-end professional tool which is really challenging so we had a lot of internal discussions I think this is uh again I said that that was one of the key challenges um in the past couple years to really understand how we can address that issue and to answer your questions yes we we will be serving multiple audiences I think the the refinement that we did to the uh from a product perspective is to understand that this is a professional product this is a product for professionals but every professional started out as a beginner and uh we need to make sure that we provide those professional features that we we give that functionality and you also can see that in the latest uh in the latest releases you know now that we've got that kind of feature train going you can see some really Advanced features in there but we also have to allocate resources to make sure that we can bring those more beginner users to that professional level and this is different it's a bit nuanced but if you think about it you know it's not a product for beginners right it's a product for beginners to become professionals and I think that that that took it took us a while to kind of you know hone in on that nuanced approach but once we did we were able to start kind of finalizing those features you know figuring out the best product design and kind of get on that train okay so you you don't think that trying to serve two audiences sometimes can also slow down the progress because that's what I'm thinking is what kind of communication do you use uh because for example like uh let's uh have the example of webflow they just say on their website something like development but then visual so it starts with development but within Elementor it start in a visual way right there's there are a lot of templates and I know these other tools also have templates but it's it's hard to communicate to two audiences and um don't you think that that can also slow down progress because you have to at some point you have to make a decision like how is this feature gonna work for example with with the loop Builder or the the container like what terms do you use right do beginners actually know what what this development term means and how do you navigate that isn't that making it a bit harder oh absolutely it's making it way harder but I think the great products if you look at you know great products of of the past and of today those are products that were able to figure that thing out and there are many examples of those right in uh in in professional products and you get sweets of products that are able to offer super high-end functionality but they have a huge user base and that user can select whether you want uh to just use some basic features like I know um you know I'm fairly old right and I remember Photoshop uh and uh you know there are many users that are using Photoshop in a very simple simple and basic fashion but you can do you know great things with Photoshop and you can you know there are many more modern and kind of you know kind of current product that are the same that you can you can use them at a very basic functionality you can use you know templates you can you know just you know shift some layouts around but you can also get into like as high as as you want in terms of of functionality and in complexity and yes it's absolutely not a simple thing to do it absolutely is a challenge but now that we we figured out kind of like the the the attack Vector we can we can answer a lot of the questions that were were really challenging for us to to answer from a product design perspective uh and I'm you know I'm optimistic that we will be able to figure this out I think that was the core of Elementor was that right like you can superpower give superpowers to users and give them a lot of functionality that was not available before and I think we just need to apply that same same idea on on a much larger user base we don't always get it right the first time I'm around and not always the second time around but we keep iterating and and we make them we make those kind of we succeed in those challenges and there's already some examples that you can see how you know we we tackle a specific challenge looks impossible we make it work and we just move on from one chance to the next one and I think what you present is it is a challenge but we we look for we look forward to to to succeeding in that as well okay well I I think that that's beautiful because I think that you know with many companies that become too big they they tend to sometimes become too cocky and then they lose the grip on the market I think you know for example what happened with Nokia or uh with uh you know companies that don't want to innovate and then they they they die because you know they think they are the biggest and I think that that's uh always a threat so it's beautiful to see that there's a lot of self-awareness in the in the learning process here so that just makes me you know confident about the the future I want to end this by thanking you for the answers I think it's super important to shine some light on what's happening in the background because I think a lot of people were a bit worried so for me at least this was really nice and I really want to thank you and I want to give you the opportunity to end with something else you want to add maybe uh if not then it's also okay no for sure so first of all thank you for that interview it's uh it's a great opportunity to communicate more you know uh with our with our community and our users I think that uh um again sometimes it's not Apparent from the outside but we we listen all the time to the community you know we we review every GitHub request uh you know every feature request every issue uh we we are in all the Facebook groups we read the comments that uh you know that that people are putting on on on your videos uh we'll listen to you we listen to to many other people that talk about Elementor we have a lot of attention uh and we collect all that feedback and we try to address that and you see that sometimes we're more successful and I think that now we'll be able to do more of that and again this is this is great you know we're uh it's uh it's it's been a it's been a wild ride in the last last few years here in elementary you know we got uh you know more than 12 million websites it's growing fast it's uh it's incredible uh and I think we're uh we're uh we're at a very positive uh place right now uh so I'm looking forward to this coming year I think there's there's a lot of uh really awesome plans a lot of cool features that are already in the works uh like we said you know hopefully we'll be able to to share that public roadmap very soon and I'm excited to see you know what uh what you're thinking about uh about those uh those next two releases it's gonna be it's going to be great okay so and so thank you well thank you as well it's it's awesome that that you guys want to do this and just you know talk to the community so yeah I want to end it here and uh I'm very excited for what's coming all right bye okay guys I've tackles most of the points that I wanted and I think the most important thing to learn here for us is that this company Elementor is open source and other plugins can build on top of it and that just makes the progress a lot harder so I think how you should look at Elementor is not just as a page builder plugin as you said but more like a platform it's not just Elementor you you also get the opportunity to to add things like Croco block on top of it which which as you guys know I'm a big fan of but not only Croaker block all the other add-ons and this just makes it harder and the second thing that is important is about the audiences that they're trying to serve I'm not really sure if I fully agree if that's a good idea to focus on many different audiences but I also do agree that there are some products in the market that are for beginners and for pros but I'm just not really sure if that is enough in this WordPress mark because there is so much competition but only the future can tell I don't run this company I'm just a dude making video also what do I know of course I have my thoughts and I share them with you and of course it's also good to keep our eyes open for what's happening in the market so if there are really some things that you want to say to Elementor put them in the comments below because they might just read the comments as he said which is which is great to hear in general the road map everything I think the future looks pretty bright for Elementor but again we'll see I hope that you enjoyed this episode if you want more videos about how to run start your own web design business and check out living with pixels below and then I want to thank you for watching and hopefully I will see you in the next video foreign [Music]

Channel: Rino - LivingWithPixels

Views: 10,655

Keywords: livingwithpixels, living with pixels, elementor interview, livingwithpixels interview, rino interview, living with pixels interview, elementor cpo, elementor amitai, elementor ceo, elementor chief product officer, elementor updates, elementor 2023, Amitai Gat, elementor amitay

Id: VZO2hbCj-cM

Length: 30min 50sec (1850 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 16 2023