It's not every day
you get to do something new. But today is one of those days. Thank you so much for joining me here
on this, the first episode of Input. I've got a lot of really cool stories
that I'm very excited to be sharing with you here
as part of this channel's journey. But to kick things off,
I thought it would be really cool to start with another startup story. Now I work at a company
called Rocketgenius. And Rocketgenius
are the creators of Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms has been around
the WordPress ecosystem for about 14 years now, and it got its start
in WordPress at a time when there weren't very many products
like it out there. So I invited the co-founders of Rocketgenius to come and sit with me and tell the story, the origin story
of Gravity Forms and how it came to be. We had a lot of fun. It was a really great conversation. And yeah, I hope you enjoy it, too. You ready? Let's get
into it. Welcome to Input. Well, thank you so much, gentlemen,
for joining me today. It's very exciting
as this is our first episode of Input, to have you,
the founders of Gravity Forms here. And so maybe we can just go around
and introduce ourselves, starting with Alex
and then Carl and then Kevin. All right, my name is Alex Concado. I'm originally from Brazil. I moved here to the States, in 1997 to go to college. I graduated in computer science. I started working here. And then in one of my jobs, I got to meet
Kevin and Carl and here we are. I'm Carl Hancock. I'm one of the founders
here at Rocketgenius. I got my start in web development
back in the mid to late 90s when I was in high school
and worked in web development for quite a number of years
before meeting Alex and Kevin. And eventually we decided
to start our own company and Gravity Forms is what came out of it. Hi, I'm Kevin Flahaut and I have been in the web development space
since the late 90s as well. Kind of jumped into that space. I ended up moving to the Virginia
Beach area, Virginia, and where I started working at a company,
eventually met Carl and Alex. Shoot, I guess that's almost 20 years ago.
Now it's pushing. And then so we worked together
closely for several years, decided we wanted to do something a bit more,
something that we felt that was more engaging for us. And so we kind of just jumped ship
and decided to start a company. And Gravity Forms and Rocketgenius, it's
been great for almost 14 years now. So. So I'm curious, one of the things
that a lot of people probably don't know
unless you work here at Rocketgenius, and I should, in full disclosure, acknowledge
that I am an employee. You are all my bosses. And but but when you work here, there is this very permissive culture around,
you know, side projects and working on things
and being adventurous and that kind of a mentality
with work and play. And what I know is that
it comes out of actually the origin story,
the beginnings of Rocketgenius. And I'm interested to hear a little bit
from the three of you and you can decide who wants to do this. Alex, maybe maybe you talk a little bit
about how Gravity Forms really started as a side project
while you were working together and then launching it off
into a new project. Yeah. So Kevin, Carl, myself, we worked on this company together. I was a developer, Carl and Kevin are more
front end developers and designers. And we wanted to do something
that we could control more in our company. We had to basically do things
that were, you know, not perfect because customers
wanted to do things one way and in some customers
wanted to do things another way . So we wanted to basically do something
that was great, that was awesome and that we controlled. You know, so we got together,
we started working on a side project, and we did it for a couple of years,
and it didn't really move forward. Then we decided, hey, we really need to
to get serious about this and do it full time
so that it can actually take off. And that's that's
basically how we started. Wow. It's interesting to hear that. I think for a lot of people
that are working in a product space,
that's often how it starts. It starts out with an idea that comes from a customer
and they have a vision for what they want. Often they aren't the experts necessarily. And so they have demands or requirements
that you get to a point. I can remember even in my own my own days
when I would do like Web design projects, I'd get to a point
where you'd get it to where you were happy with it
and then you'd present it to the client. And it was almost like that was the fork between like the perfect project
and the final project. And that's really often
where product start is in that fork, where you give the client
the version that that makes them happy. And then you tweak that other version that's been sitting there
that you've been working on. That sounds similar, Kevin, to. Oh, yeah. Yeah, very much so. I mean, we we had some some really
good ideas and we worked hard to work. You know, we tried to use, you know, best
practices when it came to these things. And we try to build things in a way
that made sense and that, you know, that they were extensible. And the development, you know, ended up being steered a lot
by the customer demands. I mean, that that's
understandable to some degree. But, yeah, it became frustrating for us. And we you know,
we felt like that between us. We had the capability
to do something that was, you know, better and that that was
that was more satisfying for us. And so that was really our goal, you know, was just to get out
and do something that was that was challenging for us, that,
you know, gave us the satisfaction that we longed for,
as far as you know, from our work. And that offered us a good balance of, you know, work and life,
you know, just just trying to find that that balance and someplace, you know,
where we could plug in and we didn't know. For like a long term plan, that wasn't
something that we originally started with, we just knew that we
we were unhappy and wanted to get out and pursue something different. So we've been very fortunate
and still here today. So that's a great thing. You know, so product space was
was something that we wanted to get into because the where we were was a company
that wanted to be in the product space, but was still too
deep in the agency space . So they weren't building a product. They were half building a product
and half customizing it for their for their customers. And that doesn't result in a good product. It just got frustrating to
to work in that environment. So eventually we we decided to jump out and do our own thing
and focus on on building a product. It's nice you get the ability to have
the final say on what it looks like and hope that it's going to be good enough
or that people want to buy it. And that's that's that's
sort of a great segue into my next question,
which is you you've got a product, you're in the agency space,
you're doing the agency thing where you as a as a team or as an agency
working primarily in WordPress, because at that point, WordPress was quite
young as a platform, mostly blogging. You know, Carl, can you tell us
maybe a little bit about why you chose WordPress at a time
when WordPress was still relatively new? It was it was relatively new
at the time when we when we decided that we wanted
to do something in the product space. But we recognized that
it had a lot of traction behind it. And at the time, this was
there was very few commercial products. There were some in the space,
but they were more fringe. They weren't more mainstream
within the WordPress community. And we just saw that there was a lot of traction
with using WordPress to build non blog sites for businesses. So we saw a lot of potential there. And we came from a business
that had built a proprietary CMS and a proprietary CRM
for their customers. And we saw what WordPress was doing was something that was
had a lot of potential to build on top of. And it turns out that it did. Alex, tell us a little bit
about the early days of Rocketgenius. You know, like where did you start?
How did you get going? What were some of the early problems and challenges that you had to face
as as a team getting started? Also, the biggest challenge was, you know,
how were we going to work full time on this thing
and still pay the bills? That was the first step. The first challenge, you know, I've been
in Carll, they've pretty much jumped ship. Like, OK, we're quitting. And if you want to come with us,
you've got to come with us. And I mean, how am I going to do this? And so they did. And they pay the bills
by by doing freelance and by actually outsourcing some of their
work to the company we work for. And I started to just think about ways
that I could do it, what the way that I have that
I was able to do it, and I changed jobs. And before I started
and negotiated with them so that I would work
three days a week with them and then two days
a week at Rocketgenius. So I started working
two days a week with them. And then obviously I would work at night
and the morning at all times. But but full time, two days,
you know, out of the week. And then we started
and it was the best thing. He was very, very exciting,
you know, just being there and working on on you know, at that point,
we didn't know what we were going to do. We were just kind of playing around
and trying to see for me, myself, I was going to be the developer
just getting familiar with WordPress and creating some small little projects
here and there to just kind of feel it out and see how how to program for WordPress
and kind of understand it. And and Carl had some awesome ideas
on small projects. And so that's kind of how we started. And I remember Kevin working day and night
on a bunch of projects, you know, just kind of, you know,
basically just helping us pay the bills. And we did. If I can
jump in real quick. We did. Well, the timing wasn't I mean, what anyone would consider great,
because this is around the time of the big, you know, housing
market crash and a bunch of things. I had just purchased a home
four months prior to that. Carl had just had his first child. Alex, part of the reason
that he did work with this this other company
for the for short period is because his wife was expecting
at the time, too. And so he needed to keep, you know, some
insurance coverage and things like that. So, yeah, so we all took a big leap
of faith, you know, kind of at that time. I don't think that anybody sometimes
I think in their right mind would thought, hey, this is a great time to, you know, to quit our our ,
you know, job and jump out. But, you know, we felt
like we could do it. And our goal was, you know, at least
like Alex said, you know, pay the bills. If we could do what we liked and make,
you know, a reasonable salary and take care of our families,
then that was great. So. Yeah. Carl and I hustled. We did just random websites and projects for anybody that, you know, where
we could hustle up a dollar for a while. And we did actually do some kind of
subcontracting for the previous employer. As a matter of fact, working on some of the systems
that we worked on, they maintained we maintained a relationship
with them for a while. So the first, you know, year
was was like that. It was it was a whole lot of hustling. But we tried to insulate Alex
as much as possible so that he could really focus
on getting and learning WordPress and start putting,
you know, some some products together. A fun time. It was good, you know, and and, you know, you know, you look back and maybe more fondly than than
we would remember it if we were there. But, you know, it was
it was good to hustle. It felt nice, you know, kind of building
something and doing something again. And it was good energy. And these guys are great to work with. So fond memories for me for sure. Reminds me a lot of the teams that I know. You can get your hands
on a really good developer, give them everything they want
and never let go. There's something else. There's a truth there somewhere. Yeah. And and it's exciting. So for me, it's fascinating
that you had conceptually maybe an idea that you wanted to pursue in the WordPress space, but you didn't
launch the business with a product. You just knew you wanted
to work together as a team and you wanted to do something together. And that was the foundation
and relationship is so it's, you know, working here. at Rocketgenius. You see that it's it's number one, right
like that, that working with people you love to work with day
in and day out is such a big part of the team culture. And you can see that foundationally,
even in just how you're talking. You know, we just knew
we wanted to work together. Didn't matter necessarily
what that end was. We have an idea, but it was it was doing it together
that was that was really valuable. Carl So WordPress is the thing. Apparently, you're the idea guy. So can you tell tell us a little bit
about how Gravity Forms came about as a concept? Well, we have been building client sites
at our previous job. We had been building
both for small businesses, and I don't want to go too
deep into the industries that we worked with,
but we worked with both manufacturers and distributors, if you will,
of those manufacturers. And we knew there were some things
that every website needed, and that was something that we wanted to
focus on, was something that was there was a big need
for business websites in general. And when we started looking at WordPress, we definitely saw a need
in that space for a better form solution. So Kevin and I actually were talking over
a product ideas. And out of that conversation
we basically had settled on forms as being the product that we wanted
to tackle based on prior work we had done and some of the form solutions
that weren't WordPress specific at the time that were available. Some PHP form solutions. We thought Forms was was a good product, and we settled on it
pretty quickly once once. Basically, we started talking it over Yeah, from my point of view too I had already built two form products
before on my previous two companies. So that was an area
that was very familiar to me. So when they started suggesting a form solutions, I guess I kind of
I've done that before a couple of times. I should be able to do it. So it kind of went pretty well there, too. And I can recall
when Alex worked on these other projects now these were in dot net and using a bunch of dot net components
and built completely differently. But these were in the early days of the Ajax and and the things like this
and being able to drag and drop. And Alex had some of the
some of this drag and drop functionality that Alex had built. And in relation to the forms
and how some of this worked. And, you know, we started,
you know, kicking around the, you know, the possibilities
of conditional logic and and, you know, how people might use this stuff. So it was exciting, you know, in it. And again, as Carl said, you know, out of the box, WordPress
had just a very simple contact form. But, you know, there was really nobody else in the space
that was doing anything similar. So, you know, it was just
it seemed like a huge opportunity there, you know, to leverage
some of the experience that we had already, you know, to fill
that to fill that void there. And then, you know, just, you know,
building upon just a simple formula, all the the the potential and capturing
and manipulating data down the line, you know, and how that might be used later on,
which is incredible to see what people do now, you know, but yeah, I remember that
being like pretty short conversation. And we were. And Alex was like, fine, Let me go, man. I'm here
we go. You know, so it was good. It was a space you knew well. Yeah, it worked. The interesting thing for me, so,
you know, when you think about what Gravity Forms is today, one of the most influential products,
probably in WordPress, in the ecosystem. And yes, I do work for Gravity Forms,
so I can say that and champion it. But, you know, like you look at the
transformation of WordPress over the last, you know, 10, 15 years, and the start
was a blogging platform where, you know, what what is the expectation of
of that core product? Well, you just needed to have
a name and email and a message. Right. Like that was all all the information
you really needed to collect as a form. And as WordPress
began to transform and themes. And I can remember the early days where, you know, you go on to the theme repo
and you'd be looking for themes . And it was all you know,
you'd be basically selecting the color of your blog that was it. Right. And then we started
moving to magazine layouts, and all of a sudden people
started to break down those those boundaries
of what it meant to build on WordPress. And you see not just the
the design and look and feel, but you get into this idea
of of why people actually build websites in the first place. Right. And what's the number one thing
they're trying to do? Most times is to sell product. Right, or to sell something. Sell service. And to do that,
you need to collect information. And you need often
more than just a name and an email. Right. Like you need more details. And then you want to be able to customize the experience
and you want to customize the responses. And you can just see how naturally,
as the Web has grown, as WordPress has grown, as our use case
and understanding of how Web technology can be leveraged
to move a business forward. Gravity Forms has been there
every step of the way, offering new and better ways to do that. Now, this isn't an ad for Gravity Forms,
despite what you might think. But I say all that because it speaks to. Decision-making on your part as a company, and I see your part as founders, as as leaders, and in terms
of the early direction that you took to be open, to be extension
friendly and developer friendly. And I'm curious to hear a little bit
about some of those foundational decisions, like they don't happen
intentionally often. Right? They happen in a reactionary way. Right. It's based on situations that come up. But I'm just curious to know a little bit
about how you approach these kinds of things and approach
this kind of decision making. And maybe, Carl, you can jump in here
and talk a little bit about the decision making process, especially between
the three of you as founders and some of those early decisions
that you think were pivotal in helping the company
get to where it is today. I mean, I think a key part of the product
from the beginning was extensibility. We we did a lot with with hooks
and filters from the very beginning. And we had already intended
on creating add ons for the products
we actually launched without any add ons. And the promise of add ons would be part
of what people would be purchasing. So even when we launched, we
you got all of our add ons on our our developer license, for instance.
But we didn't have any add ons yet. But we had we had a list
of potential products that we wanted to integrate
from an add on standpoint, extensibility was definitely something that we saw
as important for us as a company. And then that kind of just snowballed
into other people taking advantage of that extensibility
to create add ons and customizations for Gravity Forms on their own
without us doing anything. And I think that that was pretty big. And it's similar to WordPress itself. I mean, WordPress is what it is
because of the ecosystem and because of the
extensibility of WordPress. And I think any successful WordPress
product has to basically be developed with that in mind
and that mindset that people want to extend your product
and you need to make it extensible. From my point of view, it was you know, I used to be a Microsoft dot net developer
before we started this. So jumping in to be
and jumping into WordPress, it was really a huge shift for me in the sense of how easy it was
for me to use WordPress' functions and to, you know,
tapping in all these different things. It was very pleasant
to work with. So, you know, so when I started developing
Gravity Forms its kind of you know it was natural for me to kind of do things
in a similar way and that kind of, you know, then Gravity
Forms to be somewhat open and easy to work with also. I think that's absolutely right. You know, you've got this this ecosystem
you're building within that's creating advantage and opportunity
for for this product to even exist, right. For Gravity Forms to exist and that pay
it forward effect, and we see that in the culture and in the ecosystem,
even within Gravity Forms. Right. With our certified developer program
that we have, as well as just the hundreds of independent developers
who can go and look at the product and build something off of that
and without any permission or support or anything but that, you know,
if they have find a need or a user case that they want to explore and build for,
they can do that which, you know, like, talking about expanding
and growing, natural point to move on. So I want to there's there's two stories
out there I want to talk about. The first story is your first sale
and the next one is your first hire. So I'm curious is there's
there's some lore around Gravity Forms and in Rocketgenius
about how quickly the first sale came in. Alex, can you tell that story
of like the first sale for Gravity Forms? Yes. Yes. So so we were. You know, it was launch day,
we were going to launch today, we, you know, try to get everything ready to try to get in a licensing system ready
and all that kind of stuff. And there's a lot going on, obviously,
on this launch day. And we are testing things and everything
is, you know, ready to go. This was later at night, I want to say it was around
10 o'clock at night or something. And in our like, OK,
we ready to go? Let's go. So we flip the switch. We turn the site on. We didn't go to Twitter.
We didn't do anything. And within I want to say two or
three minutes, we got an email we got a sale and then we're like,
oh, something's wrong. What's going on? I don't know what happened.
And we started this thing. Did someone place a test? Yeah. Right. Yeah. Anybody place a test? No, no, no. And then we come to find out
that was a real sale that came in. You know, like, you know, I want to say two or three minutes
after we flip the switch. It was it was a it was a lady over
in the U.K., I believe. And I remember actually emailing her. I'm like, did you actually just,
you know, buy this? And she's like, oh, yeah, I've been waiting. So, you know, we had
Carl was good about, you know, some buzz putting the buzz out there on Twitter
and making some noise out there. So apparently people had been watching and and as soon as it was turned
on, we had a sale. But, yeah, none of us could believe that
that it happened that quickly. So it was good fun. It's a good memory, you know, and then. But, yeah, we were
we were sure that it was erroneous, that somehow or another
that it was broken. We done something. So. Fortunately not. Yeah. That story is told a lot around the office. Yeah. Yeah. It was pretty crazy because we had
we did have a mailing list. We had we had beta testers that we had like a closed private
beta test for the product. And we were doing a lot on Twitter
at the time, which was and still is pretty popular in the
in the WordPress community. And when we launched the site,
we hadn't gotten a chance to actually send out an email to everybody
that was on our our beta list. to let them know. And we hadn't done any promotion
at the site and had actually launched. So it was pretty surprising
when we got that notification from the the super powerful e-junkie e-commerce
platform that we were using. Yeah. And we laugh about e-junkie. But e-junkie was was very streamlined, we'll say there wasn't
a lot of functionality in e-junkie, but it cost us a whole five dollars
a month was their fee for the processing. And we went for, what, six,
eight years on that platform, I guess. And it never failed us. You know, I always felt like it was going to be the weak
link or something, but credit to them for. You know, it was simple,
but it was robust, so, you know, we didn't get a lot of info,
but it was good fun. You know, it's so wild. You think about the tech stock that you had back in the day
when you were launching. And it's it's so hard, like, you know, like you
imagine a world before Stripe or PayPal, you know, like before these
these platforms that were really there square that allowed you to transact
on your site in in such an easy way. It's you know, everybody had to start
it was like the pioneer days. Right? Like you had to start somewhere.
It's crazy. Yeah. This was before WooCommerce. Before Easy Digital Downloads before. Yeah. Most of the tools that
people are using right now to sell WordPress products
or digital products in general. I mean, at the time you e-junkie
was pretty popular with selling just simple digital downloads, things
like ebooks and software as well. And there just weren't
a lot of options out there that made it quick and easy
to to get started. And it happened to be one of them. And we made a lot of
money with them, considering all we paid, what
we were paying for the solution. Yeah. All things change. All things grow. And at some point, three became four. Kevin, what was it like in those days? And, you know, like getting ready to hire
and then moving from a founder only company to being a founder
led company with multiple teams. Can you talk a little bit about the journey that Rocketgenius
has been on over the last number of years? Yeah, it's we we grew very slowly and deliberately
and and just kind of organically, I guess. We never had a you know, again,
our goal was was to to have a workplace that somebody doing something that we enjoyed,
something that was fulfilling to us. We never just wanted to build a company
just to go, you know, make it public or to sell it. That was never the goal. And, you know, just
we wanted to work somewhere where we enjoyed the people,
where we had that, you know, that culture
that we talked about. So. You know, as. Our previous company went through, you know, some transitions
and some of the people had left there and then that we that were friends
and then not just friends, but actually some very accomplished developers and and
and very good people and what they did. So as we had opportunities, we began
to kind of contract with these people. And I think it was a couple of years
in two and a half, three years. And maybe when we finally brought our
first full time employee into the fold, and then shortly after that,
our first full time support guy. But our growth was was very slow
and metered over the longest time, you know,
and then and then it was fortunate because these people that we'd had the the
the privilege of working with for for many years, people that were very much
like family of a like mind, so that they were a very good culture fits
right off, you know what I mean? And so that was it was it was always
really, really easy and almost surprisingly so, you know,
that we could grow and work together. And we have some very strong willed,
opinionated people. I'm not going to lie,
but we've always been able to. And it's it's incredible. But we are we were all able to work very
well together and communicate really well. So that's been great. I want to say, what was it last year? 2020 was probably our biggest growth,
you know, a single growth spurt. So we added quite a few people last year. And and we're at a bit of disadvantage
with with the current, you know, Covid situation
and things like that is is being able to interact with these people as as
as closely as personally as we want to . And we hope to hope that soon
that, you know, we can get back to those, you know, the kind
of situation we like to have for the remote employees
we always like to have people come in and work with us
and take a couple of weeks and come share that office space with us
and even if they're remote employees. But it's been fun. It's just like, say, up
until probably 2020 it was just a very, very slow kind of,
you know, casual, metered growth. And and we only wanted to grow
as we needed to. You know, we we wanted everybody to have
buy in, you know, in our decisions. We wanted everybody to feel like that
they were a part of the process and they're part of the decision making and that everybody
was invested in that way. So we never really wanted to grow quickly
and just throw bodies in there for no reason. And so, again, I think we've been very fortunate in that in that respect
that after all these years, we still from a culture and vibe, for lack of a better word,
you know, it's still very much the same. And we enjoy it. It's it's harder
to kind of scale the energy that we had when it was three of us, you know,
sharing a bedroom at my house, you know. But we I think we've done well
and we're proud of our team. And it's been a great journey, really has. So I hope that's not too much. No, I think that's great. You know, like so
the team now is definitely bigger than it was gone from, I think three to 30
or somewhere in the neighborhood of 10x growth over, you know, 14 years. That's that's pretty pretty good. I, I came in to a company coming from three hundred down to 30. So my story is a little different
coming from that from that angle. But the thing that has struck me about being here
is there is very much this this relational culture,
this people first type mentality. But the other thing that's really cool
is, is being here. You see everybody
genuinely loves what they do. They do. They there's there's good people
position fit, if you will. You know, and as things go
and people grow and mature and change doesn't mean, you know,
people don't don't, you know, come and go. But there's genuine excitement
and energy here. I'm curious now to hear a little bit
about. Here we are. This has been a big year for Rocketgenius,
a big year for Gravity Forms. We launched two point five,
which is the first major release in a long time, setting us up
for the future as founders and as people who've been around now
for for the history. What's next for Gravity Forms? What's next for Rocketgenius
or where do you think WordPress and the whole ecosystem is going? I'm curious to get your thoughts
on all of the above. Well, one thing that from a WordPress standpoint, WordPress is evolving are pretty quickly,
probably quicker than it ever has in its in its history with all
the changes that it's going through. And Gravity Forms
has been pretty consistent with its change during that time period. We haven't evolved as quickly
as WordPress itself. And some of that comes from having
a product that's used by so many people and WordPress had the same issue
where they you have a product that is used by so many people,
it's hard to make more sweeping changes. And that's something that we're 2.5
where we're starting to do, because we have to
we have to make changes to to keep up with the the industry,
to keep up with WordPress. And we're really just getting started
with those changes, the changes that we've made to the editor to
to make it more Gutenberg esque, if you will , are just the beginning of
changes that are coming to Gravity Forms. That one is more more of a
jolt to the users in a similar way that Gutenberg
was from the editor standpoint. But there's a lot of things
that we have coming in the future to make. Gravity Forms, not just powerful
and extremely extensible for developers, but extremely easy
to use for users. And it's always been pretty easy,
I think, to use. But there's there's definitely a lot
a lot more we can do in that area. And there's a lot of really cool things
that we're working on to to make it a great tool
for developers and super easy to use for people
that don't know how to do any development. And I think the barrier to WordPress
development is getting higher. So I think it's important to make
the product easier to use for people that aren't developers,
because WordPress itself is just evolving in that way, where previously you had
a lot of people that would kind of hack their way through WordPress
and make customizations. And with the transition to Gutenberg,
it's it's getting quite a lot more complex with the tech stack
that's required to to work with it. So we want to focus on making it
not just powerful for developers, but easy for for users and make things that they would do on on the regular
just simpler and quicker. Yeah, I think I mean,
it makes a ton of sense. And it's one of the reasons
why I think Input is here as well,
even just as a as a new thing I was talking with you all a little earlier about it, but there's
there's a recognition on on our part that the people that use WordPress
are changing, diversifying and moving away from that developer
who knows how to tinker with PHP to an end user who is using you know,
is probably like you can even divide that up a little bit to somebody
who just uses it on the front end to somebody who sets up the backend. If they don't code the back end,
they set up the back end with all the tooling for somebody else
to be able to use. And that and you're right,
there is that leap now, even from setting it up in the back end
to creating it and creating the tooling that goes in there, that's going to be interesting
to watch the WordPress ecosystem as it as it makes that shift
from one side to the other. We've known that this has been coming
for a number of years. Gutenberg as a product. And as a project
came out of this knowledge and this understanding
that we needed to level up the user experience
for less experienced users and give them the power and the ability to get what they want out of WordPress,
the same way that more advanced and more professional
or developer oriented users could. So it's neat to see us as a as a team
and as a product moving in that direction as well.
I'm totally on board. I think it's a great idea, and I'm excited
as well to see what people do with it once they have access to the new tooling
and things are simpler. What kinds of people are leveraging
Gravity Forms and WordPress to do things? The world is just getting more creative. It's not getting less creative because people have access to more tools
and more more ideas. And so it's really neat that as ideas
diversify, as industries diversify, and as we see more niching,
that products and tools like WordPress and Gravity Forms are positioned there
to help people achieve their dreams. You know, one thing that I wanted to add to what Carl said is. We yes, we need to move forwards. We need to keep up, we need to have better tools, and
we are very much looking forward to that. But we are also committed to
backwards compatibility. So it's a challenging position because here you have, you know,
millions of websites using a product. You need to push the product forward. But at the same time, you don't want to break sites from people
that are using it. So it's. So that's the challenge
that we have right now. It's, hey, how do we move it forward
and maintain backwards compatibility? Because we are committed to it. So that's you know, that's going to be a part of our future. It's always going to be
this challenge of balancing out, you know, driving the product forward,
but at the same time being committed to making sure the sites keep walking. I think that's a fantastic spot to be in. I would argue it's one of the reasons
why WordPress has been so successful is their commitment
to backwards compatibility has meant that as companies invest in their Web
presence, they can invest with the knowledge that no matter what happens,
if they decide to set it and forget it five to seven years right now,
they can and know that the product will still work exactly as it did
the day they installed everything. And that's exciting.
So that's that's really cool. Well, I'm going to end it there
and just say thank you to all three of you for taking some time
and being here with me and doing this. For those of you
who don't know, this has taken a while, and it's very exciting
to get everyone together. And I don't know
that this has ever happened anywhere. This is as exclusive as it gets. And so thank you for
for being here. Thanks, James. Thanks, James. Well, it's not every day that you get to interview your bosses
and ask them those kinds of questions and hear right from them, but if there's one thing
I've learned working at Rocketgenius. It's that that is how they are
super genuine, super great guys. And the kind of culture that they're creating is one
that I'm really excited to be a part of. Well, this is just the beginning
for us here at Input. And we're going to tell stories like this
more and more, because I love it. I love being able to hear
how people create, how they connect that creativity with purpose
and just what happens in between. And it's exciting. I'm also curious what you think about
Input and what we've been doing. So please make sure to leave a comment. Let us know your thoughts
and consider subscribing as well. We'd love to have you on this journey
with us and to see where it goes. Well, that's it for me. See you next time.
