Latest / WP Builds / 487 - Building WordPress plugins: lessons from Newsletter Glue and EventKoi

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487 - Building WordPress plugins: lessons from Newsletter Glue and EventKoi · WP Builds

• 0:01
  Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the WP Builds Podcast. Bringing you the latest news, interviews and fun for the WordPress community. Now, welcome your host, Nathan Wrigley. Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds Podcast. You've reached episode number 487, entitled Building WordPress Plugins, lessons from Newsletter Glue and EventKoi.
• 0:35
  Nathan Wrigley: It was published on Thursday, the 29th of October, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley and in a few moments I will be joined by Leslie Sim so that we can have our chat. But before then, a few bits of housekeeping and self-promotional bits and pieces. Please stay tuned. I would really love it if you did and didn't skip forward. The first thing to say is that if you have a product or service in the WordPress space...
• 1:01
  Nathan Wrigley: Perhaps you would like to add it to our Black Friday page. If you go to wpbuilds.com forward slash black, currently there's roughly a hundred products over there. It's completely free to list them. However, if you would like your product or service to be boosted and to feature more prominently on that page, you'll notice that there are some cards at the top. Over there at the minute, we've got NovaMira, we've got Show.fm, we've got Elementor and we've also got WSForm.
• 1:30
  Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much to them for coming on board and helping keep that page alive. There are some blank cards. If you look at those, there is a button underneath them. And if you would like your product or service placed there, click on the button, fill out the form, and we will get back to you ASAP. If you'd like to just advertise more generally on the podcast and get in front of a WordPress-specific audience, head to wpbuilds.com forward slash advertise. And I'm going to keep droning on about it. Show.fm is a new SaaS platform that I have launched to help podcasters make podcasting easier. So we really do have a whole set of features that are unavailable elsewhere. So if you know somebody that's doing a podcast, if you're doing a podcast, or even if you're thinking of doing a podcast, go check it out. Show.fm.
• 2:16
  Nathan Wrigley: Until the 31st of October, so a couple of days from now, you'll be able to make a substantial saving in order to try and onboard quite a few founders to help us shape the platform. We're offering up to 75% off our studio plan. So go and check that out. Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with Leslie Sim. Leslie came on the podcast several years ago now to chat about Newsletter Glue. She's moved on from that now and is working on EventKoi. And so we talk about what it's like in the year 2026 to have a WordPress plugin. What are the challenges? What are the differences between the product that she had, which was very niche, to a project which she now has, which is much more general?
• 3:02
  Nathan Wrigley: How is she managing it? How is she finding the challenges of building in the WordPress landscape and in the open? And it's really interesting to hear from somebody so honest and forthright. And I hope that you enjoy it. I am joined on the podcast by Leslie Sim. Hello.
• 3:19
  Lesley Sim: Hello. Good to be here.
• 3:21
  Nathan Wrigley: Leslie and I have already spent half an hour trying to figure out what we're going to talk about and what the state of the world is and WordPress and events and podcasting and all of that. But it's lovely to have you back. How long has it been, do you think?
• 3:34
  Lesley Sim: Years. Too long. Maybe three, four, five years, something like that.
• 3:39
  Nathan Wrigley: Hopefully not five. No, maybe not. I don't know if this is true because in the WordPress space, which is what we normally talk about, you've had two products that I associate with you. Firstly, there was Newsletter Glue, which you have moved away from and I guess sold. We can get into that. And then EventKoi, or EventKoi, I should say, not events.
• 4:01
  Lesley Sim: Singular.
• 4:01
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Singular. Do you want to just tell us a little bit about both of those and the journeys and what have you very quickly, just so that we've got some knowledge of who you are and what you've been doing low these many years?
• 4:14
  Lesley Sim: Yeah, so Newsletter Glue was my first product, my first plugin product that we built. It was, I guess in a sentence, it kind of gave People substack features inside of WordPress. So you could publish a blog post and inside the post or the editor, you can also, you know, click a button and that also sends out the email together.
• 4:42
  Lesley Sim: Yeah, so we did that for a few years, I want to say four or five years. And then we sold that and we started EventKoi, which is an events plugin.
• 4:56
  Lesley Sim: And I want to say that the learning there and how we made the move from Newsletter Glue to EventKoi was with Newsletter Glue, it was a very niche product that we sold for a lot of money to very specific journalists and editorial teams. And we then decided to make the move to a more mass market product, which is what EventKoi is.
• 5:24
  Lesley Sim: We, so that, that's like... It's a product that has, hopefully, millions of potential buyers, users. And that also means that we have dozens, if not hundreds, of competitors. So it's a very different market. And I'm enjoying learning how it all works.
• 5:49
  Nathan Wrigley: Did you consciously, I mean, was it the product itself, like you wanted to do an events thing that led you there? Or did you want to experiment with, okay, we've gone for this niche thing, and that was kind of interesting. You know, high ticket price, few customers, but they were, you know, paying your wage. Was it a conscious decision, we want something more widespread so that we've got a greater chance of making an impact? Or was it simply, I want to do an events plugin, and that, by coincidence, has a greater footprint?
• 6:20
  Lesley Sim: The former. So we, we wanted something bigger, more mass market. We felt that we were ready for it. So, so the reason why we went with Newsletter Glue to begin with was because nobody knew us. And so trying to get someone to... To buy a mass market thing when there are already hundreds of competitors is really hard, but when you have something really niche and it's like we're the only one or two options around, then people are going to be willing to give us a chance.
• 6:49
  Lesley Sim: But after doing Newsletter Glue, we felt that enough people knew about us that if we were to launch something more mass market, there would be at least enough trust to get us off the ground. And then once you're off the ground, you know, hopefully we're able to do the marketing, do the brand building and have enough people trusting us to use us.
• 7:14
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Did that wisdom hold? Is that what it turned out to be?
• 7:18
  Lesley Sim: I think we're very much still in the people who we know are excited about us and use us. And we're still trying to get to like the, you know, second, third... You know, 10th degree of separation away kind of thing. So we're still working on that part.
• 7:38
  Nathan Wrigley: I use that metric all the time. I mean, I don't know that I do it much outside of the WordPress space. Like, you know, if I'm willing to buy a vacuum cleaner or a kettle or something, I don't really care. So long as it, you know, maybe there's something about the brand. I'll, you know, I've trusted that brand before and it's worked. But in the WordPress space, the person behind it hadn't really ever thought about this. But the person behind it is a significant bit of my buying decision.
• 8:07
  Nathan Wrigley: And I will definitely go back to the character or team that I've had success with in the past. And by success, I mean, you know, no problems. The plugin got updated in a timely way. The support was good and all of those kind of things. And also, curiously, when I buy something in the WordPress space, my journey from clicking on a link for a product I've never seen before kind of goes like this. Click on link, go to home page, go to pricing.
• 8:35
  Nathan Wrigley: Then go to the About page. And the one that I dwell most on is the About page. And I read almost every word of that. And if you don't have an About page, I'm thinking, why don't you have an About page? Why don't you want to tell us who you are? So I don't know if I'm curious, but I'm like you. I go with, you know, the intuitions that I've built up over the years. But you say it's, you know, that worked. But obviously, if you started with a niche product, so I don't know, you've got 1,000, 2,000, 500, whatever the number of customers you've got is, and then you're trying to move that over and you can bring those 500, 1,000, 2,000, whatever, but you're charging less, does that mean you're now in a situation where you need to either put your prices up or find more customers to make it do the same amount of revenue, that kind of thing?
• 9:25
  Lesley Sim: Yeah, so we're trying to find more customers, get better at kind of mass marketing, I would say.
• 9:33
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And how are you at that?
• 9:36
  Lesley Sim: Learning. And of course, I've chosen the best possible time to learn now that, you know, SEO has been completely decimated and even the best marketers in the world don't know how to market anymore these days.
• 9:50
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So what are you doing? What's your like playbook of, well, we're recording this in October, late October, 2026. What's your go to set of things?
• 10:01
  Nathan Wrigley: I'll throw into the conversation that I, podcast listeners will know this already. I am, I have a product out there in the market and I'm on the same journey as you. We're trying to figure it out at the same time. So let's bat this around a minute. What's working for you? Or at least what are you doing? Whether it's working or not, we can talk about. Um, yeah, so I...
• 10:27
  Lesley Sim: I can say a bunch of things that will make me, maybe to some people, sound smart, and to others, maybe sound really dumb. This is the way.
• 10:38
  Lesley Sim: So I've been, I guess I think about it in terms of two different frameworks. So the first just being like, you know, typical marketing funnel, top of the funnel, bottom of the funnel type stuff. So I make sure that I'm doing things across every different layer of the funnel.
• 11:00
  Lesley Sim: So I guess that that's pretty basic. But then I also try to think about it in terms of short term customers and like long term investments. So short term stuff is like if I see someone. You know, looking for an events plugin on Reddit, then I'll try to reply to that thread, try to be helpful, and hopefully convert them as a customer. And that's been pretty successful. I get, you know, like a small handful of customers that way. But it's, you know, that doesn't scale, but it does get me, yeah, there's only going to ever be so many customers, you know, complaining on Reddit, right?
• 11:48
  Lesley Sim: I'm not going to be able to build a business off of that.
• 11:51
  Nathan Wrigley: Well, yeah, I guess if you're in the right market, if you've got the right product where three customers is going to do it for you, then that's great. But yeah, perhaps not here. Anyway, sorry, I interrupt. Carry on.
• 12:01
  Lesley Sim: Yeah. So, you know, I get the three customers or whatever from Reddit, and they are fairly easy to convert because they're already primed. They're looking for an alternative. They're looking for someone that like fits the exact specs. And they've told me, you know, on the Reddit where they're complaining, like, every single thing that they're looking for. And so, you know, when I chime in and I say, like, this is, you know, we have every single thing exactly how you want it. It's a pretty easy conversion. But like you said, not that many.
• 12:29
  Lesley Sim: Going on Reddit and Complaining and me being like the perfect fit. So that's kind of like an example of like short term stuff, which I do to, you know, get money in the short term. And then you have to also do like the long term plays. So that's where it becomes like more fuzzy because we, nobody knows, you know, how SEO or whatever they call it, AI, SEO, whatever thing they call it these days works.
• 12:56
  Lesley Sim: And so, you know, I try to do the things that people say that you should do, and then it's just kind of hope and pray. So I just do a balance of both. I do the short term stuff and then I also try to do the long term stuff.
• 13:15
  Lesley Sim: I try to ask customers as well, like how they find us. But, you know, obviously not everyone is going to give me a report of like their buyer's journey, although I love that.
• 13:27
  Lesley Sim: But, you know, they typically just say, you know, I did some research, I did some, I, you know, did a Google search, or I looked at a bunch of articles, and they find us. So I think some of the long term stuff does work. You have to be there, be available, be around, be findable. Yeah. And I think it's just like, putting in the reps, and hopefully it pays off over time.
• 13:53
  Nathan Wrigley: It's a, I think, does it feel a bit brutal from, at times, you know, does it feel a little bit like you're sort of shouting into the void a bit? Or do you, do you take, you know, this is just necessary. This is what I need to do. This has got my business head on. I'm doing it. Because I, I think, for some people, myself included, to some extent, the, the... Going out and trying things on Reddit and things like that, I just find it quite hard, you know, to summon up the energy to keep doing it because you don't quite know where it's going to land. You don't know if that comment that you make is going to get you booted out of that subreddit because it comes across as a bit salesy. So you have to kind of meter those things as well. So really, I'm just, you know, how do you feel about all that sort of stuff? Is it a necessary part of business? Do you enjoy doing it? Because I know some people do love that kind of stuff.
• 14:45
  Lesley Sim: I think you get used to it after a while. Yeah, just, I mean, you develop, I wouldn't call it a thick skin. But like, I think when you do it enough times, you stop caring too much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like maybe, you know, I don't know if you remember the first couple of times as a child you went to a restaurant or you went to a supermarket and you ordered something from a waitress or you went to a cashier and checked out something and you were probably super nervous and you didn't know what to say and you said the wrong thing.
• 15:19
  Lesley Sim: And after you've done that like five, six, seven, whatever, ten times, it's awkward but then you kind of figure out your order or whatever and it gets easier. So I think it's very similar to that because it's just a social interaction, right? And so figuring out like the social rules, like the unspoken social rules and all that stuff, it's all the same skill set.
• 15:49
  Lesley Sim: It's just applied differently and every social platform has its different implicit social rules. And so, you know, just kind of... Being okay with embarrassing yourself, potentially getting kicked out of certain subreddits is par from the course. You can't go through life just saying, I've messed up an order at a restaurant once, so I'm never ordering from a restaurant ever again.
• 16:16
  Nathan Wrigley: Right, right. Oh, that's a good way of framing it. Yeah, I like that. I think you sort of grow into it a little bit. I've become, well, I began not that long ago, you know, we're talking a handful of weeks, really, really a lot of hangups about the way that I'm going to approach advertising and a bit of embarrassment and a bit of nervousness and a little bit of this doesn't fit my personality type, therefore I can't do it.
• 16:43
  Nathan Wrigley: And then with a bit of encouragement from a few people who sort of coached me through it, basically, could sort of, I think, tell that this wasn't my A game, let's put it that way. And they just took me to one side online and sort of said, okay.
• 16:59
  Nathan Wrigley: Do this. Try this. Don't worry about this. And I feel a little bit more sanguine about it now. And I figure this is the game, you know. If this is what I need to do, this is what I need to do. And I need to lean into it and what have you. We've been doing, so it's me and Dan maybe for the podcast platform that we've got. We've been trying an awful lot of stuff and seeing what works best. So doing the Reddit thing that you described, I think for us LinkedIn might be a useful platform.
• 17:29
  Nathan Wrigley: Because it's because we know the title of their role and what we've got will map quite well to two or three job roles, you know. So as an example, if you've got the word podcaster as the first word in your description of your bio, you are obviously making that a very important part of your life. And if you've got podcast producer, that's another one. And so various things like that. So LinkedIn.
• 17:56
  Nathan Wrigley: But we're also trying out things like video because our product is demonstrated well by showing screenshots. We're trying that out, but also kind of trying out the, I call it the TikToks and what I mean by that. Well, not really the platform, but just that much more quick 12-second YouTube shots.
• 18:22
  Nathan Wrigley: Right. And that, that, there's no bit of that which feels normal to me because I don't use any of those platforms. I don't think I've ever scrolled on one of those like YouTube shorts or TikTok or Instagram. I don't have any of those on my phone. So I don't really understand it. So when I, when we create that stuff and I look at it, I think, wow, what is that? Do you, do you do that? Do you do video and things to?
• 18:48
  Lesley Sim: How do you know how to create it if you haven't watched any of it?
• 18:51
  Nathan Wrigley: Ah, so I, I, I did that. I watched enough of them to get an intuition of what the playbook looks like, but also quite a few of the tools that I use, they have like these sort of templates that you can use, but also Dan is much more experienced with this. And so I think uses a variety of different tools, including a little bit of AR, which sort of helps with that as well.
• 19:17
  Nathan Wrigley: But I don't know if you've tried any of that stuff.
• 19:19
  Lesley Sim: I haven't yet. This is my own hang-up, right? I'm not sure how well talking about WordPress plugins on Instagram or TikTok is going to... I'm not sure that's where my customers are, but I feel like that's a completely wrong-headed thing to say. No, I totally get it. I'm in that space as well. Because to me, and again, I don't really do it...
• 19:58
  Nathan Wrigley: Well, that's true. Okay, so there is maybe more alignment with what...
• 20:04
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But what if you described the... What if the video wasn't about the plugin and about the, you know, like running an event and tearing your hair out because you can't... Do an event, you know, that little 12 second video of somebody getting mad and throwing a shoe at us. Right, they're not, no? So I could get, you know, 10 million views on that. But, you know, if it doesn't convert to sales, then I'm just, you know, then I'm just like a YouTuber now.
• 20:34
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that seems to be where the trajectory is going everywhere. But, you know, like, everybody's putting all their effort into video. I don't know if that's going to be the right thing. Like I said, I feel like LinkedIn is going to be really helpful. And email, you know, you've obviously steeped in email. Do you still plunder, you know, an email list? Do you still do that side of things? I mean, obviously, apart from, like, product updates and all of that, do you reach out to people via email still?
• 21:03
  Lesley Sim: I never really did that. I tried it for a while with Newsletter Glue. It didn't go that well, I would say. I just think that most of those, like, email lists that you can do code emails with... You know, it's the same, whatever, 10 million email database and these poor 10 million people have gotten so much spam and unwanted emails. Oh, especially now that AI can concoct an email.
• 21:32
  Lesley Sim: Yeah. I have found myself.
• 21:36
  Lesley Sim: I think I got like one lead out of, you know, maybe three months of really hardcore trying. Like I bought a whole course, like it was like an intense course that asked me to buy 10 email addresses so that I could like be like sending out like, I don't know, hundreds of emails per email address. Wow. Yeah. It was like very, very intense. And I got one lead from that and I don't think that that person got better.
• 22:05
  Lesley Sim: Yeah. And you've got to. Yeah.
• 22:07
  Nathan Wrigley: I mean, looking from the outside, I suppose, with the benefit of hindsight, it's like, duh.
• 22:11
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But you've got to try these things, right?
• 22:14
  Nathan Wrigley: Unless you give it a go, you'll never know.
• 22:16
  Nathan Wrigley: But I guess once bitten twice shy. Yeah.
• 22:18
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Well, all right. Let's use this as an opportunity then to plug what it is that you do. Because why not? We're here.
• 22:26
  Lesley Sim: Yeah. This is one of my attempts.
• 22:28
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There you go. So tell us what it does. Tell us what EventKoi does. And I don't mean like the, you know, the one line UVP, like dig in a bit. Tell us some of the bits that you're really proud of, maybe roadmap items, bits that you think you do better than your plugin rivals out there.
• 22:46
  Lesley Sim: My rivals. Yeah. So I guess talking about rivals, I call us a competitor to the events calendar and modern events calendar, sugar calendar. So all of those, like I said, at the start, we've got, you know, dozens, if not hundreds of competitors. And I think that the thing that we... The unfair thing that we do is that we started in 2026. So a lot of these plugins started, you know, more than 10 years ago now. And so they feel like a plugin that was built in, you know, 2015.
• 23:24
  Nathan Wrigley: Right. And so if you think about the things that you, the type of software that you're using in 2015, if you think about what Facebook looked like in 2015 versus now, it's a huge difference.
• 23:36
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
• 23:37
  Lesley Sim: And so most of those plugins still look like that. And ours doesn't. So ours feels like it's built in 2026 with all the other software that you use every single day that is also just as modern.
• 23:51
  Lesley Sim: So I think that's kind of...
• 23:52
  Nathan Wrigley: So when you say that, are you merely describing the UI and the UX or is it the technology that sits behind it? Is there some layer of technology, I don't know, React or something like that, that maybe is more...
• 24:04
  Lesley Sim: I mean, we are using React, but I feel like that's not as important as just when you log in, you're like... This feels like it was built this year.
• 24:15
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there's a lot of that in the WordPress space, isn't there? You really outdated UIs and platforms that they simply don't wish to change it because, well, if it's not broken, don't try and fix it.
• 24:36
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, it would probably be like a one or two year project to change the UI of one of these plugins at this point. So how did you decide upon the UI and the UX that you've got? Are you kind of like, get the pad of paper out and draw it a thousand different ways? Or did you build it a thousand different ways and then decide that's the superior way? Or how did it land where it is now?
• 24:59
  Lesley Sim: Um, I think... I think... Well, I had some ideas of how I wanted it to look. How do I explain this? Software in 2026 looks a certain way. It really does, yeah.
• 25:18
  Lesley Sim: If you use linear or even clawed and stuff, it's clean in a certain way, it's toned down but utilitarian and stuff like that. So, I think that's kind of the feel that we wanted to give it. And that's very much my own sensibility, I think, as well.
• 25:43
  Lesley Sim: For me, I like things to be very utilitarian. Yeah. And the beauty is in the...
• 25:57
  Lesley Sim: And so I kind of focus a lot on that. So we use ShadCN, I think that's how you pronounce it, as like the components framework. And so everything's kind of built off of that. Obviously, we've kind of deviated over time as we've built our own things, but that's kind of the foundation.
• 26:19
  Lesley Sim: Yeah, and I think, and I like to think like kind of, it's not just like, how the buttons look, like it's not just that, but it's also how you use the product. So, like, for example, the things that a new user wants to do with the product, right, like, add a new event. Mm-hmm.
• 26:46
  Lesley Sim: How do you make those things as easy and straightforward as possible versus what an advanced user who wants to use our product does? And then how do we give them those settings and make that as complex as they would want them to be, but also not have that show up and overwhelm a new user? And balancing all of those things and the new users, things have to be as few clicks as possible with very clear descriptions so that they don't get lost. Whereas the advanced users, sometimes even more clicks makes them happier because then they can do more things and it's more complex and they're willing to read the documentation and they're willing to get in touch if something doesn't make sense.
• 27:39
  Lesley Sim: And so kind of going all out for those users as well.
• 27:45
  Lesley Sim: Yeah, so I think like that's kind of the stuff that, that's kind of the way that I approach building the product and one thing that I'm also, sorry, now we've like completely gone off course, but I really enjoyed it. I've got a load of follow up questions from what you've said, so keep going and then I'll blow into them, yeah.
• 28:04
  Lesley Sim: So like one other thing which I think we do well, which I want to say PyCalendar does this really well as well, which is we build in flexibility. So like our power comes from flexibility, it doesn't come from more features. So what I mean by that is, for example, one feature that we recently built that I'm really proud of, which explains this principle really well, is our custom taxonomies feature.
• 28:36
  Lesley Sim: And so the events calendar, they built. They have like a hard-coded venues and organizers feature, which lets you add reusable venues and reusable organizers for your events, which is very helpful, right? So if you own a building and you have five meeting rooms and you'll only ever have those five meeting rooms as your venues, then you obviously want them to be reusable, right?
• 29:05
  Lesley Sim: So you can just click on meeting room one, meeting room two, and so forth. How they built it is as custom post types, and it's all hard-coded, so you have, you know, whatever the address one, address two, you know, country, city, post code, something like that, right? Full stop. And same goes with organizers. They've got, you know, some, I can't remember the exact details, but it's probably something like name, you know, image, URL to the person's website, something like that.
• 29:36
  Lesley Sim: Yeah, yeah. Whereas, but I never liked that because it's... A very kind of, here's a whole bunch of features that we think that you want, right? Yes.
• 29:51
  Lesley Sim: But in WordPress, the one thing that we can guarantee is that nobody ever wants the same thing. Nobody has the same setup. And if we think that we've got 10 different use cases, we've probably got a thousand, right? That's like pretty much the only thing that you can guarantee in the WordPress world. And so why are we building such hard-coded features
• 30:13
  Lesley Sim: when we can already guarantee that those are not going to be the only features people want, right? So instead of building it that way, which, by the way, was a very highly requested feature from people coming over from the events calendar to us. They all wanted this feature because that's kind of how they're used to building their events already. But I didn't want to build that because, like I said, it's like really hard-coded and not flexible. So instead, how I lean is more towards giving power to users by giving them flexibility. So we Build custom taxonomies. With custom taxonomies, it works like custom fields. If you're familiar with custom fields, advanced custom fields, ACF, pods, that kind of stuff, that's fields. Taxonomies work similarly. It's like categories.
• 31:09
  Lesley Sim: So now you can build your venue and your organizers and your whatever as a taxonomy. And you can decide what goes into it because I haven't dictated that your venue is only going to have address and postcode and country. Because your venue, you might want to know whether there's bathrooms, how many bathrooms. Okay, so you have a venue as a parent item and then you have some children, which is room A, room B, room C.
• 31:42
  Lesley Sim: Yeah. And like I said, so now you can add anything that you want into your venue.
• 31:48
  Lesley Sim: Or you can have like a genre taxonomy. Okay, it doesn't even need to be a venue, does it? It could be anything. Yeah,
• 31:56
  Lesley Sim: You know, it could be if you are a restaurant and you want to have, you know, this one has alcohol, this event has alcohol, this event doesn't have alcohol, this one is trivia night, blah, blah, blah. So now you can build any taxonomy that you can think of and you can have any fields in your taxonomy that you can think of and it's much more flexible. It gives you the exact same thing, the outcome is the same, right?
• 32:22
  Lesley Sim: So you still have the reusable venues, you still have the reusable organizers, but now I haven't dictated anything and you have complete flexibility as to what you need to go inside. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so like a beginner user would never ever use this, right? They don't even know what a taxonomy means. But an advanced user would, if they had come from the events calendar, they would probably have already, you know.
• 32:49
  Lesley Sim: Spent hours developing their own kind of add-on to the events calendar to kind of morph it to what they need it to be but with us they can just build it straight from our plugin and it's you know much cleaner and works even better than how they were doing it with the events calendar for example.
• 33:10
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah this is really interesting I have so many questions the first one is so was this your are you driven by your own intuitions on this in other words for that feature the taxonomy feature it was it like it popped into your head one day and you thought oh that'd be great I've seen it somewhere else let's do that or do you get driven more by people coming to you your existing customers and saying there's a thing over on this one and it would be nice to have that so where does where does the intuition come from how do you filter out the the the good ideas.
• 33:40
  Nathan Wrigley: ideas the nice to have from the oh that's nice enough to have that we're actually going to build it so there was a lot in there sorry.
• 33:46
  Lesley Sim: No, that's a great question. So I think it's a bit of everything. So the first thing is, you have to have basic feature parity with your competitors. People are just going to say, right, I can't use you because you're missing features. So that's the first thing. And then obviously, that comes hand in hand with customers saying, can you build this because I need this. But then I think that the part that is firmly in my territory is how I decide to build these features.
• 34:16
  Lesley Sim: So, for example, whether I like it or not, you know, customers want that reusable venues feature. And then it's up to me to decide how I want to build that. So that's kind of how I look at it.
• 34:30
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And how good are you at saying no to things? And what I mean by that is, I remember that, you know, everybody said this phrase, Steve Jobs was always describing how in Apple products, it was more about... It's not saying what you didn't want in the product as opposed to what was in it and you only had to look back in the day when the iPhone came along and there were rival kind of nascent phone brands like Microsoft had a thing and it was just this really messy interface with every single possible feature in there including all the options for IMAP and the iPhone came along it's like no there's just these basic settings it'll do that but it's beautiful it's just beautiful and it'll do a subset of things but it's really
• 35:14
  Nathan Wrigley: really beautiful because they left alone out do you have to say no to yourself a lot because I can imagine in a plug-in like yours the feature creep would be real if you let it get away from yourself you could ah but they're doing this and they're doing that and they came up with this and they came up with that and yeah just wondering how much no do you need to say to yourself.
• 35:38
  Lesley Sim: I think that's hard so I think software that has been around for a long time becomes bloated because of this like so I think that's it You serve your first big pool of customers, and then when you go to the second pool of customers, then they have more specific and advanced features, because you've already saturated the biggest main pool of customers, and then after five, six, seven, eight years in, you've gone now to your third, more tertiary pool of customers, and they want even nichier features now.
• 36:11
  Lesley Sim: And so, I feel like in some ways, you don't really have a choice. And that's also why incumbents will always get, I guess, beaten by new startups, just because the new startup will come and they say, oh, look, we are cleaner now, right?
• 36:31
  Nathan Wrigley: Right.
• 36:31
  Lesley Sim: And that always works. And that's something that we talk about as well in, for our plugin marketing, right? We say that we're not as bloated as the old people, but I feel like the reality is if we're... around for 10 years then we will necessarily be as bloated because you know same thing right like once we've gotten a hundred thousand customers then the next 10,000 customers are going to want more niche features right okay if they didn't want it they would have bought it already right they would already be in the first hundred thousand pool of customers right okay that's really interesting so the calculus then is about growth if growth is the metric of success then features creep in whether you like it or not.
• 37:13
  Nathan Wrigley: I'm just looking on my wrist and I have a watch and it's a watch I don't need my watch to be better next week than it is today I need my watch to tell the time and that's the set of features that I need and I need the hands to go around and so long as it reliably does that I'm fine.
• 37:31
  Nathan Wrigley: I guess the company that sold me the watch will only sell so many watches of that kind in a year, and if they want to sell more watches, they'll have to add extra cogs and throw a digital display on there and have a battery in it and lights and all of this kind of stuff. But that's such a difficult decision to make, isn't it? You know, are we building for the 100,000 users that we've got at the minute and we want them every single year to keep coming back, knowing that churn's a thing, knowing that there'll be new startups coming along, or do we want to keep iterating and adding new features?
• 38:03
  Nathan Wrigley: I've dropped so many platforms in, not just, not really in the WordPress space, actually, you know, things like note taking apps and things like that, because something comes along and I just get, oh, oh, shiny, but usually shiny and less. Yes, it's very often that less is more because this became bloated and I now no longer know where things are. Boy, that is a... That's an impossible circle to square, isn't it? That's, you know, you'll never get to the bottom of that one. But anyway, sorry. So, that was your feature set. Tell us about some, you know, other parts of it, apart from the taxonomy, which you're obviously proud of. Tell us what else it does and, you know, other bits that you think, oh, that's curious. Happy that we built it that way.
• 38:51
  Lesley Sim: I guess, I mean, the taxonomy thing is, like, front of mind, because that's something that we spend a lot of time on. And I think it's, like, a differentiator for us, because I don't think any other plugin has built it this way.
• 39:06
  Lesley Sim: I think the other big thing that I'm really proud of, which is kind of, if you would believe it, harder to explain than the taxonomy thing, is our
• 39:20
  Lesley Sim: I guess you could call it dynamic tags, shortcodes, meta keys thing.
• 39:25
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Oh, is this a way on the front end to show exactly what you want to show? Okay, right, right. So every other plugin, at least, I mean, they should get in touch with me and scold me if I'm wrong.
• 39:39
  Lesley Sim: But I believe the event plugins that I have checked out, most of them have very rigid ways of displaying data. So, you know, if I've built, or if I want to show the time and date of my event,
• 39:59
  Lesley Sim: most plugins, maybe they have a shortcode, maybe they have a widget that they've built, and that's about it.
• 40:07
  Lesley Sim: But for us, we have now, I think, 45 or 50 different pieces of data that you can show. So... With shortcodes, dynamic tags, meta-keys. So you can really plant it anywhere you want and format it however you want.
• 40:25
  Lesley Sim: So if for example you want to split up your time and date, if you want to split up your day, your month, your year, if you want to put your time zone somewhere different, you can do all of that. So imagine you have like a query loop. We also have our own query loop block and you want to create an events list and you want to design the hell out of your events list.
• 40:51
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
• 40:52
  Lesley Sim: You can do that with us. You can't do that with any of the other events plugins. So you've atomized all the bits. So let's say for example in, I don't know, you might say date, bold that, put a colon and then it'll have the date, but you insert there, your variation of how you want the date to look. And you know, you're in the UK, so you want it to look like that and you're in France, so you want it to look like that and what have you. But then that goes. It goes to all the other fields as well. There's multiple permutations for each of the different things that you wish to display. And because it's done in that way, as opposed to one short code for all the things, you can, in the query loop, just build it up and obviously that query loop will replicate itself over and over again, but you can make it kind of basically how you want, which I guess, actually, now that I think about it, dates and times is a quirky one.
• 41:43
  Lesley Sim: Just about every nation does it differently. You know, the day comes before the number, or the number becomes before the day, or there's a comma randomly inserted in a time or, you know, a colon there. Do you know what I mean? Oh, that's great. That's really neat. So you're very pleased with that. Yeah, I think, I think that's also something that, like I said, I don't think any other plugin has done that. And we've done that, but we've done it across multiple different ways, right? So it's not...
• 42:12
  Lesley Sim: Yeah. Just a meta key or attribute or whatever you want to call it in the block editor, but you can also insert it as a shortcode. Or if you're using a page builder, you can also insert it as a dynamic tag in your page builder.
• 42:25
  Lesley Sim: And the same goes for all of our custom fields and custom taxonomy.
• 42:29
  Lesley Sim: So if you've created a custom field for yourself, you can also insert those bits of data however you want.
• 42:37
  Lesley Sim: Nice. I remember, it's probably going back a few months ago now. I think you enabled being able to pay for events. Was that a thing that happened at some point?
• 42:50
  Nathan Wrigley: Maybe six months ago, something like that. That's quite a new feature. I'm just wondering if there's other features in there. You know, we were talking about not adding new features.
• 42:59
  Lesley Sim: Yeah.
• 43:00
  Nathan Wrigley: Tell us about the roadmap of new features that you're going to be adding in the days and weeks to come that you are going to have to work really hard not to clutter the interface of.
• 43:11
  Lesley Sim: I think the biggest new feature that we are planning to add is Front-end fields. So what I mean by that is, again, with the flexibility thing, right? So I don't know what you want to collect from customers when they buy a ticket from you. So you might want to, because right now our checkout is very basic. It's, you know, like name, email, and I think that's about it. And then it goes to Stripe or goes to WooCommerce or whatever it is that you've chosen to set up.
• 43:46
  Lesley Sim: But like, maybe you might want to collect an image or something, right? You want to collect like an indemnity form or something as part of your event. Or maybe you want to have someone tell you the name of their dog because it's a, you know, dog party or something and you want to pay any cards for your dog or something. Got it. Yeah.
• 44:11
  Lesley Sim: Yeah. Yeah. And right now we don't have any way to do that. So, and it's, it's a feature that has been requested, but I still don't know how I want to build it. So I need to figure out how I want to build it. Which is why we haven't built it yet. Because, again, I don't want to build something that's hard-coded and feels kind of heavy. I want to build something that's flexible, that lets people do whatever they want. So it's powerful in that way and not powerful in, like, here are 5,000 heavy features that we've hard-coded into the plugin for you.
• 44:47
  Nathan Wrigley: You've got to really worry about conversions, haven't you? If you give people the capacity to ask 7,000 different questions, I think inexperienced website owners who, you know, just assume that the more information you can get out of the customers, the better, will probably learn at their cost that actually for every question that you add, you halve the number of people that get through the sort of checkout process. Yeah, that's a difficult circle to square, but also you want that interface to be really adaptable. So, I don't know, maybe there's going to be sliders or really nice ways of incrementing numbers up and down on date pickers and all of that kind of stuff. And you want that to be as...
• 45:25
  Nathan Wrigley: It's as beautifully simple as possible. Yeah, come to think about it, I use, I probably, I don't know, on a weekly basis, I probably do some event once a week, something like that, and I often book it. And it usually is just a date. Sorry, you know, I pick the date off a date picker, and then it's usually an email and a name. And if I've got an account with that company, like Eventbrite or something like that, I'm already logged in, so I don't even need to think about that. Yeah, that's an interesting one. Yeah, good luck.
• 45:55
  Lesley Sim: So that's where you're going to be concentrating your efforts in the near future. Anyway, I think that'll be the next big, like, big feature that at least I'll be excited about. Hmm. Yeah, okay. Well, there we go. I think probably we're about at the 45 minute mark, something like that. Should we, should we knock it on the head there? That's been a really wide ranging conversation, hasn't it? That went off in all sorts of different directions, but we did manage to get them.
• 46:21
  Nathan Wrigley: The good stuff out of you I think as well in terms of the product. If you want to find out more about EventKoi, I nearly said the name of one of your rivals. If you want to find the EventKoi plugin or you indeed Leslie, where do we go? Where's the best places to go? Obviously the website, but social networks, that kind of thing.
• 46:44
  Lesley Sim: The website is EventKoi.com, E-V-E-N-T-K-O-I.com. Koi is carp, I think.
• 46:54
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I'm going to stop you right there. I hadn't even thought about that. Why? So, okay, it basically means event fish, right? Yes, yeah. Why? Why event fish?
• 47:11
  Lesley Sim: I really wanted... A URL that was clean. And as you can imagine, everything that can be appended to the word event has already been appended to the word event.
• 47:26
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so go for Koi.
• 47:27
  Lesley Sim: Yeah, so K-O-I, it's just three letters and I get the .com and it's clean.
• 47:34
  Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what's really interesting about that? The first time I saw that product, I saw it with the imagery attached to it. So I didn't see it as a, like, you know, a piece of text. First time I collided with your product was probably on the homepage and I saw the fish and I knew, you know, the Koi. And obviously it's a fairly, it's a beautiful creature, isn't it?
• 48:00
  Lesley Sim: Yeah. You know, it's actually pretty cool to look at. You could stare at that thing for hours.
• 48:04
  Nathan Wrigley: And there was no bit of me, there wasn't one bit of me which went, that's weird, event fish. I just thought, that sounds good. It just sounded like a . . . And it only just occurred to me now that it was EventFish. Hey, I mean, if Beaver Builder is Beaver Builder, I don't see why I can't be EventFish.
• 48:25
  Lesley Sim: You can have EventKoi. That's absolutely right. So EventKoi is the website. We've got that now.
• 48:30
  Nathan Wrigley: What about you personally? Where do we collide with you?
• 48:35
  Lesley Sim: I am on X quite a bit. Twitter at Leslie, L-E-S-L-E-Y underscore pizza, P-I-Z-Z.
• 48:45
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah.
• 48:46
  Lesley Sim: Yeah. So you can find me over there.
• 48:49
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
• 48:50
  Lesley Sim: Yeah, I think that's about it.
• 48:52
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, that'll do. That'll do. In which case, the very best of luck, I hope you managed to get those features shipped if indeed that's what you want to do. Go and check it out. All the links in the show notes. You know, I'll put all the different places for products old and new and features and blog posts that I can find that are related on the WP Builds website on this. So if you go and search for Leslie Sim.
• 49:16
  Nathan Wrigley: In our search facility at the top, you'll be able to find this podcast episode. Leslie, thank you very much for chatting to me today. I appreciate you being able to adapt some of the vagaries of my questions. That was great. Thank you.
• 49:30
  Lesley Sim: Thanks for having me. Nice to catch up.