How Lift is taking WordPress to the Emmy’s

Lift is a WordPress-powered product, design and consultancy business. I’ve been following Chris Wallace, a Partner at Lift, for a long time. I’ve always known they do a lot of work for television and other interactive media, and this morning I discovered they were nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Interactive Program. The nomination is for their recent work on AMC’s The Walking Dead StorySync® app.

And it’s WordPress powered. How awesome is that?

So, I was curious to learn more about the app, and I also wanted to discover more about Lift and their business. They do a wide variety of work, and I love to see how people manage that. I emailed Chris and asked him a few questions:

How did your relationship with television networks start?

We actually got our start through a friend who was working for AMC in 2011. He asked us to bid on a major redesign project and even flew down from New York to visit our office. We ended up losing that project, but they asked us to do a smaller project, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because the larger redesign was very complex and likely would’ve been more than we could handle at the time (we were a very small team at the time).

Eventually, after completing a few projects with AMC, they asked us if we would be interested in building their very first Sync app. Even though we weren’t quite sure how we’d pull it off, we jumped at the opportunity. As a result, we produced WE tv SYNC®, which allowed us to then move on to other apps like The Walking Dead StorySync® and Breaking Bad StorySync®.

What’s the most rewarding part of your work at Lift?

I think the best part is the fact that we’re able to help virtually connect millions of people with the television shows they love as well as other mega-fans of shows with cult followings. Part of going to work at Lift means loving film and television and getting to help shape the experience of how viewers engage with their favorite shows and that’s a lot of fun.

How do you balance your client and product work?

That’s always a tough question. The demand on our time by clients makes it very difficult to spend the proper amount of time on products that they (and customers) truly deserve. When planning projects, we try to keep schedules predictable and allow extra time in the week to work on products instead of being 100% dedicated to client work, but we do have some employees that are essentially 100% dedicated to certain clients for long periods of time, which allows us to free up other team members to dedicate time to products. For lack of a better analogy, it’s sort of like robbing Peter to pay Paul, except we’re not actually robbing anybody.

In the atmosphere you’re doing client services, how do you frame and promote WordPress as a platform?

Generally, clients almost always approach us because of our experience with WordPress, so that helps frame the conversation. Companies are starting to realize the power, cost-effectiveness and security of WordPress as a platform and that’s something we’re super stoked about. For companies that don’t generally understand WordPress or perhaps fear it, we show them what we’ve done with it and they generally start feeling a lot better about it.

Did you have to convince AMC to do the Walking Dead StorySync® to be powered by WordPress? How’d you go about that, if so?

They actually asked us to build it on WordPress, so we were definitely interested in that approach since we are extremely familiar with WordPress and its architecture and scalability. Scalability was really the primary concern and with a few caching systems in place, that concern was tabled very early in the development process. AMC had already been moving sites over to WordPress before we started working with them and their Sync product was a part of that overall strategy from the very start.

What’s the next big hit you guys are working on at Lift?

We’re actually working on a tool to scratch our own itch as well as the itch of a lot of developers. We’re currently building a WordPress plugin called IssuePress that allows software builders to offer public support for private Github repositories. The goal is to bridge the gap between third-party customer support tools and the ultimate place developers get things done—Github.

Rather than logging into Another Third-Party Hosted Customer Service App, developers can simply install IssuePress on their WordPress website and begin offering support for their Github-hosted projects to customers immediately! The best part is, the developer never even needs to log into IssuePress. Simply continue working on Issues in Github and responses will be automagically synced to IssuePress. I’m actually really excited to share this tool with the world because I think it’s a better way forward for supporting software. Developers wanting to sign up for the upcoming closed beta can do so here.

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I’d like to thank Chris for getting these answers to me so quickly so I can share them with you all. If you’ve never done so, definitely check out Lift’s website, check out their products and subscribe to their blog. They’re always up to fun stuff.