Marketing a WordPress Product Live: Session 22

Transcript ↓

In this episode, Michelle Frechette and Corey Maass engage in a detailed discussion about their latest WordPress plugin development and marketing strategies. They introduce a new plugin designed to take website screenshots and save them to the media library, emphasizing its user-friendly features and accessibility standards. The conversation shifts to marketing plans for Black Friday, reflecting on past sales and contemplating pricing adjustments to create urgency and exclusivity. They also discuss the importance of email campaigns, social media content, and community feedback. The episode blends technical insights with strategic planning, highlighting their collaborative and thoughtful approach to product development and marketing.

Top Takeaways:

• Black Friday Co-Marketing Plan: The IPAWP initiative is gearing up for a Black Friday co-marketing campaign where participants will be paired to promote each other’s products. This involves visiting their partner’s website, checking for Black Friday deals, and sharing it via social media, with an easy and light effort on the participants’ part.
• Engaging and Humorous Marketing Approach: Michelle and Corey are using lighthearted, humorous content in their marketing for OMGIMG, including showcasing a personal photo of Corey with a playful caption about “embarrassing photos” and tying it to the product’s purpose. This approach not only captures attention but also makes the marketing relatable and fun for potential users.
• Open Feedback Loop for OMGIMG: The team is actively seeking feedback from users about the product and its homepage. They are open to ideas and suggestions, highlighting their commitment to continuous improvement and ensuring OMGIMG meets user needs and expectations. This openness encourages user involvement and helps shape the platform’s development.
  
• Progress on IPAWP’s First Version: A developer is working on the first version of the IPAWP co-marketing tool. It will allow businesses to be paired randomly for co-marketing tasks, with the team overseeing pairings to ensure compatibility. The tool will also help track whether participants have completed their marketing assignments.

Mentioned In The Show:

• Admin Menu Editor Pro
• TypingMind
• Claud.ai
• Katie Keith
• Alex Standiford
• Underrepresented in Tech
• Samah Nasr
• Stellar WP
• Dense Discovery
• James Lau

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:

• Corey Maass
• Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status  podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 📝

Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

Transcript:

Corey Maass 00:00:01  Whatevs. Yo.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:03  Whatevs.

Corey Maass 00:00:04  Whatevs. 

Michelle Frechette 00:00:07 Yeah. Let me just pull this link and we can put it out on all the socials really quickly. Really quickly. Let’s see.

Corey Maass 00:00:18  Live, live right now. 

Michelle Frechette 00:00:20  We’re doing it live. That’s right. Oh let’s see I can just copy this one from before. Change out the change out the link. Join us now live. Okay.  Next

Corey Maass 00:00:38  OMGIMG.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:46  Right? Okay I’m just going to say post publish publish. Okay and I’ll put it in Slack. And let’s see. Join me and Corey for marketing.

Corey Maass 00:01:11  Marketing. This week on OMG at Post Status. Marketing. 

Michelle Frechette 00:01:21  Yeah we need a. We need a theme song for sure. Okay, let me see.

Corey Maass 00:01:28  If only there were tools where computers could take a prompt and generate. Speaking of, Yeah, I have a whole new plugin, so I’m. So I’m there to, like, little plugins that I’ve wanted. I’m totally derailing this call right away.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:49  I’ve never done that before.

Corey Maass 00:01:51  I, I think I told you a few weeks ago, I think off camera, there’s I’ve always wanted a plug in. So there’s all these great plug ins for manipulating the admin menu in WordPress, like admin Menu Editor Pro, which I have bought for clients and stuff like that. And and the free version lets you manipulate the menu, and the pro version lets you manipulate the menu depending on user roles and stuff like that. The problem is, is it. It takes it’s a I like the permanency of it. So for like clients, I like making it so that they can’t see plugins depending on their role. Well, that’s that’s not right. That’s not a good example. Because like, depending on their role, they wouldn’t see plugins. Right. But like admin admin menu, like I create these big custom layouts so that but like menu items end up being repeated and all those places, blah blah blah. Anyway, point is, is, and then I have users where I want I don’t want them to see certain things, but I want them to still have access to them or even me, like 90% of the time when I sign into most of my websites, I need to see not posts, I need to see pages, you know, and and users or like whatever, 1 or 2 things.

Corey Maass 00:03:20  But I obviously need access to plugins and stuff like that. So I had messaged the creator of Admin, whatever. I said, Menu Editor Pro and said like, how about an option where it like shows hides like just keyboard combination. Because I’m a big I’m a deep nerd, right? So I use Alfred to to launch all of my apps through keyboard shortcuts type of thing. and so I tried to use AI three, four weeks ago and got most of the way of letting it write a plug in for me that just, here’s here’s all the menu items. Let me in a little admin screen. Let me select which ones I should see or not see, depending. And then and then a key command like just hit option and suddenly you see them kind of thing. And I’ve been, I’ve actually now installed that on like three clients websites in my own even, because again, I’m like most of the time I don’t want to see plugins appearance. Seems like I don’t have to scan through. 

Michelle Frechette: Yeah.It’s a lot. 

Corey Maass 00:04:30  But but let me hit one key and it’s like, there they all are. Now I can hit plugins if I need them. But I’ve been it’s, it’s a cool little tool for me, but I think I could release it. but a minute ago there were 600 pending plugins in the repo, but now there are none. Like it went all over Twitter that, like the plug in review team have hit zero, which is an unbelievable well done. 

Michelle Frechette: Yeah awesome. 

Corey Maass: Well done plug in review team. Holy crap. And then, I’ve also been sitting on the domain Screenshot dot Express for a year or two years now, and originally I had actually built this like fancy API, on AWS that would take a screenshot and then OMG came along and we just and I realized we could just do it in the browser. And so I just abandoned it. It’s over there. I don’t know if there’s actually anything even there. Let’s see if there is Screenshots dot express there is quick and easy website screenshots, blah blah blah.

Corey Maass 00:05:43  But there’s not. It doesn’t. It doesn’t actually work anymore. I think I ripped it all offline. but so for a while now I’ve been thinking about since I have the domain and it. I wound up building the functionality of taking screenshots of your own website into OMG, so that you could build an OG image that has a screenshot of the page that it is the open graph image for. 

Michelle Frechette: Okay.

Corey Maass: So right you write a blog post, take a picture of that blog post, stick it in your open graph image with Corey’s smiling face next to it. And that could be your open graph image that actually shows the content that you’re about to see, right? Since I already built all that, I was like, I’ve long wanted a simple plugin that would take screenshots and just save them to the media library. And I could do this as a free way to get. And then we’ll put a banner in there that says, by the way, if you want more sophisticated image editing, go check out OMG because I’ve been looking at looking for ways to have a free plugin in the repo without actually putting some version of OMG in there, right? So this is the meandering way of saying that I finally sat down with this time I opened.

Corey Maass 00:07:03  So I use a client called TypingMind that is an AI client and I usually use Claud, but for whatever reason when I opened it this time ChatGPT-4o was open and we have been working together to build a plugin and in and, and people have asked me about this. And so I guess this is part of why I’m talking about it. But it wasn’t one big prompt, but I was like, first prompt was write a WordPress plugin that adds a new submenu page to under media. Done called screenshots. Done. Okay, now add some form fields. It it updated the code And as we iterated over it, I walked it through writing all the code for how to plug in a URL, but it wrote all the code for like, you know, when you’re in the classic editor and you’re adding a link and you start typing a URL that exists on your site, it’ll auto populate. So it wrote all of that. And then anyway, so we walked through the code, and so now we have this little plugin that you select your URL on your website, width and height or width and aspect ratio.

Corey Maass 00:08:23  And it’ll generate and it’ll take a screenshot. And then you can say either download or save to your media library. 

Michelle Frechette: Wow. 

Corey Maass: With the name, the title of the page. So if it’s, you know, the home page of MichelleAmes.Com is how awesome is Michelle that it now saves the alt text, the description and the caption as screenshot of quotes. How often how awesome is Michelle? So all wonderfully, as accessible as we can make it and save to the media library. And then you can do whatever, whatever you want with it.

Michelle Frechette 00:09:02  You know, my question was going to be the alt text, and you already solved that part, so that’s awesome.

Corey Maass 00:09:07  And so it’s, you know, I basically I give it a prompt, I go do something else. It thinks about what it wants to do, writes all the code. I come back, I copy paste, I go into the browser, I hit refresh, it works or doesn’t, I do a little debugging. I go back and I say thanks.

Corey Maass 00:09:24  Here are the bugs I found and it starts and it and it updates it. And then and then the next step which, which I haven’t tweeted about is the plugin checker plugin was recently released and everybody’s saying, okay, you need to run that. So I said, okay, well let me run it and see what errors it comes back with. And then I dropped those into chat and said, okay, here are all the errors that you need to update. Whether I agree with them or not. Some of them. But what? It’s code, right? It’s code doing its best to read code. And so it’s been muddling through those and like we’re working together so it’s not, it’s not like a I didn’t write four pages of prompts and then it spat out perfection. But I didn’t have to go figure out the regex to, like, clean up a page name. I didn’t have to, you know, figure out which jQuery libraries WordPress already has installed for doing the auto select drop down when you’re adding a URL.

Corey Maass 00:10:27  I didn’t have to like go write the admin endpoint or the Ajax endpoint so that blah blah blah blah. So it was like working with somebody else. And I just kept kind of like testing and prompting and testing and prompting. 

Michelle Frechette: That’s wild. 

Corey Maass: And that’s why I have a plugin that is, currently two errors away from being compliant with the why they call it PCP plugin checker plugin. Like I know why they did, but come on people.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:58  They could of just called it Angel.

Corey Maass 00:10:59 Right? Or like if nothing else, there are a thousand other things. Not even like a drug reference called PCP, right? No primary care physician like. So one little thing that I wanted to catch you up on there is like, we potentially. I’ll send it over to you, give it a try. And we’ll see if we can get that in the repo. And there’s only I think there’s only one other plugin that does screenshots and.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:30  Oh that’s cool then.

Corey Maass 00:11:32  You know, it’s just again, tech as marketing or.

Corey Maass 00:11:37  Yeah. And then we have something that says OMG in the plugin repo and it’ll be free, and it can be free forever. And if for some reason we want to do a pro version down the road, we can.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:49  Yeah. Oh, that’s very cool.

Corey Maass 00:11:49  Now at least we have something free. We’ll have something free in the plugin directory.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:54  That’s very cool. I love that. The more the merrier. The the there.

Corey Maass 00:12:00  I taught her 12 minutes about nothing on the agenda.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:04  Speaking of the agenda, shall we. Shall we take a look at what we have on there? 

Corey Maass: Do it. 

Michelle Frechette: Let’s see. I gotta get back to our our chat here. I was I was posting other things. Black Friday plans. What are our Black Friday plans?

Corey Maass 00:12:18  These are not necessarily in order. So we don’t have to start with that one. But we can start with that.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:23  I figure that’s the easy one really.

Corey Maass 00:12:26  Okay, so last year we had a sale. Last year was actually our launch.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:35  Right.

Corey Maass 00:12:36  And I think we did 50% off.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:43  So I was looking at our pricing. Let me just pull it up again. And I think we need to change some of our pricing. 

Corey Maass: Okay. 

Michelle Frechette: I think that our lifetime is way too generous. 100 site licenses for life for $699. Seems very very generous. We went from ten at $299 to 100 at $689.

Corey Maass 00:13:21  But with limited support.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:23  Well yeah. So that’s true. And it just felt like it just felt really, really, I don’t know, generous I guess that’s right. I mean, if you’re happy with it, I’m happy with it. I’m not gonna I’m just wondering, you know.

Corey Maass 00:13:37  This is a discussion, not a decision or rebuttal or no.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:42  I was just wondering behind the thought process behind that and if it should be tweaked. And maybe this is the last time we offer it like that, and then we cut it back, you know, to 50 for the same price next year. So that if we, if we if we put it 50% off the lifetime deal, then they’re getting 100, whereas next year it’ll be the same price for 50 of them or something like that.

Corey Maass 00:14:07  Sure. I mean, we don’t. Since Black Friday we haven’t sold a limited lifetime. I’m, I’m saying that and then I’m going and looking at our sales reports to make sure that’s true. but I’m quite sure that that’s true.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:29  Yeah.

Corey Maass 00:14:38  That is true. December. Last December. Yeah. Okay. So last December somebody bought. So we were offering 50% off. So last December somebody bought the the lifetime. Before the end of the window.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:58  Is it 50% last year. Did we do 50% off all the plans or just the lifetime deal?

Corey Maass 00:15:04  Nope. All of them. 

Michelle Frechette 00:15:04  All the plans okay. Is that what we want to do again?

Corey Maass 00:15:09  That’s that’s how I feel?

Michelle Frechette 00:15:12  I’m fine with it. I’m just curious if that’s what you were thinking of. 

Corey Maass 00:15:15  Sure. That’s what I, that’s that’s what my initial reaction says. Or we could reduce it a little 40% in the next year. It’ll be 30% like as we go up in value.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:29  Eventually it’ll be nothing. 1%.

Corey Maass 00:15:34  Now you owe us more.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:36  So what if we did 50% off and then with a notification that our lifetime deal is going to be reduced to 5o site licenses at the end of the year. And see what happens there. It’s worth a shot, right? So basically this is your last chance to get a lifetime deal that covers 100 licenses at 50% off or at all, really. But that was 50% off.

Corey Maass 00:16:07  Which is pretty big. Yeah. And I, I still like I’m looking at our pricing page too, I haven’t really looked at it a while. The, the basic is we said two site licenses so that you could share with a friend. Agency jumps it to ten, three times the price, ten times the number of sites. And I think that’s why we then went &699 for 100 sites, which was not exactly three times the price, but conceptually, 2 to 6, and then and then 100 site licenses. So same, same idea, but yet dropping it to 50. We lose. We lose that beautiful symmetry of it.

Corey Maass 00:16:57  But, no, I, I absolutely follow, I mean, I could even see it being lower, but because it’s lifetime, you you always get updates. You just don’t always get support. So we could in theory I could see it like 20 site licenses instead of ten. But you get updates forever.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:22  What about also offering a support plan in addition to that for those 50 licenses? So if they, if they want it like so what we could do. All right. What about this? What if we did, the $699 for 100 for now? Right. But if we half off that, and then we could also offer, like a, I don’t know, $100 a year or whatever price you think, support plan if they want to pair it with that.

Corey Maass 00:17:54  Yeah, I like it. Yeah. And I it’s I’ve been thinking about that recently because I’ve been seeing more of this limited lifetime, like different people call it different things, but some version of lifetime, but so that you’re not you’re not on the hook for it forever.

Corey Maass 00:18:12  Like you just automatically get updates. And then that way, technically I’m not losing time as money in the future. But I that popped into my head recently where I was like, but I don’t on a lot of these websites, I don’t see an option to buy an additional buy additional support at some lower tier or lower price point.

Michelle Frechette 00:18:36  Or even after that year, they can buy it on a like, I don’t know, a one time deal kind of thing. Like I need support today. Here’s 40 bucks or whatever.

Corey Maass 00:18:46  Yeah, I like that. It has never come up. I wonder if it has come up for other people like you. Presume that it has and or. I mean, my instinct. Don’t tell anybody. sSnce this is a private conversation. But I, like somebody tweeted recently, do you, you know, even if it’s after the night, if you offer a 90 day refund and it’s after the 90 days, do you give them their money back? And I wrote back like, yes, period.

Corey Maass 00:19:16  That was the tweet. And and they were like, thanks for your input. Which I mean, I think was they didn’t give a they didn’t actually care. They just wanted my engagement. But I felt compelled to explain more. I was like, it’s never worth the hassle. Like it’s never worth the risk. And frankly, it’s not worth thinking like this tweet is not worth thinking about. Like just I mean, if it was ten years ago, right? Or if it’s a $5,000 product and you’re, you know, and, and and that payment is going to make you lose a mortgage payment like then. No, but if it’s a $100 product, you know, and it’s within a reasonable amount of time, just give them their money back. And, and the only thing I do I pushed back on your like your, your, mentioning a couple of times of like being particular about when you say thank you or when you say sorry. I wrote a blog post a long time ago about don’t don’t ever say no questions asked.

Corey Maass 00:20:16  Like your money back, no questions asked. Like, yes, I’m absolutely going to ask you why you don’t have to answer. And I’m not going to I’m not going to hold the payment hostage based on your answer. 

Michelle Frechette: But I still want to know why. 

Corey Maass: Yeah, I’m going to hit refund. I’m going to reply to you and I’m going to say, okay, your money’s on its way back, but I’d love any feedback as to why you wanted a refund, especially on day 91. When we have a 90 day refund policy or whatever.

Michelle Frechette 00:20:47  For sure. Yeah, absolutely.

Corey Maass 00:20:49  But I, I just don’t think it’s ever worth arguing. But anyway, so all that to say, I have a feeling that most people, when they offer limited support, will just answer the support ticket rather than, you know, saying like, well, you need to you are beyond your, you know, one year of limited support. You need to spend another $40 to get support. But that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be a button on the page so that if somebody is happy and willing to say, let me buy a little bit more support, you know, two years after the fact that you shouldn’t let them spend their money on you.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:29  Yeah, true. And we could do. Let me see if I can find this on my screen here. I wouldn’t know. We could do like that. You, make a purchase, you get Flat Cory.

Corey Maass: Haha! 

Michelle Frechette:I love the way that came out, by the way. Much better than the one I did of me, which had me cross-eyed and really, really bizarre looking. 

Corey Maass 00:21:55 It was bizarre.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:56  It was bizarre. I didn’t keep it. I can’t even show it on the screen if I wanted to. But yeah, we could. I still think there’s something to this that we should put that somewhere on the website.

Corey Maass 00:22:05 Love it, I think. Yeah, like almost all the as I talked about at WordCamp, like I put my picture in every email for Mexican Train because again, like that was kind of the nature of it. But I love that. Like and I, you know, I mean all the emails are not or the I’ve never signed an email like the OMGIMG team or anything.

Corey Maass 00:22:30  It’s like right, I’m freaking Corey. You should know who you’re talking to, you know? And so there should be a picture of me and so maybe it needs to be flat me.

Michelle Frechette 00:22:42  I mean, it’s kind of cool. It’s actually still on my phone. I did it with an app on my phone.

Corey Maass 00:22:48  I was wondering, I was gonna ask. 

Michelle Frechette 00:22:50  Yeah. I tried to do it a couple different ways through some, like, free programs and stuff online, like tried to upload it, but then it had to pay some kind of money to download it. And I was like, I’m not going to do that yet. Let me find a couple other ways. I tried to use some filters in Photoshop that didn’t really work, but I found that app that I liked. So.

Corey Maass 00:23:10  You heard it here first people Corey is worth time, but not money.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:14  Well, I mean, not until I knew it was going to be what I wanted it to be, right? I actually paid for the app once it did it the right way.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:20  And then I thought, and then I did my picture and I was like, oh.

Corey Maass 00:23:24  I want my money back.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:26  This sucks. It’s probably still in our chat. People really wanted to see it. If you really want to see that nasty picture of me, say something in the chat and I’ll. 

Corey Maass 00:23:39  Like and subscribe and.

Michelle Frechette:  Exactly. I did find it actually.

Corey Maass: Send $0.99 to PayPal dot me slash Michelle Ames. 

Michelle Frechette 00:23:50  Exactly. And all they have to do is ask and I’ll be like, there it is. But you know so far nobody’s posted in the chat. So Flat Michele will remain a mystery.

Corey Maass 00:24:02  Anonymous.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:05  Oh goodness gracious.

Corey Maass 00:24:07  But yeah, Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I’m pulling up the old page. I’m looking at the old page. So we did November 13th to the 27th. All right. And I now I remember that. So there was, a person contacted me and said, like I missed the sale. Could I still get the sale? And that’s why there was a sale in December, which, I mean, let’s be honest, if somebody wants to give you their money, take their money even after the fact.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:36  It’s interesting you know, I run the page on Post. I’ve got the hiccups. Sorry. The page, Post Status for the Cyber Black Friday. Cyber Monday.

Corey Maass 00:24:43  Drunk at 4:45 pm. 

Michelle Frechette 00:24:44  Yeah, I’m on new meds, and they’re making me hiccup all the time.

Corey Maass: Oh that sucks. 

Michelle Frechette: It’s terrible. But anyway, the, I read the page, and everybody runs there beginning to end at such different, like, dates. It’s like, I wish that I could be like, you have to. Everybody in the whole world has to run their dates on these ones. So we’re all on the same page, but a lot of them do it right through the end of the of the year. I almost said school year because I still have that in my head from 20 years in higher ed. But right, right to the end of the year, which, I mean, that’s not a bad idea either. So we could do whatever we want. It’s up to us.

Corey Maass 00:25:22  I do like. So let’s see the 13th there.

Corey Maass 00:25:26  There was logic to it, last year. So it was like probably the Thursday before or something do do to I’m going scrolling back, back, back. So November 13th was the Monday before and then the 27th was the Monday after. Okay. What is Cyber Monday in the middle. Kind of you know, so it was a two week block.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:51  What if we extended it to Giving Tuesday which would be December 3rd?

Corey Maass 00:25:57  That seems fine. October. November still being October or excuse me, December 2nd on Monday.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:07  Yeah. December 3rd Giving Tuesday is always the third. I mean it’s giving Tuesdays always a Tuesday. This year it’s the third. Oh my word. There you go. 

Corey Maass 00:26:16  So you said the second. That’s why I was like,

Michelle Frechette 00:26:18  Yeah. I didn’t say I was writing the number two when I said it, so I’m tired. I know my new meds have made a little loopy too. I’m sleepy. Okay. So what? What’s the first day of it then? If you’re looking at a calendar?

Corey Maass 00:26:35  So wow, Thanksgiving is the last, so it definitely will go through the third because Thanksgiving isn’t until the 28th of November.

Corey Maass 00:26:45  So like Black Friday is the 29th. And so I would say from the 18th to the 9th.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:57  18th to the 9th, November 18th to December 9th, okay, I’m writing us all down. So we have it later. That works for me.

Corey Maass 00:27:07  Right. And so that’s a that’s a full two week window with Black Friday slash Cyber Monday in the middle Giving Tuesday in the middle and two weeks to me feels like a perfectly generous window, like people used to do in the day. And I wish that we had the audience to do a sale for a day and like, see any returns from it. Honestly. But. 

Michelle Frechette: Right. Yeah.

Corey Maass: I never did the full. We sent out a few emails, so it was. Katie Keith was talking about it on Twitter that she was going to add a couple of emails this year, and I was like, please post your yes, you should you should tell us how many emails you send so that we can weigh in on whether you should add more emails so that we can all copy your, your campaign style.

Michelle Frechette: Yeah.

Corey Maass 00:28:08  But I haven’t seen a schedule. But something along the lines of, like, minus two weeks, minus one week. First day. Seven day, and then the day before it ends kind of thing.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:39  That makes sense.

Corey Maass 00:28:40  So that’s five, which I think is fine. I do think we should I do think we should queue up more social media content. I will also start working on this stuff. I mean, it know, knowing it’s so late, we have we still have six weeks, which is a lot.

Michelle Frechette 00:29:01  Yet it’ll be here before, you know, it’s. Like when. Remember when we said we had six weeks? It’s next week. Yeah. That’s how it always goes.

Corey Maass 00:29:10 Yeah seriously. But, similar to the next piece on the agenda, which we’ll get to in a minute. I think let’s spend some time. So previously it was me going, oh, crap, I need to send out an email today. And then going and writing something and then sending out an email, and then three days going by and going, oh, whoops.

Corey Maass 00:29:33  Wait, crap. This is another day I’m supposed to send out an email like, let’s have you and I sit down and and actually even just outline them, but, you know, do it with intent rather than.

Michelle Frechette 00:29:46  List some of the new features and some of the work that you’ve done on it since the last year and that kind of thing to make. 

Corey Maass 00:29:52  Which we should be doing anyway but we’re not.

Michelle Frechette 00:29:54  Yeah. Well, because we, we have I feel like we haven’t like figured out exactly where it fits where it sits yet. Like we’re still working on a bunch of that stuff. And by we, I mean you, the collective we. But definitely and, and and we probably should work on that homepage before we hit Black Friday, too. And maybe we put a banner ad up at the top for Black Friday when those days are.

Corey Maass 00:30:20  So so yeah. Yeah. Banner and new homepage. Yeah I have lots of ideas. I’m determined to get this update out this week.

Corey Maass 00:30:36  I was working on it all day today. Except for the Indian food that I ate, which then made me take a nap.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:46  Indian food sounds so good.

Corey Maass 00:30:51  Yeah. Our closest Indian is half an hour away, but there is a family that makes really good Indian food. And they’re only at, like, farmers markets and stuff. And we had a chili cookoff in town this week, and so they were.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:04  Oh nice.

Corey Maass 00:31:05  Tabling there. And it was fabulous. I shout them out, but the business card is downstairs and nobody lives here. But people should know about them anyway. But. Yeah. So I’m there were two primary, functions. New functions. I’m almost done with one in particular. And then the, the same screenshot that I showed you a little while ago of generating posts or images from the post list page, or generating from the classic editor. But ironically, Alex Standiford messaged me today, another big fan of the plugin. So if anybody needs a testimonial, go talk to Alex.

Corey Maass 00:31:51  He will talk it up for me. But he messaged me today and he’s like, hey, it would be great if dot dot, dot. And I was like, that’s exactly what I’m working on and what’s going to be released this week. And he’s like, fabulous. And then I’m like, so it’ll work in the in post list screen and it’ll work in classic editor. And he’s like, I use Gutenberg and I’m like, on you. so I still think that I’m going to try. I’m just going to I need to just release the damn thing. So I’m going to just release the damn thing without Gutenberg support. There is an auto generate in Gutenberg, but it it has not been updated to this new thing that I’m creating. But I will release this and then immediately, like, go port that over. I just don’t know how long it’ll take. And I can’t keep dragging my feet on this freaking update like I have been for ages and ages. But as we’ve talked about, that to me has been the bottleneck of which is foolish, but it’s a mental bottleneck of updating the home page and emphasizing different things.

Michelle Frechette 00:33:00  Yeah. You’ll be happy to know that. Like so my partner at Underrepresented in Tech, Samah Nasr, I showed her how to do it once, and because I did like the first half of the year like it’s another production stuff, and she was feeling guilty that she hadn’t been doing any of that. So I showed her how to do everything and she’s just been doing it every week. She’s had no problems at all, so that makes me happy. Yeah. Pretty cool.

Corey Maass 00:33:23  That’s awesome. Yeah. And I had, somebody else by this week who I, who has a very distinct visual style for the open graph images and like header images that he creates. And I was really hoping that he would give it a try. And he actually surprised me by by purchasing it full price. And I was like,Dude I would have given you.

Michelle Frechette 00:33:52  I saw that. I work with him at Stellar.

Corey Maass 00:33:54  Okay. So I was like, I would have given you a discount. He’s like, I don’t want to. I don’t want your damn discount.

Corey Maass 00:34:02  But so he was able to like, recreate his very distinct visual style in OMG, which felt great. And then.Now he’s, off and running and and then has given me a couple of other ideas for, for new little, little features. Like one of the things that he has found is some of his titles are very long. And so the, the, the text, he has the, the post title in the image, but it might like run long and kind of not break the design but not look as good as it could. And you already had asked like, well, if there’s a featured image as the background or something like, let me just while I’m generating, let me just swap it out real quick. And so I was like, oh, well, what about like if there’s because I can detect as you’re, as you’re generating, like if your template uses the featured image, then I can show that option of like swapping that out on the fly.

Corey Maass 00:35:00  And so I can also detect if your template uses the post title and if and so then again on generate, it’ll say, oh wait, you’ve got a post title. Here’s a little slider to make it slightly bigger or slightly smaller. So 

Michelle Frechette: oh, nice. 

Corey Maass: You can just jush it.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:16  I’ve had some of mine rap too. Some of my, my titles for app. yeah. My biggest thing is wanting to be able to upload the image into the generator at the same time. So.

Corey Maass 00:35:27  Right. Exactly. So, so we’ll look at doing that. But anyway, okay, so I think that Black Friday, we’ll run it for a couple of weeks, we’ll queue up a bunch of emails, we’ll queue up a bunch of social media. But yeah, let’s sit down and go through like, because I remember at some point I read about a, like, proper launch sequence. And so you’re supposed to, you know, on, on first day you’re announcing, but on the second day you’re addressing objections and on third day you’re talking about future plans.

Corey Maass 00:36:07  And because it gives you content to talk about instead of just the everyday sending the same email, going buy my thing, buy my thing, buy my thing.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:15  Right.

Corey Maass 00:36:15  Yeah. you know, and so.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:18  Let’s add value.

Corey Maass 00:36:19  Go go through all those and, and yeah, figure out what we want to say instead of me making it up on the spot.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:26  That’s a good idea. That’s a good idea. And I like that. every time you send an email, it should be some way to add value, not just buy my thing. So coming up with some of that would be great. But with our with our flair, our whimsy, the way that we, you know, like our ad copy that is up next for our final ad copy the things that we’ve been doing there. Is that the one that I already made a page for on our website? A landing page? Is it the one with the quarry picture?.

Corey Maass 00:36:53  Oh, are we are we going with that one? I mean, I think we’re good, right?

Michelle Frechette 00:36:58  I think we are too.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:59  Do you wanna take a one last look at it? Pull it up.

Corey Maass 00:37:02  Sure.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:03  Let’s see.

Corey Maass 00:37:05  Bom bom.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:06  And I don’t I don’t remember what the actual text is because I know that 180 characters is so. 

Corey Maass: I don’t either. 

Michelle Frechette: You don’t either. Where do we put it? Let’s see.

Corey Maass 00:37:23  Headshot for LinkedIn. There it is, I got it.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:25  You got it. Okay, good, because I was not finding it. Quickly.

Corey Maass 00:37:29  Let’s present, share my screen. I don’t like the new permissions in Macintosh OS.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:44  my phone keeps telling me I should upgrade my or an upgrade update. Whatever. My iOS probably do that tonight. I was like, do it tonight.

Corey Maass: Boom

Michelle Frechette: I love it.

Corey Maass 00:38:02 Trying to make it fit best on the screen. Something like that. Yeah. Well, and there’s the new like. So I just updated Mac OS and it has the new phone mirroring, but it said you needed to update the OS on your phone, so I did, and then it still doesn’t work.

Michelle Frechette 00:38:24  Yeah, I was gonna try.

Corey Maass 00:38:25  That’ll be that’ll be fun. But okay. So yeah, this this third and final ad that I bought with, with that Stella money yo. Is so 180 characters or less. You uploaded your crisp studio quality headshot for LinkedIn, but socials are showing that cringeworthy lampshade on head pic from your bachelor party. Now, this is not from my bachelor party. 

Michelle Frechette: No.

Corey Maass: But this is still pretty wonderfully cringey of Corey in college. 

Michelle Frechette:  I love it. 

Corey Maass:  I think I wonder what it.  Visit our. I’m trying to figure out, like, where that was actually taken.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:09  Great. Something in the background. I don’t know. 

Corey Maass 00:39:15  The first business I ever started online, it was my girlfriend in college and I were both into vintage clothing and we would go, we went to school in upstate New York. Not Rochester, so not even worth mentioning. But in the 90s, Salvation Army and Goodwill, especially in upstate New York, for whatever reason, was getting like fantastic vintage clothing every week.

Corey Maass 00:39:48  And so every week we would go on delivery day Monday and Tuesday or whatever it was and just, you know, go through all the clothes and pick out anything that we thought we could resell. And then we created. I created my first ever e-commerce website, which was updated by hand. The HTML was updated by hand because this was kind of before before I knew about databases and they were not that kind of stuff didn’t wasn’t very prominent online anyway. But in order to purchase an item of vintage clothing, you would click Add to Cart and then check out. All of which I figured out how to hobble together using other people’s JavaScript. And then you’d fill out your information and you’d hit not buy because it would show you a screen that said, great, now send a check to this address for this much money. And I would get an email, and I would then go manually remove that item from the HTML and wait for the check to arrive.

Michelle Frechette 00:40:55  Can you imagine if Amazon ran that way?

Corey Maass 00:40:57  Right. Because this was even before PayPal.

Corey Maass 00:41:01  And then PayPal came along and and then you could, you could have buy now buttons and stuff, but. Yeah. anyway, the reason I bring all that up was because this was a vintage Hawaiian shirt that I picked up, that actually had wood, but wooden buttons. And was just freaking awesome. And so obviously, me and my mad style, I the sunglasses were not mine. I think they belong to a girl named Jen.

Michelle Frechette 00:41:30  I like the I like the, the content I wrote on this with your picture, though. You click to see an embarrassing photo. Didn’t you look no further. This is our teammate, Corey Moss when he was in college. Winning smile. Questionable shades. Keep your embarrassment buried in the past with OMGIMG. But when you need better social images for your WordPress post page, reunion photos or whatever, take a look at OMGIMG.

Corey Maass: Love it. 

Michelle Frechette: Do we have the the the other? We should put the other tagline under there. Never play image roulette again.

Michelle Frechette 00:42:07  I put in the chat to write your pic 1 to 10, but everybody’s afraid to rate you Corey. I almost put in there that you had borrowed, Elton John’s sunglasses, but I. I left that part off.

Corey Maass 00:42:22  Where where do you want the tagline?

Michelle Frechette 00:42:25  At the very bottom up, James says you’re a ten plus. Thanks, James. Yeah, I think we just add it right underneath there. Perfect. James gave his first WordCamp. I think it was his first WordCamp talk. I’d always given some talks at Meetups and things, but he was here in Rochester this weekend and gave a really great talk.

Corey Maass 00:42:50  Nice. Yeah. How’d the camp go?

Michelle Frechette 00:42:52  Went really well. Small but mighty. That’s what I keep saying. Small but mighty. 

Corey Maass: Love it. 

Michelle Frechette: Yeah, it was good.

Corey Maass 00:43:04  Oops. Oh! What are you doing?

Michelle Frechette 00:43:07  What are you doing? Where did it go? Oh, there it is.

Corey Maass 00:43:11  Yes. I know in here you can do, I guess. Probably me being me, I probably did this to it.

Michelle Frechette 00:43:21  Haha! James says there’s lots of wonderful people at the WordCamp. There really were. It was a good it was a good camp.

Corey Maass 00:43:29  1.4 or something.

Michelle Frechette 00:43:31  I didn’t even give a talk. 

Corey Maass: What?

Michelle Frechette: I know sometimes I do, but I did not.

Corey Maass 00:43:38  Why even bother going then?

Michelle Frechette 00:43:41  Well, I was organizing so. Oh, he says it was his first talk ever. Complete nervous wreck he was. 

Corey Maass: Aw!

Michelle Frechette: I heard good things.

Corey Maass 00:43:53  So there we go.

Michelle Frechette 00:43:55  There you go. I love it.

Corey Maass: I want it bigger. 

Michelle Frechette: Make the logo big. I mean, make the font  bigger. Yeah, make it the same size as the text right above it. So it won’t really match as well, because we’ve already got a lot of things going on. It’s visually stimulating page. So perfect.

Corey Maass 00:44:22  Done. Boop.

Michelle Frechette 00:44:23  That is a very long all caps sentence at the very top.

Corey Maass 00:44:28  Right page title. Yeah I like we should probably update the template to not do that. Kinda like for the for the videos I had was the podcast.

Corey Maass 00:44:47  Well there’s a way to get to them. But anyway, it’s something like this where the actual title is shorter. We could just say, Yeah. Since discovery October 24th or something. And then. Yeah, have the rest of it just be a paragraph.

Michelle Frechette 00:44:58  Right. Just or something like for Dense Discovery fans, that kind of thing.

Corey Maass 00:45:04  Yeah, exactly. But but yeah. Great. I had forgotten we’d already done it, so. 

Michelle Frechette 00:45:11  Yeah.Perfect.

Corey Maass 00:45:13  Lampshade on head.

Michelle Frechette 00:45:14  Lampshade. That’s the only thing missing from that photo. Is the lampshade on your.

Corey Maass 00:45:18  Magician magician goatee.

Michelle Frechette 00:45:21  Yeah.

Corey Maass 00:45:22  And. Yeah. And I’ve always had the high hairline, like.

Michelle Frechette 00:45:27  I mean, you even have Elton John’s hairline in that picture. I mean, his style, like the long on the sides. Long on the sides like that from the 70s, 80s. Yeah. Yeah, I love it. That’s great. I mean, it isn’t that picture of me that, you know, why should I just share it? Should I go ahead and share it? Hold on.

Michelle Frechette 00:45:45  I gotta present it one second. This is a terrible, terrible photo of me and I thought. AI I did me dirty!

Corey Maass 00:45:57  Seriously.

Corey Maass 00:45:59  Like, some.it’s some of. It’s okay, but the the.

Michelle Frechette 00:46:02  It’s the eyes, the eyes are are creepy. I bet it would have done fine. Okay. It probably would have done fine without, Without glasses. I don’t think it knew how to deal with the, like, shine and stuff or something.

Corey Maass 00:46:14  Yeah, yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:46:14  Yeah, we’re gonna take that right down there. No more, no more.

Corey Maass 00:46:19  Nobody. Nobody saw that. This is not archived forever on the internet or anything.

Michelle Frechette 00:46:23  I figured since we had your picture up there, we had to put a picture of. That was not as flattering of me. So. I mean, that was a flattering photo in the 80s or 90s or whatever. I don’t know, when was that photo? 80s. 

Corey Maass:Mine? 

Michelle Frechette: Yeah. 

Corey Maass: 90s, early 90s.

Corey Maass 00:46:38  Early 90’s yeah, yeah.

Corey Maass 00:46:39  Again, that would have been college, late 90s. College would have been. So that would have been, yeah, 97, 98, something like that.

Michelle Frechette 00:46:49  Yeah. My brand. I think the shirt being vintage threw me timeline wise. So yeah, I’m still trying to figure out what was in your pocket in that picture. 

Corey Maass 00:46:58 I know right? Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t know. That was a.

Michelle Frechette 00:47:04  I were like, it doesn’t feel as bad. Don’t feel bad. He just started shaving his.

Corey Maass 00:47:12  You’re me. You’re, magician goatee or your head?

Michelle Frechette 00:47:15  Yeah. Well, judging from the photo, I’m going to go with both. Or at least the head.

Corey Maass 00:47:22  Right, absolutely.

Michelle Frechette 00:47:23  Oh too funny.

Corey Maass 00:47:25  All, you know, all part of the, the the bald men of WordPress movement that were starting. Since there are many, many of us.

Michelle Frechette 00:47:34  Oh, he says his head. Yeah.

Corey Maass: Nice

Michelle Frechette 00:47:38  so we have like, basically 12 minutes left to talk about the IPA WP stuff and you said needs an email update. So tell me what that’s all about.

Corey Maass 00:47:47  Well, just, radio silence, right? Like, I don’t want people to think that it’s abandoned or whatever. I do. I know everybody will be more than understanding, given our busy lives and two weeks out of afterward WordCamp and, all of the other drama going on. So, love it. But, I never like to let things go for too long, right?

Michelle Frechette 00:48:15  No. For sure.

Michelle Frechette 00:48:16  I think we could do an email out that says we’re going to launch this for Black Friday. And then, we could come up with a strategy for Black Friday. Maybe next week and talk about what that would look like and how we would be able to have everybody kind of share each other’s stuff. Assigned wise, not like you have to share 30 other businesses kind of thing, but.

Corey Maass 00:48:40  Well, and I think, yeah, I think that’s an easy first one, right.

Corey Maass 00:48:46  So we’ve got a developer building a first version. She said should have something for us to see this week and that should let us pair everybody with somebody else. First version just randomly I think we will human scan it and just make sure that it isn’t a form plugin who has to promote a form plugin kind of thing. But then we will send out emails to everybody, or I think the tool will send out an email to everybody that just says whatever assignment we’re doing for the month. And given that it’s Black Friday, I think we just basically we say, you know, your your assignment is to go to the home page of the other of whoever you’re assigned, you’re paired with, see if they’re running a Black Friday deal. And and if so, go tweet about it. 

Michelle Frechette 00:49:39 Yeah. 

Corey Maass 00:49:40  And if notNot if not, you know.

Michelle Frechette 00:49:42  True. But just to kind of show people what it looks like. So we do have the we do have the product directory up, but we need to do a little bit of work on making sure everybody has a square logo, or any logo at all, because that looks better when everything’s a little bit even there.

Michelle Frechette 00:50:00  Right. So but those, those are you could go to ipawp.com right now and click that product directory and get a little more idea of what that looks like. And we are still accepting, accepting businesses and, and products. If you have a product that you think would fit in well with the directory, we are really promoting indie products, you know, scrappy plug ins, bootstrapping products, that kind of thing. Feel free to fill out that form, and we’ll take a look at whether or not you fit in well. Let’s just say if you’re wildly successful in making tons of money, you probably need to look at another place to do that.

Corey Maass 00:50:42  Well, you don’t need us.

Michelle Frechette 00:50:44 You don’t need us. It’s exactly right. You don’t need us. So, So that’s what we’re looking at. Right there is, is, all those mostly plug ins, but we are open to, we changed it from plugins to products in the IPA, the P and IPA so that we can be a little more inclusive if there are other products besides, plug ins that might fit the same genre, if you will.

Corey Maass 00:51:05  Yeah, yeah. Because I, we, we came across like there have been a couple of SaaS apps that have launched and stuff like that. and I, I mean, to me it’s part and parcel. It’s just about the community and, and people helping each other out. So. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:51:21  Exactly.

Corey Maass 00:51:21  But I, I initially I had hoped that we would do a first practice run essentially of, of the marketing pairing up co-marketing stuff. But I mean, we may as well, if nothing else, Black Friday is like easy and obvious, you know, go, go see if go see if you know. Hey Michelle, go see if OMG is running a sale. If so, go write a tweet about it.

Michelle Frechette 00:51:48  Yeah exactly.

Corey Maass 00:51:49  And maybe we’ll do some basic thing of, you know, please take a screenshot and upload it here. Just because I think it’s, you know, I, I want, I want to at least attempt to capture whether anybody did it or not.

Michelle Frechette 00:52:06  Yeah.

Corey Maass 00:52:08  Because if if nobody’s interested in doing it, then we’ll go find something else to do. But if we find that I don’t know, more than half do it, then we’re like, okay, there’s some there’s something here.

Michelle Frechette 00:52:19  Something there for sure. Maybe it’s just a spreadsheet where they put the link to their tweet or their post.

Corey Maass 00:52:26  The dog was insisting on joining me. I don’t know why.

Michelle Frechette: Hello dog.

Corey Maass 00:52:30 This is Ohso

Michelle Frechette 00:52:32  Hello sir. And I also can’t hear me because you got your buds in. But that’s okay.

Corey Maass 00:52:35  She says hello. It’s we’re coming up on dinner. So he’s.

Michelle Frechette 00:52:42  Yeah. Yes, I’m hungry too. I’m hungry too. Ohso.

Corey Maass 00:52:47  Yeah. Now that I finished the Indian leftovers, I have to figure out what I like.

Michelle Frechette00:52:50  What’s for dinner.

Corey Maass 00:52:51  We bought. We wound up with a fridge full of leftovers. And then Lindsey left for the week for a work retreat. And so now, so I’ve just been eating my way through all the leftovers, which has been lovely, but now I have to figure out, what’s left?

Michelle Frechette 00:53:07  Oh, look at first of all, we got a woof to the dog and, ordered some wings.

Michelle Frechette 00:53:13  And James wants another garbage plate, which is, as you know, our local delicacy here. We throw a couple banners up there because I forgot to do them before. So if you are interested in more information on OMGIMG you can go to OMGIMG.co for more information there. it.

Corey Maass 00:53:28  It comes with a free dog.

Michelle Frechette 00:53:30  Haha! We are looking for feedback always. So if you have ideas for us, whether it’s the homepage or the product itself, let us know. And then also, if you are again interested to learn more about Co-marketing as an independent WordPress product, you go to IPAWP.com and you can always hit us up in Slack or on on Twitter too. We’re always happy to answer questions or take your ideas for sure. And we actually have a contact form, I think, on the website. So you could even put it there if you don’t want to do any of those other places.

Corey Maass 00:54:02  Exactly.

Michelle Frechette 00:54:04  I see more comments come in. Let’s see. You can have his three dogs.

Michelle Frechette 00:54:14  I’m a cat girl. I got cats.

Corey Maass 00:54:16  I didn’t say the. I didn’t say the free dog was one of my dogs necessarily. Like there are enough dogs. We will find one and ship it to you.

Michelle Frechette 00:54:24  Share them around anyway. All right. Should we call it a week?

Speaker 3 00:54:28  Absolutely.

Michelle Frechette 00:54:29  All right. Thanks for being with us, everybody. And, we’ll see you next week to Market Things in Public. Bye.

Corey Maass 00:54:36  Word, word. Boop boop boop.