In this episode, Michelle Frechette and Corey Maass discuss their newly developed website, emphasizing its improved design and functionality. They delve into the importance of mobile usability, coherent design, and effective marketing strategies. The conversation also touches on the challenges of reaching their target audience and the significance of language in communication. Additionally, they explore cultural observations about music, generational differences, and personal anecdotes related to advertising. The episode concludes with reflections on the evolution of music curation in retail environments and the impact of commercials on musicians’ careers, ending on a light-hearted note with gratitude to their listeners.
Top Takeaways:
- Nostalgia and Cultural References as Marketing Tools: Michelle and Corey highlight the power of nostalgia in marketing, referencing Carly Simon’s song in ketchup commercials and Reagan’s use of “Born in the USA.” These examples demonstrate how emotional and cultural connections can strengthen brand messaging and resonate with audiences.
- Music as a Branding Opportunity: The idea of creating a theme song for OMGIMG underscores the potential of music to add personality and memorability to the brand. Michelle’s experiment with AI-generated music shows the team’s willingness to explore innovative tools for creative marketing.
- Swag and Interactive Experiences to Engage Users:Corey’s enthusiasm for branded swag, like T-shirts and creative QR codes, emphasizes the importance of tangible, fun items for user engagement. Adding interactive elements, such as QR codes linking to a custom song, creates a playful and memorable experience.
- Balancing Creativity with Practicality: While the team enjoys brainstorming playful and imaginative ideas, they remain focused on aligning these concepts with the product’s purpose and audience. This balance ensures OMGIMG maintains professionalism while staying approachable.
- Consistency Builds Trust and Engagement: The commitment to regular streaming, even while planning breaks around the holidays, reflects a focus on consistent communication with their audience. This approach builds trust and strengthens their connection with users.
Mentioned In The Show:
- Beaver Builder
- Ron Popeil
- The Pocket Fisherman
- Microconf
- Rob Walling
- Mike Taber
- Weebly
- Wix
- Mitsubishi
- Lifehacker
- Mint
- YNAB
- Product Hunt
- Kanban
- Social Link Pages
- Mark Westguard
- Dirty Vegas
- Holly Hobbie
- Carly Simon
- Barenaked Ladies
- Diesel Jeans
🐦 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:
Michelle Frechette 00:00:01 And we are live. Just like that.
Corey Maass: Man, this time of year. Like, look at the. Look at what’s behind me. Like it looks pitch black.
Michelle Frechette: Darkness. Yeah.
Corey Maass: It is 8 p.m. somewhere.
Michelle Frechette 00:00:14 You still need a key light.
Corey Maass 00:00:16 I have, I have a $20 ring light. I don’t know what your talking about.
Michelle Frechette I know. I see the circle in your in your lenses.
Corey Maass 00:00:24 There we go. Put them right in. My.
Michelle Frechette 00:00:26 And your pupils are perfect. Before we go any further, I want you to share our new website on screen because this looks phenomenal. Let’s let people take a peek at it.
Corey Maass 00:00:44 Do do a bow. Present, share screen..
Michelle Frechette 00:00:51 I just clicked a button. I almost clicked end stream by accident, which would have been tragic.
Corey Maass 00:00:59 Just exciting. It’s no different than me dropping off the other day.
Michelle Frechette 00:01:05 That’s true. Except that when you drop off, you can come right back in. I’d have to restart the whole thing. Anyway, this. This is the new website and. Holy moly, what a difference!
Corey Maass 00:01:16 Yep. Yeah.
Michelle Frechette: I love it.
Corey Maass: Being being the developer I am, it drives me crazy that, you know, we’re using old screenshots or I it’s current screenshots, but I’m like frantically working on a new version where so the product looks so much better, which I can share to actually. Early days, but yeah. And little. I just noticed the pixel. It’s off by a pixel right there, but whatever.
Michelle Frechette 00:01:47 I can’t, I can’t. I don’t, I see nothing.
Corey Maass 00:01:48 Well, I think, I think it depends on screen size like, oh it’s off, it’s on, it’s off, it’s on. but yeah, really, really happy with it, with the overall design. I want to bring more coherence.
Michelle Frechette 00:02:07 Oh wait. I just saw an error. Creating create images shouldn’t be a struggle.
Corey Maass 00:02:14 This is the joy of jumping in and going. Creating images. What we could do. Creating. Creating. Oops.
Michelle Frechette 00:02:29 Perfect. Yay!
Corey Maass 00:02:30 Thanks.
Michelle Frechette 00:02:32 I didn’t notice it before because your brain just automatically sees what it’s supposed to see sometimes. And other times not so much.
Corey Maass 00:02:39 Right. And what I was just going to talk about is the fact that I’ve redone this site three, three times now. I’ve, I’ve done it three times. I’ve redone it twice. So, we use Beaver Builder on this site, and they have recently introduced their box module, which lets you do proper flex and grid layouts. And I love it. And it’s it’s a huge step forward for them. But it’s all a little squirrelly, squiggly around the edges, quirky. And, and they know this, like, they’re working on it, and that’s awesome. But the, But boy. So I’m also and then the other, the other part of this is so I’m actually going to scroll or drag it out. So you see how this the screenshot like so if you’re viewing on a wide screen like this goes way out here, which looks a little goofy, but it’s sort of intentional, like let’s have the full image, you know, but then it goes off screen if you’re if you’re down here.
Corey Maass 00:03:55 So you just kind of get a hint of it, which is exactly the like the effect I wanted. Like we’re we’re still very much a grid, but it’s, but it’s a little it’s a slightly a conventional unconventional grid.
Michelle Frechette 00:04:09 It’s a Mondrian Bauhaus kind of thing. Right.
Corey Maass 00:04:12 It and if you look at the posters that are on my wall.
Michelle Frechette: Surprise!
Corey Maass: Mondrian and Bauhaus and, I just loosened my camera.
Michelle Frechette 00:04:24 There is no surprise there at all.
Corey Maass 00:04:25 And let’s see. Bauhaus.
Michelle Frechette 00:04:35 Yeah. It’s it’s giving me,
Corey Maass: We like what we like.
Michelle Frechette: Partridge. Partridge Family bus.
Corey Maass 00:04:40 Oh. That’s awesome! Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. Oh. That’s great.
Michelle Frechette: I love it.
Corey Maass: Yeah. So, you know, slightly more modern design. Definitely like design with intention. But it but doing the original layout using the box modules. It was just fighting me and I’m also. Yeah like there’s like Beaver Builder extremely powerful at points too. Not too powerful, but like there’s two too many like WordPress itself.
Corey Maass 00:05:12 There’s too many different ways to do all the things. So anyway, point being that it I, I did it and then, got to the point and then had to sort of do it again, and then it got to the point where I was like, you know what, let’s just go live. But then it looked terrible on mobile. And so when I went in to redo it, it was like, you know, I need to just use their like standard columns, column modules, columns and rows, which it now uses. And so now it works on mobile, which obviously is crucial. And there’s still some tweaking, there’s still some spacing issues, but It’s so much better. It’s so much better. To the point where it’s. I’m. I’m pleased to, it’s really more about the language. Right. Like, we we worked on the language for weeks and weeks and weeks. I shared it with lots of people. I worked with AI to get it up to date. And then now we actually have a proper language that I feel is better, represents the product.
Michelle Frechette 00:06:18 I like the as seen on. It makes me think of like a Seen on TV.
Corey Maass: Exactly.
Michelle Frechette: You know, like Ron Popeil, the Pocket Fisherman and the all of those things.
Corey Maass 00:06:30 So yeah, I’m now we have this thing to move forward with, which I think is really what matters.
Michelle Frechette 00:06:39 Yeah, I think it looks great.
Corey Maass 00:06:41 But of course, now I’m embarrassed by, like, the screenshots because they’re all like what we have used previously. And I was like.
Michelle Frechette 00:06:51 I mean, that’ll get fixed, right?
Corey Maass 00:06:53 Yeah. I mean, as soon as we have a product update, then you will have. Yeah, you know, screen updated screenshots.
Michelle Frechette 00:07:01 I think it looks fantastic.
Corey Maass 00:07:03 Thank you.
Michelle Frechette 00:07:04 I’m very impressed. And I like that. Now it works on mobile as well. I said that like I live in Great Britain, in the UK mobile.
Corey Maass 00:07:15 Or like The Who. We’re going mobile then for the fun of it. Let’s commit the cardinal sin of showing a product in process, progress. So you can share that. I think there’s nothing too embarrassing here.
Michelle Frechette 00:07:40 I would hope not.
Corey Maass 00:07:43 Well, sometimes, you know, you put in a swear word or something.
Michelle Frehette:Oh, yeah.
Corey Maass: Anyway. So, Yeah. So now we’re looking at, So this is what we’re looking at as the updated, very, you know, very rudimentary, obviously. But in an update to the product, using modern design libraries and techniques, but also like, it’s kind of like the website, right? Like I built the original plugin and then added this and added that. And so the same with the website where it was like, we got to get something online. Well, let’s add some words. And then while I was browsing around the internet, it was like, oh, we need a testimonial section and threw that up there and blah, blah, blah. As opposed to like coming in here and going, okay, so with intention, like what. Now that we’ve got a bunch of customers like what are people using. What are people actually clicking on? And so a very basic layout, new layout system here. And then a very like Canva looking. Canva like editor.
Michelle Frechette 00:08:49 I like it. It works though, but.
Corey Maass 00:08:50 But it works. So.
Michelle Frechette 00:08:55 I mean, the red on black, not so much. But you know what you had before.
Corey Maass 00:09:01 But I actually like this library because it’s got a gradient picker built in, which which is a little also like you probably can’t see it on your screen, but it’s grainy. It’s got lines on it.
Michelle Frechette 00:09:17 Get the gist of it yeah. I see the Lorem ipsum.
Corey Maass 00:09:20 Right, right. but the yeah some things like just, just generally cleaning things up, better layout, more usable layout, more on the screen. And then I’m very happy with this resizing stuff.
Michelle Frechette 00:09:36 Oh Yeah. It’s nice.
Corey Maass 00:09:38 Where it was before. It’s it was a little janky and, like, hard to control and and whatnot. So a nice update to that. Yeah. Chipping away at it.
Michelle Frechette 00:09:54 And you can easily grab a handle like that, it’s nice.
Michelle Frechette 00:09:56 Sometimes I’ve been on integrations where it’s not obvious where that handle is to, to to drag things. And that’s nice.
Corey Maass 00:10:05 Yeah. Yeah. And that’s one of the like the one we have now. Like it. It works. It’s okay. again it was a quick implementation. Like, we need this. Let’s build it. Okay. It works good enough. Off we go. And it and it’s I’m pleased in some ways because it speaks to the, the product where like, it’s not perfect, it’s clunky, but people will but people will will muddle through it enough to be happy with the results. And so it speaks to the usability of the product and whatnot. So I’m happy with that. But time for a big update again, like revisiting all this stuff with intention, with a bigger picture, with a better vision. Makes a big difference.
Michelle Frechette 00:10:53 Yeah, absolutely. It looks fantastic. I think that, you know, your number one selling tool, once you get people to the website is the website and how they interact with it.
Michelle Frechette 00:11:04 And it’s not just how it looks, although that’s a huge part of it. Right? Especially when you’re talking about design elements like imagery, like if the site doesn’t look like you practice what you preach, then. Right?
Corey Maass 00:11:15 Right. Yeah.
Michelle Frechette 00:11:17 And so, this new site design is I think it’s phenomenal. It looks really, really good. And, Yeah, I’m very proud of you. Thank you for. Such good work.
Corey Maass 00:11:26 Thank you. Yeah. Represents us better. Exactly what you said. Like, it just feels more professional.
Michelle Frechette 00:11:30 It does. It just feels more like. It feels more like the product. Right? It feels like more like the interaction of the product is represented well on the interface of the front end of the website.
Corey Maass 00:11:41 RIght yeah.
Michelle Frechette 00:11:42 I like.
Corey Maass 00:11:43 Nice big updates.
Michelle Frechette 00:11:45 Yeah. For sure.
Corey Maass 00:11:47 We are supposed to go online three weeks ago, but we got there.
Michelle Frechette 00:11:51 Well we all know that developer time is not the same as the rest of the world.
Michelle Frechette 00:11:57 It’s a moving target often, and that’s okay. So as long as we all have the right expectation. Plus, when it’s your own thing, if you move the goalpost, that’s okay, because nobody else is waiting on you. It’s not like you’re meeting a deadline for a client.
Corey Maass 00:12:14 Nope. Yeah. No, nobody’s disappointment is worse than your own.
Michelle Frechette 00:12:19 Well, that’s true also. That is also true. Yeah, but it’s not like you didn’t get paid because you’re not getting paid. You just sell product. Anyway, how do I know? Well, I mean, you know, we’re not. Nobody’s like, saying nobody hired us to do this is what I’m trying to say.
Corey Maass 00:12:35 Exactly. Yeah.
Michelle Frechette 00:12:36 We get paid by people buying OMGIMG which is always the hope. And we did have some Black Friday sales, so that’s a good thing. Yeah, yeah. Some lifetime deals even.
Corey Maass 00:12:47 Definitely, yeah. I, you know, no, no number of sales is enough. But we had some, which feels good. I’m always and and I think we spoke about this last week or or previously, anyway. I am still a lot of the, I think I think the messaging on the website is a lot better. And that’s the feedback that I’m getting from a lot of people, which I think is great. And so I finally feel good about, okay, now how do we drive more people to the website? Because previously we had a not, a small amount of traffic, but I was like, I don’t, I don’t in theory. If we could turn on the fire hose, I don’t want to because they’re going to get to the website and, and probably not buy. So now it’s like, great. Okay. Very bottom of the funnel has been updated. Now you know and but it with Black Friday. It definitely drew a fine point on the. Okay how do we how do we reach people? And oh gosh. I was talking to oh okay. So I went to there’s a, there’s a series of conferences that have gone on for years and years called Microconf, started by Rob Walling and Mike Taber.
Corey Maass 00:14:11 And I don’t anyway. So and they now have conferences all over, including little conferences online. So I hadn’t been dipped a toe into that ecosystem in a while. So recently, I bought a day pass to one of their online where they had three different presentations. And it was fine. Mostly. I mean, good price. So it’s, you know, low risk. But mostly I was curious about they have, they use an online product for like hallway effects for hallway track, essentially. So you get these timed, you’re paired with somebody random, and then it’s like five minute segments where you get to meet somebody, which was didn’t turn out to really be enough, but still had a couple of like good conversations. So it was just kind of a neat experiment.
Michelle Frechette 00:14:57 Speed networking.
Corey Maass 00:14:58 Yeah, exactly. Very good.
Michelle Frechette 00:15:00 I’ve done that before.Yeah.
Corey Maass 00:15:01 Yeah. And I used to do it quite a bit, actually, in New York City in person, where they did like. Yeah, speed, speed dating, you know, where they’d actually have you change seats kind of thing. But anyway, so all, all that long lead up to say I wound up talking to a total stranger, which I don’t get to talk total a person totally outside of our bubble, which I don’t get to experience often, but I’ve. But I talk about often because I’m like, these are the people that we have to figure out how to reach. And I have no idea how to do that. And that’s like the ongoing challenge. Right? And so here is another tech founder. This guy is building his own, you know, SaaS app or whatever it was, I don’t recall at the moment, but, trying to explain to him what OMG does, and I gave the usual taglines, or usual, you know, elevator pitch. He had no idea what it was, what I was talking about. I’m like, okay.
Michelle Frechette: That’s good information.
Corey Maass: Yeah. Open graph. I mean, as we’ve long suspected, open graph meant nothing. But I’m like, okay, so when you, you know, put a link in Facebook and you see that preview, you know, it’s those images and he’s like, okay, why do I, you know, why do I care or why does it, you know, and if as long as an image comes up, what how am I losing? And it’s like, okay, this is our challenge.
Michelle Frechette 00:16:41 Yeah, yeah. If a picture paints a thousand words, your open graph image is just as important.
Corey Maass 00:16:51 Yeah. And and I at this point I think I’m striking open graph from our language. And saying like social image because that’s what I’m finding. Everybody calls it.
Michelle Frechette: Yeah I agree.
Corey Maass: If they call it anything. You know again which is fine. Like you, you go where, where language takes you.
Michelle Frechette 00:17:11 Yes, absolutely. And it morphs. I learned today that when kids talk about preppy, it’s not the same thing as we meant in the 80’s. So language actually morphs. Yes. Somebody sent me a TikTok that made me feel not old. Ancient. So shall we just say yes. Language changes as we go and what’s important changes too. Which is you.
Corey Maass 00:17:34 Have to answer the obvious question what is preppy now mean?
Michelle Frechette 00:17:37 Oh, it’s the people who, like, dress in like the the the fancy sweat clothes with like the Stanley mugs and, like, fanny packs and stuff like that.
Michelle Frechette 00:17:48 It’s, it’s not argyle sweaters and the sweater around your neck. You know. Yeah, yeah. Collar shirts and things like that. So. Yeah. So I was like, well, well, I guess I learned something new today. And, and the biggest thing I learned is I do not have a handle on young people today. And I just sounded like my father when I said that. So there you go. But I do like their music. So there you go. Some of it.
Corey Maass 00:18:17 Thank you for staying up. I have I have no idea. You know, I, I have a buddy who’s older than I am, in his 50s and knows all the current music. He’s a he’s actually, like, had a first career, second career as a musician. He’s now in his third career as a programmer. He’s phenomenal, and obviously smart as a whip. But he was he actually was a band leader on cruise ships. And which is just neat to hear the stories, if nothing else.
Michelle Frechette: Oh I bet.
Corey Maass 00:18:48 Right. But, but so he still follows pop music and or the newest music. I don’t know, pop. Meaning popular, I guess. And and so he schools me once in a while, like, and I, I hear a lot of new dance music, but I have no idea. What if there was a radio, which there isn’t anymore. I have no idea what music would be being played on said radio anymore. I like.
Michelle Frechette 00:19:19 You can’t go by MTV because there’s no music there anymore either.
Corey Maass 00:19:22 Right. It’s just pregnant 17 year old. Yeah. yeah. Reality is no fun. But the interesting. But he does send me a bunch of like hyperpop and stuff like that? It’s just the production is absolutely amazing. It’s all it’s all essentially EDM, especially, in the rest of the world. So it’s all and that’s the thing is, like, you know, so much pop music popular is is dance is dance music. I mean, always has been, but is like in the same it’s drum machines, it’s synthesizers, you know, big bass, bass and, and whatnot as opposed to being real instruments and has been that way for ages. But people tell me they hate dance music.
Michelle Frechette 00:20:13 Well, I’ve talked about before. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here, like back in the. When did I get my degree? Back in the late 90s, early 2000. When I got my MBA, I, we lived here. This was actually my bedroom with my daughter. This was my parents home at the time. I own it now, but it was my parents and this was our bedroom and my mother. There was a commercial on television and it was, I don’t even know the car. Okay, because it was 20 years ago.
Corey Maass: I know exactly where you’re going with this.
Michelle Frechette: And there’s this car and there’s. And as they’re driving the car, the woman that was the passenger is like pop pop locking right in the front seat, sitting down. Right. And my mother would say, you know, I hate this commercial. And then like two days later, it come on again. She’s like, I really hate this commercial.
Michelle Frechette 00:21:05 And like by a week later she’s like, I will never buy their car because of this commercial. Well, I was doing my MBA at the time and I turned to her and I said, they don’t want you to buy their car. She said what do you mean they don’t want me to buy their car? They want anybody to buy their car. I go, well, it’s true that they would sell a car to you. You are not their target audience. So what do you mean? I said they are trying to sell to the people who will pop lock in the front seat of a car. I said.
Corey Maass 00:21:29 Right. Who care more about the sound system.
Michelle Frechette 00:21:31 This is not a high end car that they are hoping that 50 and 60 year olds are buying. This is a car aimed at 20 and 30 somethings for whom those are important qualities. Well, yes, they will sell you the car. Absolutely. They’re not aiming this ad at you and they don’t care if you don’t buy their car.
Michelle Frechette 00:21:51 And I think that that’s very true. You got it up here. You found it that quickly. Oh, it was the Mitch. Yeah. Mitsubishi eclipse. Yeah. And she’s exactly. This is it, right? She’s, like, dancing in the front seat. And my mother hated this commercial with a passion. And I just laughed at her every time because I’m like, they don’t care if they. If you buy their car. I don’t know how much it cost. I don’t know, 2013 okay. Oh, it was just I guess it was more.
Corey Maass: No, 03.2003.
Michelle Frechette: 03. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. So I was right late, late 90s, early third and early 20s, 2000’s. That’s what was in my head. But yeah, she just. So she was just dumbfounded. And for that same reason, we are not trying to appeal, at least not yet. Right. To like a Wix audience. We are not trying to appeal to an HTML only audience. We are not trying to appeal to.
Michelle Frechette 00:22:46 I don’t know who whatever other builders they’re using today to build websites. We are trying to appeal to WordPress people because this is a WordPress plugin. And so we lean into that and we lean into language. We should be leaning into language that means something to people building WordPress websites. Now, will that language translate to other website builders? It should. Of course it should, because we’re really talking about building websites. But we don’t care if my mother doesn’t buy our product because she’s not a web designer. She is struggling to use her phone. You know what I mean? Those kinds of things. Right? So, Yeah. Sorry mama, throwing you under the bus. She’s not watching it’s okay.
Corey Maass 00:23:24 No I love it. So two things. One. because I’m a music nerd. You ready? that. So it’s, days go by. Is the is the hook, and there’s actual vocals in that song. Written by studio musicians. And who originally made it like there is you can go find like there’s an acoustic version.
Corey Maass 00:23:48 I think it’s actually on the album. But they, they wrote this song, right, for this Mitsubishi commercial in the studio on demand. Right. Mitsubishi came to them, said, write us a song. So they did. But it immediately became very popular because that commercial was so hip at the time. And so they 2 or 3 guys I don’t remember, called themselves Dirty Vegas and quickly put through together an album and put out the album and the album went to like top ten or something. Talking about pop music. Totally synthetic, right? Because they were not a band. It was just a like, we need to ride this wave. Good for them. I love that album. I was all like, cool underground electronic music, but, but I still love good music. And they were good musicians. Obviously, if they can just, like, whip that together and I mean, however long it took them, it could have been days, but, but just so good. Catchy. And so the rest of the album was actually really good. And then I think I’m pretty sure on that. It must have been on that album, like as a, you know, hidden track at the end or something. They had like the original studio acoustic version of them.
Michelle Frechette 00:25:06 Oh, cool.
Corey Maass 00:25:08 yeah, just kind of fun.
Michelle Frechette 00:25:10 I have to send me the link so I can listen to it again.
Corey Maass 00:25:13 Oh yeah. Oh, it must be on Spotify.
Michelle Frechette 00:25:15 Well, even just the one you just had up, I just watch the commercial. Yeah, yeah.
Corey Maass 00:25:19 No you must deep dive.
Michelle Frechette 00:25:20 I must deep dive. You’ll be disappointed if I don’t deep dive into that. It’s interesting to talk about advertising, right? Talk about marketing and advertising. There was and again, this was a while back and I think it was a Super Bowl commercial even. I do not remember what the commercial was for. It might have been for something like Weebly or Wix or something, quite honestly. Because I think it might have been about websites, but I’m not entirely certain.
Michelle Frechette 00:25:47 But the commercial that they showed was, or the product that they were displaying wasn’t even a real product, and the website was rubbereyes.com like rubber e- y-e-s. Because it was for sunglasses that were like, you could like that would squish and without breaking, like in sports and things like that. And I remember thinking, I don’t care about whatever it was they were actually trying to sell. I want to pair those glasses. So I went to rubbereyes.com and surprised at what they weren’t selling glasses. They were selling whatever the product was like. You know, the surface product was. And I was like, so damn disappointed that those glasses didn’t actually exist.
Corey Maass: Hahahaha.
Michelle Frechette: So you gotta be careful how successful your marketing is, because you might be marketing the wrong thing at the end of the day. But my favorite, and I want to say it might have been a GoDaddy ad way back, you know, early 2000 as well, was a group of like a ragtag group of college students or whatever had this new whatever it was they were selling, let’s say, a widget of some sort, and they, like, launched it.
Michelle Frechette 00:26:53 They’re all sitting on the, on the, on the couch watching like, okay, it’s launched. And like, will we get any sales? And I was like, blip. We gotta say, oh my gosh, we got a sale. Blip. Blip. Like we got three sales already? And then it was like blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And all of a sudden they’re like, how are we gonna we we can’t make 100,000 of these kind of thing, right? So I used that to always say plan for failure, but plan for success.
Corey Maass: Success.
Michelle Frechette: You have to plan for both, because if you are wildly successful, how are you going to fulfill what what it is that you’re doing to? And if we had a bunch of.
Corey Maass: Which is the story of Kickstarter.
Michelle Frechette: Right, the omg omg, right? If if the very first iteration that you created has sold like wildfire without the bugs being worked out first, it would not have a good reputation today, right? Because it would have been like, well, that that failed, that didn’t work, and then we would just be dead in the water kind of thing.
Michelle Frechette 00:27:51 So to build something slowly till you’ve got the product, so we have, you know, users who give good feedback and are happy to have bought it and know that they’re getting updates and things like that. It worked for them, but they’re happy to see the changes and those kinds of things is a better build than like, we just built it. Let’s launch it. And oh, shoot, it doesn’t work for everybody. Well, there goes our income kind of thing. So, you know, it’s it’s good to plan for failure, but it’s even better to plan for success. You have to have these contingency plans in place, because if you overshoot your goal, you need to make sure that you have a way to be able to provide what it is and the support for what you provide. So maybe like software okay, great. A million people can download it. That doesn’t we don’t have to create anything, but you also have to plan the support for all of your, your sales as well, which is a good thing to scale for.
Michelle Frechette 00:28:47 but you do, do you have to think about those things in advance.
Corey Maass: I’m looking for.
Michelle Frechette: I’m just dropping pearls of wisdom all day, aren’t I? People are like, okay, whatever. Yeah.
Corey Maass 00:29:00 Lifehacker. That’s what it was. Okay, so I’m sending you a, Nobody needs to see this, so I’m sending it to you directly. But, my first somewhat successful. Successful as in popular, not successful as in made me any money. app was a personal finance tracker, but it was intentionally low tech. So it emailed you every day and said, what did you buy today? And you were supposed to just list your purchases and you hit reply and it would collect it all. So it wasn’t an app it wasn’t tied into, because this was in the era of, Mint was really the only like, personal finance tracker back in the day. and then YNAB and a whole bunch of, you know, 100 and 101 apps came out later. But anyway. oops. Stop. I have to turn on my Christmas candle, because all of them have to. All of them get turned on at 430. Somehow this one started going at like two, so I had to, like, turn it off. So. Merry Christmas everyone.
Michelle Frechette 00:30:12 Merry Christmas.
Corey Maass 00:30:13 Well, it’s funny, like, you step outside our house and at 430, like, we’ve done this so many years that we have them all sitting out and then, like Lindsey set, an alarm for 4:30 and we quick turn them all on and then walk around and plug them in, because in the past you’d walk around and turn them on, and so then they’d come on staggered. Whereas now if you step back like bam for they all coming on at 4:30. Anyway,
Michelle Frechette 00:30:38 I noticed the picture with the, the, the link you sent me was also at Christmas time. It’s a Christmas tree in the background.
Corey Maass 00:30:44 Yeah. Oh yes. That’s right, that’s right.
Michelle Frechette 00:30:46 And you get a shirt and tie. Look at you.
Corey Maass 00:30:48 Which, which as you, as we discussed the other day, like I always used to, used to wear even though I didn’t need to, or probably because I didn’t need to.
Corey Maass 00:30:59 Yeah. With a, with the cat that I lived and lived with at one point. That’s my, like, hip New York apartment. One of them. But anyway, so the hell were we talking about? Oh.
Michelle Frechette: The app.
Corey Maass: Plan for success. So I built this little app and it was and I had a few users and I submitted it to a bunch of different websites. And again, this was. So this was 15 years ago. So before Product Hunt and before there were a thousand websites like that, there were only a few, Lifehacker being one of them. And I submitted the site to Lifehacker, and I had a meeting in Union Square, and I was working at a WeWork, in, northern no, Nolita, northern, northern, Little Italy. And so I was walking back and early iPhone and I checked my email and it went like ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. And it turned out that despite six weeks going by, Lifehacker found my email because you back when you could you it the internet actually just worked like that, right?
Michelle Frechette: Right.
Corey Maass 00:32:13 They were like, oh, this is neat, let’s write about it. And they threw an article on Lifehacker, and suddenly I got thousands and thousands of users and so went literally like running through the streets of New York, got to my office. and I had, I was hosting with want to actually use their name because they were amazing, but they’re now gone. I can’t remember it now, but this, like, hosting company out of Chicago, and and I loved them, as much because, like you, you talk to actual people. And they had an actual office, and I think I had found them for a client, but I, but I paid a lot of money by relatively speaking, you know, you could always get hosts for a dollar, but these guys were like 70 a month or something. But again you could, you could talk to an actual human. And so I called them and wound up talking to them. And they were they started watching the track because I’m like, I’m getting slammed.
Corey Maass 00:33:18 So they were like watching the server for me and they’re like, nope, you’re doing fine. Everything’s going. It was like, this is amazing. But yeah, all the bugs started happening. And ultimately, more or less the demise was this was early days of sending bulk email, bulk transactional email. And I never could figure out how to send, you know, tens of thousands of emails, essentially all at the same time, but all personalized. I know how to do that now, but and services weren’t really set up for it. Like, it a lot better a lot better setup for, sending email than like using your own SMTP server or something. But anyway. Yeah. And then never could figure out how to monetize it. I wound up with like thousands and thousands of users. But it was also like, oh, I gave it all away for free. Like maybe people will pay a couple of bucks a month for. You know, which is an interesting topic.
Corey Maass 00:34:23 We can pivot back to actual relevant conversation here. I was talking to, somebody today, another WordPress plugin developer. and we were talking about so the with my two previous bigger products, Kanban and Social Link Pages, I built a free version, I put a free version in the in the repo, got a bunch of users and then went, you know, okay, let’s make a pro version and charge for it, and then went, what do I it kind of kind of already does pretty much everything everybody wants. And so when Cory and I first were brainstorming this very pointedly, we were like, no, we’re going to start with a pro version and then back into a free version because we want that traffic. And I’m more and more especially talking to Mark Westerguard. He’s been helping me brainstorm, like, okay, some, some free version to put in the directory because it gets a lot of traffic. And he also showed me a bunch of other like essentially subdirectories that you can build something for.
Corey Maass 00:35:37 I don’t know what it looks like yet, but I’ve got an eye on that. Because we need I’m missing that. Like every time I’m thinking about, like, where can we be reaching other WordPress users that aren’t who aren’t in the Post Status bubble. Let’s be honest. The WordCamp bubble, I yeah, I think the directory is, is still the biggest lead gen.
Michelle Frechette 00:36:09 Yep. I think you’re right. Yeah. Getting it on the repo would be pretty awesome. For sure. Yeah. Try to think I did not. We did not create an agenda for today. So I’m more reactionary to you than anything else right now.
Corey Maass 00:36:29 That’s fine. I mean, I’m, I’m I’m there to, So Dirty Vegas wound up putting out four albums. Five albums. So this this studio band came together and put out five albums. Good for them. Now I have to go listen to the rest of them.
Michelle Frechette 00:36:48 I wrote them down so I won’t forget later. I’ll probably like later. I’ll look at them like, what is that about? Why did I write that down?
Corey Maass 00:36:54 What the hell? I came out with Days Go By was the song. So hopefully you have Spotify. I’m sending you the link.
Michelle Frechette 00:37:06 I do some more okay.
Corey Maass 00:37:08 Days Go By Acoustic, 12th track. Yep. Nice.
Michelle Frechette 00:37:13 Okay so here’s a question for you. If OMGIMG were a song, what song would it be?
Corey Maass 00:37:22 Everything Is Awesome.
Michelle Frechette 00:37:25 What song is that?
Corey Maass 00:37:26 Everything is awesome.Everything.
Michelle Frechette 00:37:27 What is that from? Is that from the Lego Lego movie? I haven’t seen it. Yeah.
Corey Maass 00:37:31 Yeah the Lego Movie. I don’t know that that’s true. But I, I want that to be, like, with a bright colors and the language we generally use like the new the my only, the only thing I’m not I still want to keep working on with the new website is like, the language isn’t fun, which is fine. It’s it’s it’s friendly and businessy, which is probably what it should be.
Michelle Frechette 00:37:53 But it’s not our personality.
Corey Maass 00:37:55 Exactly, exactly. And I want I want to.
Michelle Frechette 00:37:58 Because wwe are two half of the same personality. I realized that now.
Corey Maass 00:38:03 You’re the shiny. I’m the happy. Is that.
Michelle Frechette: Something like that?
Corey Maass 00:38:07 Something like that. Right.
Michelle Frechette 00:38:08 Oh, jolly. And whatever the colors. Definitely. So I’m like, what genre would it be? It would. It’s not polka, but polka is really up there like happy peppy. You know the, the, the chicken dance song when, you know, we don’t want that playing when you get to the site.
Corey Maass 00:38:23 Speaking of music, I have no no no.
Michelle Frechette 00:38:24 Dun dun dundun.
Corey Maass 00:38:26 Right. Like. Yeah, just like a tight little pop song. But that’s like, you know. Yeah. Friendly, helpful.
Michelle Frechette 00:38:38 Do you remember what was it, The Hamster Dance. That’s what it was that. Duh duh duuuh
Corey Maass 00:38:45 Duh, duh.
Michelle Frechette 00:38:48 It’s not that exactly either. But it’s that genre right.
Corey Maass 00:38:51 Like do do do do do do do do do. Yeah. It was a sped up blue song trying to remember who it was like. But I remember that in the 90s. Now you’re really dating us.
Michelle Frechette 00:39:03 Yeah, that was early. That was early internet.
Corey Maass 00:39:06 Yeah. But I loved it. Like, that was the like that was the charm of the early internet was there was. And I think that website is still up.
Michelle Frechette 00:39:15 Probably is.
Corey Maass 00:39:17 But there were like the internet was like as much for art installation in digital form as anything else. And so like, yeah, that’s what got me my first jobs. I was making these really weird, as weird as I could make them, like learning how to use HTML. This is preCSS. So it was designing things in Photoshop and then slicing them up. But making these they’re they’re at the time mid like mid late 90s, 96, 97, 98. There was hell.com. Whoever owns hell.com. It was an art installation and they changed it every month, and they actually credited the artist and whatnot, but it was like they would intentionally do things where they would have a pop up that opened a pop up recursively until it crashed your computer.
Michelle Frechette: Oh, lovely.
Corey Maass: And, and so you, you know, and you were warned, but you’re like, this is a digital art installation that comments on the deconstruction of blah, blah, blah.
Corey Maass 00:40:25 Man’s inhumanity to man, like, you know, whatever. But I was absolutely fascinated by that as a, as a medium because I came out of, like, this was high, high school because I was in college by then, but in high school, like, I was I was in an artist. I did installations like, you know, weird interactive things because that was a lot of what was happening in the 90s. And so here was this digital thing and you. So it didn’t cost you anything if you owned a computer and, and you could put it out there for literally the entire world to see as opposed to like I had taken over the a corner of the library to do this funky installation where you looked in a box that had infinite mirrors and, you know, goofy, weird, whatever. But here was a way to, like, reach the whole internet. So I, I was creating these crazy websites, and, and then went to New York City and interviewed at Cornell’s Medical College and was trying to show them all the corporate or the small business websites that I’d done up to that point.
Corey Maass 00:41:35 Because I got paired with an agency out of Staten Island. And so the guy who owned it was like going out and pitching the like the used car, literally the used car dealership down the street. And that’s who I was making all these sites for. But it turned out that my future boss, who was running the one man army behind Weill Cornell Medical College and Presbyterian Hospital. Their first websites was literally one guy. And it turns out that he was an artist. He had graduated from Rizid and was doing his own, again in person and online, in art installations. And so he kept going, well, show me this other weird stuff. And I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, let me show you the, you know, the more relevant business websites. He’s like, no, no, no, no, no. Like show me this other crazy weird. So that was a lot of fun and a nice coincidence that my, like, goofy side, got me my first jobs.
Michelle Frechette 00:42:38 You know, I think that there’s a lot to be said for personality when you’re interviewing for a job, but there’s a lot to be said for the personality of a product. Right? And and if you don’t think about it, you don’t really. I mean, good marketers think about the personality, the voice. We call it brand voice a lot, right? Of a product, I think that as consumers, we don’t think about it because it should be ingrained in the product that we’re responding to. The brand voice of that Mitsubishi commercial was definitely young and hip, which did not appeal to my mother, who was in her 50s at the time. I’m in my 50s now and I can still appreciate that, but I also have a big marketing background, right? There’s a lot of commercials I don’t care for. The the Kool-Aid guy that crashes through walls, I think is really stupid. But also, I’m not a Kool-Aid. I’m not their demographic, right? I’m not the young mother, and I’m not the kids who are drinking Kool-Aid.
Michelle Frechette 00:43:32 So. But I appreciate that they hit a market where where they are. Right. So, but there’s a lot, so there’s a lot to be said for that. And having the brand voice, I think, developing our brand voice to be more like who we are in a professional way. I don’t think we’re that unprofessional. We just really like to have fun with what we’re doing because it makes life a lot more interesting and more, you know, more fun. And it’s okay when we’re talking about having really cool images for, for social images, not open graph, but social images that to lean into a fun personality. It goes along with that, I think, in a really good way. So tweaking the language to still be professional but sound more like us, I think is perfectly fine. Absolutely. We can look at that together, you know, next week or whatever.
Corey Maass 00:44:22 I mean, it’s like it’s it’s like the jacket. Fine. No, I did it. I’m trying to find my favorite Christmas song to send you.
Michelle Frechette 00:44:30 okay. Not The Christmas Shoes.
Corey Maass 00:44:34 No. But anyway, yeah. So it was like the, you know, the crazy jacket that I printed. It’s like, how can we. I’m my honestly, my my only regret at the moment is that we didn’t pick a product that was more obvious. Like, I not forms but like, you know, something? And a page builder. A form builder, a security plugin. Like something that’s, you know, a crowded market that, that. But, you know, as many people have proven like you can we can always use more competition in these crowded markets. And so I wish that because I feel like we could use our personality as a marketing tool, like, did you. I sent you that hosting company today.
Michelle Frechette: Yes.
Corey Maass: That’s like a totally different take. you know, they’re. It feels personal. It feels weird on the internet, like it’s, you know, it feels too indie, I think, like, I sent it to a couple of people and they’re like, I wouldn’t give this whoever this is, I wouldn’t give them my money, because what the hell is this?
Michelle Frechette 00:45:41 It’s quirky.
Corey Maass 00:45:42 Yeah, it’s very quirky. So there’s so there’s a, you know, but I’m like, but I’m just, I’m because of how the internet this, this kind of nostalgia that we just were, were expressing like because of where the internet came from. I’m and and at points I am one of those people. The infinite posts on Reddit going you know, the internet used to be cool. What happened kind of thing. I still love the internet, but it definitely is. Is all of the sharp edges have been filed off, you know?
Michelle Frechette 00:46:16 Yeah. And there’s a.Lot to be said for nostalgia, but, the people who are buying of the age for which nostalgia is hits home. Right? So like if, if I don’t know what the demographic is. But let’s say that the average age of somebody building a website is 35. You and I are not 35. So we like nostalgia, but is a 35 year old looking for nostalgia because probably not in the same way.
Corey Maass 00:46:44 A nostalgia Internet? No they don’t. They have no sense of.
Michelle Frechette 00:46:46 And nostalgia for them is going to be a very different thing than when nostalgia for us is right. Like I when I think about nostalgia, I think about Holly Hobbie. I think about right, like I had.
Corey Maass: Cabbage Patch Kids.
Michelle Frechette: Yeah, exactly. Things that are from my youth that are in museums now a lot of the time, right. When I think of my first cell phone was nowhere near. It wasn’t a brick because I wasn’t rich. I didn’t get to have one of those. Right. But but it definitely didn’t flip. It didn’t open. It didn’t. It wasn’t a smart phone, right? It was just this little thing. And you had to pull the antenna up to use it.
Corey Maass 00:47:21 I got the one that had snake on it, because there’s no way I wasn’t going to use it mostly to play games.
Michelle Frecehtte: Right? Exactly.
Corey Maass: To play a game, because that was the only game on it.
Michelle Frechette 00:47:32 Yeah. But as as Gen X, you know, we are tech users. We might not be as techie as some of the younger kids are, right? But we’re tech users. We are some of the original adopters of some technology. As we start to get nostalgic about some of those things selling to others like us, the nostalgia works. It just depends on who your target audience is, which is why you’ll sometimes see one product have more than one commercial. So it’s hitting different people in different in different ways. Right. So I talk about Coca-Cola a lot when I talk about advertising, because Coca Cola is one of those that they’ll have very different commercials out at the same time, and then they’ll have a commercial that kind of hits everybody. Right? So this time of year, you’ll see the the polar bears, the Coca Cola polar bears, and everybody’s like, oh look, they’re cute, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re 15 or 70. A polar bear sliding down a hill is cute. So it just it really just depends.
Corey Maass 00:48:28 I keep thinking about yeah, all of the streaming services have reintroduced ads, and which is a sad state of things.
Corey Maass 00:48:37 But I more broadly, I actually like some of it because if we don’t see ads anymore. And so it’s it’s kind of like we now live, the way things are now, it’s very easy for me to not hear pop music. Whereas when you and I grew up, or even 20 years ago, you couldn’t not hear pop music and even, you know, and it was you’d hear the radio somehow, you know, or the newest when.
Michelle Frechette 00:49:09 Even when you go to the mall, it’s not radio, it’s piped in music that’s on a on a tape or.
Corey Maass: It’s curated.
Michelle Frechette: It’s that tape anymore.
Corey Maass: You’re adorable.
Michelle Frechette: I just aged myself right there.
Corey Maass 00:49:19 Yes. It’s on reel to reel tape.
Michelle Frechette 00:49:21 But it’s canned. It’s canned music that we’re listening to. It’s not played with the ads and things that like iheartradio is.
Corey Maass 00:49:28 Curated. You know, it’s, like, I actually have a buddy who runs an agency. That was they were one of the first where they were getting, I’m trying to think of a of a hip, Lucky jeans.
Corey Maass 00:49:47 Diesel jeans. There you go. All of the Diesel stores hired them to curate songs. And this was many, 20 years ago. And so they actually had to go get all of the MP3’s, often ripping them from CDs, put them on a Mac mini, install the Mac mini in the store. And the same way that Google used to give you a give, like, when I was at I worked at Penn State, they, all like the whole web presence of Penn State. They wanted to use Google search, and Google offered a product where they would let you essentially use Google Search within, you know, and you could define like on our website, and if you were big enough, they actually gave you a tower that you would install on your network. And but it was taped right with tamper. Tamper, you know. Which is which is funny the way that I was trying not to say that, because it’s not that you it doesn’t prevent you from tampering with it, i.e. making some evidence.
Corey Maass 00:51:03 Yeah. Proves that it was tampered with. Right. Because it’s proprietary. So same sort of thing. So they, they would do little Mac minis full of mp3’s that nobody else in the world could get that they would then and they could network in and and play these playlists. But it was all very, very curated. But most of the time, as you said, like walking around the mall, you’d hear the local rock station or the local easy listening station or whatever. And all that’s gone. But anyway, so all that to say, like I’ve now been watching these ads and it’s, it’s really interesting because not to get into it at all, but I but I will say the sentence like I feel very out of touch with most of America and clearly am out of touch with most of America. But subsequently it it has led me to a lot of reflection of like, okay, so so what is. And this goes back to the like the WordPress users who are not in the bubble, like who is everybody else?
Corey Maass 00:52:06 And it’s a great exercise in empathy, but it’s also a great exercise in like discovery. And so again, looking at the rest of our society, I’m looking at these ads and some of the language that they use. I’m like, if you take that sentence out of this ad, it literally, grammatically makes no sense. They’re just keyword stuffing or anyway, it’s it’s fascinating, like some of the language that they use, because you these are like car companies, truck companies. In particular that I’m thinking of. And I’m like, you have to assume that they did, and they put an unbelievable amount of time and research i.e. money into this. And so they’ve tested this with your average human who is meant to buy this truck. So who can afford a $60,000 truck, you know, but they’re going to show you, you know, that it drives fast and climbs mountains. But that’s funny because most of the time the people they put in them, obviously they’re all gorgeous but are generally young.
Corey Maass 00:53:16 And I’m like, none of those people could actually afford this truck.
Michelle Frechette 00:53:21 Exactly.
Corey Maass 00:53:22 But so it’s the it’s the 50 year old men who wished that they were still in their 20s and 30s, going camping with their, you know, their attractive friends or something.
Michelle Frechette 00:53:33 Yeah. Yeah. That’s funny. It is so true. So, so true. Yeah. There was a time when now we hear popular songs all the time, right at at rallies. We hear it on advertising and, you know, whatever brand buys the right or pays the right to use the music to the music owner, usually the band or the singer, but who knows nowadays who actually owns the music. There was a time, like in the 80s, let’s say a 90s, when like, the the ketchup company, the one that anticipation, like, you know, like. It’s not pouring kind of thing. Yeah. It was Heinz and I think it’s the Carly Simon anticipation song. Come on. And I remember my mom saying she sold out.
Corey Maass 00:54:20 Hahahahahahaha.
Michelle Frechette 00:54:22 She sold out for advertising.
Corey Maass: And now we say good for her.
Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Right. Exactly like oh man she must be making bank off of that. Right.
Corey Maass 00:54:29 Assuming she still owned the rights by then. But yes.
Michelle Frechette 00:54:31 Right. For sure. But you hear that song and you think of that one drop of ketchup almost coming out of the bottle kind of thing. Unless you’re my mom and you think of living in the 70s, but, you know, kind of thing. I throw my mother under the bus all the time. It’s a good thing she doesn’t listen to my podcasts, but, but yeah, so nowadays it’s like, oh, what song could we get? How much are they going to charge us to use it, etc., etc.. So.
Corey Maass 00:54:55 Well, there’s like there’s trendy songs, but like to your point, you know, like was Carly Simon popular at that time? No. Like she was a little bit with our parents, which arguably they were the ones buying the ketchup.
Corey Maass 00:55:09 But it also the song perfectly captured. The vibe or the message they were trying to do. which is, I mean, you know, other interesting examples like the, one of the early ones, Reagan using Born in the USA, right. But only ever the first verse and just the chorus pumping over and over again.
Michelle Frechette 00:55:31 Heaven forbid you listen to the rest of it.
Corey Maass 00:55:34 Yeah, right. You know, and so many examples like that.
Michelle Frechette: Don’t listen to the rest of that song.
Corey Maass 00:55:40 Right. Or at least not if you’re at a Reagan rally.
Michelle Frechette 00:55:44 But in other places, the the being on a commercial has actually skyrocketed. Some musicians, whether they’re one hit wonders or not. Right. And to actually maybe.
Corey Maass: They put out four albums.
Michelle Frechette: Exactly. But and I don’t know which came first, like the Barenaked Ladies have been, you know, popular for a long time, but that I can’t I don’t know the names of their songs, but the Chinese Chicken Song, you know, was on a commercial. That’s how I was introduced to the Barenaked Ladies was I heard it in a commercial and I was like, I like that.
Michelle Frechette 00:56:11 And I went and looked for their music, you know, kind of thing. So yeah, okay, so all I’m hearing out of all of this is we need a theme song. So, get to work on that, will you? Because I know anything I pick you’re not going to like. Just kidding.
Corey Maass 00:56:22 I know we’ve had. I know we’ve used the AI.
Michelle Frechette 00:56:24 I did create an eye song for us at one point in time. Yeah. I’m not sure it was the right song, though, is all I’m saying.
Corey Maass 00:56:32 RIght. Well, and I mean, this is, you know, as as we as we know, like, I love swag. I love product like, this. Who cares about the actual business. Like what’s fun is actually like getting t shirts made.
Michelle Frechette 00:56:46 Right or a QR code that takes you back to the song that we wrote for our product kind of scavenger hunt, just to figure out exactly who knows. We tried to find that out.
Corey Maass 00:56:58 Give us your money and we will continue to entertain you.
Michelle Frechette 00:57:01 Exactly. Anyway, on that note, we should wrap it up for the week. Yeah.
Corey Maass: Absolutely.
Michelle Frechette: We’ve got far, far afield. So, the the people who are watching. Thank you for hanging in there. We’ll see you all next week. We won’t be, we’ll be streaming the last week of December because that’s the that’s Christmas Eve.
Corey Maass: What?
Michelle Frechette: I know I’m on vacation that week, and so, but we’ll be up until then and again right afterwards. So, until then, happy marketing. Bye.
Corey Maass 00:57:34 Duh duh duh duh duh duh. Bum bum bum bum bum bum.
