Transcript ↓

In this podcast episode, Michelle Frechette  interviews Natalie MacLee and Nathan Tyler, co-founders of NSquared. They discuss their journey from developing popular WordPress plugins to launching SaaS products like Aaardvark, an accessibility platform, and Blink Metrics, a data management tool for small businesses. The conversation covers the challenges of fragmented business data, the importance of web accessibility, and the differences between WordPress plugins and SaaS solutions, highlighting N Squared’s commitment to innovation and supporting both the WordPress community and broader digital needs.

Top Takeaways:

• From WordPress Roots to SaaS Expansion: Natalie MacLees and Nathan Tyler started with successful WordPress plugins like Simply Schedule Appointments and Draw Attention. Realizing some challenges couldn’t be solved within WordPress alone, they expanded into SaaS to build scalable tools that work both inside and outside the WordPress ecosystem.
• Introducing Aaardvark and Blink Metrics: Their new tools—Aaardvark and Blink Metrics—tackle accessibility and data overwhelm. Aaardvark offers automated and manual accessibility testing, with WordPress integration. Blink Metrics pulls data from multiple sources into a centralized, easy-to-read dashboard for small businesses, simplifying decision-making.
• Prioritizing Accessibility and Innovation:Accessibility is a major focus. Aaardvark is developing an AI tool to check color contrast in complex designs and supports multilingual websites. They’re also launching Aaardvark Circle, a community to help professionals improve accessibility in their work.
• The Marketing Challenge of SaaS vs. WordPress: Marketing SaaS is harder than WordPress plugins, which get exposure through WordPress.org. SaaS tools require outreach and education to build awareness. Natalie and Nathan are leaning into this challenge to grow beyond the WordPress bubble.
• Coexistence of Platforms and a Broader Mission: Though they’re expanding into SaaS, Natalie and Nathan still actively support their WordPress products. They believe in building tools that work across platforms, aiming to improve accessibility and usability for the entire web—not just WordPress users.

Mentioned In The Show:

• N Squared
• Draw Attention
• Simply Schedule Appointments
• Calendly
• AAArdvark
• Blink Metrics
• Simple Client Dashboard

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Social Media:

• Natalie MacLees (Co-Founder of NSquared)
• Nathan Tyler (Co-Founder of NSquared)
• 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 00:00:25  Hey and welcome to Post Status Happiness Hour Live today. My guests are Natalie MacLees and Nathan Tyler from N squared. Welcome. 

Nathan Tyler: Hello. 

Natalie MacLees: Thank you for having us. 

Michelle Frechette: Yeah. It’s so good to talk to you. I was, I remember talking to Nathan about having you on the show. And then between the time we said that and the time I was supposed to bring you guys on board, I was like, wait, what are we talking about again? Because I completely lost track of our conversations. So thanks for bearing with, bearing with me. But I’m so excited because let’s just say that you guys are feeling a little sassy lately. Meaning I’m gonna lean into all the puns today. Because today we’re talking about moving. Not really moving from, but, you know, incorporating SaaS products when you’ve been WordPress products this whole time, and what that looks like for a company. I think a lot of companies think about that. And what would it look like to, you know, have been WordPress, you’ve been part of the WordPress ecosystem. What does that mean? If we go SaaS and we, you know, take things outside of the WordPress bubble and be the same, but more, to more people and what that looks like and how difficult that might be. So I’m excited to hear all of your experiences with that. And yeah, all of the things. So before we get started, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourselves, a little bit about yourself. I like to know where people are located because I think it’s interesting. We get to talk to people all over the world. You know, and you know, maybe how long you’ve been working in the WordPress ecosystem. And Natalie, I’m going to start with you.

Natalie MacLees 00:02:02  Okay. All right. Great. So I’m Natalie MacLees. I have been working with WordPress since 2007. I am in Pasadena, California, home of the Rose Parade. If you watch that on New Year’s Day. And, let’s see. Founded N Squared with Nathan in 2014. So we’ve been working together for 11 years. We got a couple of plugins. I’ll let him talk about those a little bit more. I’ve run an agency, done a little bit of everything.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:32  And you’re all in on accessibility as well, are you not?

Natalie MacLees 00:02:35  I am absolutely, yes.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:38  I’ve seen some of your accessibility talks, so I always appreciate somebody who’s also an accessible ally. So there you go. Nathan, over to you.

Nathan Tyler 00:02:48  Sure, sure. So I’m Nathan. I’ve been using WordPress also since 2007. Natalie and I met maybe around 2010, 2011, in the WordPress Meetup space, and we both had agencies at the time. And then we started working together, and it was 11 years ago at a coffee shop. So we both were running our agencies, and we built our first plugin, which is Draw Attention. We carved out four hours a week, and we, you know, met on a tiny little table at the Coffee Bean and worked on our plugin four hours a week. And then over the course of like 5 or 6 years, went to full-time, incrementally from that four hours a week. And then we built Simply Schedule Appointments, which is kind of the more common larger plugin, which is appointment scheduling for WordPress. We’re both at the time, we were both Calendly users, users of a SaaS product, and we found that, you know, there were some there was some friction of putting that SaaS product and embedding it on the page. It had ugly iframe scrollbars, and it didn’t really know whether the user was logged in. And it felt kind of clunky in a WordPress world. And so our goal at the time was just to build something as elegant as Calendly, but more WordPress native, integrated with the page builders, integrated with Gravity Forms and that sort of thing. So I think we kind of built our first plugin modeled after a SaaS, and now many years later, we find ourselves going the other direction. There’s trade offs to both.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:14  I mean, the beauty of life is you’re allowed to do differently than you did ten years ago. So the ecosystem changes and tech changes and all of the things. Are you also in Pasadena or in the Pasadena area?

Nathan Tyler 00:04:28  Yes. Yeah. I live five miles away from Natalie in Eagle Rock, just west of Pasadena, and we used to see each other once, twice, three times a week as we were working. And now we see each other about once a quarter. We meet. 

Natalie MacLees: Yeah.

Nathan Tyler: We meet in between our houses.

Natalie MacLees 00:04:44  It’s a long five miles.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:46  I was going to say. I believe that y’all need some more coffee soon in your diet so that you can say hello a little more frequently.  I’ve often wondered, do you, like, did you drink your weight in coffee? Did you pay for enough coffee to like? You should have just rented an office at that point in time. Or.

Nathan Tyler 00:05:08  When we went to the, we went from four hours a day to eight hours. And that was a very long time to be at a Coffee Bean and a lot of a lot of coffee.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:17 Yeah, for sure.

Nathan Tyler 00:05:18  At the end of the day.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:19  And a lot of looking over their glasses at you, like, how long are you going to take that table?

Nathan Tyler 00:05:24  Yeah, yeah. We got to know the shift changes and all the all the folks that work there.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:30  When you’re giving Christmas cards to every employee, even though you don’t work there, that’s another story altogether.

Nathan Tyler 00:05:36  Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:38  So Simply Schedule Appointments. That’s how I got to know you all, because back in the days of GiveWP before acquisition and all of that, we were using, Simply Schedule to be able to schedule demos with customers who wanted to see how does this work even. And so I got to know the product really, really well. Loved the interface. Loved the, it was a fox, right? It’s been a while since I’ve seen it. And it was just beautiful integration. I loved how easy it was to set up appointments. And you know, I’ve used it on different websites since then. And when you said you were moving into SaaS, I was like, oh, this could be really interesting. Is it the same product? Is it scheduling products or what are you doing with SaaS?

Nathan Tyler 00:06:24  No. So we aren’t moving Simply Schedule to SaaS because I mean, there’s already a few.

Michelle Frechette 00:06:31  A lot of competitors.

Nathan Tyler 00:06:32  Competition. I mean, you might have heard of a little company called Calendly, right?

Michelle Frechette 00:06:35  I might use it sometimes yeah. 

Nathan Tyler 00:06:38  There are products like in WordPress whose main benefit and that was the thesis when we started. It was build it in WordPress. And if you take that back to SaaS then you don’t really have any competitive advantage right now. We’re integrated nicely with the page builders and the authorization system of WordPress, and if you’re running an online course or anything like there’s a lot of benefits that are better than Calendly. But if we made it a SaaS version, we’d have 100 competitors that we don’t really have any improvement on.

Michelle Frechette 00:07:08  So tell us about the products that you are building in SaaS then. And do they are they also backward compatible with WordPress?

Nathan Tyler 00:07:16  Yeah. So both of them have WordPress plugins and are well integrated with WordPress. Obviously we’re still very involved in that community. So we’re not leaving all that behind. But the products themselves are SaaS, and some problems are better served by SaaS. There’s different trade-offs of like, if you need something that has a lot of data or a lot of scalability issues, trying to make a WordPress plugin that works on every server and version of PHP in the world is a different kind of challenge. And there’s some problems that you really don’t work well that way. If you build a SaaS platform you can, you can make architectural choices that give you a lot more options. You can deliver a better experience.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:03  So you mentioned two SaaS products. What are they? Don’t keep us in suspense. Tell us more.

Nathan Tyler 00:08:08  Natalie, why don’t you talk about Aaardvark?

Michelle Frechette 00:08:11  Shall I, shall I bring it up on screen at the same time, Natalie?

Natalie MacLees 00:08:14  Sure. That’s fine. Okay. Yeah. So that’s our artwork home page. So Aardvark is a platform that helps you, do everything that you need to get a website to be accessible.  So we combine both automated and manual testing altogether in one platform. Have a nice list of issues for you available, and then walk you through how to fix them. And I’ll flip over to a different tab here. So we do have a visual mode that lets you see exactly where the accessibility issues are on the page. Which is really helpful because I’ve done a lot of audits over the years where developers say they have no idea what I’m talking about. Where is this? So they can’t say that anymore. And then we have all the details about each of the, all the details about each of the sites, all the different issues that are there. And if we go into the issues, we walk you through how to fix each one of them so you can understand exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it. So, everything you need end-to-end, there’s a WordPress plugin available. And we have lots of nice features for getting your website to be accessible.

Michelle Frechette 00:09:32  Very nice. And so it’s looking at not to do too deep a dive into accessibility, but I’m assuming it’s looking at everything from contrast to form labels to link labeling and alt text and all of the things, correct?

Natalie MacLees 00:09:46  Yes, exactly. All of those things.

Michelle Frechette 00:09:49  I was having a conversation. I can’t remember who it was with. I think it was last week or the week before, about how back before I knew any better. So I will say it that way before I knew any better. When I was first starting to use WordPress. H tags were just font sizes to me, and I had no idea that they actually had, you know, a role other than, oh, that one’s bigger than that one. And so, you know, once you know, you do better. But having. 

Natalie MacLess: Exactly. 

Michelle Frechette: Having a service like Aaardvark is one of those things that helps you understand that much sooner than than perhaps I knew and I am talking early 2010’s and so I could be a little forgiven.

Natalie MacLees 00:10:27  But of course.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:31  I don’t do it now. I don’t do it now. But yeah. For sure. So, how does that work? How does somebody. I’m sorry. Go ahead. Nathan.

Nathan Tyler 00:10:40  Oh, I was just going to say we’ve had a lot of fun building it, because I think part of this has been Natalie’s pipe dream that’s been on napkins and things in her mind for years, like the tool that she always wishes that she had when she was doing audits and doing, you know, professional accessibility work instead of spreadsheets. But also from my perspective, you know, I’m a technical person, I’m a developer. I want to do better, but I often don’t know what to do, or I don’t understand what the issue is exactly. Or I may understand the issue, but I don’t know, like, technically, how do I fix it? And so, you know, Natalie and I have had kind of fun building this product because in one way, I’m really the ideal customer. And, you know, because she knows too much in some areas.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:24  I was going to say she’s not right. She knows what she’s doing.

Nathan Tyler 00:11:28  Yeah. And, you know, there’s lots of web developers who want to do better. And, you know, it’s similar to there’s things that are adjacent to the work that we do, building websites for clients like, you know, maybe I know a little bit about SEO and I learned a little bit about semantic, you know, data and some things so that I’m competent in SEO. I’m not an SEO like super professional. Like if somebody wants that, you know, I would make a recommendation, but I want to be competent and be building things that can be crawled by search engines. And it’s the same thing with accessibility. It’s, you know, increasingly important. And awareness is growing. And I want to know what to do about it. But, you know, I’m not going to become an accessibility professional. That’s not going to be the only thing I do. And not every project can necessarily afford or warrant like bringing in somebody like Natalie to do a full teardown audit. But Aaardvark is a really nice solution for someone like me where I can run an automated scan. I can have, I can report some, manual issues. I can see it in a context, not with like 5 million lines of output, but I can actually see it on the page in the right spot. And it tells me, you know, these are some of the recommended techniques for fixing it, and it kind of lets me get in and out, without getting bogged down in it for too long. Yeah, that’s been an enjoyable process for us to kind of figure that out together.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:51  That’s very cool. And I noticed there’s three A’s in Aaardvark. Is there a particular reason we just like it? It shows up at the top of every list.

Nathan Tyler 00:12:59  Yeah, it’s very alphabetical.

Natalie MacLees 00:13:03  That was a side benefit, actually. Yeah, it’s it’s meant to reference the three A’s for look at AAA compliance. Yeah. And, accessibility people get it immediately. So they’ve always said like, oh, I really like the name.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:19  And other people say, aren’t there only two A’s in Aardvark? Right?

Natalie MacLees 00:13:22  Yeah.

Natalie MacLees 00:13:23  Don’t you know how to spell or somebody somebody has pronounced a aardvark. Aaardvark.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:31  Like just one. There’s just one aardvark. Yeah, just one in aardvark. That’s cute.

Nathan Tyler 00:13:36  Yeah. Whenever it gets too clever, I guess. And when we were first talking, I was like, I don’t even know if A is the highest level or of triple A is the highest level of compliance.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:47   I don’t either. That’s interesting.

Nathan Tyler 00:13:51  But triple A is the most compliant.

Natalie MacLees 00:13:53  Triple A is the most compliant. Yeah. It’s the most accommodating.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:56  It’s the opposite from baseball. It’s like triple A is like lower. But so you gotta get out of the sports arena and back into the rest of the world. Right? Remember the old phone books? 

Natalie MacLees: Oh, yes. 

Michelle Frechette: It goes by the old phone books was the more, the more A’s you had, the higher up you ranked in the on the page, alphabetically. And for everybody who’s watching, who doesn’t remember a phone. But Google is your friend. Anyway, so how does it work as a SaaS product? Can SaaS products be applied to WordPress, or should I still use the Aaardvark plugin if I have a WordPress website?

Natalie MacLees 00:14:36  Yeah. So it’ll work with any type of website. You basically would just come in here, and you can add a new site and it just works off of your URL. So you just put in the address of your site. And the benefit that you get when you use the WordPress plugin is that these reports that you see, like when we go to the site dashboard. Those all end up in your dashboard. So you can see your list of issues and you can run scans and see your history, like we can see our history over time. All of that is available in your dashboard. That’s the benefit of using it. using the WordPress plugin is that you don’t have to separately come over to Aaardvark to log in. It’s all handy right there where you log in every day.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:21  Very cool. Does, I don’t know with accessibility language, is there are there polyglot issues with things like accessibility and how Aaardvark works on non-English websites?

Natalie MacLees 00:15:38 So there are we have a challenge right now with multilingual websites. Which is we’re building our first AI feature that will check color contrast for you. So automated checkers can’t check your color contrast if you’ve used a background image or a background gradient or you have opacity or things like that. And so we are working on our first AI feature, which will take a screenshot, recognize the text, sample the background all around each letter, and make sure that each letter has sufficient contrast to pass. And of course, in order for AI to be able to recognize that text, it has to know the language. So that’s the challenge that we’re solving right now. Other than that there are no extra challenges with other languages, but as soon as we get those languages figured out, we’ll have that AI feature out for everybody.

Michelle Frechette 00:16:30  That’s that makes perfect sense. Absolutely. And you’re right. Sometimes, like with the gradient. Right? Like the first half of a word is great, but the second half of the word disappears because you’ve gravitated to. That’s a word? Graded than too light behind the light background, or things like that, which does make it somewhat challenging. I did notice on my phone screen that I have a picture of a frog that I took, and the time knows to gradient to, to grade itself differently across. So if there’s a a dark color behind it, it’s light and it reverses itself. And I just noticed it yesterday, I was like, wonder how long it’s been doing that. That’s pretty cool. But I.

Natalie MacLees 00:17:11  And I.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:13  Can see how it can be challenging though, especially on websites and things like that. And here’s a question I’ve never asked before either. And I should know these things because I am on the WordPress accessibility day marketing team. But I don’t know everything, and I’m 100% the person who will say, I don’t know everything but dark mode versus light mode. How do you how are you able to test? Because so many sites now do that right. Have dark mode versus light mode. Can you test for both? Does it test for both separately? Like how does that work?

Natalie MacLees 00:17:44  I don’t think we’ve come across that case just yet. If there are separate URLs for the modes, which there probably is not, we could use those. But otherwise, that is probably a feature that we will need to figure out.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:59  Oh well you’re welcome. Feel free to take that and run with it.

Nathan Tyler 00:18:04  It would work in the visual mode, the manual testing, but not probably the automated scanner and the URL that would pick it up.

Natalie MacLees 00:18:10  Yeah, we’d have to find a way to pass the mode to the to the scanner, which I’m sure we can do. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:18:16  Yeah. I never use dark mode because my eyes don’t like light text on a dark background, but I can see how other people do appreciate it. As a matter of fact, I just tweeted yesterday, I saw one logo and a lot of logos have transparent backgrounds, but I saw one logo that absolutely looked horrific in dark mode because of how part of it just disappeared, and the rest of it that didn’t disappear looked very ominous. Without the whole thing there. And so I tweeted like have you checked your logo in dark mode? Because some of you haven’t, and it shows. These are the little challenges we find as we’re looking at things. Right? So for sure.

Natalie MacLees: Yeah, for sure. 

Michelle Frechette 00:18:58  So I love Aaardvark. I love the fact that, you know, accessibility is so important. I like to tell people do accessibility because it’s the right thing to do if you don’t want to do it because it’s the right thing to do, do it because it’s better for your sales. And if you don’t even care about that, do it because Google will be happier with you. Like, there are three reasons that go from altruistic to less so, that will still make it that you want your site to be accessible.

Natalie MacLees 00:19:27  Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:30  So. But you said two. So other than Aaardvark, what’s your other SaaS product you’re working on?

Nathan Tyler 00:19:36  So our, our other, our other product is Blink Metrics, which is an area that’s near and dear to my heart, which is, you know, most small businesses. You know, we are all strapped for time. We all are trying to make better decisions. We’re trying to allocate our time the best way we can. But very few of us actually use data. Like, you know, of course big companies have business intelligence teams and data warehouses and a lot of this stuff figured out. And that’s a lot of what I built out in my agency days, but what most small businesses are sitting on mountains of data really Like in your Calendly account, you have 50 appointments and everything that are booked. And in your QuickBooks online, you have other data and your Stripe account. You have other data in your WordPress site. You have your Gravity Form submissions. And in Google Analytics, right. You have data all over the place, and you have a CRM and you have a helpdesk Asana, and Monday.com  your project management. There’s data everywhere, but it’s so siloed and spread out that it’s hard to really make any sense of it. Or maybe you have some saved reports in these individual tools, but there’s no holistic view of it. And some of it you just don’t get around to looking at all that often because it’s just overwhelming, and you get lost. And so Blink Metrics, you know, solves that and brings it all into one place so that it’s not overwhelming. You can focus on what matters. And, you know, small businesses have access to those high-end tools that large businesses use to make decisions and and have data at their fingertips without all of the overwhelming complexity of doing that. So I can I can pull that up, actually.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:15  Yeah. Let’s let’s take a look at that.

Nathan Tyler 00:21:18  Yeah. So the way that we do that, right, is that we pull all the data from all of the silos that it lives in, and we pull it into one centralized data warehouse where everything is stored very granularly, which means we can report on it any way that we need. So typically that comes in as a scorecard and as you know, an interactive report or dashboard. So the scorecard is that’s what most small businesses are doing. If they start to get organized, they probably have a Google sheet. And once a month, they copy paste numbers from these different places into a Google sheet to try to get a sense of what’s going on in the business.

Maybe they have, you know, a dozen Zapier apps that are copy pasting things over, and they have cover sheets, and you can kind of build this house of cards that, you know, tries to tries to solve for this. And sometimes that comes tumbling down, and then somebody ends up.

Michelle Frechette 00:22:13  And ends up looking like my stack of papers next to my desk. Yes.

Nathan Tyler 00:22:17  Yeah, yeah. But you know that that is what a lot of businesses do. And that’s what Natalie and I were doing when we were running, you know, a few different lines of business. We would have a Google sheet, and we were updating it. But this is something that happens automatically, so you can look at it, like, this is what a scorecard would look like. And, you know, you can see a simple you can see it over any time frame. So you can see weekly, monthly, and quarterly, and you can see numbers from all over the business. You know, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, you know, Google Core, Web, vitals, Gravity Form submissions, you know, meetings, Calendly events that got booked.You can kind of see your whole business from top to bottom. Wherever those numbers are coming from that you trust. Right? And you can see graphs and trend lines. You can set an explicit goal or just take the average, but you can kind of see at a glance, green or red, you know, are things moving in the right direction? Are they on track or are they off track? And, and any of these numbers you can click and go right to the source that came from. It can go right to Google Analytics, right to May 1st to 31st, you know, so you can go confirm that number and, you know, go look into it. So that’s in a nutshell, that’s what we’re doing with the scorecard and with Blink Metrics.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:38  That’s very cool. I like the various shades too. So, like I’m guessing like deep red is really not good. Lighter red. We’re getting there. Pink is like borderline.

Nathan Tyler 00:23:49  Yes. And in true accessibility fashion, we have other color schemes because red and green are not accessible to everyone. So we have a variety of color schemes that you can choose from.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:01  That makes sense. 

Natalie MacLees 00:24:02  Or you can stick to icons.

Nathan Tyler: That’s right. 

Michelle Frechette 00:24:04  Oh that makes sense. Yeah. And for anybody who’s blind or visually impaired enough, I’m sure that your screen reader is also following through this the way that you’d want it to, because I can’t imagine Natalie presenting anything other than accessibility and a tool. But I’m not going to ask how it works in dark mode. So you’re good.

Natalie MacLees 00:24:28  Neither Aaardvark or Blink have a darker mode right now.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:31  That’s right, so you are good. 

Natalie MacLees 00:24:32  We’ll have those. Yeah. 

Michelle Frechette 00:24:35  That’s awesome. What are your goals? How are you marketing? I know how we market things. I’m sorry. Were you going to show me something else? I just interrupted you.

Nathan Tyler 00:24:43  No, no, I was just saying. This is an example of something that you cannot do in a WordPress plugin model. Like the amount of data and reporting, and scalability around it. Right. Like, there are some problems. If you’re solving, you have to build a SaaS platform.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:57  Absolutely. I mean, we have HubSpot. We have things that we use. And yes, there are some things that work similarly in WordPress, but there are some things that just don’t, right? Our social media accounts are not within our websites. Those are something that exists on the outside. So it makes sense that you would have something that would collect data from all of those places. Marketing within WordPress and marketing outside to the larger tech community are two different beasts altogether. How do you tackle that? So obviously, Aaardvark can work within and without, you know, outside of WordPress. Blink Metrics looks like it’s just outside of WordPress. It’s it’s a dashboard that’s within your Blink metrics account. How are you tackling like the big bad world of outside of WordPress? And to get attention to that as far as marketing?

Nathan Tyler 00:25:51  Yeah, with Blink Metrics, it’s it’s fully outside of WordPress, but it uses WordPress as a data source. So there’s a lot of critical data like Gravity Form submissions, WooCommerce orders, easy digital downloads, you know, lots of lots of good data inside of WordPress that you want to report on. But it lives. It lives outside. And that is a challenge, right? Like that’s there’s trade offs of SaaS versus WordPress. And that’s definitely one of them with WordPress. You can put something in WordPress.org, and millions of people are going to visit that every month and hopefully search for a keyword related to your thing, and they’re going to install the free version, and some of those will turn into customers or they will land on your website. You know, we can build amazing things with Blink Metrics and Aaardvark, but by default, nobody’s going to show up to those websites without a bunch of work to get them there. So it’s it’s very different to, to tackle.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:46  For sure. Yeah. I like to say if you build it, they will come. Only works in the movies. We really have to hustle to get it to work, to get people to show up to our products and our projects outside of that, for sure. Yeah. What do you want people who are watching or who people who might watch, watch this podcast later? What do we want them to know, and how do we want them to find you and all of the things? Give me some, some more information about how people would, you know, would and find and use and implement and all the things.

Nathan Tyler 00:27:18  Natalie do you want to talk about Aaardvark?

Natalie MacLees 00:27:19  Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So Aaardvark has a very handy, short URL of a20y.com.

Michelle Frechette 00:27:29  I love it. 

Natalie MacLees 00:27:31  Very easy to share. I can head on over there. Check it out. It is free to add just your home page and get a scan of your home page, and you can try out the manual testing tools. Get full access to the platform, for just your home page so you can definitely give it a try there. We’re also launching our Aaardvark Circle very soon, which will be for freelancers, agencies, designers, UX professionals, anybody who’s working on building websites and applications, who isn’t quite sure about how to do accessibility. So it’ll be a group, a learning group for those folks. And that’s a big banner right across the whole page. You can check it out.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:10  Can’t miss it.

Natalie MacLees 00:28:11  Yeah. Can’t miss it. Give it a try.

Nathan Tyler 00:28:16  That’s a nice formal version of what we used to do. Because I couldn’t hire Natalie to come in and do a full audit on all the projects, but I could send her a message and be like, hey, like, I should I do this? And she’s like, no, that’s that’s terribly wrong.This is, this is how you do it. And just point me in the right direction and send me a couple of links. And you know that a lot of times, what you need. And this is a very, like, formal, setup and structure for somebody to community to be able to come in and get those answers that they need.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:50  Nice. And so for people who want to learn more about Blink Metrics, how does like is there a free version? Is it all paid? How are they finding and using that service?

Nathan Tyler 00:29:01  Yeah. So it’s at BlinkMetrics.com. And you can book a time which is like which is me at this point. So if you book a time, you will be talking to me. And, you know, we usually spend half hour just talking about somebody’s business, the different tools they’re using, how they understand if business is going well, helping them identify, maybe they don’t know what to measure if they’re sitting on all this data, but it’s all kind of just a mess. So we can kind of talk through that. We have some templates and so forth. You’ll definitely come out of that conversation with a little bit more clarity on like, how to look at your business objectively and through data. And, you know, some people say, okay, I need some time to kind of think about that, and maybe I’ll do it in a Google sheet for a couple of months and get more comfortable with it. And they walk away with, with that, which is great. Or maybe they are a fit for Blink Metrics. They do want to automate it. Maybe they have team members that they want to have scorecards and reports and, you know, for different parts of the business and everything. It is a paid platform. We do have, you know, money-back guarantees and whatnot. But it is, you know, we are spinning up dedicated resources in the cloud to, like, warehouse the data and report on it. So we don’t have a free plan for Blink Metrics just due to the cost structure.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:22  Makes sense to me. I don’t propose that everything should be free. So I think that we need to be able to make money. And especially when something is resource-heavy, we need to be able to charge people for those services. Now, I have just the one banner here. If you do go to nsquared.io and click products? I think it was I, look there, you will see both of these things there is Simply Schedule Appointments still a thing as well? Are you still using it.

Nathan Tyler: Yes. 

Natalie MacLees 00:30:50  Oh yeah. Absolutely.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:52  Yeah, I thought so, but I wanted to make sure. 

Nathan Tyler 00:30:53  But yeah, that’s I mean nine, you’re nine years old and some 60,000 websites, with a very active, dedicated support team. We’re releasing updates every week or two, still. So, we have dedicated resources on Simply Schedule Appointments and continue to release fixes. We have a couple cool integrations with things coming in the future, too.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:19  Yep. And I see you still are supporting Draw Attention and Simple Client Dashboard as well.

Nathan Tyler 00:31:24  Yes.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:25 Man you guys don’t you don’t rest. You don’t you you’re not sitting on your laurels. You’re getting stuff done, moving forward all the time. I love it. That’s awesome. Fantastic. Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you’re like, gosh, I still want to say this one thing or this two things or five. Whatever. How many. Make sure I’m not cutting you off before we say goodbye today.

Nathan Tyler 00:31:49  No. I think the grass is always greener. You know, the WordPress people want to build fast stuff, and fast people want to build WordPress stuff. I think, yeah, there’s definitely trade-offs for both.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:59  Yeah, there used to be a stigma, really too,right? That if you tried to build something outside of WordPress. It was like, how dare you? Why would you do that? Why would you lean into, you know, why would you help people on Shopify? Or why would you help people on Wix or but really building platforms like what you’ve developed here. First of all, Aaardvark is going to help the whole internet be better for accessibility. You don’t have to be on WordPress for that. And Blink Metrics just makes sense because it’s not all within WordPress. And so, I think there’s no, you know, I’m, I’m using X and I’m using LinkedIn every day as well. Everything doesn’t live inside WordPress. So to those people, I would say I get over yourself. It’s it’s all good. It’s all good. I am a huge proponent of WordPress. We all know how much I love WordPress, but everything doesn’t exist within WordPress. And so we have to exist within the world, too. And I think that’s great. So thank you for creating some pretty cool stuff. I love it. I’m going to take a closer look at both of them very soon. So again, if people have, want to know more information, want to see things just go tonsquared.io. You can get an appointment with, apparently with Nathan so that you can see what’s going on. Get a little bit of a demo on that. and you can try out the products over there. So I want to thank you both for spending some time with me today and give up part of your day so that we can explore some of the what you’re doing to make the WordPress system and the outside of WordPress system a little bit better. So thank you both, Natalie and Nathan, for spending time with me today. Appreciate it.

Natalie MacLees 00:33:31  Great. Thanks for having us.

Nathan Tyler: Thank you. 

Michelle Frechette 00:33:33  Oh my pleasure. There will be no, no podcast next week. I’m taking a week off. I’m going to give myself a give myself a day where I don’t have to be on screen all the time. And, but we’ll return the week after that, and I will let everybody know who’s going to be my guest at that point in time, because I didn’t check the calendar. I don’t remember, but we’ll we’ll know a little bit closer to that. So, Natalie, Nathan, thank you for your time today. We’ll see everybody next time. 

Nathan Tyler: All right. Thank you.

Michelle Frechette:  You’re welcome.