Transcript ↓

In this episode of the Post Status Happiness Hour, host Michelle Frechette interviews Zach Hendershot, creator of Miruni, a tool designed to streamline client feedback and project management for web developers, especially within the WordPress ecosystem. Zach explaining how Miruni automates mundane tasks, allowing developers to focus on strategic work. The episode highlights Miruni’s features, such as capturing client requests and automating edits, and touches on future enhancements like automated SEO optimization and advanced client communication. The discussion underscores Miruni’s potential to enhance efficiency and client satisfaction.

Top Takeaways:

• Miruni is Built to Streamline Client Feedback for Agencies: Miruni enables clients to leave feedback directly on live websites by clicking and commenting, which then creates a structured request in the agency’s dashboard. This direct, contextual input eliminates miscommunication, reduces friction, and speeds up the revision cycle.
• Transparency and Communication Are Core to Its Value Proposition: One of the standout benefits is accountability: Miruni provides a record of what clients requested. Agencies get a traceable history of requests, improving trust and transparency.
• The Platform Is Actively Evolving Based on Real-World Use and Community Feedback: Miruni is addressing practical challenges like mismatched image formats, file size optimization, and the need for better reporting. The team is responsive to feature requests—like client change logs and multi-user identification—and is working to enhance collaboration tools, user roles, and automation without sacrificing human oversight or quality.
• The Miruni Team Is Approachable and Focused on Helping Agencies Succeed: Zach emphasized their openness to demos, direct support, and ongoing learning from users. Their hands-on, collaborative approach makes them a valuable partner for agencies navigating complex client relationships and content workflows.

Mentioned In The Show:

• Miruni
• Elementor
• Breakdance
• Bricks
• Divi
• Beaver Builder
• Hubspot

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

• Zach Hendershot (CEO, Miruni)
• 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 00:00:02  Welcome to the next Post Status Happiness Hour Live. I am very excited to be joined by a new friend. I always say by my friend so-and-so, you’re a new friend, Zach. So Zach Hendershot is here, with Miruni, and we’re going to talk about that today. Zach and I met first through, through DMs when Adam Weeks introduced us to one another, and then you were a new Post Status member at the time. And then we met in person out at Press Conf, which was just like, it felt so nice to actually, like, get to meet you, meet you. It’s I don’t always get to do that right away. So that was cool. 

Zach Hendershot: Totally, it was awesome.

Michelle Frechette: We decided. Yeah. Then we decided, hey, let’s get you on the show. And Adam saying hi. Here we go. So, hi Adam.

Zach Hendershot 00:00:46  Hey, Adam. How are you?

Michelle Frechette 00:00:49  So. Yeah, so I’m excited to learn more about it. You and I talked a little bit about what it does, but I haven’t seen it in action yet. Oh, James Lau is here, too. Hey, James.

Zach Hendershot 00:00:57  Hey, James.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:59  We talked a little bit about what what it does. And I was like, this is intriguing. And so you’re going to share it today. You’re going to talk about it. And this is going to be more in depth for me. And certainly I haven’t seen it in action yet. So I’m very excited to learn about Miruni. But first tell us a little bit about yourself. I, we’re both in the US, and you are in a different part of the world than I am, though. So tell us a little about yourself.

Speaker 3 00:01:20  Yeah, I’m I’m in Denver, Colorado. So I am kind of, you know, right in the middle of the of the of the country here. I grew up in Ohio, so I moved out to Denver, you know, 17, 18 years ago, something like that. Hopefully that doesn’t date me too much here. But, you know, I’ve been out here for a long time.  I’ve been in the startup space, in the tech space out here for a really long time. And I’ve been, you know, building software. I’m for. I’m formally trained as a as a software engineer for a very long time. And I started building, you know, small little websites, including WordPress sites, way, way back in the day, and everything in between. You know, I’ve, I’ve had roles in very large organizations leading large teams building enterprise applications and very small startups building, you know, adventure travel, web portals to book your heli skiing trips and a little bit of everything in between. The common theme in my professional life has always been, how do we use technology to solve hard problems? And, I hope Miruni is one of those examples that we’ll talk about today. But, you know, I just think the power of technology is is really incredible. And I’ve always been really deeply, excited about the prospect of what technology can do. So that’s been a lot of my just professional history and background. And WordPress has been a thread throughout that in a very long time. I’ve built lots of interesting, sort of public facing, and internal tools on top of WordPress and various capacities. And I’ve been in and out of the community for a long time. So I’m really, really excited, actually, to be kind of like jumping headfirst back into the WordPress community because there’s lots of exciting things happening, some interesting drama as well, which I think is also a part of the experience, but, lots of lots of expansive growth and lots of lots of cool things going on in the WordPress space.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:03  You don’t have any community without some drama. Otherwise it’s just, yeah, it’s just boring. Right.

Zach Hendershot 00:03:08  So at least the valuable community. Yeah. 

Michelle Frechette 00:03:11  That’s true. It’s good that sometimes we don’t agree on things across the board, which is good. That’s how growth happens. But more about that another time. We won’t dig in there right now.

Zach Hendershot 00:03:19  We won’t go. 

Michelle Frechette: We’re not gonna go there. 

Zach Hendershot 00:03:22  We’ll steer clear.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:25  One of the things, I was on a panel discussion back at, WordCamp Asia this year on AI and how people can use it to integrate into their. We’re about to get a visit from my cat, which is why I’m moving things so she doesn’t knock things down. There she is. So I was I was on a panel about AI. We were talking about, you know, people leaning into AI or being afraid of AI, especially from a business standpoint. Whether it’s a huge corporation with a CEO who’s a little tech shy or it’s somebody who’s like, all in and doesn’t know how to do it properly or does, but how to do, you know, all these things. And AI has been the question of the year for at least two years now as it continues to evolve and develop very, very quickly and, and how it could be included in WordPress without taking over everybody’s job has been another question that’s either spoken aloud or whispered behind closed doors kind of thing. And so you have developed a tool that uses AI, which I love. Oh, well, we got more people. Mark Andrews here. And then, James says, hey, he’s all in on AI equals all in. I love that, too. So you’ve developed a tool, Miruni which is fabulous because it helps with that low hanging fruit kind of stuff without taking everybody’s jobs away, for sure. But but especially if you’re a small agency or an agency of one or I call it that, freelancing, if you will, whatever the words you apply to yourself. It can really help streamline the way you do work and allow you to really dig into some of those deeper things, taking care of some of those. I don’t want to say lesser because they’re still important, but they’re maybe the easier kinds of projects and that and that’s what I understand about it so far. That’s what you’ve explained to me so far. I would love to see it, but tell us how it developed. What was the impetus for you in creating a product like this? And then we’ll we’ll share your screen and show how it works.

Zach Hendershot 00:05:24  Yeah. So I think what’s interesting and and you can’t you’re going to have to survive me getting on a soapbox a little bit about AI and expand on. 

Michelle Frechette: I’m perfectly fine with that. 

Zach Hendershot: You know, because I have strong feelings, especially being in the space materially, but also just living in the technology space for a while. You know, AI for me is I very much feel it is an enabler and an accelerant to humans, not a replacement of humans. And I think there’s a lot of fear and loathing and everything about, you know, replacing jobs, as you said, and sort of catastrophic changes. And, and I think, you know, perhaps in some distant future that that may exist. But I think for any reasonable amount of future in front of us, what we will find and what I think we are starting to find in the pendulum swing back a little bit from the far reaches, is that, you know, AI is a great tool to make us, you know, faster, more efficient, better, more, you know, more capable, bring new skills and ideas and thoughts into kind of the way that we do our business. And it’s not going to wholesale replace huge swaths of people. And so that’s really to kind of lead into what we built here. That’s really the ethos that has went into what we’ve done with Miruni is how do we use AI in a really targeted, sort of deeply integrated way to make the humans who manage and build and grow WordPress sites better, faster and more efficient, right? Like, that’s, that’s and not to replace them like and I and I applaud the, you know, AI generated content creators and the AI generated page builders and web page builders. I think that’s a big, noble problem to try and solve, but I think it’s a hard problem to solve the right way. And that’s why we’re focused more on the other side of the coin, which is like, how do we how do we automate a lot of these boring, low complexity manual processes that we all have to do every day and make our lives better so we can focus more energy on helping our clients and solving, you know, human problems. Right? Like telling the right story on the website, targeting the right audience, all the things that require a lot of nuance and knowledge and rationale and reasoning. So that’s what led us here. I would say the impetus came to get briefly to that. I have an agency background, so I’ve run a variety of agencies building web products and web apps and mobile apps, over the last couple of decades, actually back and forth. And I, I intricately know, I intimately I should say know. The problem with managing client expectations and managing client feedback and managing. Sort of, you know, that back and forth process. It’s cumbersome, multi-staged, hard to get clear communication between those two groups consistently and reliably. And often the requests that they have are just, you know, they’re not often deeply strategic work that needs to get done. It’s often grunt work in some ways, you know, update. It’s always and.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:18  But it’s also spinning plates and juggling while you’re trying to do everything else.

Zach Hendershot 00:08:21  With everything else going on and running your business. Yeah, 100%. You know, it’s one more thing that just sort of distracts you from ultimately what really matters, which is finding new clients, building great client relationships for the folks you have and, you know, building great web experiences, like whatever the core of your business is. And so, you know, we sort of saw this opportunity. We were like, hey, like with the new technologies and the and the techniques available to us that weren’t available to us two years ago or three years ago. We have the ability to probably solve this problem. And it’s been a pain point for me for decades. And I can only imagine, you know, for everybody else in the world, just as long and longer. So, we married that insight and that opportunity and the fresh technologies that we have with, what Miruni used to be and this is a little bit of brief background in Miruni. And Miruni was a capture product. So it was primarily originally focused on how do you capture client feedback layered on top of the web and get it into your project management tools and capture everything to make it really simple to communicate what it is you as a client want to communicate to your web developer or whatever.

Michelle Frechette 00:09:28  okay.

Zach Herndershot 00:09:29  And that’s, you know, it was a great product. It solved a problem. But we made big investments in the capture. When we talk to our customers and prospective customers, we heard kind of summarized, capture is great. It makes our lives a little easier, removes a few steps, makes things a little clearer in communication. But the real problem is I spend hundreds, if not thousands of hours implementing the thing the client is requesting me to do on a month by month basis. And if you can solve that problem. You know, that’s a big opportunity. That’s a big time savings for me. I can, I can provide a better experience. I can save some money, I can offer more competitive packages from a maintenance perspective to my customers, whatever, whatever those things are. So that’s, that’s sort of the long winded origin story of kind of where we got where we are today.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:14  So I’m assuming that there’s some automation and emails and things like that that happens. And so my corny joke of the day is if somebody does submit feedback that they’d like to make the logo bigger, will Mirunireply and say, I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.

Zach Hendershot 00:10:34  Not yet. It will. It will try and please you. But what I’ll say is, I think an important, an important enhancement over time is to have SAS, basically. You know, like, understand when things, you know, maybe are unreasonable asks right. And program that in so you, you have across my heart hope to die that I will I will satisfy that at some point for you in this.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:00 Okay. I mean, it only seems fair. It only seems fair. Well, would you like to share your screen now and give us a little bit of walk through how it works?

Zach Hendershot 00:11:07  Let’s do it.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:08  All right. I pull that up, but I will get rid of our logos. We can see your whole site. There we go.

Zach Hendershot 00:11:13  Perfect. The great thing, in my opinion, about this demo is that it will be quite fast and I think you will get it pretty quick. And then I, we can answer questions and kind of, I can talk about the state of the state and what works and what doesn’t work. But I’m going to start with, kind of a persona. So this is the website owner. So if you’re an agency, this is, I’m going to I’m going to play the role of, you know, the small business owner, in this case, the ceramic studio owner. This is a demo site that we use internally for demoing. This is for a ceramic studio. You can see we talk about the classes they teach, you know, learn the basics, master the basics, be a ceramic superhero and you know a few details about kind of things you learn and stuff. So a pretty, pretty standard site with a variety of different types of layout. But the core flow is me as a website owner, I don’t even need to know that this is a WordPress site. I don’t actually need to be logged in. I am here just for logistical reasons, but all I need is a magic link that I click that my the agency that built my site gives me. And when I click that link, I get this little widget over here that allows me to request edits at any time of day. So I don’t need a WordPress login. I don’t need any of that stuff. I just need this tool. Once I have that tool, all I do is I go to my website, which is this, I get this tool, not everybody gets this tool. So just to be really clear, like this isn’t visible to everybody. It’s only visible to me because I own this ceramic studio.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:36  Can you imagine the spam that would come through that if it was public?

Zach Hendershot 00:12:39  Yeah, yeah yeah yeah, yeah. You know, there has been a request in, in the folks that we’ve been talking to, to basically, you know, use the tool in an anonymous way to get like suggestions about how to make the site better or like, hey, this was unclear. You’re selling me a product. I don’t know what this is. So kind of like as a general feedback tool, but yes, spam management would be a huge part of us that we’re doing that.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:04  I would put that in the beta level of things that it’s only sent to specifically folk.

Zach Hendershot 00:13:09  Totally. Yeah, 100%. Right now you have one very simple tool. There’s some helpful tool tipping here. But, basically you use this tool to highlight the region that you want to change made to on your site. So in this case, this is a common example for me. I’m going to highlight the the button I want changed. And I’m going to describe what I want changed. So and I’ll show you what we’re looking at here when I do this. So change this button text to check our workshops. So, the use case here is, you know, I’m rebranding my classes that I offer to call them workshops because it’s a hands on, hands on workshop. It’s not a class. I’m just sort of rebranding a part of how I talk about my business. Pretty simple request, but a common one. So all I do is describe it and type it. You can see kind of, you know, this is the context that we’re capturing, to make sure that we’re making the right proper change when, when doing it. But all I, all I do is, as the studio owner is click save request. I get a confirmation here that, it was submitted. It’ll get addressed as soon as possible. And if that’s all I wanted done, I’m. I’m done here. I can close the site and move on with my day. My request is off in, in WordPress land and will be handled by the web admin that I’ll show you in a minute. But just for the sake of example here, I’m going to do a couple things here. I’m going to highlight this little section. So I think this section is this is just a placeholder text. But you know you can kind of talk about the types of things that you learn in our classes. I’m going to say, fill this with text that describes advanced ceramic topics. I’m going to be really vague here, and we’ll see what actually pops up, because it’s this is kind of the fun part of using the tool. You could give it very specific text. I didn’t have specific texts ready to go, but you can fill it with specific text. You can dictate precisely what you want. You can give it freedom to make some, you know, fill in the gaps, as it were. And you can kind of do everything in between. kind of a mixture of both.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:16  Could you, like, highlight the button and tell it that you want the back of the backdrop of the button to be green instead of red, things like that?

Zach Hendershot 00:15:22  Yes, exactly. I’ll do the. It’s already red. I’ll do. I’ll do that one. We’ll kind of play around a little bit here.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:31  Can you give it a specific hex code if you wanted to?

Speaker 3 00:15:33  Yes. And I’ll explain that actually kind of how that works here. You and I need to know how to spell, or. Actually, you don’t really need to know how to spell, but it helps. Green. I’m just gonna say green here. We’ll send that off to the system. So we have a few examples. But yeah. So the idea here is with the green, we actually are building an understanding of, like, your design system and what the rest of your site uses for green. And we’ll often choose something that is contextually relevant. So, we actually don’t use green on this site, so it’ll make it a pretty standard green. If I predict what is going to happen here. but we do use the context of the site to make good, good recommendations in terms of the edits we suggest. So, you know, things like colors and fonts and other things will be generally respected, including layouts and other things that already exist on the site. So I’m going to pause the I’m the owner, I’m going to close the website, or I would close the website and I’m done. I can go on with my day and run ceramics studio classes or whatever it is that you do. Me as the web admin. The agency or the freelancer or whoever it is that runs the site have, have installed the Miruni plugin which exposed the widget we just played with. But now I get a little dashboard of the work that needs to be addressed. The requests that have come in. This is my dashboard of all the requests that came in. These top few are going to look pretty familiar. These are the ones I just submitted. They’re sort of chronological order in this way. But we capture a lot of stuff you don’t see behind the scenes, so it’s worth calling out here briefly. We capture the screenshots I highlighted. We also capture JavaScript logs, network traffic, browser and device information. Sometimes that’s relevant to make a better recommendation. So all of that context is captured automatically and with very little drama, and passed into the system to influence the quality of the suggestion that we’re going to look at here. For most of these, the screenshots are going to be the most relevant. But we’ll, we’ll see.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:35  I love that screenshot right then when you do a request. That’s cool.

Zach Hendershot 00:17:39  Yeah, exactly. so when you want to review the smart edits, we call these smart edits. When you want to review it, you just click the button, you see the high level description, you click the button and you go into the detailed view. This is where the magic happens. This is the kind of the core interface. So you’ll see who sent it, which is me, the date and the description, and then the metadata. The screenshot in this case. So I can look at that briefly as the web admin. And then you get a summary of the of the edits that we’re proposing are made to the site based on the request. In this case, I’ll dwell a little bit on this. This is an Elementor site. So it found three elements, three container elements, three container widgets that, with these unique IDs that, that we found in the Elementor JSON specifically because we’re deeply integrated in the system and because they’re all the same button. So I’ll show you this. There are three buttons that look exactly that way across the page. And so it found three, if I wanted to make one because I didn’t request one update, I requested just a change that this button, I could use the Smart Edit to refine it and, you know, maybe tweak what it ultimately did if you wanted to, you know, refine how it generated, you know, the final content generated, or maybe make an update to one so you can refine a little bit. But the real, the real part of this is down here. So this is the current published version on the left. And the preview, you’ll see that we made the update, as requested, with very little drama. You can scroll down a little bit further and see there’s another one and then there’s another one below. But if that all looks good, your job is done as web admin. You click Apply Changes and that will be live on the site, immediately, As you saw it here as it’s been rendered. And you are complete with this particular request. And that’s really all there is to it. As you go through these, you can kind of see, you know, some of the updates and changes that we’re making here. What was this one? Oh, yeah. The fill, the text. Let’s see what came out of this one. So, yeah. So I gave it some leeway here. So this is a good example on the other side, I didn’t tell it explicitly what to do, but it gave some history about advanced ceramics and the types of materials and, you know, different things here. Of course, we could use the smart edit assistant to refine that a little bit or give it specific text. Maybe we know specifically as web admin that we want to, you know, kind of communicate a little differently. So we have this human in the loop process right now that allows the web admin to, you know, be the adult in the room for lack of a better term, and make sure that everything is looking the way it should look. And, you know, we’re not breaking anything and stuff like that. Although we do a really good job, generally speaking of, you know, we have an entire validation process of the edit to make sure it’s not going to break the site, make sure everything still looks relatively sane, and so on and so forth. And then this one as well. Let me show you something over here really quickly. Because I think this one is an interesting one to look at from coding perspective. Just to give you a little bit of deeper insight into what we’re doing here.  So this is the Elementor JSON. This is like a code view. You can kind of see the DIFF view of, this is a JSON file. So, you know, you may not even be exposed to this, but you can see kind of precisely the change that we made here deep in the JSON file, that, you know, allows you to build some confidence as a web admin that we’re not sort of, you know, cascading, breaking changes to your site or whatever. We’re really targeted and really precise and hopefully really accurate in the changes that we make. And you can validate that with a variety of the tools that we have that we have here. One thing I didn’t show, also is the editor is only available, when making changes to a WordPress page or post. So if we did a simpler update of, just like, you know, changing content on a page or a WordPress post, you actually can tweak the change that we make with.

Michelle Frechette00:21:32  That makes sense.

Zach Hendershot 00:21:33  So we expose the built in native editor to tweak it a little bit if we didn’t get it just right. So we have a few ways to save the manual edit so you’re not going back through and manually updating that change. But you know, the interesting thing is and I’ll, I’ll pause here because I see a couple questions in here.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:52  There are some questions. Yep.

Zach Hendershot 00:21:54  I’ll address those for sure. But the interesting thing is we’ve measured this pretty, pretty carefully, even this simple update. I’ll go to the review process. Even the simple update. We’ve measured these sorts of updates. And anybody who has, you know, managed the WordPress site especially one of any complexity will know, like even finding where this button is defined and the text to define that button can take anywhere between 7 to 10 clicks.

Michelle Frechette 00:22:20  yeah.

Zach Hendershot  00:22:20  For upwards of like 10,15, 20 minutes to find where that button is defined in the page builder and go and update it and then find it in all three places and stuff. So the, the core hope is, you know, even in these relatively simple updates, you know, we’re taking 15 to 20 minutes down to a few seconds of review and apply, to get there. So, So that’s the big picture. So a couple questions here.

Michelle Frechette 00:22:44  Yeah. What is the first question. Yeah. Where does the data live? On the Miruni side? With the compliment that it looks incredibly well thought out so far.

Zach Hendershot 00:22:52  Yeah. So a little bit, behind the cover stuff going on here. We’ll answer this question. So, we have an API that does the kind of the core processing. And generally speaking, I’m generalizing how some of this works, and I’m happy to answer more detailed questions. But, essentially what happens is the request comes in, the request with the screenshots and the description of the request are sent to our API endpoint. We make a determination of all the things that we would need to know and get from the WordPress site to make the best, most, most accurate, suggestion. Our API then goes to the WordPress plugin and extracts just the information required to generate a diff, the suggested edit, and then we generate and edit, in a structured format that allows us to basically then apply that diff to the WordPress site directly facilitated by the plugin. So to answer your question more directly, a part of the data, from the website that’s going to be relevant to the edit request, is brought over to the Miruni API for processing and then basically sent back, and not stored on our side, but sent back in form of the edit to implement the change and then applied through the plugin directly to the site. Does that answer the question? Hopefully.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:16  I think so.

Zach Hendershot 00:24:18  Okay. Please. Any follow up questions?  Happy to answer..

Michelle Frechette 00:24:22  Yep. Mark Andrew, if you have more questions, put them in the chat. can you set up separate accounts for QA folks and allow them to track changes?

Zach Hendershot 00:24:31  Yes. So, that’s a great one as well. So we allow you to, add any number of accounts to the WordPress site. And when you add those accounts to the WordPress site, they are granted access to view the Smart Edit previews. And so they can, they can view the smart edits and apply them. Over time, we’re going to launch more and more advanced sort of, permissioning systems that allow you to grant access to certain types of edits to certain types of users,QA, as an example. And allow them to apply and undo changes, and then over time also will, you know, have a more advanced sort of tracking mechanism around the changes over time and, and play with that. But right now it’s really about if you have access, if you’re a web admin, you can apply the changes, undo them, view them all. And then we’re going to continue to layer on more capabilities as we go.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:27  That’s very cool. I have some questions too, but I don’t want to cut you off if you have.

Zach Hendershot 00:25:32  No, that’s it.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:33  The next thing. So I mean, I’ll get to some of them at the end. So the first question though is obviously I see it’s working really well with Elementor. Does it work equally well with all page builders as well as standard themes?

Speaker 3 00:25:46  Great question. And I usually talk to this briefly in my demo. But yeah. So right now we have a high level support for or deep support I should say for Elementor and Gutenberg. And we’ve just launched Breakdance support a couple of weeks ago, and we’re continuing to launch more and more support. We’re going to look at Bricks and Divi and Beaver Builder. All of those are sort of in active development. The interesting thing about how we work is that some things will just work natively because we have access to a lot of the data that exists within the WordPress site. But in order to get the level of accuracy and quality that we really want to tout support for a page builder, we have to put a little bit of work in around the unique data structures the page builders use to store data in the WordPress site, and sometimes they store it in unique, different places that we don’t always catalog as a part of our work. So it does take a little bit of work on a page builder by page builder perspective to build the level of accuracy. But we’re, we’re expanding that support every week as we go at this point.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:49  That’s awesome. So I know a lot of the times when you’re pinging things through AI especially it’s bringing back, you know, text and things like that. How does that work? Like with tokens and, and cost wise as far as your AI usage?

Zach Hendershot 00:27:03  Yeah. So the way that we think about it and we’re trying to be very user friendly here, I know I take umbrage with some of the way that AI tools are passing costs on to end users, you know, in the form of credits and whatever. The way that we price this product is, by Smart edit. So each package gives you a X number of smart edits, and smart edits are consumed only when you apply it to your site. So they’re not consumed if you just get a request from your user. You can’t control that necessarily. You can’t. You know, you can’t limit them or restrict them in how many edits they send you. But if we saved you time by generating edit that you like and want to apply to your site, you consume a smart edit and that’s basically what you pay for. The only other limitation we have in our plans is the number of projects you can launch this on, but we’re very, we’re very generous with that. it really is sort of just a differentiator between like a freelancer and a pro is essentially the only way we differentiate there. Everything else is just about to consume smart edit.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:09  I love that, that’s fantastic. then the other question I just had was overall cost, but I think you could basically just address that, so.

Zach Hendershot 00:28:17  Yeah. We have a number of different tiers. And we publicly launched, about four weeks ago, 3 or 4 weeks ago. So we’re still sort of rolling out different pricing plans and listening to customers and, you know, talking to folks and understanding how we’re saving them, time and money and, you know, evolving our plans as we go. But but we’ll have a number of different plans and really the differences in immersive smart edits, which really represent how many sites you manage on a day to day basis. Freelancers may do a few and they’ll get, you know, and they’ll get, you know, maybe a few dozen edit requests a month. And larger agencies will get thousands of edit requests a month, depending on their workload.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:53  If you want to turn that feature off for your clients, let’s say that you’re like going to be on vacation or like, okay, you’ve reached your limit. Our contract is over kind of thing. Can you either turn it off or change the URL so that you still have it, but they can’t access that special?

Speaker 3 00:29:12  Yes it is. You can turn it off is a short answer. Right now you have the ability to deactivate the snippet here on this site or map it to a different project if you want to, you know, map this WordPress site to a different, internal Miruni project. That’s another tool. But just clicking the, the deactivate button will turn it off, for that website so you don’t have to, get any more requests or consume any more smart edits or anything like that.

Michelle Frechette 00:29:39  I can think of former clients that I had in my freelancing days where I would have been like, okay, you’ve reached your limit. You’re no longer doing updates for you. We have reached the point where this is a launched project. Goodbye.

Zach Hendershot 00:29:55  Yep. And you no longer have a relationship with them or whatever. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, that’s exactly what we’re trying to try and give you some tools to support.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:02  So James also says it’s a very good regression test, some very good regression testing methods. Can this tool go granular with blocks and patterns?

Zach Hendershot 00:30:11  Yeah. So really interesting question. And you’re scratching at some of where we want to take this tool over time. So the short answer is yes. Like there is the ability to use this as even even like a visual regression tool. So you can check and validate that as things come in from an edit request that there, you know, continue to stay consistent with whatever the original, you know, desire of the site was and how things have deviated over time. I think there’s also a way to automate some of that over time as well. And sort of rerun through these edit requests and revalidate that the ones that are applied are still valid, and are still applied to the site and weren’t changed independently of the site. So there’s, you know, I don’t know if that’s exactly what you’re thinking about, but I think there’s some interesting things that we’re exploring in terms of, you know, automating these requests back or playing these requests back and validating that the that what we applied is, is still there. There are also and maybe this is another part of your question. There are advanced ways to use this tool where you could upload and I’m not going to advocate for this use case yet, although it may be possible in lots of instances. This is the fun of tools like this where you can sort of like push boundaries, but you could upload an image or a screenshot of maybe a figma. That is a desired state of what the page should look like, and ask it to apply all the edits to align it with the image that I provided it. And you may have pretty good results. We’ve we’ve done a number of tests and experiments here, and you may have pretty good results of it generating a handful of edits that bring the live site to look more and behave more like a figma design. So that’s an advanced use case and may not be high levels of accuracy in all cases, but we’re going to continue to invest in our ability to kind of like do these larger scale changes to the site based on a variety of different inputs.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:10   Nice.That’s awesome. Any other. You’ve got some applause here from James.

Zach Hendershot 00:32:15  There’s another one in there briefly. So you you, flip up. 

Michelle Frechette: Is it this one here?

Zach Hendershot 00:32:20  Yeah, unless you use the pieces. Yeah. How does this.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:26  How does it work on multi-site? Or does it?

Zach Hendershot 00:32:29  So today. So this is another kind of,cool part of this in the future that we’re, that we’re focused on in building right now. So right now it’s a 1 to 1 relationship. So, you install the plug in on one site and we can and, edit requests come on that site and you can apply them to that individual site. So it doesn’t have multi-site support in the, in the strictest sense of the word. But you can install it on each site and get the benefit, what we are launching, over time and is on our roadmap, and I’ll flash this up on the screen. So we have an existing web dashboard that exists at app.miruni.io  and you can see all of the same requests here. You can’t apply the edits directly to the site, but you can go to different projects and they can all be unified here in one place to allow you to view all of the edit requests that came in across maybe your entire portfolio. I have a bunch of demo sites here and demo projects. Here’s another one and a bunch of requests that came in for this one. What we want to support is the ability to log in to a unified web dashboard and push the changes in the edit requests directly into each site, no matter where they are. So imagine the agency with 100 sites that they manage. You can just use this one dashboard. Log in to all the different projects, all the different websites, and push each one from a unified web application into each of those sites. So then you get sort of like multi multi-site sort of platform level support in one place when we launch that feature.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:04  Yeah. Dan Knauss says that multi-site support is likely to be a key agency in enterprise adoption feature.

Zach Hendershot 00:34:11  Yes.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:12  Especially if you like, especially with multi-site. That’s multilingual. Right. So you’ve got a site in English, you’ve got a site in French, and you want the buttons to change to green on both of them kind of thing, right?

Zach Hendershot 00:34:22  Yep. So WordPress multi-site is is also another thing that is on our radar. We don’t have that launch yet, but for all the reasons that Dan and others have said like that is that’s a sort of an agency and enterprise use case that is high on our list, for sure. For those reasons and others as well, we know that there’s a lot of automation around multi-site setup and other stuff that we want to be a part of that, that we can we can scale into as well. So yep, very much on our radar.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:48  Nice. So, as I’m thinking about some of the different questions I have here, it occurs to me too, that, first I lost my train of thought. So let me get it right back. The with the multi-site and things like that. I was thinking about that. We have opportunities to be able to use this in multiple different ways, for sure. The dashboard you just showed us is one of those ways. So I can see that it came through. For one, I can know that I have to go apply it to the other mirror, you know, kind of site kind of thing. And that helps you kind of keep track of those things when you. Here’s my here’s my question. It did come back to me. Doesn’t always do that. But thinking about your road mapping and what kinds of things we’re talking about. Future things that you’re wanting to input in this. What, I can foresee some things that would be really cool. Right. Like, also like time tracking. How long does it take to do? And how can I build the client for those things. Right. Because all of those changes add up over time. But what other features are you looking to add and what is your timeline for getting those kinds of things? I’m never going to hold a developer to say it’s going to be done by a particular date, but what does your roadmap look like over the next year or features that you’d like to add?

Zach Hendershot 00:35:56  Well, since you’re recording this, I’m not going to say anything at all, actually, because then I’ll be on record. No, I’m happy to go through some of that. You know what.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:03  Your wishlist, your wishlist.

Zach Hendershot 00:36:06  What we’ve built, is we think of this as sort of an insight that or an engine that turns insight into action. Right? Today the insight is edit requests, and we turn that into action by implementing those edit requests. But we’ve really built an orchestration engine that exists within the CMS platform itself, and that grants us all sorts of interesting future phases. One that I think is really interesting and I think can get people thinking about the opportunity here, is and we’ve done some experimentation around. You know, imagine if you generated a HubSpot report of SEO optimization, and it details, you know, 48 different things to increase the SEO score for your, for your website or an individual page or whatever. That’s another input. That’s an insight that we can turn into action. We can turn those into the 48 tasks that it called out, and give you independent ability to go and update the meta tag with a more descriptive description of the website or the page, or update the, you know, the OG tag to you know, better. Highlight this or update the link because the link in the OG image is broken and figure out how to fix the link. And a lot of that stuff we can automate for you and sort of turn into an automated SEO optimization tool, right? So that’s an interesting one. And that’s, that’s on our radar. There are other things that agencies do when we think about this sort of as an agency automation tool, for lack of a more sophisticated way of saying it. There’s lots of things that happen inside agencies that we can automate with some of this sort of deeply integrated capability. Certainly, time tracking. So you call that out a little bit so, you know, better and more accurate tracking of the work that’s happening in the site. There’s some testing implications, right,  that James was hinting at a little bit, which I think is also really interesting. We can automate, testing and revalidation of requests that come from the client. We want to we want to go deeper into providing more advanced client communication capabilities. We know from a lot of pain point exists around just being transparent and communicative with your clients. And we want to be a facilitator and, you know, helping clients feel like their their heard, where you’re addressing their issues quickly, you know, having clear lines of communication and really transparent communication. So we want to advance and grow our ability to communicate to your clients and keep them up to date and workflow, as well as the other big one. Giving more tools to, control and, give more, you know, more granular access to different parts of the product so that you can have a bigger team working in here and those things, you know, if I if I give you a sense of kind of a roadmap and kind of how we’re rolling some of this stuff out, you know, over the next month or two, we’re going to be really focused on more expansive support for page builders, and then we’re going to go into more and more complex content types, things like uploading images and swapping images by providing by uploading the images directly and allowing the client to provide, you know, new image for their new product or for their class that they’re launching or whatever it is, and then swapping that out. So supporting the content comes.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:15  With a checkbox that says, I have permission to use this.

Zach Hendershot 00:39:18  Yes, exactly. Yeah. You know, and and the other thing not to dwell too much on that, but, you know, there’s some challenges with some of that. What if they. What if they upload a completely vertical image. Right? And the place that they want to put it is a horizontal layout. Right? So there’s lots of that stuff. We actually have some great tools to massage some of this today in a way that we didn’t before, but but yeah, and file size limits and other things and, you know, size optimization, we can also automate as you upload an image. Right? And all of this with the human loop process to make sure that we’re doing the right thing and providing high quality experience. But, but lots of things to think through. So expanding it, will happen over the next few months. And then we’re going to continue to invest in more use cases over, you know, in the next couple of quarters.

Michelle Frechette 00:40:04  I think one of the selling features too, is, you know, you talk to a client on the phone and then they later said, I never said that. That’s not what I meant. Right? This is you’ve got it in writing, so you’ve got it there. Which brings me to another question. Is there a way to export a report of the changes that you’ve made and when they occurred, in case the client says. I didn’t see that happen. Or is there a way to do that?

Zach Hendershot 00:40:26  You just submitted your first feature request Michelle.

Michelle Frechette 00:40:30  okay.

Zach Hendershot 00:40:30  No, we don’t have that today. But that’s a great request.

Michelle Frechette 00:40:33  I think that would be great. Yeah.

Zach Hendershot 00:40:34  Yeah. We we have the ability to export, the, the request as they came in, just the description and, links to images and stuff, but not the changes that were made to the site directly. And I think that’s an interesting, you know, interesting approach. that I’ll add to our list.

Michelle Frechette 00:40:51  Especially if you’ve if you’ve racked up enough time to be able to say, and, you know, it was another hour or two kind of thing to be able to have something that shows that would be lovely feature.

Zach Hendershot 00:41:00  Yeah, exactly I agree.  

Michelle Frechette 00:41:02  For sure. Well, I love it. I don’t know if anybody else, James is actually. Let’s see. So, Dan says seems perfect in the world of super support tool. Glad to learn about it. James says you should set a file size limit for the images, please. So they’re not uploading, you know, ginormous things. And then here’s a plus one for a client reporting.

Zach Hendershot 00:41:24  Yeah. Client reporting that that is a big one. Especially when we think about, you know, helping clients or helping agencies better serve their clients. Right. And giving them more data and more transparent and more visibility. That’s that’s a big one.

Michelle Frechette 00:41:35  If you have 2 or 3 people from the client side who are submitting these, do you know who submitted it or do they each have their own URL, or is it like it just came in from the client?

Zach Hendershot 00:41:46  Yeah. Great question. So we derived the name of the reporter from their email address. if, if they use the standard flow. We also support I didn’t mention this, but we do support the ability to invite. Well, we had it, and then we’ll bring it back. The ability to invite a user in a way that they create an account and they provide their full name so that you can, you know, they can get access to more advanced tools. But also we would have their first and last name to also.

Michelle Frechette 00:42:12  A custom Miruni  user, as you will.

Zach Hendershot 00:42:15  Right, exactly. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:42:17  Awesome. Yeah. Any other other questions. Oh, so I love it when people like my question. Great question. I’m so glad you like I thought of it myself. So, any other questions? Put them in the, you know, just a few minutes. I do want to bring up where people can find you because I hadn’t done that yet. So if I’m going to go ahead and take you off screen, not you, but you’re. So we’re not all trying to squelch down to the corner. For more information, you go to Miruni.io. I didn’t ask where the name came from. I don’t know if there’s a story for that or not, but that’s a cool name.

Zach Hendershot 00:42:52  There is, there is a story, a slight story. it comes from a traditional Japanese glass art. And I’m going to butcher the original pronunciation. But it’s like Murano, which is basically an ancient glass art for like multicolored glass. Or if you’ve seen Japanese vases and stuff that have layers of glass and different colors and stuff, that’s the name of that art. And so we it came from the fact that we were originally a pane of glass on the web that you could mark up and collaborate around. And so that’s where it came from. Then we played, we played on that word a little bit to, to turn it into Miruni.

Michelle Frechette 00:43:31  So if people are interested in learning more, they can go to Miruni.io Assume you have a contact form on that website.They can hit you up there.

Zach Hendershot: Yep.

Michelle Frechette: And of course you are in Post Status Slack. If, I assume that you would invite a DM now and then, if somebody has a question about it before they make a purchase especially.

Zach Hendershot 00:43:47  Absolutely. And I’m always happy to demo and, you know, handhold you through the process. We’re, we’re very much in learning mode. What works, what doesn’t work, how can we help? So I’m always happy to jump on a call and chat with folks.

Michelle Frechette 00:44:02  And I love that Mark Andrews. He’s just this positive person in general, but he’s thanking you and I and appreciates the questions that James and Dan also brought to us. Thank you so much, Mark Andrew and Chihuly glass art is pretty cool. If you have ever seen a Chihuly? I love Chihuly. I don’t even know if I’m saying his name right or not. And before I let everybody go, I also want to let people know there is no Post Status Happiness Hour next week. I will be at WordCamp Europe and I will not be doing this live from Europe, so there’s no Post Status Happiness Hour next week.  I’m working on getting a guest for the week after that, and I do have some more lined up in June, so please plan to come back and be with us then. Zach, thank you so much for your time today. I truly appreciate it. Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that you would like to punch in there before we hit at the end here?

Zach Hendershot 00:44:47  No, I think we covered it all. I always love chatting about this stuff and sharing what we’re working on, so I appreciate the time.

Michelle Frechette 00:44:54  Oh, it’s my pleasure. It was great to learn more about it. And I can’t wait to kind of check it out on my own, too. So, again, if anybody is interested, just go toMiruni.io and check it out. So again, Zach, thank you for your time today. Thanks everybody who tuned in with those great questions. Really appreciate it. We’ll see everybody else in a couple of weeks.

Zach Hendershot 00:45:13  Bye.