Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee:
Welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast, the podcast for web designers and design agencies, exploring the world of WordPress and online business. And now your host, Lee Jackson.
Lee:
Hi, and welcome to episode number 82 of the WP Innovator Podcast. This is Lee. And on today’s show, we have Robbie from Beaver Builder, who is talking all about Beaver Themer. This is a brilliant episode. Robbie is brilliant. Everyone over at Beaver Builder is brilliant. I am super biased because I love Beaver Builder, but you already knew that. So this is a great show. Remember, if you want to talk about anything we discussed today, then head on over to the Facebook group on wpinnovator.com forward slash group. And in the meantime, sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. Oh, and please keep your arms and legs in the vehicle at all times.
Lee:
Hello, and welcome to the show. And today we have Mr. Robbie McCullough. How are you doing?
Robby:
Doing well. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Lee:
That’s not a Scottish accent. What happened there?
Robby:
Oh, yeah, I don’t think you want to get into it. I’ve never been one for accents, I guess. I guess we could try.
Lee:
Probably want to avoid that one. Just think Braveheart and Mel Gibson. The flack that he got for all that. And you’re away. Yeah. So you’re originally from Scotland then?
Robby:
Yeah, exactly.
Lee:
Oh, you are. That’s cool.
Robby:
Yeah. Been in the States so long, my accent is all but gone. But yeah, no, I’m now born and raised here in California, Silicon Valley. Where it’s happening.
Lee:
Yeah. Started in a garage, I assume. Not a bad place to be set up at all.
Robby:
No. Please tell me you started the business in a garage. Like if you’re in Silicon Valley, this kind of has to, this is the story, right?
Lee:
Yeah. Yeah. A garage. It started out in a secondary room. So the man cave.
Robby:
Yeah. Justin and Billy actually started Fast Line out of Billy’s spare room. And then when Billy started a family, they grew out of the spare room. They got kicked out of the spare room. I think they probably could have gone to the garage, but they instead got a little office in Campbell, California, which is where I met them not too long after they got set up in the office.
Lee:
That’s so cool. I am a bit disappointed it wasn’t a garage, as you would say, or a garage, as I would say. But you know, I can live with that. Start off in a small room. It’s kind of the typical California startup, isn’t it? You know, you start off somewhere small and then you work your way. I love that. So people might not even know who you are, which I would be surprised, but you are one of the guys from Beaver Builder. That’s amazing. Do you want to just tell the people who don’t know what Beaver Builder is, despite the fact I mention it every episode, what Beaver Builder is and what you do at Beaver Builder?
Robby:
Sure. Yeah, I appreciate the plugs. That’s really nice of you. So Beaver Builder is a piece of software that lets you drag and drop and design a website. It’s an extension for WordPress and it’s becoming, we’re kind of transitioning into being, it was originally just a page builder and then we introduced a theme. And then most recently we introduced an extension called Beaver Themer. So it’s kind of slowly transitioning to a suite of products or a family of different kind of products and extensions. But at the core of it is the page builder plugin.
Lee:
And what’s your role within Beaver Builder?
Robby:
I am the, I guess, well, that’s another kind of long story, but I mainly do the kind of marketing, copywriting, web design, blogging. I kind of put myself out there and do the hustling.
Lee:
Do the hustling.
Robby:
Yeah. Yeah. Originally we all got together and we were all building websites. So I have a little bit of a background in development and I kicked myself now because I really haven’t been writing a lot of code or building a lot of sites in the last year or two, which is a little bit of a bummer. I always enjoyed it.
Lee:
I think it’s fair to say you’ve been kind of distracted though, I imagine, with Beaver Builder. It’s been crazy the last two years.
Robby:
Things have pivoted, I guess, to use the Silicon Valley term, right? The term of the day. Or I don’t know, pivoting might even be an old term, right? That’s like Facebook.
Lee:
I’d rather pirouetting. That sounds nicer.
Robby:
Yeah. Much more eloquent. I like that.
Lee:
You pirouetted. That would be quite interesting for people who didn’t listen back to episode three or four whenever you guys were on, because we had the whole team on maybe a year and a half ago now. That’d be great. Just remind people how you guys actually got started because you didn’t start out with Beaver Builder. You actually started as an agency. So could you just kind of recap that story quite quickly for us?
Robby:
Yeah, that’s correct. We started as an agency. We were doing a lot of websites for photographers at the time and small businesses, both kind of local and outside of the area. And then we started working on Beaver Builder as a project that we wanted to use internally. We originally didn’t intend to sell it or productize it. It was just something that we were kind of building to scratch our own itch, as they say. And yeah, we started hacking away on this kind of idea experiment on our off hours and evenings and stuff. And it started coming together. And we decided to turn it into a product and sell it. And that was about three, a little over three years ago that we launched. And ever since then, yeah, Beaver Builder has been kind of steadily growing. And we phased out the client services part of the business after about the first, it’s a year and a half of doing Beaver Builder. Now it’s just 100%. We’re building software and supporting it and building and growing a team and a community around it.
Lee:
I’m glad you mentioned the team because that’s one thing that’s fascinated me. You’ve gone from a small agency to being an online business selling online software. You’ve got the whole support around that, which is obviously going to be very difficult. I mean, I know I have submitted support tickets over the last couple of years, not many, but if you add lots of me’s up and you guys have got thousands of installs, I mean, that must be pretty hard to manage. How have you guys managed to scale? Did you make any mistakes originally on pricing and find that you had problems trying to scale the support or pretty much has it been plain sailing? I mean, give us a bit of insight.
Robby:
Yeah, gosh, those are good questions. We had when we first, so we did, you call it a mistake. I just call it, yeah, it was learning a learning curve.
Lee:
I agree with that, by the way. That’s a good way of looking.
Robby:
Yeah, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into when we started. I mean, support was the funny part, you know, because you build something and you put it out there and you just want people to use it, right? Like we were doing everything you get told to do at that point. You know, we were kind of injecting ourselves in conversations and going to, you know, blogs about page builders and jumping in the comments and saying, hey, have you heard of ours? And just trying to get people to try it, you know, to get that initial couple of users and start getting feedback and building from there. And then, but then, you know, when people did start using it, they started sending in questions and we’re like, oh man, this is support. Like this is what we hear of taking so much time and trouble when people actually start using your software. So we’ve definitely had to kind of evolve our processes and our infrastructure and our team significantly. Then when we all started, we just shared an email box like a Gmail. There was nothing fancy about it. We all shared the same box and we were all sitting in an office. So an email would come in and one of us would be like, oh, I got this one. I’ve done this before. You know, I got that one or I am busy today. I have a call. Can you grab this one? And we would just like raise our hand in the office when emails came through as inefficient as that sounds.
Lee:
I’m sure it was.
Robby:
And then we, let’s see, long story short here, started with an inbox. We switched over to a support forum at one point and that was really popular. People really liked the forum. That was kind of the genesis of the community around our product too, is that people were coming to the forums and chatting and getting to know other users. And so we were doing the forum for a while. Around that time, we brought on our first kind of outside employee to help with support. And so let’s see, where did we, we ran into hiccups with the forum as, so we started off in the office and then we transitioned to going remote and being a distributed company. And then when we started growing the team and when we were no longer all sitting in the same physical space, the forum got really cumbersome. It didn’t, it wasn’t good. You know, it was hard to like assign a ticket to someone or if you wanted to like get someone’s advice or feedback. Again, long story short, we switched over to Help Scout a couple, maybe like a year and a half or so ago, roughly, which is a much better platform for doing larger scale support and managing teams around support and then tracking everything too. So, sorry, I’m getting long, I’m long winded here, but…
Lee:
No, it’s absolutely. Keep going because there are people who are launching products right now who listen to this show. So, you know, they’re writing madly down as you speak. So keep going.
Robby:
Okay, cool. Cool. Yes. Well, let’s see. What are the good takeaways? Good. Like the forum, I think was an awesome way to start out, but it quickly became unmanageable. And if we could do it all over again, there’s still a lot of folks in our community that wish we had a forum available. And we hear that a lot. Fortunately, though, the thing that we found with forums is when we were using it for our official support channel, people had to come there and register an account and put posts up there. So it became part of the routine. And when we’ve tried to do a forum that was just a community forum that we didn’t offer our support through, it was a lot harder to get traction because there weren’t as many people coming there regularly. The conversations weren’t just, you know, they weren’t happening because people don’t, people, you know, have limited time in the day. So it’s been a lot harder to try and grow one outside of it being used for support. So yeah, I’m doing it all over again. The forum worked really well for us. If we could have started out with Help Scout, I think maybe we would have. The only, the other downside to using the system we’re on now, Help Scout, is that none of the answers, it’s all email based. So none of the questions and answers get indexed by search engines. So they’re not, you know, the nice thing about a forum is if someone has a similar question, they can do a Google search and hopefully find an answer that’s already been typed up.
Lee:
Well, that’s what I was going to say. I mean, I don’t necessarily miss the forum because I didn’t like submitting personally a ticket on the forum. I felt like I was kind of telling the entire world what my problems were. I know you were able to tag things as private, etc. But there was still a little bit of a concern about security and all that sort of stuff.
Robby:
Of course, yeah. So that was always a concern for me. But on the flip side, whenever I’ve done Google searches, your forums are still the guy. It still keeps popping up. And I actually get quite a lot of answers from your forums, you know, code snippets, etc. And obviously, you’ve got your notification at the top there saying, hey, this is no more rest in peace. But still, there’s some great advice in there.
Robby:
Yeah, agreed. I mean, to be totally honest, I was kind of hoping the forum would like, you know, slowly, slowly lose. I mean, there is still I guess we made a push to try and get as much of the information in those old forums into our knowledge base. So it was my hope that we would be able to kind of transition and, you know, move away. Like, so we’re still, you know, we still have the forums on an install that we have to update and we have to, you know, keep an eye on make sure that, you know, it’s not crashing or costing us a, you know, ton of money and server. I mean, it’s just something that we need to be mindful of that’s still there. So I wouldn’t have, you know, been opposed if we could have phased it out. But what you’re saying is true. We see a lot of people organically finding the questions and answers on that forum still to this day. So I don’t think it’s going anywhere anytime soon.
Lee:
Well, here’s a top tip for you. And this is for free. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you’ve come in here to teach us some stuff. But, you know, let’s reciprocate. Let’s teach you something. You can download HTTRACK and actually create an entire HTML dump of that entire forum so that you don’t have to keep updating the software or anything else like that. And if it’s costing you money and server space and everything, that’s just going to be a lightweight HTML version of the original forum, which you can archive somewhere on some cheap set. Just say, hey, guys, it’s over here if you want it. And then you can stop updating that annoying forum software. I presume it’s not a WordPress plugin. I’m assuming it’s like a PHP BB that we all used to use back in the day.
Robby:
Oh, man. That’s one we could unpack. Yeah, it’s not. No. So it is. That’s a great idea. Great idea.
Lee:
And I was kind of I was being I was exaggerating in terms of server costs. Like, I don’t really think I wish I had more excuses.
Robby:
Stop visiting the forum from now. Robbie says stop visiting the forum. He’s put his house on the market again. Carry on, mate.
Lee:
No, it is good. That is a good idea. Well, I guess that’s yeah, I like that idea. I forgot that that exists now that you mentioned it. Oh, yeah, of course. But no, it is. It’s a BBPress. It is running WordPress. It’s a BBPress forum. You’re forgiven.
Robby:
But man, PHP BB. That’s the BBPress is good. But coming from I did a lot of PHP BB back when that was what kind of got me into PHP and building websites.
Lee:
That would have been the early noughties, wouldn’t it? Late 90s, early noughties.
Robby:
Yeah. Yeah. It was like the whole Web 2.0 era when, you know, interacting with websites was becoming more commonplace when they were kind of going transitioning from just brochures to communities. I miss PHP BB. I loved it. I thought it was brilliant. It was and it was. I mean, no, yeah, like represented this time in my life that I remember fondly. But then thinking about remember when you do like add ons for PHP BB and they were literally just a step of instructions and code snippets. It would be like, go find this file and then go to line 34. And paste this code in there.
Lee:
Yeah. And that was how that was how add ons were. You know, come in, you go to WordPress where it’s like, oh, activate, remove, install, update. It’s so pretty. It’s so much nicer. You know, the whole hooks and filters. I can’t argue with it. I can’t argue with that. But I do kind of miss it. I guess it’s, you know, when you kind of miss that retro thing in life, don’t you? Like you, you visit the old bar or you go to, you know, you just look at the old magazines or watch the old movies just for the sake of it.
Robby:
Yeah. The nostalgia factor. Definitely. I remember that. I remember looking at that logo, the PHP BB logo with a bevel on it thinking bevels are so like now and fashionable and awesome. And I’m going to make every button beveled.
Lee:
Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. That kind of like that metallic look, you know, with the reflections and the glossy.
Robby:
I found the effect in GIMP. I was like, yes, everything. Oh, man. Yeah. That’s funny. So it will. Yeah. PHP for all of its kind of rough edges. It was a really fun piece of software to work with. And it was super cool. So we’ve totally digressed here.
Lee:
We were like, we’ve gone off on a complete tangent. It’s like, what’s PHP BB? What are these guys talking about? This is the new podcast, retro PHP software with Lee and Robbie McCullough. So I can’t say your last name without doing a fake Scottish accent. I’m really sorry. So sorry to all Scottish people listening. I just murdered your accent.
Robby:
So that’s cool. Now, you’d mentioned that you brought someone on. So you had to change software. You’ve got Help Scout. And that’s great. You’ve been building up your knowledge base, which is also brilliant, because doing stuff like that does help reduce the tickets because people are going to pick up and go and check that out first. But you mentioned you brought people on. How have you managed that? Because you’ve gone from a physical office. You’ve got people all around the world. And I mean, I was listening to a podcast the other day where one guy is actually working for another business and working for you guys. So how do you manage all your communications and know who’s doing what at any one time?
Robby:
That’s a good question. Another example of things kind of evolving and changing as time goes on. We’ve definitely experimented a lot. So we brought on the first guy we hired. His name was Ben. He’s based out of the Philippines and he’s still with us. He’s great. Actually, I think the second person we brought on was his brother. So once we’d been working with Ben and kept growing, it was maybe like six, eight months down the line. And we’re like, gosh, we need to hire someone else. And he’s like, well, hey, my brother’s looking for a job. He’s just finishing up a gig with this company. But he’s going to basically his brother was becoming available. And that was really cool because they work in the same house sometimes. Like they’re close by. Ben was able to help train his brother, John. Yeah. So we got really lucky there being able to get the kind of two, not two for one, but two for two.
Lee:
But having two guys that knew each other and that were close and were brothers made the whole training and onboarding process a lot, a lot easier, I think.
Robby:
But so back to your question. We use Slack as kind of our home base or hub for all of our communications. We don’t do a whole lot of email. And then the thing we’ve been experimenting with is trying to do not meetings, but we’ll have kind of like meetups. We have this weekly time on the calendar. That’s an optional. It’s not like a formal meeting where we talk shop or go over anything critical. It’s more just a time where we all come into Slack and just hang out and chit chat and kind of talk and try and get to know each other. It’s more of like a team building exercise. And then we’ve tried doing hangouts before doing like video conferences. Yeah. Yeah. We have what I’d love to do is like a physical hangout. Get everyone together in one place.
Lee:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s always the logistics of trying to. So we have a couple of guys in the Philippines now, a couple in the UK, a couple here in the States. And the logistics of trying to get everyone in one place has been a little daunting. But someday we would like to do that. But yeah, it’s always been we’re trying to find more and better ways to communicate.
Robby:
I think I need a Slack masterclass. Like I’m still somebody who totally relies on email for our business. And we’ve got Slack. But all I find it is just this noisy board of lots of people saying lots of stuff. And I just I can’t cope with it. My brain does not compute with an email. I can like see my unread messages and like shove stuff into folders. And with Slack, I look at it and it kind of brings me back to the old days of a chat board. Remember the old chat boards?
Lee:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. With different channels. It was IRC, wasn’t it? And they had lots of different channels and stuff like that. And I just find it a noisy mess. So I actually I have no idea how to manage Slack.
Robby:
Maybe this should be an entire episode with you where you could kind of give us the top five tips for for managing your business with Slack unless you can drop a couple now.
Lee:
Well, you know, it’s funny. OK, let me let me how can I do this? OK, so we use there’s with with Slack. Sorry, I’ve got like five different stories I’m thinking about right now.
Robby:
Nice.
Lee:
I remember when we were doing client work, we had a client that wanted to use Slack for their project. And that was a pain because the client was working for a company. He was kind of like a middleman. He was a designer that was working with a company on their website and he hired us to build it. So there was the company. There was him, the designer. And then there was us. And he wanted to do a Slack, you know, for all of us to communicate. And the friction point that he had was that there were people working for the company that hired him that just weren’t interested in like they weren’t they weren’t WordPress or tech particularly. And they didn’t want to install, you know, an app on their phone or, you know, they installed it on their computer once or looked at the web version of it, but then never went back. You know, everyone’s already looking at email. So that’s tough with Slack. If people aren’t open to getting on it or if you’re trying to bring in multiple clients and do that, that can be that can be tricky. I don’t know if I can help there.
Robby:
But I get I’m guessing internally, though, it must be good. Good because you’re already it’s already the framework you guys are all using to communicate. If you’re not using email internally, then there’s one source.
Lee:
It’s yeah. Yeah. Like everyone that we bring on is open to, you know, like, hey, where this is how we do things. And so you can kind of jump into our, you know, our way of doing.
Robby:
I think it was working with, you know, if you’re working with multiple companies doing client work, I think it’s a lot more difficult to to embrace or, you know, get everyone on Slack.
Lee:
Have you heard of discourse by chance? It’s OK. So it’s it’s like Slack, but for gamers.
Robby:
Are you have you ever done any gaming? Oh, so boring me. I really I’ve got such a crappy attention span. I start playing a game and about five minutes in if I’m not winning, I’m just turning the thing off.
Lee:
OK, well, so I’ve I’ve got a little bit of a gaming history, right? And clans and guilds and all the teams of people I was a game with. And and communication was always kind of an interesting hurdle, right? Like there was apps you could use to chat when you’re going into a raid together or whatever. You know, like Xbox has a chat, you know, communication system, but it’s kind of shoddy. So people would use Skype. Anyways, there was, you know, 100 tools throughout the years people have used in gaming to communicate. And this company called Discourse came out with it’s basically Slack for gamers. It’s a communication platform. But the reason I bring it up is because I joined. I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but I got really into Pokemon Go last summer when it came out. Oh, man, it was I was having so much fun. It was a perfect, like perfect time for me because I had been working, you know, remote that whole year. And I was just kind of sick of being inside, you know, not meeting new people. And then this game came out. It’s all about like, you know, go outside and like meet people, you know, get sunshine. But again, long, long story short, I joined a Pokemon Go chat with like a bunch of local guys and they moderated the chat super well. And I got all these inspirations on how to manage our Slack based on being in the Pokemon Go one. Like they would have an announcements channel that you could only post in if it was like a, you know, that you like the rule was no chatting in the announcements channel. Because everyone had the announcements channel synced up to send notifications to their phone. So if like, you know, a super rare Pokemon spawned, you could stick it in the announcements channel and everyone would see it.
Robby:
And then you were sounding really geeky now.
Lee:
All right. I know. My cover is blown, right? I’m actually actually kind of a nerd. Where’s Robbie gone? Oh, he’s all right. He got an alert. He’ll be back in five minutes. The funny part of the story, or at least the part I get a kick out of, is I really did. I learned a lot of tricks to managing Slack and how to, you know, like set up a channel structure and, you know, actually being kind of not strict, but enforcing the rules so that the system works a little bit better. So I tried to bring some of that into our Slack. Although everyone makes fun of me, they call me the hall monitor.
Robby:
I kind of like that. Don’t chat announcements. I like that.
Lee:
It works. It works when you get things dialed in like that.
Robby:
Well, I mean, we still have Slack. We’ve all got it installed and all I do is just put stupid messages over it now and again because I know it pops up on everyone’s screens because we’ve all still got it set so that it gives us an alert. But we never really know what to do with it. But I do like the idea, you know, of the announcements channel and trying to keep certain things in certain channels. I still, though, can’t like work out, you know, if somebody’s working on something, how I can like go back to that particular project. And maybe there is a to-do list in there. I don’t know, but I’m kind of a to-do list guy. So I quite like, say, Basecamp 3 because I’ve got, I mean, we live in Basecamp 3. That’s our communication tool internally. And everything’s to-do lists and checkboxes and multiple owners, et cetera. And all the conversations happen per to-do item. So that’s kind of where my brain works.
Lee:
Yes, I’m still struggling with Slack. Sorry, I was trying to get lots of free advice out of you there.
Robby:
No, I totally agree. It’s missing an element that, I mean, we read or keep track on how automatic, I mean, they’ve published a few things about how they do communication at a large scale. And they use P2, which is the theme, the WordPress theme, kind of like a message board forum. And I think that Slack is great for, you know, real time being able to chat with someone. But, you know, if someone has a, if we’re talking about a new feature or something like that, we have a discussion about it. It’s really hard to go back and, you know, you literally have to go back through the chat history and reread what happened. And then if you wanted to make a comment, like imagine if it was just a Facebook post, right? Like someone posts on Facebook and then you can come in and the next day and kind of kick the conversation off again by posting a comment. It’s like the asynchronous or synchronous communication.
Lee:
It’s funny you should say P2 because I remember looking at Slack and thinking this really feels like the P2 theme. Because I remember installing that once and having conversations with people because it was almost like, it was like the early days of Facebook had come out and people could have conversations on a wall. And then I remember setting up P2 internally with our business, you know, the theme, the old theme. And you could do kind of status updates and people could reply to those and you could put them in categories. Essentially the same as Slack, but it was like just using their theme. So I didn’t realize that WordPress or, I mean, Automatic are actually still using that as their main communication tool. That’s kind of mind blowing.
Robby:
Pretty sure. Yeah, this might be, this information might be a year out of date or so, but I’m almost positive that’s still, but it’s like the pair. Having the real time chat paired with something that’s more, you know, more of like a threaded kind of long term forum for discussion, I think is the kind of the perfect compliment.
Lee:
Makes more sense. Now let’s pirouette.
Robby:
Yes.
Lee:
Because we like that word. And we kind of gone off on several tangents, which were brilliant tangents. I love them. And we’ve learned from them, or at least I have. And I’m sure people listening will have, but you did pirouette yourselves recently. And maybe it was a long time in the planning, but like you said, you got your page builder, it then made sense to have a theme that would support it. And I personally love the Beaver Builder theme because we pretty much use that now for all of our websites and then just create a child theme over the top for all of our customizations. So that’s beautiful. And thank you guys. You know, in fact, John, Johan, I can never say his last name from the WP Navidad group as well. When I said, has anyone got any questions for the group? He just says, please just thank him for the amazing products that they create. So the community say thank you, buddy.
Robby:
Yeah. You’ve got those two products, man. But then, you know, Beaver Themer came out recently and it’s cool. I love it. There’s a few things I want to see in it. I’ll email you those. Don’t worry. I’m not going to have a go over on the podcast right now. But how did that happen? What was the genesis for that idea? And I don’t mean genesis is in those guys. I just that was I just use that word randomly and then realize the connection after I said it. Damn it.
Lee:
No, that’s cool. We like we like the genesis guys. So genesis is one of the well, I’m going to get ahead of myself. But genesis Beaver Themer fully supports genesis as well as generate press and a couple of others are starting to come into. Yeah. So Beaver Themer is a theme builder for for WordPress. So it’s a little bit of a mouthful. I’m still kind of trying to dial in how to explain it in one sentence. But it with Beaver Builder, you can build the content of your page. And one of the questions that we see all the time from the beginning of Beaver Builder is folks would ask, how do I, you know, change my header or my footer with Beaver Builder? And we’d kind of go through this this dance of explaining like, wow, you know, your header and footer come from your WordPress theme. And those are separate from your content. And Beaver Builder focuses on the content. It’s one of those things. I’ve heard this come up a lot in the discussion around WordPress in general. And how do we make WordPress more accessible and get more people over that are maybe considering using something like Squarespace or Wix over to WordPress. And the whole kind of relationship and dynamic between your theme and your content and WordPress’s approach to that is it’s it’s great. Like it works really well having a theme that’s separate from your content so you can change your design. It makes like, you know, I think it’s a good system, but it is it’s kind of confusing, I think, when people are first getting into WordPress. But anyways, I’m going off on a tangent again. So Beaver Themer lets you modify your theme using the same kind of page builder interface that we have for Beaver Builder.
Lee:
That’s a good one line. You’ve nailed it.
Robby:
Yeah. Okay. Well, the thing is, it does. But it does so much. This is where I get it. Like, I feel like I’m getting infomercial easy. But I’m like, but wait, you know, like it does all this.
Lee:
Yeah, you chop up your tomatoes and your onions and make a salsa. Just six low, easy payments.
Robby:
Six low, easy payments. I love it. It’s been a long time. I used to watch it a lot more time. It’s usually three. And they usually say as well that it was like $1,000 and now it’s only three payments.
Lee:
Oh, yeah. So ridiculously low amount. And you’re like, well, how was it ever $1,000? Don’t be stupid. Anyway, sorry. Get a free set of knives and a towel.
Robby:
Mate, I would love that. I’m still waiting for my knives. I bought Beaver Themer the other day. What’s going on?
Lee:
Yeah, we had some issues. Some issues with the international deliveries. Makes sense. I get it.
Robby:
Sorry. Carry on, mate. I’m sorry because I literally just didn’t answer your question at all. The genesis of the idea was from user feedback, I think, or from what we were hearing in support. That question, the first one I mentioned, the headers and footers. How do I build headers and footers with Beaver Builder came up all the time. And that was one of those problems that we kind of thought about solving. The other question that came up all the time, which Beaver Themer tackled, or I guess I should say problem that came up, was styling multiple either blog posts or WooCommerce products or custom post types. You know, with Beaver Builder, if you have, you know, a WooCommerce store, you can build a single page with the page builder and, you know, lay out your product image and your add to cart button and your reviews and all that. But if you have a store with a hundred different products before Beaver Themer, you would have had to either not use Beaver Builder or build each of those hundred pages individually, like by hand, do them all. And with Beaver Themer, you can build a template that says, you know, pull my product image and then pull the add to cart button and put that there, put this there, and then apply it to any number of, you know, products or posts or custom post types. So that question also came up all the time too. So those two problems we kind of identified as coming up regularly and we wanted to try and solve them. And yeah, we started, Beaver Themer has been in development for like almost a year at this point. So it really was a long time in the works. We worked on it a lot internally before we ever kind of put it out in the wild or anything or showed it to anyone. So it’s one of those iceberg kind of analogies, I think, right? Like this is just kind of the tip that’s poking out of the water right here. But there’s been a lot of infrastructure and a lot of time and effort behind it that hasn’t been, that maybe is just sitting under the water, not quite as visible.
Lee:
Well, I think with Beaver Themer, you know what, guys, seriously, all these different titles, they’re so confusing. If you try to say them too fast, they’re like tongue twisters. I think I had this conversation on the podcast the other day. I was getting tongue tied trying to say all these different titles.
Robby:
Yeah, I saw that one actually. I was chuckling about that. So we had it, we’ve like naming things Beaver, like X, like whatever Beaver Themer, Beaver Builder, Beaver Themer. We really, I swear, we really do debate these things and we really do kind of second guess ourselves. But then, you know, maybe it’s just like the kind of childish nature, playful nature. We always just like, you know, start giggling and like, oh, we have to. We can’t. Why not? So Beaver Themer, the name came up like months and months ago and we’re like, oh, like no way. We can’t call it Beaver Themer. Like that’s silly. It’s going to confuse people. And, you know, like we got away with it once. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to get away with it again. And then, you know, we kept laughing about it and we were like, OK, we have to do this.
Lee:
I’ve been calling it, I’ve been saying Themer. It works. It’s a little easier to roll off the tongue if you just say Themer. Let’s call it Themer.
Robby:
Well, yeah, Themer. The thing I love about it, I guess for me as a developer, is it’s a framework. So the framework for me is I’m able to start with the theme, the original theme, and then Themer, I’m getting there. Themer will integrate with that. So it’s got all of the hooks all built in. I can replace the header. I can replace the footer. But also for every single post type that I create, and I can use one of many cool plugins to create post types if I don’t want to do code. Obviously, I like to do code. I’m a bit old school. But, you know, for the people that are wanting to try and do as much point and click as they can, they can use like the custom post type UI. You can create those post types. You can use ACF to create the fields. And then you can use Themer to create all those different layouts. So you can, you know, the loops, the outputs. I love that. That’s fantastic because although still being a bit old school, we’re still building a lot of our themes, you know, creating our own loops, creating our own page templates for specific builds for those sort of rapid application developments that we need to do. And we’ve got a lot of those coming down the line now, especially with the big brands, kind of brand authorities who want to create a site that evolves and changes quite a lot. Viva Themer, yeah, I said it, has been very, very helpful. So we’ve actually started that. We’ve actually had two personal brands who have launched their own membership sites, but they have lots of exciting plans to do a heck of a lot more. So what we’ve done is used Themer for those. So instead of committing a whole load of stuff to code, we’ve got all of these templates and layouts saved in Themer, knowing that we can change them at any time without the headache of trying to work out what the hell we were doing with our code or worrying about breaking something because it’s all in there. So that’s something that’s really excited me about Themer, although there are still a whole ton of stuff I really want to see. And we’ve been creating this nice big list. You’ll be happy to know all internally, Mila, Sir and Karthik of just a few features we’d really like to see, which we’re going to send you over the next few days, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard all the feedback already. But we’ll throw our own in the mix as well. Obviously, still early days, but it’s a fantastic framework. And it does give people that framework to build pretty much anything you want to build. It’s taking less of the grunt work with regards to trying to build loads and loads of code if you want to do things like an MVP, etc. You can actually put something together using all of these WordPress tools, which kind of blows my mind now. It kind of worries me as well. Maybe no one will need HTML in the future. Maybe people just need something else. I don’t know. But anyway.
Robby:
Yeah, we can go off on that tangent, too. But no, I mean, that’s really – I appreciate the kind words. It’s awesome to hear. I mean, we were all kind of overwhelmed getting Beaver Themer out there and the response. You know, we thought it was pretty cool, right? We were building it. We’re like, man, this is pretty slick. But just the initial wave of seeing what people have been building with it and kind of the way people are using it creatively that we hadn’t even really anticipated or thought about yet. And it’s been a really exciting couple weeks here. So we launched three, four weeks ago at the beginning of May. So it’s just kind of in the infancy of like we’re just starting to see sites that are being built with it and kind of leveraging it in really exciting ways. And yes, please do send us your feedback because we’re absolutely curious to hear yours and everyone’s thoughts on how we can improve it from here.
Lee:
Well, one of them was I wanted to make my coffee for me in the morning. So if you can sort that out, that’d be wonderful. We’re about to actually pull it into our core site because what we’ve got on our core site, anglecrown.com, is quite literally Beaver Builder theme. But then we had to create a child theme and then we’ve created lots of code to say, if it’s a podcast, do this. And if it’s that, do that. Whereas actually now we can pull Beaver Themer in. Hey, I’m getting better at saying it now. And do all of that stuff inside of the Themer without having to do any of the code, etc. So that’s good for us. Now, this question, I mean, I have a very strong opinion about the answer to this question. I’m not going to tell you what it is until you’ve said what your piece is. But I’ve seen in the Beaver Builder forum, not forum, sorry, Facebook group, that there are some people who aren’t very happy that Beaver Themer was a separate product. So can you just tell us why you decided not to incorporate Beaver Themer with Beaver Builder?
Robby:
Yeah, I mean, I guess the simple answer is that we wanted to have an additional product to sell as a – I mean, how do I come on – how do I put this in the nicest light? I mean, one of the goals when we started working on Beaver Themer was to create a new kind of extension or product that we would have available. I mean, there was a business incentive to doing it as an add-on because we wanted something else that we could offer both our existing customer base and any new folks that are going to be using Beaver Builder in the future.
Lee:
But that said, I think we also put a lot of effort and investment into building new features and improving and updating and maintaining the core Beaver Builder package. I mean, it wasn’t like a situation where we were like, okay, you know, Beaver Builder is done. We’re moving on to the next thing. We have a big update coming out for Beaver Builder here very, very soon.
Robby:
Don’t spoil it. We’re going to get onto that.
Lee:
Okay, yeah. I won’t talk about that.
Robby:
So, yeah, like folks – there were some folks that weren’t happy that it wasn’t included. But it just wouldn’t have justified the kind of research and development time and the investment of developer time that went into it. I mean, from the beginning, the goal was to create another product. And I don’t think it would have been – wouldn’t have been a good decision on a bunch of different levels had we tried to do that.
Lee:
Well, my strongly held opinion is it was the complete right decision to make. And one of the things I’ve been, you know, touting in the group to people is quite simply that you’ve got Beaver Builder is a page builder. So, you can build a page and that is a particular demographic of people who know how to – or can learn at least – how to lay out a page and build landing pages. You’ve then got Beaver Themer, which is actually really targeted at people who are building more complicated websites, who can start to understand the concept of what a header and a footer is, who can start to understand the concept of custom fields and page loops and archive templates and part templates and all of that sort of stuff, which is a completely different demographic. So, if you guys were to try and merge the two together into one super product, you’re going to just create something that is way too complicated for people to use. So, I love the fact that you have separated them out, but when you activate them both at the same time – and this definitely sounds like an infomercial now, doesn’t it, guys? It sounds like I’m being paid to say this, but it’s just true because I love Beaver Builder. Always have done. I just love the fact that when you activate Beaver Themer, it’s seamless. So, suddenly, in the existing Beaver Builder modules, suddenly I can now start to add custom fields, etc., in there as well. So, it’s a beautiful setup, but I think it was totally the right thing to do because if my clients had suddenly seen Beaver Themer options appearing inside of what was already something that had taken them quite a while to learn, I think it would have been too much.
Robby:
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, again, for the kind words. And it’s interesting. We kind of had to discover that on our own. I think the headers and footers piece was something that when we were kind of talking about this before we launched it and before we were – when we were kind of talking about the strategy of how we wanted to position it, the thought that being able to build headers and footers was kind of the missing link and it could potentially make WordPress compete a lot more closely with something like Squarespace, where it’s targeting the user that isn’t particularly interested in learning about building websites. They just need a website. But then the power of Themer and we kind of moved away from that idea of just making it a simple build a header and footer to making it a tool for maybe someone who’s a little bit more familiar with WordPress and that can leverage it to do a lot more. But, yeah, it’s nice hearing you say it because that was what we decided on the kind of the market and the position that we wanted to go after. And I think so far it seems to be working in that sense.
Lee:
Sounds like we’re all on the same page.
Robby:
Now, we’ve got a bit of a random thing that we do now and again and we pick on certain guests. Troy Dean was the last person. You are the next person where we open up some questions to the WP Innovator Facebook group. And if you don’t know what that is, guys, just check out WPInnovator.com forward slash group. There is a group of crazy people all talking about WordPress and agency life. And as of this recording, we’ve got 672 members. That is freaking insane. And we’ve got some questions, mate. So do you mind if we just put you on the spot? I’ve not prepared you for any of these. I literally asked these questions a few minutes before this recording started. Do you mind if we hit you with some?
Robby:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I’m up for it. Let’s do it.
Lee:
Sweet. All right. Steven Greer. Do you see an official marketplace for BB add-ons in the future?
Robby:
Oh, that’s a good question. Yes, but with an asterisk. Yes, I see one. But we don’t have any concrete plans. I guess it’s a hopeful yes on that one. I think that would make a lot of sense. We’ve been talking about marketplaces for a long time. And the solution we came up with is that we’re very encouraging of third-party developers, people who are creating products or add-ons and extensions that leverage Beaver Builder. But what we didn’t want to do is kind of fall into the scenario or the trap that we saw. Like Easy Digital Downloads, we read a lot about – we always read what Pippin writes over there. But we read a lot about how when they kind of created an ecosystem around their product that was under the umbrella of their brand. And WooCommerce does this too, right? Like people will build extensions for WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads. And then WooCommerce will sell them as WooCommerce extensions. But then managing the support and the updates and the maintenance to that software I think is a challenge, right? Like if you have a third-party developer that creates a product that your customer has an issue with and that maybe that developer disappears or they create something and they move on. So sorry, I’m getting – going off on another tangent. But basically our solution to that problem was that we are very encouraging of third-party developers. But we just at this point ask everyone to kind of have their own shops and their own businesses. Like there’s Ultimate Add-Ons and there’s PowerPack and there’s a couple other popular add-ons that you hear a lot about in our community. But none of those are offered under the umbrella of the Beaver Builder brand of our company. But we would like to change that. I think there’s an opportunity there for everyone to kind of do better if we could figure out a way to do that. It’s just been a – again, it’s kind of a logistical nightmare. So we’ve been taking that one.
Lee:
I guess you could kind of franchise the brand that is Beaver. And then if people are going to launch something under that, you could potentially set up some rules or something to help manage that. I guess also there is nothing stopping anyone from creating a website that showcases all of the different Beaver add-ons that are currently available. So, Stephen, I’m guessing if you want to put a website together that educates people, that would be a great thing. I think I saw a website just a couple of days ago. Someone’s just launched. I think it’s something like Built with Beaver, I think. I can’t remember the domain name. But it’s just a whole showcase of – a really cool website as well. Great graphics on there. I love the Beaver they used as well. But, yeah, just a great showcase of sites that have been built and some really cool-looking sites.
Robby:
Yeah, yeah. No, I saw that one too. That’s always fun. There was a site that came through our Facebook group. Someone had shared. It was his first Beaver Builder site. It was brilliant. It was just the design. I saw that. I was like, freaking A. Yeah, yeah. I think – okay, you know the one I’m talking – I think he was – I forget where he was based out of. Maybe Germany or somewhere. I was just like, you look at him showing off. Well, at first I was like, oh, this is the first Beaver Builder site. I wonder if it’s going to – we see all the spectrum of kind of – and, yeah, it was beautiful. Very, very nice site. But, yeah, it’s fun seeing when artists get a hold of Beaver Builder and make something really beautiful.
Lee:
Yeah. Kind of sit back and go, oh, shucks. I can’t believe – actually, that’s a good one. When you say artists, I’ve heard this phrase, a poor workman blames his tools. So if you’ve got – you’ve provided some tools. But, you know, there are all of these artists, these web developers that literally can create pretty much anything with a tool like Beaver Builder. There’s no real limit. So that’s exciting. Now, we’ve got Jeffrey Patch. And I’m not even sure if this is a question or whether he’s trying to get a reduction on his renewal. So I’m just going to read this as it goes. It’s safe to say Beaver Builder is one of, if not the most popular and well-respected page builder available. This starts off well, this question. What does it feel like to have this amazing level of respect, I guess he’s saying, from the WordPress community? Because, in his opinion, and I’ve got to agree with him, you are probably one of the most well-respected page builders around. There you go. There’s a big question.
Robby:
And give Jeffrey a reduction on his –
Lee:
Yeah. That’s a lovely question. Well done, Jeffrey.
Robby:
Yeah, the check’s in the mail, Jeffrey. It’s my cousin, Jeffrey. I asked him to seed a couple of nice things in there. Oh, man. No, that’s – I don’t know. Gosh, that’s – let’s see. Well, when we were building websites as an agency, we worked with WordPress. But we weren’t really tied into the WordPress community or kind of even aware that it existed, really. I mean the first WordCamp we ever went to was right after we launched Beaver Builder. And we put Beaver Builder out and we were like, gosh, we should probably start paying attention to this. We’re like, hey, guys, there’s WordCamps. There’s conferences where we can go and meet other people using WordPress. And there’s local meetups. And like, oh, there’s this website called WP Tavern. Like, we should read it because we should try and get on there. And we just had this realization of the community around WordPress and what a kind of interesting and unique, cool spot it was. And we’ve had the opportunity now to attend a lot of events and conferences and meet so many interesting, smart people. And it’s been a really exciting and I feel very fortunate that we’ve had the opportunity to do all of it. So I don’t know if that’s a…
Lee:
That’s as good as any because it’s a great community, isn’t it? The WordPress community is amazing. And I just love your guys’ story. I think you’ve done so well to create something. I mean, the fact that it started off as an internal product is testament to your own internal skill that you were able to then pirouette. Pirouette. I love that. I’m going to call this podcast Pirouette. Be a builder, I think. But, you know, you were able to then take that out as a product. But then the product has been taken on by the community. And I think by you guys getting involved and being friendly and nice guys, I mean, crap, a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago, I first started this podcast and I was bricking it and you guys were super nice and great fun to chat to on the podcast episode. I think it was episode three or four. I can’t remember. But you guys have been consistently just a good team of guys who’ve created a quality product. So I guess it must be hard to get out of the door every day because your head’s kind of grown very big with all the love that you receive.
Robby:
I hope not. Man, you’re making me blush over here. I hope not. No, I mean, we can appreciate that we’ve had it. We’ve it’s been just we’ve been fortunate on so many levels. You know, we kind of stumbled into I mean, it’s like you kind of said it right there. We started working on this, you know, project internally. This wasn’t our goal or our mission. We’ve just been kind of following our noses down this path. And it’s been a really fun, really fun adventure for all three of us. And we’re all really, you know, appreciative of of I think the help that we’ve gotten from everyone along the way. You know, family support community.
Lee:
Did your mom be a builder by any chance?
Robby:
My mom is like my number one fan. She reads all my blog posts and she used to listen to I’m sure she heard our original podcast episode actually. Hi, Robbie’s mom. Just in case you’re listening, you’re awesome.
Lee:
Yeah, no, very we have very supportive, very supportive families and significant others. And yeah, and then and then, yeah, support of the community and folks like yourself, you know, inviting us to come bumble on your podcast. We felt like we felt the same way from the other perspective. We’re like, why? What are we doing? Like, this is a horrible idea. We’re going to go talk on a podcast. Does this guy have any idea what he’s getting himself into?
Robby:
You guys are good fun. I’m going to have to go re listen to that.
Lee:
Now, I am too now. Yeah, because I remember having a good time chatting with you.
Robby:
Oh, that was great. That’s because I can’t remember. Actually, I was going to say that you were drinking, but you weren’t because it was the morning. So I can’t pretend you were. So I am a bit conscious. I mean, like, are you all right to carry on for a little bit longer time wise? Because I feel like we’re going over time, but there’s still a few questions in here. Do you mind just hanging out for a bit longer?
Robby:
Yeah, yeah. No, I’m fine.
Lee:
Sweet, man. So, all right. Mark Taylor, a good buddy of mine, met up with him the other day. He’s put an interesting question out there because some developers, you know, won’t have, I guess, maybe don’t have the money for the large agency licenses, etc. He’s put out, is there ever a plan to have it? Well, he’s just said, I’m kind of ad-libbing here, but his exact question is, can we have a time limited but feature full trial for a dev site? So I’m guessing what he means is he would then want to pass the billing on to the client.
Robby:
Okay, let me see if I understand. So like a trial, so I think what we do, a lot of times if someone writes up and maybe if they’re a blogger or someone and they say, hey, I want to give Beaver Builder a try, we’ll just shoot over a copy of the plugin, but we won’t set up a license.
Lee:
Yeah.
Robby:
So you can have a, you know, a demo version available to tinker with. But yeah, you won’t be able to get updates or support. So that’s something, if you’re a blogger, if, you know, we try to not just like give it away for free to anyone who asks, but more often than not, if someone comes in and they say, hey, I write for this website and I want to do a review on you guys, we’ll get them a copy for that.
Lee:
You’re going to get that influx of imaginary magazines.
Robby:
Yeah, well, that’s all right. I’m right for the WordPress observer. You know, no, I’d rather it be like that because, you know, let’s if we’re honest, right, like there’s all those nold, like, you know, GPL club website, like if you want to find a pirate, it’s not even pirated because it’s GPL, right? But if there’s plenty of copies of Beaver Builder out there on those kind of shadier, you know, where’s websites and whatnot. But no, I’d much rather get an email from someone like if you can’t afford or if you don’t even if you don’t want to pay them, like if you just want to try it and you’re not ready to buy it yet, like come and like write us an honest email and let us know your situation. Like don’t go get one of the shady copies. So those guys like inject malware and all that kind of stuff. Like you don’t want to go get one of the ones off the web. But yeah, and if we get if we get an influx of people coming in, I can be like, oh, yeah, right for I’m just kind of interested in the imaginary names that come in. I’m quite happy with the WordPress observer. I was quite pleased with that one.
Lee:
So Devinder, Devinder is in. He’s asking he’s asking two questions. I think that’s a bit selfish, really. I said, have you got any questions? Well, anyway, let’s go. Let’s go. Guys, guys, just always take, take, take. It’s never it’s never anything. That’s not true, is it? Because the amount of the amount of information this guy puts out there in the in the Beaver Builder community.
Robby:
Yeah, I presume you’ll be sarcasm. I know you’ll be an ironic. Came through on that one.
Lee:
OK, I was explaining just to explain for anyone who doesn’t get sarcasm. Hashtag sarcasm. Hashtag sarcasm.
Robby:
After 2.0 release, can we expect improvements in existing Beaver modules with the testimonial?
Lee:
Testimonial. I went well posh with the testimonial slider and so on. I agree. That’s a good, good question.
Robby:
Yeah. Yeah. I think. Because that’s the interface, isn’t it? You’ve improved the interface.
Lee:
Yeah.
Robby:
No, if I answer that one honestly, we have been like heads down working on Beaver Themer and 2.0 for like pretty much this year. And that’s been the core focus. And now that both of those like Beaver Builder 2.0 is just about to come out in an alpha stage. Essentially, what I’m trying to say is that it’s done. Like we’ve completed the majority of the work there. So we’re and we’re we are at this point where we’re kind of figuring out what comes next. We have a lot of ideas. I get maybe prioritizing would be the best word. Like we have a lot of ideas. We have a lot of kind of directions we could go in. But prioritizing and strategizing like what we want to do next is something we’re working on pretty actively right now. So and I agree, too. Yeah, I think I think what Devinder. So I can speak to the testimonials module in particular because I actually wrote that one. So I’m not going to offend anyone when I say that it’s definitely it could use it could use an update. But so, yeah, let’s I don’t think we have anything concrete planned yet. But that’s definitely a direction we’ve talked about and where we put that in a priority list will be kind of determined. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see some some update to the content of Beaver Builder modules, etc.
Lee:
That’s good. And then his second question, which is kind of interesting, it’s more of an idea here. He’s saying, how about the easier loading of third party commercial templates via the main Beaver Builder plugin? So I guess he’s he’s saying maybe an open marketplace of not plugins, but like the of theme of template.
Robby:
Yeah. Yeah. I’m with it. I like that idea a lot. We are in 2.0. We’re adding some features specifically for third party developers to better organize and show off. You know, if you buy an add on that has templates right now, they just kind of, you know, pop into the to the save rows and modules. So we’re going to give we’re going to give third party developers better tooling to kind of classify and categorize and brand their their templates in the UI. So that’s happening. And then we’ve talked about doing some sort of how are you trying to improve the process of loading and reusing templates, either, you know, templates or rows or modules that you’ve saved of your own or from third parties, like improving that experience. Because right now you can export them and import them using the WordPress import export tool. But yeah, I think there’s there’s definitely some some opportunities to improve that process and make it easier for people to share either, you know, for free or as a, you know, in a premium kind of business setting. Share pieces of a website and templates, entire designs.
Lee:
Now, top tip, guys, if you use WordPress multi site, one of the things I love about Beaver Builder, which is why we fell in love with it kind of a year and a half, two years ago, two years now, two years ago was the fact that you guys support multi site so well. And what we’re able to do because we’ve got a lot of multi site installations, we’re in the events industry in our other business. And one of the things I love is that I can set up one of the key sites to be a template site. So that’s where I’ve actually created loads and loads of different layouts for events. And then in the main multi site settings, you can set the idea of that site so that all of the other sites will pick up or they pick up those templates. So it actually outputs this gorgeous interface of all of the templates we’ve created, none of the Beaver Builder ones, all from that one key site on the network. And I love that. It just makes us look so good. So hopefully that feature is going to stay. But if you weren’t aware of that, guys, go and check that out. If you’ve got a multi site, you can create a hidden multi site of templates and then share them across your entire network. So that’s a quick top tip, which I love. So last question, mate. And then obviously we’ll kind of do the long goodbye, sending hugs and all that sort of stuff.
Robby:
Sure.
Lee:
But it’s a good question. It’s a very good question. It’s a very long question. So be prepared.
Robby:
OK, this is from my mate, Pete Everett. I had coffee with him just a few days ago. That’s a great thing about this community. So if you’re in the UK, let’s meet for beer. And if you’re in California, meet Rob for beer.
Lee:
Yeah. This question is, are you prepared? It’s quite a long one.
Robby:
I’m ready. I’m ready. Let’s do it.
Lee:
OK, hang on. Why beaver?
Robby:
Oh, man. There’s so many angles and levels to this one. I don’t even know where to start. I’m loving the answers from the community right now. There’s people actually saying answers. Like one person said, beavers build things. I assume that was the one and only reason. But it’s also a childish name that men won’t forget. I don’t think I could have said it better myself.
Lee:
Yeah. I mean, OK. Well, I think. Have I told this? We started out as the FastLine page builder.
Robby:
Sexy.
Lee:
Yeah. Well, our agency was called FastLine Media. And it was. It was not very or it wasn’t. It was not very exciting or it didn’t. You know, when you said like at the time we were going to all those top 10 page builder lists and asking like writing in to be like, hey, we have a new page builder. Like, would you mind checking us out? Like, here’s a copy or would you like to write about us? And in those, you know, if you think of like a list of page builders, FastLine page builder didn’t really stand out. But Beaver Builder sure did. That was it. We went through like the process of trying to name it. We were thinking of all sorts of different names. Beavers build things. And we started chuckling about it one day. And again, we like totally second guessed ourselves. We were like, this is a horrible idea. We shouldn’t call it Beaver Builder. But then we kept laughing about it and laughing about it. It just was so sticky. So I love it.
Robby:
Yeah. So basically, that was the entirely right answer from Mark Taylor. My legend. That was a great answer. I actually just Googled just for giggles FastLine page builder, and I found a 2014 review.
Lee:
Yeah. Yeah. WP Mayer of FastLine page builder review.
Robby:
Oh, yeah. It’s funny. Yeah, we did. We did.
Lee:
I’m going to put that in the show notes. That’s so cool.
Robby:
Do that. Yeah, a little bit of history. A bit of retro for you.
Lee:
Yeah. And it shows that the interface obviously has changed. But there’s still things that I recognize in here, you know, the page builder settings, et cetera.
Robby:
Oh, man. Yeah. That’s been wild. Going through the time machine that is the internet. I think I was looking through all of our old blog posts or I was trying to remember something I’d written a few years back so I could reference it. And I was reading through some of our old posts. And I’m sure it’s not interesting to anyone but, you know, like myself or, you know, I’m like, I’m not suggesting you go back and read all our old stuff because now it’d be a horrible waste of an afternoon. But for me, it’s really fun to see all the progression of the features. I remember, you know, there’s features now that when using Beaver Builder, they just feel like commonplace. And there was a time. Like saving templates even. That was not a feature we launched with. And just thinking of, you know, using Beaver Builder without some of those key pieces that came in later. It’s funny. It’s funny looking at these screenshots from 2014 because I can see that you started with pre-made templates that you guys did. In fact, I remember that.
Lee:
Yeah. We couldn’t make our own templates.
Robby:
Yep. And then we could. And that was, again, something else. Because like I said, we’re in the business of my other company, Event Engine, is in the business of helping event companies get their events online using, you know, WordPress and different frameworks, etc. So Beaver Builder, first of all, started for us as just a little section on our existing theme, which was all ACF based, where people could build their own landing pages. Because we were trying to encourage people to just, you know, do targeted email campaigns with landing pages and all of that sort of good stuff. And then slowly but surely, as you guys have filtered out these different options, like the layout templates, you’ve got the support for multi-site, etc. Essentially, Beaver Builder has gradually kicked out any need for ACF interfaces. We still have the fields there, etc., where we need them. But over time, you know, Beaver Themer is now coming in. So our latest version looks nothing like our old system. It’s essentially, you know, all Beaver. Everything’s Beaver about the latest iteration of our product that we’re working with clients with. So it’s definitely fascinating to see that whole journey. It’s well cool.
Robby:
Oh, man. Thanks. That’s great to hear. Yeah. No worries. Well, that ends the question. Sounds like Mark Taylor nailed the answer. Beavers build things and men giggle at Beaver. So there you go. That’s the reason, Pete. Great question. Told you it was a long one.
Lee:
Yeah. So, guys, you can check out Beaver Builder over on BeaverBuilder.com. That must have been fun because I presume that was already purchased.
Robby:
We will. We actually bought. So our domain, when you if you go to BeaverBuilder.com, it redirects you to WP Beaver Builder, which was the original domain. And then someone let us know. They’re like, hey, did you guys know that Beaver Builder is available? Basically, like you should buy this because if you don’t, then someone’s going to buy it and throw an affiliate link on there. We’re like, OK, we went and looked it up and it was a premium domain. It was it was not a cheap domain. Like you look at some of the premium domains that are like, you know, $20,000. It wasn’t anything in that kind of it was a couple thousand dollars. And we were all like, are we really going to do this? Is this are we really going to spend this much money on a on a on a Beaver domain? But, yeah, in hindsight, it would have been it wouldn’t have been cool if, yeah, if someone else bought it and like redirected it to their their like Beaver Builder knockoff or through an affiliate link on there.
Lee:
Yeah. Yeah. So that domain came after. But yeah, BeaverBuilder.com. Sorry, I’m getting all on you again here. And if you appreciate all the hard work that we do at WP Innovator, then just head on over to WP Innovator dot com forward slash BeaverBuilder. That’s the other option. That’s the good old affiliate link. Although I’m not really a very good affiliate marketer, to be honest, because I keep forgetting to use keep forgetting to use.
Robby:
Oh, that’s right. No, yeah. Sorry.
Lee:
I’m terrible at using affiliate links.
Robby:
Forget everything you heard.
Lee:
I even don’t do it on our website. About what we were talking about before. What website? What’s the name? Who? WP Innovator dot com forward slash BeaverBuilder.
Robby:
Yeah, that’s the one.
Lee:
That’s it. Whenever I hear the word BeaverBuilder as well, it just reminds me of. Do you remember the Narnia books?
Robby:
Yeah.
Lee:
Yes. And Lucy and that, they meet up with the lovely beavers. They’re building that dam, etc. And they go and stay in their little home and have a meal and all that sort of thing.
Robby:
Yes. It’s been so long. I mean, 20 years ago, I read those books. Every time I hear it, I just get that little image and kind of feel like a child again. A bit like Disney.
Lee:
Mate, you’re a legend. How can people connect with you? And then we’ll kick you off.
Robby:
Well, yeah. So to go to our website via WP Innovator link, I’m on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. I’m on Twitter, Facebook, Twitter. Everything’s just my name, Robbie McCullough. If you feel like shooting me a message, Twitter’s probably the easiest bet. Or if you send us an email through our website, those all go to a shared inbox you can peek at.
Lee:
Sweet. Yeah. I’ll stalk you on the internet. Find all your URLs and I’ll put them in the show notes. I mean, we’re friends on Facebook. Sorry, do you know that? We’ll get your Twitter link and everything. And guys, do check out Beaver Builder. If you are not a user of it, there is actually a free version as well. If you just want to go and check out how to drag and drop stuff. And you can even just have a go if you’re a developer making your own modules. And I believe that still works with the free version as well. Is that correct?
Robby:
Yep. Absolutely.
Lee:
So if you just want a no-risk play around with the Beaver Builder interface, just trying it out. Because a lot of people have been burnt in the past by, dare I swear, the visual composers of the world that have burned me in the past. Then, yeah, go ahead. Check it out. I’ll put a link as well to the free version, which is on the WordPress plugin directory as well. Robbie, you are a legend. I’ve really enjoyed this. I hope you’re going to enjoy this weekend with your drone, your 360 camera.
Robby:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I got a new toy. I was posting pictures on Facebook.
Lee:
I know. My daughter was like, whoa. I gave her the phone and she hugged the phone and was going through all your pictures for ages, just turning around in circles.
Robby:
Yeah, thinking it was a money. Well, okay. As long as we’re plugging it, I just got this thing. It’s the LG 360 cam. You can get it on Amazon Prime. I’ve been talking about wanting to get a little point and shoot camera to take. I do a lot of concerts and music festivals over the summer. I never pulled the trigger on it just because it was one of those things that I always – I told myself if I bought it, I’ll just – I’ll never use it. You know, like I have a camera I never use because I just use my phone. But I saw this one and it takes 360-degree photos and I was like, oh, that’s perfect. I can go. And I thought, how fun would that be to have at a concert or conferences too I think would be really fun. But anyways, I took my first round of pictures this weekend. And, yeah, I’m pretty happy with it.
Lee:
They were brilliant. Like I said, my daughter loved them. She was literally like, whoa, these are amazing. I’m like looking up at the sky and looking around in circles and she’s like, you’ve got friends everywhere. I was like, yay, daddy’s cool.
Robby:
Well, the next – it’s one of those slippery slope purchases because now I’m reading about if you hook it up to one of those VR headsets, then you can actually physically look around and I guess it adds a new level. So I haven’t done that yet though. You also make me feel kind of old. I mean I’m 34. I don’t know how old you are. You look like you’re 25.
Lee:
But like for me, a good night out is actually a night in watching TV whereas you’re like at a festival and I’m like, man, I used to want to do that. And now I’m like, oh, let’s just watch Britain’s Got Talent. That sounds lovely. Get a beer out the fridge. Ooh, lovely.
Robby:
Yeah. Well, it’s funny how Facebook – like social media kind of amplify. I mean, you always put – if you just looked at my social media or Facebook page, you’d probably think I’m out every night just sitting around doing – I mean, I just – I don’t post pictures when I’m sitting in my pajama pants watching Netflix. But I do a fair amount of that as well.
Lee:
Oh, phew. Okay, good. I feel a little bit better. But oh, yeah, circling back to you, thanks again for having me on. This was really – it’s always a pleasure chatting with you. This was a fun one.
Robby:
No worries. Like I said, you’re a legend. Thanks for your time, buddy. And have an awesome rest of your day.
Lee:
You as well. Cheerio.
Lee:
And that wraps up episode number 82. Now in next week’s show, we’re talking to Rob Watson from ClickToSale. And he’s going to be talking all about local SEO. I also ask him the age-old question, is SEO dead? So it should be interesting to get his response to the age-old SEO question. Well, it’s not really age-old. I suppose SEO has only been out for a few years. But, you know, it feels old because I don’t know. Anyway, I’m rambling. Remember, we have a Facebook group. It’s over on wpinnovator.com forward slash group where there are some fantastic people sharing cat pictures, also sharing their opinion on our shows, which is usually good. If you really don’t like the show, it’s probably good not to let me know because I’ll probably cry. Also on that, if you do love the show, head on over to iTunes. It’s going to be really helpful if we can get some more iTunes reviews because we don’t have very many. For a show that gets so many downloads, we’ve got very few iTunes reviews. And it would be really nice. Okay, I can’t act. It would be really nice if people could go ahead and just share what they love about the show in the iTunes review section. That’s just going to help us build up more credibility, attract more people to the podcast, and hopefully more people to that Facebook group where we can all keep adding amazing value to each other. All right, guys. Have an awesome week. You can tell these are unscripted, can’t you? See ya.
