Episode 34
· 24:57
Hey, welcome to Product People. In one of our first episodes, we explored this idea of using WordPress as an application platform. Building your application on top of WordPress. We explored it specifically in the realm of developing an MVP, but there are people that are building fully functional web apps using WordPress. The most famous is probably Noel Tock of happytables.com.
Speaker 1:I got together with him and talked about building apps on top of WordPress and whether he thinks it's a good fit for other people as well. This show would not be possible without the generous support of some great sponsors. Last episode, I tried something new by putting the ads throughout the show and interrupting the interview with them. I got some feedback that that really was not an enjoyable experience and I fixed it for the last episode. So I'll just be bringing you the sponsors at the beginning of the show.
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Speaker 1:When you're ready to sign up for an account, I'll get you 10% off. Just use the code product people TV 2,013. Hi, I'm Justin, and this is Product People, the podcast focused on great products and the people who make them. Today, joining me is a guy I've been wanting to talk to for a while, Noel Tock of happytables.com, is here to talk about using WordPress to build your app. Noel, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thanks for having me on the show. It's a pleasure to be here, and I just love the show so far. So let's do this.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. Now let's start with basics. Where are you from, and what's your product about?
Speaker 2:So I'm in Zurich, Switzerland, and that's where I'm actually from. I was born and raised here. I've moved around quite a bit, also to The States and other places, but I've come back here. We'll see how long I'll still stay here. But Ultimately, what I do is I have Happy Tables, which is now part of Human Made, which is the agency I work at.
Speaker 2:I'm an equal partner at with Tom and Joe. And that's a lot of fun. Basically, head up all the products there, and on the other side, they'll do a lot of the consulting of stuff on a daily basis.
Speaker 1:Cool. And what I'd like to focus on today is Happy Tables, because it's pretty unique. You built it on WordPress, right?
Speaker 2:Yep, that's right. So it's all built on WordPress. It may not look like WordPress anymore. We definitely often get the question if it still is WordPress and that comes out with every new release we do. The same people come back and ask again if it's built on WordPress, but it's all WordPress.
Speaker 1:And maybe just for our audience, what does Happy Tables do? What is the product?
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. So what Happy Tables does is it provides restaurants with the ability to create and manage their own websites. So it's pretty fun, we try to keep it really simple. So that's a big step away from the more traditional things you would associate with WordPress, which would be installing a theme, installing a plugin. Happy Tables is really an application whereby we want the restaurants to interact with the app directly.
Speaker 2:So everything is really simplified and just a lot easier to use.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I haven't used it in a while, but I remember shortly after it came out, I went and tried it out. And basically, if you're a restaurant owner, you can sign up. Most of it doesn't look like WordPress at all. Most of the stuff I did, like choosing colors and things like that, was all done on the front end. I didn't even see WordPress.
Speaker 2:Right. Yep, that's correct. So we've been doing a lot of fun things, if you want, experiments and trying to push WordPress to the limit. So what you essentially saw was something that was still pretty close to WordPress, but in the last couple months what we've done is we've actually moved away completely from what people know as WP admin or the WordPress admin area, and we've just completely moved away from that. So the technical side of that is that we've just created a second theme for the dashboard.
Speaker 2:So we have full control over what goes into the admin area. Yeah. What the UI looks like, what it feels like, what the interactions are like, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Now, I I think this is great, but why did you decide to use WordPress as a platform to build your application on top of? What was behind that decision?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good question. WordPress isn't a foundation for any type of app. The thing is WordPress is good at building websites. So it's website tool to build other websites. It's kind of meta in that respect.
Speaker 2:But with Happy Tables, that's essentially what we're doing. We're spawning new sites. We're creating a new user. That user will have a website that contains posts or pages or custom post types, all data which WordPress already handles very well and has the structure for. So why would we go out and write that in a completely different language or something that we're not used to, or start from scratch with PHP to create a new CMS?
Speaker 2:It doesn't really make sense to us if the whole structure of the security, the user management, everything is already there.
Speaker 1:Is there any disadvantages to using WordPress as an app platform?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd like to say no for what we do in terms of an application that's used to build other websites because ultimately you can just add whatever PHP or other backend code you want to do something different than WordPress or something more specific. But ultimately what it comes down to is if you're willing to kind of break out the WordPress mold that people have gotten so used to and try something else. And you'll notice at that point that it's really easy to create something that just works right off the bat.
Speaker 1:And has it been easy? Is it easy to customize WordPress the way you have so that it works? Especially simplifying the interface the way that people, in your case, build websites. Was that an easy process?
Speaker 2:The first time around it wasn't because what we did was we customized the actual WP admin area, the WordPress admin code, you're trying to add CSS on top of existing CSS. You can't really manipulate the DOM, so you're playing around a lot of jQuery and JavaScript tags or whatever just to try and make the admin feel different. So you're doing a lot of work just to undo what WordPress has already built in because you're trying to simplify things. Then when we did version two in February, we actually flew out to Lanzarote and there we just banged out an entire new version of Happy Tables within a week. That was pretty much just Joe, Theo, and I just working on that for a week.
Speaker 2:Because we weren't restricted by what WordPress has in terms of the admin interface and we just created our own, it was that much easier because WordPress already provides all the functions you need to interact with the user, with the post content, displaying that stuff on the front end. It's already there. So it was just that much easier starting with a blank canvas as opposed to trying to tear down something that's already been built up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Now, did you use MP6 to do this? Or is this something completely separate? Yeah. No.
Speaker 1:Am I allowed to say m p six on a podcast? Will the the WordPress secret service come and get me for that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You could say. I I I think it's it's m p six is it's got some cool things to it, but it's it's essentially like a a very visual sort of modification. I guess it's like it's like putting another skin on on an application you use as opposed to changing the way it works. So Happy Tables now is just completely different.
Speaker 2:It really does not look like WordPress at all. So we did that from scratch.
Speaker 1:And so how because I imagine the first time around the problem was every time WordPress comes out with a new version, you've got to redo all that work. So how now when WordPress comes out with a new version, can you upgrade your HappyTable setup, or do you have to kind of rebuild some things?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. Basically, before we used to have to spend like half a day or so of just intense work in terms of going after the CSS, what they've kind of changed. But the good thing is that the core team behind WordPress is just really good at maintaining or not changing too much stuff, from release to release. They almost don't change anything in terms of core functionality, which is great. So that means for what we're doing, where we're running a theme on the front end for the website and then we're running another theme for the dashboard and then a third theme for the actual client website, there's almost no change there.
Speaker 2:We have all the front end code in our repositories and none of that is influenced by what WordPress does or changes to the admin interface because we just don't use it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Now you've said that for what you're doing, so basically creating an application that allows people to build websites, WordPress is a good platform. Why wouldn't it be a good platform for other applications?
Speaker 2:Oh, I don't know. I've never really created another application, to be honest. It would be hard for me to judge right off the bat. I mean, probably use WordPress, but I'm sure that there's quite a lot of knowledge, expertise and maybe a bit more of a movement behind the whole sort of SaaS application stuff when it comes to something like Ruby on Rails as opposed to PHP and WordPress. So yeah, I mean, it's tough.
Speaker 2:I just haven't seen that in action very much. I'm sure for an MVP or something simple that you want to create, WordPress will do fine. But then when you really want to scale or do something special that's different than building websites, you may move to something else.
Speaker 1:I'm thinking about a simple app like a CRM, for example. You know, looking at what you've done, I mean, basically, you've got a CRM is going to have extra fields and things stored in a database. And there's even some fellows that are doing work on this. Like originally there was a project called RoloPress and then they've moved to something else called Picklist. Based on your experience, though, how hard would it be for you to build something like a CRM on top of WordPress?
Speaker 2:I don't think that would be all too hard. I really don't think so. Cool thing about WordPress more recently and like last year plus is that custom post types have come out. And with that you have the ability to flex WordPress with any sort of data types you could imagine. So in our case with happy tables you are looking at events, are looking at food menus.
Speaker 2:Those food menus then have taxonomies so you have custom taxonomies as opposed to just the regular categories. And those things are just really easy to register in the back end and then to pull up and style and run various queries on the front end. So yeah, it's definitely possible. I think the harder part of any app is once you start coming to the front end and there's just that many higher expectations when it comes to interaction and the whole soft side of a product as opposed to just a code. Maybe it's a case of it doesn't even really matter anymore which technology you're using in the back end, but much more how you're executing the front end and tying into the back end.
Speaker 2:It's a tough
Speaker 1:one. But are you saying it's easier now to do things on the front end with WordPress running in the back end? Like, are those things separate enough in the WordPress stack that you can do some interesting things on the front end?
Speaker 2:No. What I'm saying is that I think that the challenge in applications, the bar has just been raised in terms of what users expect and the way the quality of apps that has come out is just so much better. We used to be content when an app just worked and it just did something. Hotmail did email. Now we not content with that anymore.
Speaker 2:We went to Gmail, now we have Mailbox. We have all these different apps that are trying to fix email when they're just trying to change the user experience somewhat. But there's a lot of what I call the soft side of the app simply because it's everything that's not really development related on the back end. It doesn't really touch on to what WordPress does. It's really how do you deal with the customer.
Speaker 2:What's your microcopy? What auto responders do you have in place? Are you using some sort of onboarding process? All these kind of different things. And that's a much larger challenge than implementing WordPress as an app will ever be.
Speaker 2:I before am saying it's easier, actually. Has become pretty easy to do anything like create your own app, but you just really need to follow through on the entire product, I guess.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And do you think you'll keep using WordPress as your back end, like, for a long time? Is that something?
Speaker 2:Think so, yeah. The thing is, because we're a VIP agency and we've kind of come up to that level, it's probably something we'll do for a long time regardless. At the same time, it's also something that we really know well. So I can't really see us moving into another language, but more so trying to understand the users more as opposed to what code powers the backend.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so now you're getting to the business side. Let's a little bit about that. When did you launch HappyTables?
Speaker 2:When was that? February 2012.
Speaker 1:Okay. And did you have a how did you launch? Did you have a waiting list or a mailing list when you launched?
Speaker 2:We had previous beta testers and people had bought my restaurant themes before. We had Twitter and all these kind of things. I guess ultimately the concept of a launch implies a single event. If you're really banking on the launch to bring you in a certain amount of users, might be disappointed. Launch is really just a kick off for your first step to a lot more work in terms of promoting your product.
Speaker 2:I'm sure as you've probably launched a couple of products yourself, you're just constantly swimming upstream trying to get more users. That initial launch just won't bring you that great point from day one. Whilst it's cool for hype, it's a great way to get influencers on board, get them to know about your product so that they can relate it to other people. That's great. But in the case of Happy Tables, we did a whole shift from selling themes to WordPress developers or website assemblers to trying to actually get to restaurants themselves.
Speaker 2:That's a huge jump, which we just didn't have the list for on launch day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so how has growth been since then? What did you have on launch day and how many customers do you have now?
Speaker 2:We necessarily share the numbers. They could be higher. We're never satisfied with how many sites we have. One of the things that's important to stress is that we've never really marketed the product. We get a lot of organic traffic, we still do, which is fun and that's great because it hardly costs anything.
Speaker 2:But one of the big things that stepped in between then and now is that we started working with ClickBank. I'm not sure if you had seen that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, noticed it on your homepage there. What is ClickBank?
Speaker 2:ClickBank it's like a beast of internet businesses that survived the .com crash and all that. So they've been around for fifteen years or so. And they're out in Idaho. Actually, think they're the largest tech company out there, which I'm not sure what that means if that's big or small. They probably do like half a billion a year in terms of revenue.
Speaker 2:They're pretty big but what they do is they bring together affiliates, vendors, basically this marketplace for selling digital goods. So it's like a much more evolved e junkie, if you want. And they've been doing that for years. How we come into the picture is that we we have a relationship with them now whereby we created the entire platform so that their vendors can create websites that already do the lead capture, they already have the auto responders built in. Basically all the technology that someone or a vendor would want if they don't know how to build a website or use WordPress or they don't want to deal with hosting or installing plugins or even dealing with Aweber or all these other tools that are out there.
Speaker 2:So that was pretty much a big project that came in between. And that's been a pretty big part of what Happy Tables has become in terms of the time we allocate to the business. It had gone to ClickBank over the entire winter dragging out for quite a while. It's something that has been great for us, but took us away from Happy Tables obviously for a little while.
Speaker 1:And ClickBank, was that an OEM deal? Like, do they pay you a license fee for each install? How's that?
Speaker 2:I wish I could tell you. It's behind one of these big contracts. But I mean it's definitely something whereby we have an interest in making sure that it runs smoothly, that it runs well, that it grows. It's an ongoing relationship in that respect.
Speaker 1:And is Happy Tables as a product itself, is it profitable right now? How long did
Speaker 2:Sorry, I was just getting a drink of water.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's fine.
Speaker 2:Cut you off.
Speaker 1:It is profitable?
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah.
Speaker 1:And how long did it take to get to that point?
Speaker 2:Took about what? Six months?
Speaker 1:It took six months. And what does that mean? Does that mean it was supporting somebody full time? What does profitability mean to you?
Speaker 2:Profitability means that it's taking care of all the costs and then some. For us, it's pretty easy because there's just this big jump in the numbers from before six months to after six months. Mhmm. Or just, you know, took off in that respect, which is great. But we still don't have a full time person on it.
Speaker 1:Okay. So it's still not necessarily providing a full time income right now?
Speaker 2:It would, yes.
Speaker 1:Okay. It would it would provide a full time income for
Speaker 2:for one person? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, you can figure it out. There's probably a couple more actually.
Speaker 1:Noel and I were having such a good chat. We decided to break it up into two parts. So come back next Wednesday, 1AM Pacific for part two with Noel Talk. You can follow him at Noel Talk on Twitter. You can follow me, Justin Jackson, on Twitter as well at m I Justin.
Speaker 1:And we even have a Twitter handle for the show at product people TV. As always, we love hearing your feedback. If you could email me at productpeople@bizbox.ca. I try to reply to every message I get. That's it for today.
Speaker 1:Enjoy the rest of your week, and I'll see you next Wednesday.
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