[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast.
You've reached episode number 393, entitled streamlining digital sales with Mindspun. It was published on Thursday, the 10th of October, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley and a few bits of housekeeping before we begin.
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A bit like these fine companies did.
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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, as I said at the top of the show, we're talking about Mindspun. I've got Matt Laue on and he is the founder of this new plugin. So you know how, when you pay for things these days, you're so used to whipping out the phone, putting your fingerprint on to the fingerprint scanner, and holding your phone up to the terminal and immediately the payment goes through.
Well, what if you could do that on websites? What if it was possible to sell digital products, such that the person buying it would make a decision. Hit one button, scan their thumb print, and boom, you've purchased it. The whole process could be over in seconds. Well, that's the premise of Mindspun and Matt Laue's here today to talk about it.
Really interesting technology, leveraging WordPress and all of the innovations happening on mobile devices and their digital wallets. I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast today by Matt Laue. How you doing, Matt?
[00:05:09] Matt Laue: Alright. good.
[00:05:11] Nathan Wrigley: Is joining us from Las Vegas, which is, a nice place. We were talking before I hit record about all the fun things that you can do if you're an outdoorsy kind of person in Las Vegas. Sadly, this is not an outdoor podcast. WordPress. So we're not gonna talk about those, but Matt and I have met in the real world because, Matt and I had a, chat in a cafe in Torino during WordCamp Europe and he was telling me all about Mindspun, which is a product that he's got.
We'll get onto that in a moment, but, there's more to Matt than that because we're gonna talk a little bit about some other things as well before we get stuck into it though Matt, it's a fairly pedestrian, tell us your short bio, who you are, what your relationship with WordPress is, that kind of thing in, I dunno, a minute or so.
[00:06:02] Matt Laue: Yeah. I'm Matt Laue. I live in Las Vegas. I came here via Silicon Valley. Before that I, I ran a small boutique sort of consulting group there. I left that to join a startup, a few years ago, actually, many years ago now that I think about it. The time passes really quickly.
And then, after I left that startup, one of the problems that I had was like, how to correctly build a site for a, SaaS company. And that's what brought me to WordPress. So I'm actually, in terms of the people who've been in the WordPress space for years, if not decades, I am a, newcomer. And I started Mindspun with the, purpose of solving some problems that I saw in, this space Specifically, it was difficult to sell things on WordPress, so that's how we got to here.
[00:06:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you so much. I'll just direct people. It gives you some indication of where we're gonna go with this podcast. If you want to Google, Mindspun, of course you can do that, but probably easier if you just go to Mindspun.com. Pause the podcast. It's exactly how you'd expect. It's M-I-N-D-S-P-U-N.
have a little ferret around there and then you'll have some intuition as to what Matt is gonna be talking about. Before we get into that, we've got two topics. We've got WordPress development and how difficult it now is. Plus we've then got the Mindspun bit. And just before we hit record, you said you'd like to get into that whole development and what it's like.
Beginning a project in the WordPress space now, so we'll open up that conversation. And you said that you thought it was harder to develop now for WordPress, plugins, blocks, themes, just really because of the technical. Debt, the technical overhead that you've gotta have if you want to develop. So React has got to be in your back pocket now, whereas maybe 10 years ago you could dabble with PHP and dabbling was fine.
Mostly, if something went wrong, you could probably Google it and figure it out. And if it didn't work, things didn't break in an irreparable way. Whereas it does seem like the, burden of knowledge with React is a lot harder. So just let's get into that. are you happy with the way the WordPress project is going regarding all that?
[00:08:21] Matt Laue: I actually am. we're we're, not there yet. There's a long way to go. We, I think that we all thought that we'd be farther along in this process than we are, but, I, it's the right direction and it, especially for large, projects like WordPress being maybe the largest ever, it's, It would, it's easy to sit back and rest in your laurels and let the world pass you by. And WordPress didn't do that. So that's, that's, we should all be really happy about that. The problem is the technology has definitely gotten harder. The barrier to entry for a new product for developing in WordPress for things like that is, It is just much higher now, and what we don't want to do is get into a situation where the only people who can, who have the technical knowledge to do it are like large companies. only, the enterprise can really play in this space because that's just not the core of what WordPress is.
[00:09:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think if you were to go back, when plugins first started, for example, or themes, when they crept into WordPress, it was relatively straightforward, even for a complete novice. I. To, to have a go. And obviously, as plugins got more complicated than the debt that you would have to have in terms of PHP knowledge and JavaScript and CSS and all of that would be significant.
But most people who were technically inclined or had that desire. Probably could have given it a go. And I do, I know what you mean. I do hear grumbles amongst the community about how difficult this stuff is to master, but also whether or not they want to put the work in for React, because it may be that WordPress isn't gonna be what they're gonna do forever in a day, and they just wanna be in technology.
And so being so opinionated about React, and I, don't know what your thoughts are on this, but it does feel as if. React in the enterprise was really super popular, but it feels like it's not quite, it's not quite the, hotness that it was a few years ago. I dunno what you think about that.
[00:10:30] Matt Laue: It's not the, It's not the, new thing. It's not the shiny new thing that everybody's talking about. It's still the, workhorse though, it, is, was absolutely the right JavaScript framework for WordPress to go towards it. It just was, if we'd gone to something else, some competitor Ember or Angular or whatever, it wouldn't have made it any easier.
And in fact. Because the RAC community has such, a, following, there's a lot more help information out there about that than any other choices. So it, I think that new, projects that are being spun up outside of the WordPress space that are just using JavaScript are still very heavily focused on
[00:11:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But does it concern you then that because of the nature of the WordPress's community and how it evolved, that evolution is gonna stall? if you're a plugin developer and you are coming into the space, which is what you are, you. You in the back of your mind, I'm guessing is okay.
I'm banking on WordPress because WordPress has this history of getting bigger and bigger, and it seems like the right bet, but I guess in the back of your mind, you're thinking, Am I betting on the right horse here? should I be doing something for a, I don't know, some sort of SaaS based solution like Squarespace or Wix or something like that?
Because there doesn't seem to be this groundswell of new people coming in and, I don't know if you picked up on it when you went to WordCamp in Torino, WordCamp Europe, but if you look around the room, it's not full. Of 18 year olds and 19 year olds and 20 year olds, it does tend to skew towards the, the older gener, 30 plus maybe is the demographic where it really begins?
So does that kind of stuff worry you, that the community's not gonna be there in five, 10 years time? Therefore, it's a bit of, a bet to make that you're gonna go with WordPress.
[00:12:30] Matt Laue: It is a, it's a really good question. yes. when you go to award camp, it def the age, the average age definitely skews much higher than, the average tech conference. I don't know if that is an indication of, I. Of where the market itself is going. Because, the word Cape community is the people who go to WordCamps are not necessarily, the people who are ne are building with, at least at the, at the national size.
They go maybe the more local ones has more people who are actually doing the, hands-on work as people as opposed to people who are building for it. when you put, your. Effort behind a technology, you're betting on that technology and WordPress is still a major, 40% of the market, right?
so there's, even if it drops a little bit, there's a lot of, a long way to go. There's still so much of the internet that runs on WordPress. a, change in WordPress. Affects the internet and that's, that's major.
[00:13:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think, it's still the thing to bank on would be my guess. But, you've obviously got experience of launching, Recently, tell us about the journey of, building then, how hard was it? Were you, you said you'd come out of Silicon Valley, you didn't really allude to what your roles were there, but has it been difficult for you to build a product, is the technical side of building a product in the WordPress space now?
pretty high.
[00:14:11] Matt Laue: I think it is. I, and I was fairly surprised about this. I've built a lot of stuff in the past. and I was, I'll be honest, I was pretty wrong about how long it was gonna take to add. Block support to the Minds Fund Payments plugin. It took a lot longer than I thought. So lemme give a little bit of history that'll
[00:14:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, please. That'd be
[00:14:33] Matt Laue: that, a little bit more, make sense more.
We, we created a a, Minds payments plugin that had, the ability to configure things with templates, just like an old PHP templates, the very standard way that most other, Other plugins work and the goal was to fix some of the problems that we saw with, the way other plugins, EDD, w, things like that.
Were using, were using the payment processor. That's too technical, but it means that, it, it excluded a lot of the use case and we could talk about digital products
[00:15:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we'll get
[00:15:18] Matt Laue: that, and we'll get to that, but, but, it was really to fix some, of these problems that, that just didn't have a solution.
Okay. We did a bunch of, early beta testing, very early on, like really, raw, you actually signed up for it, way back when. Yeah. And, found a few problems. and one of the things that we found across the board was that no one, was changing how they, how their like checkout experience worked.
No one was changing the, default, like checkout screens. And that is a huge impact like con. to your sales process. how you sell is really about the friction in the process and having a, a co cohesive branding. All that increases, your conversion rate. it's been, proven time and time again.
All the major brands focus on this, and yet no one was doing that. And so it was, the question was why? And the reason was it was just. Too difficult to go in and change the templates because you had to know what to put into the PHP and it was weird and all that. Okay. great. That, that has an obvious solution.
we, create blocks that, that we do exactly this and so began a months long process to make this happen because, Because we wanted to do it the right way, we wanna do it in the WordPress way where blocks are really, as you would think about them, they're little pieces that you, put together to make a bigger thing.
Not here's a block that shows you your entire checkout screen. That's just like putting in new technology with the same functionality. it doesn't actually provide any
[00:17:12] Nathan Wrigley: So are you atomizing all the little bits? So you've got all of the component parts of a page as separate bits that you can build in a jigsaw, jigsaw sort of metaphor?
[00:17:23] Matt Laue: Exactly right. Using the block editor metaphor as opposed to here's a whole bunch of functionality that gets stuck into essentially a section or a div in a, in a site. And and that's the, theory that, that the editor has, right? A paragraph tag is just, is just that a paragraph tag, heading, et cetera, and then you compose those into exactly what you want.
Exactly. Not just here's a generic like login form, let's move around the forms and, We, went down that path. It took way longer than
[00:18:05] Nathan Wrigley: Oh no.
[00:18:07] Matt Laue: yeah, Along the way, we ended up building essentially a block library that, that's called mine, spend Responsive Blocks.
That's available for free on the, that. On the app store that, or excuse me, the plugin repo. That took a long time too. and that, and the purpose of that was just to add responsive controls to the blocks so we could use them. And then along the way, we, also created the ability to, for other plugin developers to use that there's a storybook for, showing.
responsive components that you can use in your plugin. If there's plugin developers listening to this, don't go down we wanna save you the pain. You use our, stuff for free. I'll help you do it. Don't experience that pain. and then, that became the framework for the ability to generate your own checkout page.
Exactly. In a pixel Perfect brand, accurate
[00:19:06] Nathan Wrigley: I ask, was it naivete? with a bit of hindsight, could, you have known it was gonna take longer or is it just a case of, okay, we're doing something on WordPress? Yeah, we, Know what we're, we're technical people, we can figure this, react stuff out, and then, oh, hang on. in other words, if you did the same thing again, do you think you could have made the journey quicker or is it just a long time that it takes,
[00:19:34] Matt Laue: Yeah. knowing what I know now, I'm faster at it. but, but it does, I don't think that my, introduction, my ramp up was novel or, unique to me. I think this is what it takes to, build like that in the WordPress space Now. and it's React, but it's also WordPress React, which is technically, I guess preact and all that.
And so it's, and it's got some very specific WordPress ways of doing it, right? it's React plus, Redux Plus, and so with different terminology, all that stuff is very much changing. On a day-to-day basis. we've seen the terminology evolve. We've seen all kinds of stuff. even in today's like AI space, like the, you can't get, you have to dig through the code.
You have to dig through some other stuff because even the, AI models aren't trained on it because there's just not enough
[00:20:34] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, Okay. Yeah.
[00:20:35] Matt Laue: And that, yeah. And that's not, that is not a criticism. That is just, That's just where we are. it's new stuff. It's changing quickly. the documentation's way better than any other project would be at this stage, but it's just not like the amount you can read about online for a, for the PHP side of it is just significantly
[00:21:02] Nathan Wrigley: it's interesting because during the, PHP years, if you like, when all the plugins were just basically using PHP, we've risen up to, I think at the minute it's 60,000 plugins in the WordPress repository. Plus, countless May, maybe that. Number, again, commercial plugins. Who knows? it would be hard to know, but the point is there were lots and it ramped up very quickly.
I haven't really kept my eye on how that number has increased since the advent of blocks, but it seems like for years we've been saying 60,000 plugins in the WordPress repository. And I do wonder, and it hasn't really occurred to me until now, if that has slowed down, if the community. If it's difficult for people to get in, make a start if they haven't got that technical knowledge already and whether or not new companies will be able to forge their weight like you are trying to do at the moment.
whether you can get off the ground or whether projects stall because it's too difficult, too time consuming. The barriers are too, there's just too much to overcome. That is, that's interesting, but that number of 60,000 doesn't seem to have spiked up. In my recollection, but that's just what's in my head.
But that's concerning,
[00:22:18] Matt Laue: that's interesting because the, so we just released a new plugin for the first time. The Mind center response blocks earlier this year, and that, that team, who's all volunteers, they're great, right? But they're slammed. The Plugin Review team is completely slammed right now. We, we took, it took something like two months for them to get to it and I think there was 200 and some odd.
Plugins in the queue ahead of me whenever I submitted it. 'cause it just tells you. So there's definitely, work going into it. there must be plugins coming out the, who are dropping off the repo too. But, new stuff is definitely
[00:23:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'm sure you're right. I just, I, it is interesting. It'd be interesting to see if new, innovative stuff is coming in from incumbent players. people who've already figured out their place in the WordPress space and have got a development team, or whether or not, single developers just.
Trying to nickel and dime an idea that they've got. I wonder if that's gonna be more difficult. You're right there, there's been great measures taken to increase that, or sorry, decrease, put more boots on the ground with the plugin review team to decrease the amount of time. But I don't think we're out of the woods yet.
But that is a really interesting observation. If the di, if the level of difficulty has climbed to the point where somebody seasoned like you is. I, guess you are looking back and thinking, gosh, I wish we could have done it in half the time, a quarter of the time, two thirds of the time, whatever it may be.
Then that is probably getting played out th thousands of times over. And it'd be interesting if you're listening to this and you've got any intuitions about that. If you're banging your head against the React wall at the moment, then yeah. Matt is maybe somebody to talk to. Let's, just move on because we've been talking.
[00:24:12] Matt Laue: Absolutely.
[00:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: I mentioned the URL and we now know what the project is. mindspan.com. Go check it out. What is it? Just tell us about this project. It's time to, advertising mode engaged. te tell us what it is, what it does, why you built it. Let's start there. I.
[00:24:30] Matt Laue: It, minds Fun Payments is at its, core a fundamental way of selling on WordPress. It's, it's, sell a digital product on WordPress the right
[00:24:42] Nathan Wrigley: So it's digital projects, which we wanna nail that to the
[00:24:45] Matt Laue: digital product.
[00:24:46] Nathan Wrigley: not like you don't, you're not, there's no inventory here. It's not selling socks or trainers or, it's just digital stuff. Okay.
[00:24:54] Matt Laue: Yes. if you're selling t-shirts or whatever, go use woo. that's, absolutely the way to go. But, for years, since. Since we've, the internet was created, we've sold digital products the same way that we sell, physical products. And that's just wrong, right? Digital products are fundamentally different things.
there's no concept of inventory, there's no concept of sizing, there's no concept of. a whole lot of asking questions and putting things in and shipping, right? we use this methodology that was geared towards, like from the 1930s where we take a bunch of things, put them into a shopping cart, people on who are listening to the podcast can't see the air quotes I just used, put it into a shopping cart and then, buy everything that way.
And that made sense because you had to, you had to make sure that all the stock existed. You had to, the shipping was better if you did put it all in one box, all that stuff. But it, for a digital product, you should be able to buy it with a single
click. Um
[00:26:03] Nathan Wrigley: button, right? If you, I don't know if you're after an ebook or something like that, you just want to hit the button and get the thing, because you know that there's no configuration of that thing happening. Nobody's putting it in a box. Nobody's putting it on a.
A truck that it's got to go somewhere or figuring out shipping costs. It's just, okay, it's coming from your computer to my computer, and I want it right now because it's digital. Yeah. Okay.
[00:26:26] Matt Laue: Yeah, that's exactly right. So what, The amount you're gonna sell is directly proportional or directly inversely proportional to how much friction there is in that process. So if you can write a blog that talks about something and then, oh, by the way, here I go into it more deeply in, in my ebook, and you click on the button stage, similar on the page, continue reading.
You're gonna sell a lot more than if you have to go to a shopping cart processing and pay the normal way. digital wallets today. I guess for, the Europe market, it's mostly a Google Pay. The US is, dominated by Apple Pay, but those make it possible for, no typing.
And I showed you this in, where we, we used demo dot minds spend com. We bought it a digital ebook. It sent you an email with, some upsell information, and you typed in nothing. It was just, it was just your, digital wallet
[00:27:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'll just illustrate to, everybody what, I went through and, if I get this wrong or if I've misremembered, just let me know. So you sent me a URL, I had my phone in my hand. I went to the URL navigated whatever it was I was supposed to get. there's the button and I hit the button.
And then if memory serves. Google stepped in and says, give us your thumbprint, because there's a card transaction about to happen. So that was pretty obvious. I knew what was going on. Okay. Okay. Google's okay. It's protecting me. Great thumb went on, and then that's it. That was basically the thing done, and the whole thing was without any friction and honestly for five seconds.
It was done. the only decision there was do I put my thumb on it because I want it or not. And in this case, it was a zero cost item, so there was no decision. We were just testing it, but the, it was pretty remarkably quick and frictionless. And I guess that, have I got that about, have I remembered that correctly?
[00:28:28] Matt Laue: That's exactly right. And, and that was the perfect example. 'cause we were, we're sitting in a coffee shop, it's a WordCamp like people were walking by that we'd know, there's, a thousand distractions and it. You were able to, complete that process. Just really quickly.
And that's, that's an analog for modern life. That's just how things are. I was listening, I was at WordCamp Phoenix and listening to one of the, I think it was a presenter from Blue Host who was talking about like some, she, basically said, Hey, if there's not just a digital wallet, I just don't buy it anymore.
it's just not worth it. and. That's not how you buy a plugin these days. It's not how you buy a lot, of things. So we're really trying to make that, that process correct for digital products. And
[00:29:23] Nathan Wrigley: no, You keep going 'cause I, I was gonna just take segue a bit so you carry on.
[00:29:28] Matt Laue: But it's the, could the, it's the entire purchasing process, right? So it's what you, did with the thumbprint. but then after that it took you to a another page that you could, again, design with blocks, which helps you with onboarding. because the only thing that's worse than a missed sale is a refund.
there's, that's, and if you can help people onboard very quickly, that is, That really decreases the amount of refunds you have to give out, which are fairly common in the WordPress space. people asking for refunds for like digital products or product plugins themselves. What we, the interesting thing also is, we've, as we've gone down this path of, really thinking about what, how a digital product differs from a physical product.
we've, the, metrics you follow are different. We. you're focused on, getting that first customer, getting their information, customer acquisition, and not necessarily like the initial customer purchase price, which is what people with physical products tend to focus on. Like, how can I increase my average order size?
And what we, turned that, and the marketing, continues after that first customer acquisition. I.
[00:30:51] Nathan Wrigley: So it's about because it's a digital thing and there's no configuration going on, I, I honestly, I feel that your product, its best days are ahead because at the moment we're all just getting used to the idea of having the digital wallet. I dunno about you, but I still know a whole load of people who literally have never used it.
And when I go in with my. phone or my, watch or whatever it may be, and I pay for things. I am genuinely shocking people sometimes whoa, what did you, what? And I, know that's increasingly becoming, it's everybody's doing it now. And, at some point in the future it will just be, maybe will be entirely cashless.
I don't know. But it just, it. It still seems like quite a quirky thing to do, and the idea of buying digital things, it's still yeah, I could use a checkout, but once you've done the Mindspun thing and you've seen it, especially as a vendor selling this stuff, it's just a. A bit of a no brainer, isn't it?
And because nothing's to be configured, and let's say it's an ebook or it's an MP three, you've written a song or you've got a podcast and it's, I've made it. It's sitting in a file bucket somewhere on Amazon, whatever it may be, it's ready to, to ship. People can just buy it. It the whole thing is done in seconds.
And the only guardian of that is. Is the thumb, you're trusting. Whereas if you go with a cart, you've gotta either have an account, set up an account, do all of this kind of stuff, and type in a 16 digit number and then remember what the CVC number is and all of that kind of stuff. And I know that's not that hard, but the generation that's coming up, that's gonna be like, ugh. I don't, what's that all about? I just give it to me now yesterday. In fact, it's, I just want it right away and there's my thumb to prove that it's me. And I think the use cases for it are gonna be far broader in the future. I. Than they are now. 'cause we're using things like ebook MP three, but it could be, I, don't know what it'll be, plugins, themes, blocks in the WordPress space, but almost anything that whole click your finger on the, button, authorize yourself, get it right away.
That's gonna be so much commerce, I think will be done that way.
[00:33:09] Matt Laue: And I think that's right. and the numbers are, the numbers support that, the, adoption for digital wallets is significantly growing. and then on the other side, if you look at the, something like 60% of all shopping carts are abandoned.
[00:33:26] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.
[00:33:27] Matt Laue: So yeah, it's crazy.
[00:33:29] Nathan Wrigley: that's so depressing as a vendor.
[00:33:31] Matt Laue: If a product Oh, yeah.
Yeah. if a product goes into a shopping cart, it's more likely it won't be bought than it will be bought by that
[00:33:39] Nathan Wrigley: Which is infuriating 'cause there's so much intent by putting it in the cart as well. Oh gosh.
[00:33:45] Matt Laue: And some of it is, and some of it is that, people are just using it as like reminder list and stuff like that, but really the number is about 60% in terms of abandonment rate.
[00:33:56] Nathan Wrigley: can I just ask in, in the process that you've got, so the way I described it is you've got a product. so let's use the mobile example and I'm, imagining that increasingly in the future, m my Mac. I've got a Mac Mini and it doesn't have a, it doesn't have the wallet because I don't have a thumb.
I don't have a fingerprint sensor, but my, my daughter has a, MacBook and she does have a fingerprint sensor. So would it be possible to use mine sponsor technology on a machine, like a desktop machine or a laptop if it's got that fingerprint sensor as well? Would it, be something that you could implement there?
[00:34:32] Matt Laue: Yeah, it's still, it, still works on, a desktop. the fingerprint, it, the, security measures that are used d differ upon the, hardware you have available. and so like with a, MacBook, you can, It usually the, your credit card is tied to that to, to, the bio sensor, right?
but it can also just prompt you for a password, right? So it's the same, it's the same concept. the digital wallet has been implemented in the browser, in, in the phone, all that stuff. so it, just uses what's
[00:35:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I've just thought of a really neat example actually of where something like this would like, it's an actual thing, but it's not an actual thing. I went on a train journey the other day. In order to buy the train ticket, I had to go to the, it's called the train line in the uk. So you, select the train that you want and you, make sure that it's all at the right times, and then you add, that to the cart, so you have to add the train ticket to a cart.
You're never getting a train ticket. The train ticket is just going into, in my case, Google's wallet. But you have, you still have to add it to the cart. Then you have to go to the cart and check that, oh, yeah. Is this is the train ticket that you want? Yes. It's the train ticket that I want. Just check, yes, I've checked.
And then you go through the process of buying it. That buying a ticket, for a gig or a concert or something. That would be another, almost like real world example of how this could work. I've got a ticket for a concert. Do you want this? Yes. Click your finger on it. There you go, Don, you've got it.
How does the, email arrive? Because I, don't remember plumbing in my email address, but maybe I did. When you did the demo. I can't remember if Google handled that or, yeah.
[00:36:21] Matt Laue: Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's the real, that is the, real advantage of doing, the digital wallet approaches. The information is then sent to, the vendor automatically by the purchase. So here's an email and a little bit of additional information saying, Who, here's the, person who made the purchase.
If, if you're using a digital wallet for a physical product in, a different thing, it, can also include things like shipping address and things like that too. But the real, advantage is exactly what you're talking about is it's typing this to buy something. You don't have to type anything.
and that is a huge win on. On mobile as, you'd seen. the, if you have to type in stuff on, especially at, a certain age level,
[00:37:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,
[00:37:19] Matt Laue: if you have to,
[00:37:19] Nathan Wrigley: can,
[00:37:20] Matt Laue: you have to type in stuff on, then you tend to, then you tend to have to, that's like having to type in a bunch of information on your phone is actually a pretty big barrier to entry.
I'll just do it at home. I'll type it in on my desktop and then you forget about it. So if you could just, push a button, maybe enter your thumbprint, do something that says, Hey, I authorized this purchase. and it just happens right away. That's gonna really increase conversion rates.
And that's, that's what, vendors
care
[00:37:57] Nathan Wrigley: I, just think we're just getting used to it. We're in that phase where it's still weird for some people. The friction, how to describe this, it's re, it's reassuring in some senses to have a bit of friction because then you know that fraud is gonna be lessened and what have you.
And I remember the first time that I put my fingerprint on my phone and it unlocked my phone. I remember thinking. I'm not entirely sure if I trust that, in oth In other words, if somebody steals my phone, is their thumb actually gonna work? But now that we know, right? We, know that technology is really robust.
We, I totally trust that if I leave my phone on a train, nobody else is getting into that, even though my t thumbprint is enabled. and I think that's where we're at. We're just at this period of. Okay, this is the technology that's now available to us, and you are right in the middle of it. you've come out with a technology which adopts all of that, but is it getting accepted?
are people starting to use Mindspun? Is it on a, an upward clip of growth? Is it hard to convert people to it because it's fair? It's fairly difficult to explain. no, it's not. It's easy to explain, but the revelation of it, when you actually see it. Hard to, it's hard to understand.
You've gotta try it one time and then you go, oh yeah, I get it.
[00:39:17] Matt Laue: And, you've, basically gotten to the crux of the problem, right? the, good part of WordPress is, has been around for a while. The bad part of WordPress is, it's been around for a while, right? So there's lots of, there's lots of players in this space and it's, difficult to cut through the noise.
there's a thousand. You go to the app store, there's, and that, that may be literal, but there's at least a, dozens of, plugins that say, oh, I use Stripe for payments. Great. that's not what we do. This is a new way of buying. but, that doesn't mean that from a search perspective, we don't have a hard time getting that message through.
[00:40:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:40:01] Matt Laue: And, we also came, this is taking the topic into changing the topic entirely, but we, also decided to release during Google's helpful content update timeframe, which made, it very difficult to be, found online.
[00:40:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Oh,
[00:40:19] Matt Laue: so a content strategy at that time also was very difficult.
[00:40:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:40:25] Matt Laue: And I think that all the plugin developers are running into that, right? they've everybody, like going post status for instance, just people talking about like how my search traffic has dropped off in the last
[00:40:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. how, do let, so let's say that I've got a phys, a, digital product that I wants to sell, let's say, I don't know, podcast episodes or something like that. H how does it work? What do I Do do I go to Minds spawn.com, download a plugin, stick in the types of products, put a button on the front with a block.
Just run us through briefly what the, how that works and, what is the. What is the, vendor relationship there? Are you using something like Stripe in the backend? Because I, genuinely don't know how Google or Apple, if they're actually taking your credit card number, that they've got in their wallet and what have you.
Is it a direct bank transaction that's going on the Google or Apple side? What's going on? So let's start with, how do we, get products onto our website with the plugin?
[00:41:26] Matt Laue: and the beginning of that question at the end of the question are actually the same answer, right? So one of the things that, that Minds Spend payments does, correctly, is it uses, the payment gateway, which is stripe correctly, according to Stripe best practices. if you look at some of the other Products, they just submit, submit payments through it as a payment gateway. And, what that does is it messes up all the analytics capability you get from like Stripe natively, because Stripe is a huge company. they provide a lot of tools that are very useful to the vendor, A mobile app that you can check your sales every, every minute of the day on your phone sort of thing. but by the way that some of the other tools use the payment gateway, it breaks all that, it auto generates products and stuff like that. And you get, you can't really tell, like you can't really use the Stripe tools.
So Mindspan follows the Stripe best practices and uses Stripe the way it was intended. you create a product catalog there. just whatever you wanna sell and give it a description, feature list, picture what, whatever you want. The only, I think the only thing that's required is like the title and price, right?
and then you download the Stripe plugin, or excuse me, download the Minds Spend payments plugin. It connects to Stripe, syncs the, product catalog entirely. And then at, that point, you've got a block library that you can use to. Create to add a button, add a product listing. Basically any type of display of a product that you want on your side.
All block editor, all, no code.
[00:43:10] Nathan Wrigley: So it,
[00:43:10] Matt Laue: All this
[00:43:11] Nathan Wrigley: it's got is it using, are you using patterns to do to make those displays or is it you just build up your own jigsaw pieces of blocks?
[00:43:19] Matt Laue: It's jigsaw pieces of blocks. and it's not technically patterns, but it's, you, create a block. It, it gives you several choices. for instance, if you wanted to add a product, it gives you a, detailed view with the picture and everything. It gives you like a column view that's very similar to the three column pricing page on every website ever.
and or just here's a button. And all of those things are actually just collections of blocks that you can move around and change as you want. So you could, you can choose one and turn it into the other one if you want. It's just a matter of dragging it, dropping it through the Gutenberg editor. So no code required, which means that you can be selling like in an hour instead of, like the typical WooCommerce store takes quite a bit of
[00:44:08] Nathan Wrigley: you need a Stripe account. You configure the, for want of a better word, inventory, but it's really just list of products with their description or what have you in there. Set a price in there. install the plugin. The plugin consumes the product list. And then you go into the block editor, what you know, digital products.
You're probably creating pages and posts and things like that. You get to the point where you wanna sell, you've described whatever it is. That you get to the point you wanna sell, you drop in the minds spawn block, pick a configuration that you want, which I presume you could then amend if you wanted to.
And that's it. And when you publish that, it's got everything there. So what does that look like from the buyer's point of view? Is that, is it a button that you've click and then when you invoke that button, we're off through the process that we described. it engages the mobile wallet and what have you.
[00:44:56] Matt Laue: And literally from the buyer's perspective, it's, whatever you want it to be. or you, whatever you want it to be for them. so it could be just a button, it could be like, here's a picture of the product itself. Here's a feature list. it's, whatever. However you design that. And, that's the thing.
You get to design the experience that is the best. The best fit for your product. And that's, and not only is from the, buy it to like the digital wallet or if you want, the standard shopping cart, but also the experience afterwards where you send it an email that says, thank you for your purchase, all the onboarding process.
You can design that process as well. All using the block editors. You can design the, you can including the emails that get sent afterwards. And you saw that too. That's by the way, that. That email's really good from a, here's how you get started with the thing you just bought, but also, hey, you might be interested.
Yeah. You might also be interested in these things, which has links there, which takes you back to the minds, to your site that mindspan allows you to sell. So you can, also do upselling in that, fashion.
[00:46:04] Nathan Wrigley: I'm looking at the, I'm looking at the website at the moment and I'm at Forward slash Payments. Everybody wants to know, don't they? What, what it is at the moment? It's $129 a year. Are there any caveats to that you know can, do you bind it to one domain or is it possible to use two or three different websites if you've got the $129 a year payment going on?
[00:46:27] Matt Laue: That's per, that's per site. the goal is, it's not li limited to it, is it's, think of that as per. Production site, we, have to actually give you multiple installs because we want you to have a staging site. We want you to do local development. We want, we don't want you to develop on your production site.
But the idea is that is per production
[00:46:54] Nathan Wrigley: Got it. Okay. and can you bind it to other things? can you trigger actions? I don't know, there's a lot of people who do things, webhooks and things like that, so they wanna fire off, put an email address in a CRM or get you in a list of funnel that enables you to upsell various things at various other points in the future.
Does it do any of that or is it simply. buy, get, email, you're done.
[00:47:21] Matt Laue: it is the, our goal is to provide all that and then make sure you don't need it. seriously. Yeah. So there's a series of hooks that are described in our documentation, both in terms of, front end hooks for. purchases and different actions, and also traditional, like PHP, actions that you can tie into.
we've got a series of add-ons that you can also do things like slice wp, integration because you're gonna need a, an affiliate plan and all that stuff. none of, all of our add-ons are there and configurable, but they just come in one bundle, right? So if you don't turn them on, they're not, They don't have any performance impact essentially. but they don't, it's not like EDD or something where each one of those costs money. These are just things that, there are additional features that you can enable that, are free.
[00:48:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think we've given it a good shot at explaining how it works and, what it is. I think, honestly, stop listening to the podcast, dear listener. go to mind. to Mindspun.com, check it out. it's got some endorsements from some friends of mine, which is really nice. I see that.
That's nice. go check it out and if you've got any questions you can contact Matt. Is there a preferred place, Matt, that you would like to be contacted? Do you hang out on like socials or is it all email? What's the best spot?
[00:48:55] Matt Laue: Yeah, we're everywhere, like everyone these days, right? post status is an obvious choice. hit us up on Twitter. Send us, a good old fashioned email at Minds [email protected]. That's, you'll get, an answer on any platform you choose.
[00:49:18] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. thank you for chatting to us about, the difficulties in creating new things on WordPress, but also, showing us what Mindspan can do. good luck. I hope it all takes off. I've got a intuition that things like this are gonna be really popular in the future. So maybe you're in, got your foot in the door right at the beginning.
Let's hope so. Thank you, Matt, for chatting to me today. I appreciate it.
[00:49:39] Matt Laue: For having me.
[00:49:40] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. Fascinating chatting to Matt Laue, all about Mindspun, and digital wallets, and fingerprint scanners, and NFC, and all of the fantastic ways that you can almost immediately buy things through their plugin.
Hopefully that's piqued your interest. If it has had to episode number 393 on the WP Builds.com website and leave us a comment there we'd really appreciate it.
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Okay. That really is all I've got time for. Just a couple of things. Don't forget. wpbuilds.com/black. Bookmark that for all of your black Friday needs. If you want to advertise it's WP Builds.com forward slash advertise. And don't forget the Tim Nash masterclass. WPLDN.uk forward slash masterclass.
Okay. That really is all I've got time for this week. I'm just going to fade in some cheesy music and say, stay safe, have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
