[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 487 entitled, building WordPress plugins, lessons from Newsletter Glue and EventKoi. It was published on Thursday the 29th of October, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and in a few moments I will be joined by Lesley Sim so that we can have our chat.
But before then, a few bits of housekeeping and self-promotional bits and pieces. Please stay tuned, I would really love it if you did and didn't skip forward.
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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with Lesley Sim.
Lesley came on the podcast several years ago now to chat about Newsletter Glue. She's moved on from that now and is working on EventKoi. And so we talk about what it's like in the year 2026 to have a WordPress plugin. What are the challenges? What are the differences between the product that she had, which was very niche, to a project which she now has, which is much more general. How is she managing it? How is she finding the challenges of building in the WordPress landscape, and in the open? And it's really interesting to hear from somebody so honest and forthright.
And I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Lesley Sim. Hello.
[00:03:19] Lesley Sim: Hello. Good to be here.
[00:03:22] Nathan Wrigley: Lesley and I have already spent half an hour on trying to figure out what we're gonna talk about and what the state of the world is, and WordPress and events and podcasting and all of that.
But it's lovely to have you back. How long's it been, do you think?
[00:03:34] Lesley Sim: Yes. Too long.
[00:03:36] Nathan Wrigley: maybe 3, 4, 5 years, something like that.
[00:03:39] Lesley Sim: Hopefully not five.
[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: No, maybe
I don't know if this is true because you've, you, in the WordPress space, which is what we normally talk about, you've had two products that I associate with you.
Firstly, there was newsletter glue, which you have moved away from and I guess sold.
[00:03:54] Lesley Sim: Yep.
[00:03:55] Nathan Wrigley: into that. And then events coy or events coy, I should say. Not events.
[00:04:00] Lesley Sim: Yep. Singular.
[00:04:01] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, singular. Do you wanna just tell us a little bit about both of those and the journeys and what have you? Very quickly, just so that we've got some, some knowledge of who you are and what you've been doing low these many years.
[00:04:14] Lesley Sim: yeah, so Newsletter Glue was my first product, my first plugin product that we built. It was it, I guess in a sentence, it gave people substack features inside of WordPress. So you could, publish a blog post and inside the Post or the editor, you can also, click a button and that also sends out the email together.
yeah, so we did that for a few years, I wanna say four or five years. And then we sold that and we started EventKoi, which is an events plugin. And, I wanna say that the learning there and how we made the move from new set glue to EventKoi was with New Set Glue. It was very, it was a very niche product that we sold for a lot of money to very specific, journalists and editorial teams.
And we then decided to make the move to a more, mass market product, which is what EventKoi is. we, so that, that's like, a product that has hopefully millions of potential buyers users, and that also means that we have dozens, if not hundreds of competitors. So it's a very different market,
[00:05:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:05:43] Lesley Sim: and I am enjoying learning how it all works.
[00:05:50] Nathan Wrigley: Did you, you consciously, was it the product itself? Like you wanted to do an events thing that led you there? Or did you want to experiment with, okay, we've gone for this niche thing and that was interesting, high ticket price fuel customers, but they were, paying your wage. Was it a conscious decision? We want something more widespread so that we've got a greater chance of make an impact, or was it simply, I want to do an events plugin? and that by coincidence has a greater footprint.
[00:06:20] Lesley Sim: the former. So we wanted something bigger, more mass market. we felt that we were ready for it. So, the reason why we went with Newsletter Glue to begin with was because nobody knew us. And so trying to get someone to buy a mass market thing when there are already hundreds of competitors was, is really hard.
But when you have something really niche and it's like we are the only one or two options around, then people are gonna be willing to give us a chance. but after doing new sets of glue, we felt that enough people knew about us, that if we were to launch something more mass market, there would be at least enough trust to get us off the ground.
And then once you're off the ground, hopefully we're able to do the marketing, do the brand building, and have enough people trusting us to, use us.
[00:07:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Did that Wisdom hold? Did, is that what it turned out
[00:07:19] Lesley Sim: I think, we are, we're very much still in the, the people who we know are excited about us and use us, and we are still trying to get to like the, second, third, 10th degree of separation away kind of things. We're still working on that.
[00:07:38] Nathan Wrigley: I use that metric all the time. I, don't know that I do it much outside of the WordPress space. if I'm willing to buy a vacuum cleaner or a kettle or something, I don't really care so long as it, there's some, something about the brand. I'll, I've trusted that brand before and it's worked. But in the
[00:07:58] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:07:59] Nathan Wrigley: space, the person behind it hadn't really ever thought about this, but the person behind it is a significant bit of my buying decision. And I will definitely go back to the character or team that I've had success with in the past. And by success, no problems. The plugin got updated in a timely way.
The support was good and all of those kind of things. And also, curiously, when I buy something in the WordPress space, my, my journey from clicking on a link for a product I've never seen before, goes like this. Click on link, go to homepage, go to pricing,
go to the about page. And the one that I dwell most on is the about page.
And I, read almost every word of that. And if you
[00:08:43] Lesley Sim: Oh wow.
[00:08:43] Nathan Wrigley: page, I'm thinking, why don't you have an about page? Why don't you want to tell us who you are? I, don't dunno if I'm curious, but I like you, I would, I go with, the intuitions that I've built up over the years, but you say it's, that worked.
But obviously if you started with a niche product, so I don't know, you've got a thousand, 2,500, whatever the number of customers you've got is, then you're trying to move that over and you can bring those 500, a thousand, 2000, whatever, you are charging less. Does that mean you are now in a situation where you need to either put your prices up or find more customers to make it do the same amount of revenue, that kind of thing.
[00:09:25] Lesley Sim: yeah, so we are trying to find more customers, get better at kind of mass marketing, I would say.
[00:09:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:09:33] Lesley Sim: Yeah,
[00:09:34] Nathan Wrigley: at that?
[00:09:36] Lesley Sim: learning.
[00:09:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,
[00:09:38] Lesley Sim: of course, I've chosen the best possible time to learn.
[00:09:41] Nathan Wrigley: Me
[00:09:41] Lesley Sim: that, SEO has been completely decimated and even the best marketers in the world don't know how to market anymore these days.
So I
[00:09:51] Nathan Wrigley: what are you
[00:09:51] Lesley Sim: picked the right time.
[00:09:52] Nathan Wrigley: what's your like playbook of, we're recording this in October, late October, 2026. What's your go-to set of things? I'll throw into the conversation that I podcast listeners will know this already. I am, I have a pro product out there in the, market and I'm on the same journey as you we're trying to figure it
[00:10:13] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:10:13] Nathan Wrigley: time.
So let's bat this around a minute. What's, what's working for you? Or at least what are you doing, whether it's working or not, we can talk about.
[00:10:22] Lesley Sim: yeah, so I.
I can say a bunch of things that will make me maybe to some people sound smart, and then to others maybe sound really dumb.
[00:10:34] Nathan Wrigley: This is,
[00:10:35] Lesley Sim: but
so I've been, I guess I think about it in terms of. Two, two different frameworks. So the first just being like, typical marketing funnel, top of the funnel, bottom of the funnel type stuff. so I make sure that I'm doing things across every different layer of the funnel. so I, guess that, that's pretty basic, but then I also try to think about it in terms of, short-term customers and like long-term investments.
So short-term stuff is if I see, someone, you know, looking for an events plugin on Reddit, then I'll try to reply to that thread, try to be helpful, and hopefully convert them as a customer. and that's been pretty successful. I get, a like a small handful of customers, that way, but it's, that doesn't scale, but it does get me, yeah, there, there's only gonna ever be so many customers, complaining or Reddit.
I'm not gonna be able to build a business off of that.
[00:11:51] Nathan Wrigley: well, yeah, I guess if you're in the right market, if you've got the right product where three customers is gonna do it for you, then that's great. But yeah, perhaps not here anyway. Sorry, I interrupt. Carry on.
[00:12:02] Lesley Sim: yeah, I, get the three customers or whatever from Reddit, and they're fairly easy to convert because they're already primed. They're, looking for an alternative, they're looking for someone that like fits like the specs. and they've told me, on the Reddit where they're complaining, like every single thing that they're looking for.
And when I chime in and I say this is, we have every single thing exactly how you want it. it's a pretty easy conversion. but like you said, not that many are going on red and complaining and me being like the perfect fit. so that's an example of like short term stuff, which I do to, get money in the short term.
And then you have to also do like the long-term plays. So like that, that's where it becomes like more fuzzy because we, nobody knows, you know how SEO or whatever they call it, ai, SEO, whatever thing they call it these days works. And I try to do the things that people say that you should do.
and then it's just hope and pray. So I just do a balance of both. I do the short term stuff and then I also try to do the long term stuff.
[00:13:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, do
[00:13:14] Lesley Sim: and then
[00:13:15] Nathan Wrigley: go on, sorry.
[00:13:16] Lesley Sim: I try to ask customers as well, like how they find us. obviously not everyone gives, is gonna give me a report of like their bias journey, although I love that.
they typically just say, I, I did some research, I did some, I, did a Google search or I looked at a bunch of articles, and they like find us. So I think some of the long-term stuff does work. You have to be there, be available, be around, be findable,
[00:13:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:13:46] Lesley Sim: and I think it's just like putting in the reps and hopefully it pays off over time.
[00:13:53] Nathan Wrigley: it's a, I think do, does it feel a bit brutal from at times, does it feel a little bit like you're shouting into the void a bit? Or you take, this is just necessary, this is what I need to do, this has got my business head on. I'm doing it because I, think some people, myself included to some extent, the, the, the going out and trying things on Reddit and things like that, it, i, just find it quite hard, to summon up the energy to keep doing it because you don't quite know where it's gonna land.
You don't know if that comment that you make is gonna get you booted out of that sub Reddit, because it comes across as a bit salesy. So you have to metre those things as well. So really, I'm just, do you feel about all that sort of stuff? Is it a necessary part of business? Do you enjoy doing it?
'cause I know some people do love that kind of stuff.
[00:14:45] Lesley Sim: I think you get used to it after a while. yeah, just I think you develop, I wouldn't call it a thick skin, but I think when you do it enough times you stop caring too much.
[00:15:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:15:03] Lesley Sim: It's like, maybe, I, don't know if you remember, like the first couple of times as a child, you went to a restaurant or you went to a supermarket and ordered something from a waitress or you went to a cashier and checked out something and you were, probably super nervous and you didn't know what to say and you said the wrong thing.
after, you've done that, like 5, 6, 7, whatever, 10 times, it's awkward. But then you figure out, your order or whatever and, it, gets easier. So I think it's very similar to that. 'cause it's just the social interaction, right? And so figuring out like the social rules, like the, the unspoken social rules and all of that stuff, it's all the same skillset.
It's just applied differently. And every, social platform has its different, implicit social rules. And just being okay with embarrassing yourself, po potentially getting kicked out of certain subreddits, is Yeah, just like par from the course. you can't go through life just saying, I, I've, I've messed up an order at a restaurant once, so I'm never ordering from a restaurant ever again.
you can't do that.
[00:16:18] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's a good way of
[00:16:19] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:16:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I like that. I think you, grow into it a little bit. I've become
[00:16:23] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:16:23] Nathan Wrigley: well, I began, not that long ago. we're talking a handful of weeks. I've a lot of hangups about, the way that I'm gonna approach advertising and a, a bit of embarrassment and a bit of
[00:16:37] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:16:37] Nathan Wrigley: and a little bit of, this doesn't fit my personality type, therefore I can't do it.
And then with a bit of encouragement from a few people who of coached me through it, basically could
[00:16:49] Lesley Sim: Nice.
[00:16:49] Nathan Wrigley: tell that this wasn't my, my a game, let's put it that way. and they just took me to one side online and said, okay, do this. Try this. Don't worry about this.
I feel a little bit more sanguine about it now, and I
game. if, if it, if this is what I need to do, this is what I need to do, and I need to lean into it, and what have you, we've been doing. so it's me and Dan maybe for the podcast platform that we've got.
We've been trying an awful lot of stuff and seeing what works best. So doing the Reddit thing that you described, I think for us, LinkedIn might be a, a useful platform because it's, because we know the title of their role and what we've got will map quite well to two or three job roles, you know, so as an example, if you've got the word podcaster as the first word in your description of your bio, you are obviously making that a very important part of your life.
[00:17:50] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:17:51] Nathan Wrigley: got podcast producer, that's another one. And so various things like that, so LinkedIn, but we're also trying out things like, is demonstrated well by showing screenshots. We're trying that out, but
[00:18:08] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:18:09] Nathan Wrigley: of trying out the, I call it the tiktoks.
[00:18:13] Lesley Sim: Oh, nice.
[00:18:14] Nathan Wrigley: that, not really the platform, but just that much more quick. 12 second.
[00:18:20] Lesley Sim: right? YouTube shots.
[00:18:22] Nathan Wrigley: And there's no bit of that, which feels normal to me because I don't use any of those platforms. I don't think I've ever scrolled on one of those, like YouTube shorts or TikTok or Instagram. I've, I don't have any of those on my phone, so I don't really understand it. So when
we create that stuff and I look at it, I think, wow, what is that? what even is that? do that? Do you do video and things to.
[00:18:48] Lesley Sim: how do you know how to create it if you haven't watched any of it?
[00:18:51] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, I, I've, I did that, I watched enough of them to get an intuition of what the
like, but also quite a few of the tools that I use, they have these sort of templates that you can,
[00:19:06] Lesley Sim: Ah.
[00:19:07] Nathan Wrigley: Dan, is much more experienced with this and so I think uses a variety of different tools, including a little bit of ai, which helps with that, as well.
But I dunno if you've tried any of that stuff.
[00:19:19] Lesley Sim: I haven't yet.
just 'cause I don't, I mean, again, this is, this is my own hangup, right? I'm not sure how well, talking about WordPress plugins on Instagram or TikTok is gonna, I'm not sure that's where my customers are, but I feel like that's a completely wrong headed thing to say because.
[00:19:43] Nathan Wrigley: get it. Like, I, I'm in that space as well. Just like can, 'cause to me, and again, I
[00:19:50] Lesley Sim: But I feel like podcasting is much more consumer consumery. And there's loads of podcasting and podcasters
on those platforms.
[00:20:01] Nathan Wrigley: maybe,
[00:20:01] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:20:02] Nathan Wrigley: alignment
[00:20:03] Lesley Sim: WordPress plugins is like,
[00:20:06] Nathan Wrigley: But what if you
[00:20:06] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:20:07] Nathan Wrigley: the what if the, the, the, the video wasn't about the plugin and about the, like running an event and tearing your hair out because you can't an event. You that little 12 second video of somebody getting
[00:20:21] Lesley Sim: Yeah, but those aren't my customers, right?
[00:20:22] Nathan Wrigley: right?
They're not, no.
[00:20:24] Lesley Sim: So I could get, 10 million views on that. But, if they, if it doesn't convert to, sales, then I'm just, then I'm just like a YouTuber now.
[00:20:34] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's, yeah. And isn't that where it's all, that seems to be where the trajectory's going everywhere. But, like everybody's putting all their effort into video. I, don't know if that's gonna be the right thing. I, like I said, I feel like LinkedIn is gonna be really helpful and email, an email.
Do you still
[00:20:54] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:20:55] Nathan Wrigley: you know, an email list? Do you still do that side of things? obviously apart from like product updates and all of that, do you re reach out to people via email still?
[00:21:04] Lesley Sim: I never really did that. I tried it for a while with Newsletter Glue. It didn't go that well. I would say, I just think that, most, of those like email lists that you can do code emails with, it's the same whatever, 10, 10 million email database. And these 10 poor 10 million people have gotten so much spam and unwanted emails at this point that it
[00:21:30] Nathan Wrigley: that
[00:21:30] Lesley Sim: doesn't.
[00:21:31] Nathan Wrigley: concoct an email. Yeah,
[00:21:33] Lesley Sim: So I did try it for a while, but it, yeah, it didn't, I think I got one lead out of, maybe three months of
[00:21:42] Nathan Wrigley: no,
[00:21:42] Lesley Sim: like, really hardcore trying, I, I like bought a whole course, it was like an intense course that asked me to buy 10 email addresses so that I could be like sending out like, I dunno, hundreds of emails per email address to yeah.
It was like very intense. and I got one need from that and I don't think that person converted
[00:22:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And you've gotta,
[00:22:07] Lesley Sim: so.
[00:22:07] Nathan Wrigley: looking from the outside, I suppose with the benefit of hindsight, it's Yeah, but you've gotta try these things, right? Unless
[00:22:14] Lesley Sim: Yeah. Yeah, I think so.
[00:22:15] Nathan Wrigley: know. But I guess once bit and twice shy.
[00:22:18] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:22:18] Nathan Wrigley: okay. alright, let's use this as an opportunity then to plug what it is that you do.
because why not? We're here
[00:22:26] Lesley Sim: Yeah, this is one of my attempts, one of my marketing attempts.
[00:22:29] Nathan Wrigley: There you
[00:22:30] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:22:31] Nathan Wrigley: tell us what it does. Tell us what, event co does, and I don't mean like the, the one line UVP, dig in a bit. Tell us some of the bits that you are really proud of. Maybe roadmap items, bits, bits that you think you do better than your, plugin rivals out there.
[00:22:47] Lesley Sim: My rivals. yeah, so I guess talking about rivals, I call us, a competitor to the events calendar and modern events calendar, sugar Calendar. So all, of those, like I said at the start, we've got, dozens if not hundreds of competitors. And, I think that the thing that we, the unfair thing that we do is that we started in 2026, so a lot of these plugins started, more than 10 years ago now.
And so they feel like a plugin that was built in, 2015.
And so if you, think about the things that you, the type of software that you're using in 2015, if you think about what Facebook looked like in 2015 versus now, it's a huge difference. And so most of those plugins still look like that.
and ours doesn't. So ours feels like it's built in 2026 with all the other software that you use every single day, that is also just as modern. So I think that's
[00:23:52] Nathan Wrigley: you say that, are you
[00:23:54] Lesley Sim: yeah.
[00:23:54] Nathan Wrigley: describing the UI and the
[00:23:56] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:23:56] Nathan Wrigley: is it the, the, technology that sits behind it? Is there some layer of technology, I don't know, react or something like that, that maybe is more
[00:24:04] Lesley Sim: we are using React, but I feel like that's not as important as just when you log in, you're like,
[00:24:10] Nathan Wrigley: How it
[00:24:11] Lesley Sim: this feels like
[00:24:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:24:14] Lesley Sim: built this year.
[00:24:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there's a lot of that in the WordPress space, isn't there? You really outdated UIs
[00:24:19] Lesley Sim: Yes.
[00:24:20] Nathan Wrigley: that it's, they simply don't wish to change it because, if it's not broken, don't,
[00:24:26] Lesley Sim: I think it's also hard to change it at this point,
right? 'cause it's, it's so big and sprawling, a lot of these plugins and, you can't change one part and leave the rest, So you, yeah, it's, it, would probably be like a one or two year project to change the UI of one of these plugins at this point.
[00:24:44] Nathan Wrigley: So did you decide upon the UI and the UX that you've got? Are you a get the pad of paper out and draw it a thousand different ways? Or did you build it a thousand different ways and then decide that's the superior way? Or how did it, land where it is now?
[00:25:01] Lesley Sim: I think, I had some like, ideas of how I wanted it to look. 'cause the, how do I explain this? software in 2026 looks a certain way.
[00:25:17] Nathan Wrigley: It really
[00:25:18] Lesley Sim: so if you use linear or even clawed and stuff, right? there's like a, it's clean in a certain way. It's, toned down, but like utilitarian and stuff like that.
I think that's the, the, the feel that we wanted to give it. and that's very much my own sensibility I think as well. for me, I like things to be. Very utilitarian and the, the beauty is in like the ease of use,
And so I focus a lot on that. so we use shared cn, I think that's how you pronounce it, as like the components framework.
And so everything's built off of that. obviously we've deviated over time as we've built our own things, but that's kind of the foundation. yeah. And I think, and I like to think like it's not just like how the buttons look like, it's not just that, but it's also, how you use the product.
So like for example, the things that, new user wants to do with the product, right? add a new event. how do you make those things as easy and straightforward as possible versus what an advanced user who wants to use our product as. And then how do we, give them those settings and make that as complex as they would want them to be, but also, not have that show up and overwhelm a new user.
And like balancing all of those things. And, the new users things have to be like as few clicks as possible with like very clear descriptions so that they don't get lost. Whereas like the advanced users, like sometimes you can, even like more clicks makes them happier because then they can do more things and it's more complex and they're willing to read the documentation and they're willing to get in touch if something doesn't make sense.
And so going all out for those users as well. yeah, so I think like that's the stuff that, that's the way that I approach
the product.
[00:27:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:27:53] Lesley Sim: And, one thing that I've also, so now we've like completely gone off course, but I'm like.
[00:27:59] Nathan Wrigley: really enjoyed it. I've got a load of follow up questions from what you've said, so keep going and then I'll blow
[00:28:04] Lesley Sim: okay, so one other thing which I think we do well, which, I wanna say PI Calendar does this really well as well. which is we build in flexibility. So like our power comes from flexibility, it doesn't come from more features. So what I mean by that is, for example, one feature that we recently built that I'm really proud of, which explains this principle really well is our custom taxonomies feature.
And the events calendar they built, they have a hard coded venues and organisers feature, which lets you, add reusable venues and reusable organisers, for your events, which is very helpful, right? So if you have, you own a building and you have five meeting rooms and you, you'll only ever have those five meeting rooms as your venues, then you obviously want them to be reusable, right?
So you just click on, meeting room one, meeting room two, and so forth. how they built it is as custom post types, and it's all hard coded. So you have, whatever the address, one address to, country City postcode, something like that, right? Full stop. and same goes with organisers.
They've got, some, I can't remember the exact details, but it's probably something like name, you know, image, URL to the person's website, something like that.
[00:29:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:29:38] Lesley Sim: whereas, but I never liked that because it's a very here's a whole bunch of features that we think that you want,
[00:29:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yes,
[00:29:49] Lesley Sim: but.
In WordPress, the one thing that we can guarantee is that nobody ever wants the same thing. Nobody has the same setup. And you know what? If we think that we've got 10 different use cases, we've probably got a thousand, right? That's like pretty much the only thing that you can guarantee in the WordPress world.
And so why are we building such hardcoded features, when we can already guarantee that those are not gonna be the only features people want, right? So instead of building it that way, which by the way was a very highly requested feature from, people coming over from the events calendar to us, they all wanted this feature because that's how they're used to building the events already.
but I didn't wanna build that because like I said, it's like really hard coded, it and not flexible. So instead, how I lean is more towards giving power to users by giving them flexibility. So we build custom taxonomies. So, with custom taxonomies, it works like, custom fields.
[00:30:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:30:59] Lesley Sim: if you are familiar with custom fields, like advanced custom fields, a CF pods, that kind of stuff, so that's fields.
So taxonomies work similarly, it's like categories. so now you can build your v your venue and your organisers and your whatever as a taxonomy and you can
[00:31:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:31:19] Lesley Sim: what goes into it. Because I haven't di dictated that your venue is only gonna have address and postcode and country, 'cause your venue, you might wanna know whether there's bathrooms, how many bathrooms,
[00:31:35] Nathan Wrigley: so you have a venue as a parent item, and then you have
[00:31:37] Lesley Sim: Exactly.
[00:31:39] Nathan Wrigley: which is room A, room B, room C. Okay.
[00:31:42] Lesley Sim: Yeah, and like I said, so now you can add anything that you want into your venue, right? or you can have a genre taxonomy if you're a movie theatre.
[00:31:53] Nathan Wrigley: it?
[00:31:53] Lesley Sim: Yeah. It can be anything. Yeah.
[00:31:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:31:56] Lesley Sim: it could be if you are a restaurant and you want to have, this one has alcohol, this one, this thing has el, this event has alcohol, this event doesn't have alcohol.
This one is, trivia night, blah, blah, blah.
[00:32:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.
[00:32:11] Lesley Sim: now you can build any taxonomy that you can think of, and you can have any fields in your taxonomy that you can think of, and it's much more flexible. It gives you the exact same thing. The outcome is the same, right? So you still have the reusable venues, you still have the reusable organisers, but now I haven't dictated anything.
And you have complete flexibility as to what you need, to go inside.
[00:32:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:32:35] Lesley Sim: yeah, so and a beginner user would never, ever use this, right? they don't even know what a taxonomy means, but an advanced user would, if they had come from the events calendar, they would probably have already, spent hours developing their own kind of, add on to the events calendar to morph it to what they need it to be.
But with us, they can just build it straight from our plugin and it's, much cleaner and works even better than how they were doing it with the events calendar, for example.
[00:33:11] Nathan Wrigley: This is really interesting. I have so many questions. The first one is, so this your, you driven by your own intuitions on this? In other words, for that feature, the taxonomy feature, did, was it like it popped into your head one day and you thought, oh, that'd be great. I've seen it somewhere else.
Let's do that. Or do you get driven more by people coming to you, your existing customers, and saying, there's a thing over on this one, and it would be nice to have that. So where, does the intuition come from? How do you filter out the good ideas, the nice to haves from the Oh, that's nice enough to have that We're actually gonna build it. So there's a lot in there. Sorry.
[00:33:47] Lesley Sim: No, that's a great question. So I think it's a bit of everything. So the first thing is you have to have basic feature parity with your competitors of, if not, people are just gonna say, I can't use you because you're missing features. So that's the first thing. And then obviously that comes hand in hand with customers saying, can you build this because I need this?
but then I think that the part that is firmly in my territory is how I decide to build these features. for example, I, whether I like it or not, customers want that reusable venues feature, and then it's up to me to decide how I want to build that. So that's how I look at it.
[00:34:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And how good are you at saying no to things? And what I
[00:34:34] Lesley Sim: Bad.
[00:34:35] Nathan Wrigley: is the, the, I remember that, everybody said this phrase, Steve Jobs was always describing how in Apple products, it was more about saying what you didn't want in the product as opposed to what was in it. And you, only had to look back in the day when the iPhone came along.
and the, there were rival, kind of nascent phone brands like Microsoft had a thing and it was just this really messy interface with every single possible feature in there, including all the options for imap and the iPhone came along. It's like, no, there's just these basic settings. It'll do the, but it's beautiful. It's just beautiful. And it'll do a subset of things, but it's really, beautiful. 'cause they left a load out. Do you have to say no to yourself? A lot because I can imagine in a plugin light, yours, the feature creep would be real if you let it get away from yourself. You could, ah, but they're doing this and they're doing that.
And they came up with this and they came up with that. And yeah, just wondering how much no. Do you need to say to yourself.
[00:35:34] Lesley Sim: I think that's hard. So I think, software that has been around for a long time becomes bloated because of this. you, serve, your first big pool of customers and then when you go to the, the second pool of customers, then they have like more specific and advanced features.
'cause you've already saturated the biggest, main pool of customers, right? And then after, 5, 6, 7, 8 years and you've gone now to your third like more tertiary pool of customers and they want even niche features now.
[00:36:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:36:11] Lesley Sim: and so I feel like in, some ways you don't really have a choice.
and that's also why incumbents will always get, I guess beaten by new startups just 'cause the new startup will come and they say, oh look, we are cleaner now. And that always works. And that's something that we talk about as well in for our plugin marketing, right? we say that we are not, as bloated as the old people, but I feel like the reality is if we are around for 10 years, then we will necessarily be as bloated because, same thing, right?
once we've gotten a hundred thousand customers, then the next 10,000 customers are gonna want more niche features, right? If not, if they didn't want it, they would've bought it already, right? They would already be in the first a hundred thousand pool of customers, right?
[00:37:04] Nathan Wrigley: That's really interesting. So the calculus then is about growth. If growth is the
[00:37:08] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:37:10] Nathan Wrigley: then features creep in whether you like it or not.
[00:37:14] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:37:14] Nathan Wrigley: on my wrist and I have a watch and it's a watch.
[00:37:19] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:37:20] Nathan Wrigley: my watch to be better next week than it is today.
I need my watch to tell the time, and that's the set of features that I need, and I need the hands to go round. And so long as it reliably does that, I'm fine. I guess the company that sold me the watch will only sell so many watches of that kind,
[00:37:37] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:37:37] Nathan Wrigley: want to sell more watches, they'll have to add, cogs and throw a digital display on there and have a battery in it and lights
[00:37:45] Lesley Sim: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
[00:37:46] Nathan Wrigley: but that's such a difficult decision to make, isn't it? are we building for the a hundred thousand users that we've got at the minute and we want them every single year to keep coming back knowing that churns a thing, knowing that
[00:37:58] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:37:59] Nathan Wrigley: new startups coming along, or do we want to keep iterating and adding new features? I've dropped so many platforms in not just, not really in the WordPress space actually, things like note taking apps and things like that because something comes along and I just get oh, shiny, but usually shiny and less. It's
[00:38:18] Lesley Sim: Yes, exactly. Yep.
[00:38:20] Nathan Wrigley: is more because this became bloated and I now no longer know where things are. Boy, that is a, an impossible circle to square, isn't it? That's
[00:38:29] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:38:30] Nathan Wrigley: know, you'll never get to the bottom of that one. But anyway, sorry.
[00:38:34] Lesley Sim: No, it's,
[00:38:34] Nathan Wrigley: that
[00:38:34] Lesley Sim: this is fun.
[00:38:37] Nathan Wrigley: tell us about some, other parts of it apart from the taxonomy, which you're obviously proud of. Tell us what else it does and other bits that you think, oh, that's curious, happy that we built it that way.
[00:38:53] Lesley Sim: the taxonomy thing is like front of mind because that's something that we spend a lot of time on. and I think it's like a differentiator for us because I don't think any other plugin has built it this way. I think the other big thing that I'm really proud of, which it's if you would believe it, harder to explain than the taxonomy thing, is our, I guess you could call it dynamic tags.
Short codes. Meta keys thing. So every other plugin.
[00:39:27] Nathan Wrigley: the front end to show
[00:39:29] Lesley Sim: Yes.
[00:39:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:39:31] Lesley Sim: Yes. So every other plugin at least, and I mean they should get in touch with me and scold me if I'm wrong. but I believe the events, the event plugins that I have checked out, most of them have very rigid, ways of displaying data. if I've built or if I wanna show the time and date of my event, most plugins, maybe they have a short code, maybe they have a widget that they've built.
and that's about it. but for us, we have now I think 45 or 50 different data, pieces of data that you can show with short codes, dynamic tags, meta key. So you can really plant it anywhere you want and format it however you want. so if, for example, you want to split up your time and date, if you want to split up your day, your month, your year, if you want to put your time zone somewhere different, you can do all of that.
So imagine you have a query loop. So we, also have our own query loop, block. And you want to, create an events list and you want to design the hell out of your events list.
[00:40:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:40:52] Lesley Sim: you can do that with us. You can't do that with any of the other events plugins.
[00:40:56] Nathan Wrigley: So you've atomized all the bits. So let's say
[00:40:59] Lesley Sim: Yes.
[00:40:59] Nathan Wrigley: in, I don't know, you, you might say date bold that put a coal on and
[00:41:03] Lesley Sim: Yes.
[00:41:04] Nathan Wrigley: the date. but you, insert there your variation of how you want the date to look and you
[00:41:09] Lesley Sim: Yes.
[00:41:10] Nathan Wrigley: so you want it to look like that and you're in France, so you want it to look like that and what have you.
[00:41:15] Lesley Sim: Yes.
[00:41:15] Nathan Wrigley: to all the other fields as well. There's like multiple permutations for each of the different things that you wish to display. And because it's done in that way, as opposed to one short code for all the things you can in the query loop, just build it up and it will, obviously that query loop will replicate itself over and over again. But you can make it basically how you want, which I guess actually now that I think about it for things like dates and times is a quirky one. Just about every, nation does it differently. the day comes before the, the number or the number becomes before the day or there's a comma
[00:41:53] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:41:53] Nathan Wrigley: inserted in a time or a colon there or a, do you know what I mean?
Oh,
[00:41:58] Lesley Sim: Yes.
[00:41:59] Nathan Wrigley: a really
[00:42:00] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:42:00] Nathan Wrigley: you're very pleased with that.
[00:42:02] Lesley Sim: Yeah. I think, that's also something that, like I said, I, don't think any other plugin has done that, and we've done that, but we've done it across multiple different ways, right? So it's not just, a meta key or attribute, or whatever you wanna call it in the block editor, where you can also insert it as a short code, or if you're using a page builder, you can also insert it as a dynamic tag
in your page builder.
and the same goes for all of our custom fields and custom taxonomy. So if you've created a custom field for yourself, you can also insert those bits of data however you want.
[00:42:37] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.
[00:42:38] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:42:39] Nathan Wrigley: I, I remember it, oh, it's probably going back a few months ago now. I think you, I think you enabled, being able to pay for events. Was that a thing that
[00:42:49] Lesley Sim: Yeah. Tickets.
[00:42:50] Nathan Wrigley: maybe six months ago, something like that.
[00:42:53] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:42:53] Nathan Wrigley: quite a new feature. I'm just wondering if there's a, there's other features in the, we were talking about not adding new features.
[00:42:59] Lesley Sim: Yep.
[00:43:00] Nathan Wrigley: tell us about the roadmap of new features that you're gonna be adding in the day, days, and weeks to come, that you, are gonna have to work really hard not to clutter the interface of.
[00:43:12] Lesley Sim: I think the biggest new feature that we're, we are planning to add, is front end fields. So what I mean by that is, again, with the flexibility thing, right? So I don't know what you want to collect from customers when they buy a ticket from you. So you, you might want, 'cause right now our checkout is very basic.
It's, like name, email, and I think that's about it. And then it goes to Stripe or goes to WooCommerce or wherever it's, that you've chosen to set up, but maybe you might want to, collect an image or something, right? You wanna collect like a indemnity form or something as part of your event.
Or maybe you want to have someone, tell you the name of their dog because it's a, party or something and you wanna create name cards for your dog or something.
[00:44:11] Nathan Wrigley: it.
[00:44:11] Lesley Sim: Yeah. And right now we don't have any way to do that. and it's, it's a feature that has been requested, but I still don't know how I want to build it.
So I need to figure out how I want to build it. which is why we haven't built it yet. 'cause I, again, like I don't wanna build something that's hardcoded and feels heavy on to build something that's flexible, that lets people do whatever they want. so it's powerful in that way and not powerful and like a, here are 5,000 heavy features that we've
[00:44:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I
[00:44:46] Lesley Sim: into the plugin for you.
[00:44:47] Nathan Wrigley: really worry about conversions, haven't you? If you, if you give people the capacity to ask 7,000 different questions, I think inexperienced website owners who, assume that the more information you can get out of the customers, the better will probably learn at their cost.
That actually, for every question that you add, you halve the number of people that get through the, sort of checkout process. Yeah. That's a difficult circle to square, but also you
[00:45:12] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:45:13] Nathan Wrigley: to be really adaptable. I don't
[00:45:16] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:45:17] Nathan Wrigley: be sliders or really nice ways of incrementing numbers up and down on date pickers and all of that kind of stuff.
And you want that to be as beautifully simple as possible. Yeah. Come to think about it. I use, I, probably, I don't know, on a weekly basis, I probably do some event once a week, something like
book it, and it usually is just a date, sorry, an, I pick the date off a date picker, and then it's usually an email and a name.
And if I've got an account with that company, like Eventbrite or something like that, I'm already logged in. So I don't even need to think about that. Yeah, that's an interesting one. Yeah. good luck. So that's where you're gonna be concentrating your efforts in the near future anyway.
[00:45:59] Lesley Sim: I think that'll be the next big, like big feature that at least I'll be excited about.
Yeah.
[00:46:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. there we go. I think probably we're about at the 45 minute mark, something like that. should we, knock it on the head there? That's been a really wide ranging conversation, hasn't it?
[00:46:18] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:46:19] Nathan Wrigley: sorts of different directions, but we did manage to get good stuff out of you, I think as well in terms of the
[00:46:24] Lesley Sim: I hope so.
[00:46:25] Nathan Wrigley: If you want to, you wanna find out more about, EventKoi, I said the name of one of your rivals. if you want to find the, event co plugin or you indeed, Lesley, where do we go? Where's the best places to go? Obviously the website, but social
[00:46:43] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:46:44] Nathan Wrigley: that kind of thing.
[00:46:44] Lesley Sim: the website is event koi.com. E-V-E-N-T-K-O i.com. Koi is carp, I think
[00:46:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That, I'm gonna
[00:46:55] Lesley Sim: a carp.
[00:46:56] Nathan Wrigley: there. even thought about that. Why? okay. it basically means event fish, right?
[00:47:05] Lesley Sim: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:47:06] Nathan Wrigley: why event fish? What's.
[00:47:12] Lesley Sim: I really wanted a URL that was clean,
[00:47:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:47:17] Lesley Sim: and as you can imagine, everything that can be appended to the word event has already been appended to the word event.
[00:47:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:47:27] Lesley Sim: Yeah. KOI, it's just three letters and I get the.com and it's, clean. Yeah.
[00:47:35] Nathan Wrigley: do you know what's really interesting about that?
[00:47:38] Lesley Sim: sounds nice as well. Yeah.
[00:47:41] Nathan Wrigley: it with the imagery attached to it. So I didn't see it as a, a piece of text. First time I collided with your product was probably on the homepage and I saw the fish and I knew, the, koi and obviously it's a fairly, it's a beautiful creature, isn't it?
[00:48:00] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:48:01] Nathan Wrigley: actually pretty cool to look at. You could stare at that thing for hours and there was no bit of me, there wasn't one bit of me which went, that's weird event fish. I just thought That's sounds good. It just sounded like a, and it only just occurred to me now that it was event, fish.
So
[00:48:21] Lesley Sim: Hey. if they can, if they, if Viva builder is Viva Builder, I don't see why I can't be event fish.
[00:48:26] Nathan Wrigley: coi. That's absolutely right. So EventKoi is the website. We've got that. Now what about you personally? where do we collide with you?
[00:48:35] Lesley Sim: I am on X quite a bit, Twitter, at les V-L-E-S-L-E-Y pizza, P-I-Z-Z-A.
[00:48:46] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,
[00:48:47] Lesley Sim: can find me over there.
[00:48:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:48:51] Lesley Sim: yeah, I think that's
[00:48:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:48:53] Lesley Sim: it.
[00:48:53] Nathan Wrigley: that'll do. That'll do.
[00:48:54] Lesley Sim: Yeah.
[00:48:55] Nathan Wrigley: the very best of luck. I hope you managed to get those features shipped. If indeed that's what you want to do, go and check it out. All the links in the show notes, I'll put all the different places for products, old and new and features and blog posts that I can find that are related, the WP Builds website on this.
So if you go and search for Lesley Sim, in our search facility at the top, you'll be able to find this episode. Lesley, thank you very much for chatting to me today. I appreciate you being able to adapt to the vagaries of my questions. That was great. Thank you.
[00:49:29] Lesley Sim: Thanks for having me.
[00:49:31] Nathan Wrigley: You
[00:49:32] Lesley Sim: Nice to, catch up.
