Online translations have sped up research and business growth, now how about paying for a one-stop shop translation plug-in?
Today on the WPMRR podcast, Joe talks to Augustin Prot on co-founding WeGlot into existence, why premium subscriptions should offer more, and how community support adds value to a business service.
Listen to how the translation business has evolved for a broader mass consumption.
What you’ll learn:
- [00:01:10] Where we met.
- [00:03:10] What is WeGlot?
- [00:05:00] The early days of WeGlot – from a javascript library to a plug-in
- [00:06:58] Free version has removed the idea that “we only want your money”.
- [00:09:25] What goes into the Free version and the Premium version?
- [00:11:45] Why start a translation business?
- [00:13:25] Frustration on incomplete translation tools.
- [00:14:39] How did you and your co-founder meet?
- [00:16:47] Once there was traction, we registered the company
- [00:18:03] WeGlot value: Help people set up multilingual sites.
- [00:19:32] We provide a layer of automatic translations.
- [00:21:32] Manual translations are a lot of work.
- [00:22:25] How helpful is the WordPress community in growing WeGlot?
- [00:25:14] It can be a challenge to find balance between marketing and providing community service
- [00:27:54] It’s also about people getting more for what they do in WordPress.
- [00:29:36] We need more premium solutions in the WordPress space.
- [00:31:19] WordPress should offer more premium offerings so they can promote healthier business with more growth.
- [00:32:02] How do you do support and where is it in the priorities of the company?
- [00:33:15] We’ve all been in a situation when we have to pay for anything.
- [00:34:16] There are companies that only offer support for premium licenses.
- [00:35:45] We have the responsibility to keep improving so subscription continues each month.
- [00:36:32] WeGlot can be used across different platforms in need of translation.
- [00:37:24] Client support is the most important work a company can do.
- [00:38:08] What are your plans for the rest of the year and the next?
- [00:40:05] We are trying to find ways to give back and remain visible.
- [00:41:15] WeGlot discount code for new users who wish to upgrade: WPBUFFS20
Episode Resources:
- Visit WeGlot
- WeGlot is on Youtube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the WordPress Directory
- Send questions to contact@weglot.com or support@weglot.com
- Leave us a 5-star review on iTunes
- Binge on past episodes you missed
- Send your questions to yo@wpmrr.com
- Check out our virtual summit
Augustin Prot:
At the end of the day, if you’re a big online E-commerce player, you have hundreds of thousands of millions of words. I mean, just you can’t… You don’t have the time to do all manual translation.
Joe Howard:
Hey, hey, good WordPress people, welcome back to the WPMRR WordPress Podcast. I’m Joe.
Augustin Prot:
And I am Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. And you’re listening to the WordPress Business Podcast. We’ve got Obi-Wan on the pod this week. Obi-Wan’s a popular character, obviously. People love Obi-Wan in the Star Wars. Yeah, we’ve Obi-Wan on the podcast this week. What going on, Obi-Wan?
Augustin Prot:
I mean, I’m fine. A bit of quarantine with the COVID. But apart from that, I’m fine.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Tell me about it. It’s, I think it’s been a tough time, tough time for everyone. Although, I’ve heard a lot of people in the WordPress space, people say, business is going well, everyone’s online, everyone’s doing more WordPress stuff. So things are picking up for me. But it still doesn’t mean it’s not tough for people. It’s a challenging time, I think for everybody in the world right now. But yeah. We’ve got Obi-Wan on the pod this week. Also known as Augustin Prot. Augustin, we met at, I think it was WordCamp Europe last year, right before we started recording. We were like, “Oh, so good to see you.” It’s been a year since we saw each other. But yeah, I think it was WordCamp Europe 2019. Is that right?
Augustin Prot:
Yeah, exactly. We also met at WordCamp US 2019 too, I guess.
Joe Howard:
Oh, we did both.
Augustin Prot:
Maybe no. No. We actually met together at WordCamp US 2019 and you met the other co-founder of WeGlot at WordCamp Europe 2019.
Joe Howard:
Oh, okay. That’s where my brain is short-circuiting a little bit. Cool. I remember seeing you guys at WordCamp Europe because I feel like everybody who has a booth or something, or is doing some sort of promotional for these big WordCamps have swag or they have T-shirts or hoodies. You guys had the hood less sweatshirts, which were super unique and I was like, “Those look really cool.” And WeGlot was really nicely printed on them. I remember being like, “Oh, WeGlot’s got awesome swag.” Yeah. We could take a lesson out of your book because I was kind of basic.
Augustin Prot:
Yeah. We tried to improve our swags over years. I could show you the pens and the pencils we had the first year we did the WordCamp. I mean, there is no shame but it was very off and far beta version of our swags.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Right on. It’s that, it’s always a journey, right to view? Anything cool you see, you should have seen the five versions before that. It’ll give you some clarity into the work that went into making it really good. But, cool. Yeah. Okay. Augustin, tell folks a little bit about you. About WeGlot. I already blew it. You’re the co-founder of WeGlot. But yeah. Tell folks a little bit more about the company and yourself as part of that.
Augustin Prot:
Yeah, sure. With pleasure. I’m the co-founder of WeGlot. We’re two in this journey. The other co-founder is Rémy who is a more technical guy, I’m more the business guy. WeGlot is actually… it’s a solution to make any website multilingual easily. Basically, you have a website. It’s in English or in French and you want to make it available in other languages, Italian, Spanish and others. You would use WeGlot to do that. So it would help you to translate and to display the translated versions to your end visitors. Right now we have approximately 50,000s users in the world. Yeah, it’s going great. We are 20 people in the team. I mean, it’s an amazing journey. We’re very happy.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Very cool. So, 50,000 users about. What’s the split between… I don’t know if you do a freemium version or if it’s only premium. Is it part of those free users and part of those paid users?
Augustin Prot:
We do free trial and free version. We have a free trial freemium model. We have approximately 15,000s paying customers and we have 35,000s free customers… users.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Yeah, cool. That’s a pretty good split. That’s like 30% of your folks who use WeGlot are premium users, which, I’m not a plug-in guy, so I actually don’t know if that’s high or low. But it seems pretty high to me. Like 30% of people use it are paying for it. That sounds pretty good. Because I know a lot of plug-ins I’m sure have a lower percent, 10% are paying and most are free. Cool. Have you been using the freemium model/having a free plug-in and a premium plug-in since the beginning? Or have you changed your business model as things have gone?
Augustin Prot:
No. We changed actually. At the very beginning, we didn’t have a plug-in, we had only a JavaScript library. We would ask people to add the JavaScript snippet in the HTML. At the very beginning again, we used to go to remote working offices. I was asking everyone on the tables, “Do you have a website? Can you add my product and tell me what you do… If you like it or not?” Most of them would reply to me “Yeah. But do you have a WordPress plug-in? I don’t know how to add the JavaScript snippet?” That’s how we went from having a JavaScript library to a WordPress plug-in. And to be on the directory, you need to have a real free version. Before that, we had a free trial and we actually added the free version because it was required to be listed on the directory.
Joe Howard:
Oh, okay. That’s interesting. I feel like that’s something I should know as someone who is deep in the WordPress space. But I don’t know if I ever explicitly knew that. It sounds like, having a free plug-in allows you access to be in the repository. And, although you’re using that probably to bring in mostly free users, it’s also kind of free marketing for you. Like, it allows new users to come in and potentially upgrade in the future, but it’s also… It gives you a huge market for, to find new users from. I guess that’s kinda how it works?
Augustin Prot:
Yeah. It’s an amazing hub of distribution and it’s… you can touch many people. It was great for us to test traction and to test if it actually works… worked initially. And if you were able to make money with it. Yeah, the proof of concept was great things to distribution through the directory. And also, I would say that making the decision to have a free version was a very good thing. I mean, apart from being able to be listed on the directory, because we really try to bring the value very quickly to the user, so we don’t having him getting his credit card or anything else. So having the possibility to use the product for free for very small project, I think it’s in a way it’s… It’s removed the idea of, we only want your money to users that are trying to discover the product.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Yeah, I totally get that. We… I always feel like we’re trying to do that better because we don’t… Like we’re a services company so we don’t have like a free anything we do because you can’t really do free services. That model doesn’t work for a services company. I think what we try to do and like that equivalent space is, we really try to educate people. We have ton of great blog content. We just started a YouTube channel with tutorials and it’s… At the end of the day these are marketing opportunities for us, but we want to be a marketing opportunity that shows people like, “Hey, you can trust us.” “Hey, we really helped you with these things.” Maybe now you want to work with us. So I totally get that. And I think that that makes a lot of sense. I’ve always-
Augustin Prot:
Even when you look at what’s going on in the software industry… When you look at Slack, at Zoom, at other great services, they have a… It’s a large feature. It’s not just a tricky feature when you only have a 10th of the product. It’s really something that people can use and they can discover, and then they can bring it in their own company or department and it provides value to the rest of the team. And I just find they can convert into a paying customer.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I think that’s something that people in the WordPress space are very cognizant of, if a free version of a plug-in is, it’s just a free version just to have a free version, but it’s not really useful to people. I’ve heard a lot of people who say… I won’t name any specific plug-ins under that. Definitely some free plug-ins out there that people like complain about like, “This is all just you have to upgrade to do anything useful here.” So I’d be interested to hear from you, how did you walk that fine line, and I’m sure you still are, but how do you find that balance between offering a lot of great things in the free plug-in to make it really valuable for people while also making sure that the business is sustainable and giving people the opportunity to upgrade when something really is going to be that valuable for them? Like, how do you guys figure out what’s going to go in the free version and what goes in the premium paid one?
Augustin Prot:
It’s hard. I think it’s a balance between what we can do and how users and customers responds to what we’re trying to build at their… in terms of line between the free and the paid one. And on the other hand, it’s also a cost issue. I mean, we’re paying based on usage. So, for example, if a website has 10,000 of words and low traffic, we’re not paying the same for website that has one million translated words and high traffic. So, it’s normal that the terminal one would pay more than the first one.
Augustin Prot:
And then, we also, we had the feeling that the key values of WeGlot it’s being able to add WeGlot in minutes, I mean, to make your website machine work in minutes and being able to translate your website, at least if it’s a small one, a landing page for an app, or a small hotel website, you could do that for free. We tried to make it possible for this kind of chore to get the free version. But it’s a very complex line. We iterated a lot and now we have the feeling that we found kind of a balance that’s working.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Cool. I think a lot of people who are starting off… Like, if someone’s thinking about starting a translation plug-in they’d think that kind of pricing is so complex and what do I include free? What do I include not? And I think it’s important to realize a lot of this comes with experimentation. A lot of the things comes with hearing feedback from customers and no-one’s going to get it right the first time and it’s always going to be an evolution. I’m sure you’re still at the point where you’re kind of thinking about a few features like, “oh, what should go here? What should go here?” It’s a constant journey and it’s going to be for everybody. And so we have free version [inaudible 00:11:52] version.
Joe Howard:
Why did you start a translation plug-in, or is this something that you found a need for, or are you really into translations? Is that part of your backstory? I love to hear why people started businesses in the first place in terms of being in the translation space in this instance.
Augustin Prot:
So, it’s actually not my story. It’s more my co-founder’s story, this one. On my side, I had a financial background. I didn’t know about CSS or HTML before, so it’s really about my co-founder, Rémy. Before WeGlot he did… I mean, he started another startup that was a mix between Google Maps and, for example you know apps where you can buy and sell things to your neighbor or to anyone. So it was a mix between the two of them and he was in charge of the web development. So he did the web app, he did the mobile app, and when he faced really extremely complex challenges, technically speaking, he always found a solution. So for example, when he had to do text messages he used Twilio. When he had to do E-mail he used SendGrid just to be placing a small snippet and it was working. When he had to do payment he did Stripe. And then paying… Doing an online payments gateway, it’s very complex, so having a solution like Stripe, or its competitors, it’s really useful.
Augustin Prot:
And when he had to do translations… He speaks English, he made part of his studies at Columbia, in New York, but the technical complexity behind that was low value, time consuming. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t find just a tool to make it easy to just make your website multilingual, SEO friendly, taking care of URLs, and you just focus on translations. And that’s really how the idea came out. That’s where the frustration, a pain-point he experienced and when he decided to stop the first startup, because he couldn’t… I mean, they didn’t make money, he just say, okay, “I need to build a product that does that.” And I met him at this point, so we started to do sort of the rest of the journey from there.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I want to dive into that even more because I think that a lot of people like you who are on more of the marketing business development side, everyone’s looking for like a technical co-founder, right? It’s like, I have all these great ideas, but I don’t really know how to build it. I could really use some help there. So I like to dive in a little bit into the… How did you meet your technical co-founder story as maybe like the non technical co-founder. Cause that’s me, I’m a non technical co-founder, and Nick is does everything technical, as does the rest of my team. But in terms of you two meeting, did you meet and then two weeks later start to get to work together? Had you known each other for a little bit before you started working together?
Augustin Prot:
Well, we didn’t know each other before. And actually we met through a friend of mine that used to work for kind of an incubator for startups in France. They were being incubated by this incubator. And so the one then that they would stop the first startup and then they were open to meet other people that can have complimentary skills. And that’s how the idea… That’s how we get to meeting together. And then during the meeting, we kind of described who we were, what we were working on, both of us. And he had a strong pain point, he already had a first prototype and a first user. And I really liked their… Not only the idea because I didn’t know about websites or even SAS, like SendGrid or Twilio, but the way he presented me the issue and the problem he was trying to solve and the way he was building the prototype very customer centric. He was doing things. He was not trying to explain me how to teach me things because he was doing things and I was like, “Okay, if you’re looking for someone else, let me try being the number two.”
Augustin Prot:
So, I tried to find as many users as possible during the next weeks. And then learning from that, trying to… How we distribute, how we do the pressing. The goal was to prove that we could make money. I mean, 10 customers and there is… Then there is a market for that. And we did that without a bank account for the company, without a registered name, nothing, just checking that. And once we reached that 10 or 20 customers and we saw the traction, especially thanks to the WordPress community, we said, “Okay,” so now we do the statements and we register the company and we can focus on the development.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Cool. I like that all of that came about from an introduction from someone who said, “Hey, you two should meet.” I think a lot of people are like, “Ah, networking, like that sounds so formal and stuff.” And you don’t have to network in the most formal way possible, like shaking hands and trading business cards. But it’s another lesson of that. Like having and knowing some people in the space is important because these big things all WeGlot, it started because there was one introduction and these small little details can blossom into huge things. And they almost always do. Probably most people who’ve done big things, have a few small pieces that are like, “Wow, if that hadn’t happened, who knows what things would have been like today.”
Joe Howard:
Cool. I want to jump into community stuff here in a second, because I’m interested to hear about utilization of the community to help grow your product, the WordPress community specifically. But one thing before we jump into that is, you mentioned previously that WeGlot is able to… One of your values is helping people to be able to set up a multi language website in minutes, which I think is really valuable for a lot of people who don’t necessarily have the time to do all sorts of manual translation and to spend hours doing that or pay expensive rates for people to be able to do that for their whole website. But I think there are also two camps of people. One is automatic and fast and maybe not a 100% correct translation, but then there’s people who are like, “I manually translate everything, I get translators to manually do it because I know it’s going to be correct.” Sounds like WeGlot’s in the promotion of getting websites translated for everyone, even if it’s not 100% correctly translated, but maybe I’m not right about that.
Joe Howard:
I’d love to kinda hear a little bit more about like WeGlot’s perspective on fast translation and how you help people to translate quickly and get the website translated in minutes, but also giving them high quality translations.
Augustin Prot:
Yeah. Thanks for the question. So I think it’s very important to clarify. Yes, so we are not translators, so we are not there to be a translator. We’re there to provide the tool to make it possible to translate the website and to manage [crosstalk 00:19:38]. And so what we do is then we provide a first layer of automatic translations. Like you say. Because I think it’s two reasons. First, automatic translation engines gets, they are so good now. It’s really impressive, Spanish to English, English to Spanish, French also. It’s really impressive. So first the quality of the automatic translation really improved over the last years. Second, it’s pretty good to start with something. So when you install WeGlot you have your first layer of translation, then you can yourself, your team, your in-house translator, you used to work with, you can just edit and validate the translation if you want directly on the WeGlot tool. And last, if you prefer working with professional translators, you can adjust other professional translations directly from the WeGlot tool too.
Augustin Prot:
So the idea is really to give you the resources to build your own workflow, depending on your budget and your constraint and how you want to do that. But at the end of the day, if you’re big online E-commerce player, you have hundreds of thousands of millions of words. You don’t have the time to do all manual translation. So you need to do a balance between maybe the key pages, the key products and the other one that are less important on your website. At least at the very beginning. And then you can improve it over time. That’s a way to build it, but you can have a different workflow. Again, the users create their workflow.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I like that idea and concept a lot. Of allowing people to create their own workflows. And I like the idea of speeding up translation by starting with an automatic translation and then, instead of having to manually translate everything, you edit a translation and have someone just proofread it, which probably is a lot faster than going through and manually translating all these pages. And the idea of… I know some companies that do manual translations for all their pages, and it seems like a lot of work and it seems very expensive. And I think that it’s also understanding to hear, because technology is getting better, right? In 10 years, think about how good auto translate is going to be, so maybe people don’t need manual translators in 10 years because the error rate will be so so small. I think it’s cool that you’re helping people do that now, because it will only probably continue to gain momentum as time goes on, because again the technology just gets better.
Joe Howard:
Community. Sounds like community has been really important for you to grow WeGlot. It’s important for us here at WP Buffs too. We’re very involved in the community. Community has helped us grow. Significantly. And we’ll always have to be thankful to everybody and continue to give back to the community. But, I’d love to hear from a plug-in developer’s perspective or a plug-in’s perspective, what did you guys do to lean on the WordPress community a little bit to help grow WeGlot? And what kind of… How useful was it in terms of your journey?
Augustin Prot:
Yeah. Maybe I can first talk about the very beginnings because at the very beginning when we knew nothing about WordPress, we discovered that there was a French community. And so we tried to contact people, calling many people. Obviously not everyone answers you, but we had many answers. So, for example, Johnathan from WP Rocket, also Kim from MailPoet. These are two guys that had great plug-in and businesses at this time. They could just ignore us, but they replied and they actually give us advice. It was really useful and helpful, and it was, I don’t know, maybe it’s a kind of way doing business. It’s not just about money, but they were happy to share their experience and advice.
Augustin Prot:
And from there we sponsored our first work in Paris, France. It was very early 2016. That’s when we officially launched WeGlot. And that’s where we met most of the people from the community. And yeah, I mean, they have been very helpful, very welcoming. So, overall it was surprisingly easy to get access to great people into the community, the friends that you meet them. So, thanks for everything. I mean, I think that this first traction could not have happened without that.
Augustin Prot:
So from there we understood two things, that we needed to keep investing into the community because we could learn a lot of thing, and also the power of the community as a way to reach more people for your business. I don’t want to do… Of course there is a part of that that’s marketing when we support WordCamp we expect to be more visible to the community. But I think it’s, we’re trying to do that in a healthy way. So we’re trying to invest our time and money to give back to the community and to make sure there is a fair balance between what you get and what you give to the community. I don’t know if we achieved that, but that’s what we’re for trying to do.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. It’s a hard balance. It’s one that all companies, I think in the WordPress space, are always trying to do. That’s what I want to talk about too, is the balance between giving back to the WordPress community and trying to give back more than you take and leave a place better than you found it. Right? It’s that mentality. But also growing a healthy business and one that is financially healthy and successful. It can be difficult to find that balance sometimes. Right? I’m not gonna lie. There’s sometimes I want to do more marketing stuff. And a lot of times I think that all the marketing and community stuff I do is pretty much in line. All the marketing stuff I want to do is pretty in line with the community stuff, because our values as a company are structured in a way that’s like, we want to help people and that’s how we attract customers. But it can be a challenge. And I know it can be a challenge for other folks too. So in terms of what y’all do at WeGlot, sponsorships sound like one thing. Maybe some other things too?
Augustin Prot:
We’re doing similar things, but we’re doing classic sponsorships to a WordPress WordCamp. I mean, right now there is no WordCamp anymore, but it’s going to come back. Yes, all virtual. And then we’re also doing the same for meetups when it’s possible, for local meetups. What we also love to do is to try to partner with a member of the community, individuals, and rather than going ourself, taking the plane and being there for the WordCamp, we prefer partner with local people. And making them kind of ambassadors of WeGlot for a day or two. Obviously it’s only the case when they like WeGlot, when we have a good feeling between them and us. And I think it’s a way of, it’s a balance. Of course, we hire them. So there is a fee for that on top of our sponsoring. I don’t know, it’s a fair balance between what we give and what we get in some sort of a way to make the community keep growing in a healthy way. I mean, that’s a feeling we have. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s a good way to increase our presence inside the communities.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I think probably that’s right. And that’s a good way to think about it and the more… Okay if you want to grow more from the community, you have to give more to the community. That seems like the only real equation that’s going to make the community sustainable, is if people aren’t just like taking, taking, taking from the community. Sure, maybe you can take a little bit more from the community, but you have to put in twice as much as you’re taking or three times as much or whatever that number is, but yeah. Yeah.
Augustin Prot:
And that’s why I’m thinking that there is this wave of this trend of no code. So more and more easy things to use, more and more plug-ins and solutions in WordPress, but also outside of WordPress. And so, if you want this to continue and you want WordPress to keep a growing market share, I think we also all need to have more professionalization of some of the service, like what you do, currently. And so it’s also means people getting more from what they do for WordPress. So paying them more for things they do. So it’s also… I think it can make sense. WordPress is attracting more and more money. It has to go somewhere else also into the community and not only through the WordCamps.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Yeah. We’ve talked about that a lot on the podcast of the WordPress space changing a little bit and more money coming into this space which in essence changes a lot about how the WordPress space functions, both community-wise and economically. How do you think companies can continue to professionalize their services better? Like what pain… What gap are you seeing in terms of companies that could do a little better in that area? Anything specific that you’re like, “Oh, companies should probably try and do X, Y, and Z better.”?
Augustin Prot:
I’m not gonna name anyone because I don’t actually have any example in mind and I don’t have a… I mean, I’m no one to give advice for that, but what I see as a trend is very focused solutions for very specific pain points or problems, even if it’s a niche. If it’s good and you’re focusing your time on it, you should be paid. So we need more and more premium solutions, more and more paid solutions within WordPress that are doing things great. That’s a general comment I can do.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I totally did not mean I want you to call out a company. But, I totally agree with you. I think probably the WordPress space, like a lot of people in the WordPress space have probably been underpaid for a long time. I think that as the WordPress economy, we have some growing up to do to match the money that’s coming into WordPress. And I think that instead of providing a good solution for a good price, we… Folks should be continuing to try to find how can they provide a better service? How can they make an even better product that people will pay more for? That will be more expensive, but that gives more to the end customer as well. I think that’s really important and a lot of folks have found more financial success when they move up market.
Joe Howard:
And I know a lot of folks in the WordPress space, they want to help everybody. They want to be at a price point where anybody can afford them and they want to help as many people as possible. And I totally get that, but I think that there’s also the space to make sure that things are priced correctly. I think you can do both. I think you can help a lot of people. And I think you can also be priced correctly, whether you have a new pricing tier for certain people. Or someone has a million pages need translated, obviously they’re going to pay a little bit more for that. I think that there’s… Every WordPress business should be thinking of ways to offer more premium offerings so that they can run a healthier business financially and continue to give back financially in the ways that are important to help the space grow. So, I dig what you’re saying. It makes sense to me.
Joe Howard:
All right, cool. We talked a little bit about community stuff, helping you build. Support. I’d like to talk a little bit about that, cause that’s something you mentioned here, it was one of the things we could talk about. Obviously we do a lot of supports, like the main thing we do at WP Buffs, but a little bit different, different for a plug-in company. How do you do support and where is it in terms of like your priorities as a company?
Augustin Prot:
We’ve done supports like 95% of our time the first year of doing WeGlot with Rémy. I mean, we were so happy to have people chatting to us. We spent hours to get people to the product. And when people are coming to your product and asking you questions, you are happy. I mean, you can include your Game of Throne and whatever [inaudible 00:32:42] whatever. It’s great.
Joe Howard:
It means they’re using it and it means they want to do more with it because they’re asking questions. So it’s like, yes.
Augustin Prot:
Exactly. And it’s… That’s where you understand your issue. That’s where you have your best features requests. This is at the very center of our company today, we have a bit more than 20 people and it’s one-third tech team, one third marketing, and one third support. And we provide support to all our users, I mean free and paid ones. And it’s very important because we believe that’s… We’ve all been in a situation where we need support for anything from a phone company to an online issue with a product and so on. And when you have the answer timely, and it’s exactly what you were looking for and it’s fixed, you’re very happy. So it’s… I think it’s part of the journey and you need to be very focused on the customer journey. On the other hand, it’s your responsibility and your job to decrease and lower the level of support by improving your product. So that’s so where to see if your product is going to the right direction. So if the average number of support per user is decreasing and if their difficulty per case is decreasing, it means your product is improving.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I think that there are definitely plug-ins out there, and definitely folks out there who are like support is a premium thing. Like you have to be a paying customer to get support, which I understand, like I understand the concept of that. I think there are definitely distinct advantages to doing support also for free members. Obviously, you may not be getting directly paid for that free support, but like you said, it’s part of the customer journey. You’ll probably get more people to stick with you, to upgrade to a premium license, also to talk about you more, more five star reviews in the repository. I think also as a company that, like all companies, we all have to listen to our customers and get feedback from them to figure out what we’re going to build next.
Joe Howard:
And if you’re doing free support, it actually gives you a huge access to all your customers because they’re telling you their pain points and you can build lists of like, “Oh, 10 people in the last month asked about this thing. Like we should probably change the UX there.” and that can help all your customers, including your premium customers which will eventually reduce churn for your premium customers. So I think there’s… It’s a complicated science between choosing to go which route you want to go, supporting free customers or not. But I think there are definitely a lot of advantages to doing that. Plus it’s just a good thing to do, like you said, so yeah.
Augustin Prot:
To me, I go for supporting free customers. I mean, they’re giving you ideas, they’re giving you features, they’re giving you big issues. So it’s value actually, it has value. And also on the other hand we’re a subscription based service. So if someone is not happy with our service, it can stop paying us the next months. So we have a responsibility to keep improving the business to make sure they’re happy with the product and they’re happy with the service every month. Which is, in sense, it’s a healthy way to do business because whenever it stops, we stop improving the product or we stop solving their issues, are we creating more problems to his experience? There’s nothing… They can just remove our plug-in, our solution, and choose another product. And we’re not just, sorry, we’re not only on WordPress. We started out in WordPress, but now you can use WeGlot if you have another CMS or even custom websites.
Joe Howard:
Okay. So like works across Squarespace or Shopify or Wix or some stuff like that?
Augustin Prot:
Yeah. No, you can do it, but also if you have something in JavaScript or in PHP Symfony, you can use it.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Cool. Support’s just so important and adds so much value to everything you’re doing. It’s always good to hear when people are so focused on it. I think-
Augustin Prot:
And I want to say that our support team is amazing. Really. I’m really proud to work with these guys because they’re doing an amazing job.
Joe Howard:
Totally. I feel the same way. It’s like the support is so core to what we do. It’s like, they’re doing the most important work we could do, which is helping people when there is a problem. Also, when, proactively, when they need help doing X, Y, or Z. But especially when there’s a problem, like to be the people who are there on the front lines to help them when someone’s having a challenge and, you know WordPress pretty well at this point. There’s all sorts of stuff that could go wrong, to be able to help people through that challenging time. It’s great. So I say the same thing to our support team, like nice. Alright. Very cool.
Joe Howard:
I like to kind of wrap up at the end of these by hearing a little bit more about what the future of WeGlot looks like. What do you have planned during the next year or so. Or… Yeah, what does next year look like? Especially now during this kind of crazy time in the world of COVID happening, not a lot of… No WordCamp Europe this year, no WordCamp Europe next year. What do you have planned for the next year?
Augustin Prot:
It’s hard to say. And first we’re among the lucky ones, we can do remote work easily, the business is up, we don’t need to fire anyone. So, just for that I think we’re very lucky and it’s great that we can keep doing business. Then for the year coming, we now have the possibility as I said to use WeGlot on any website. So we’re trying to grow also into other communities. So you name for example, Squarespace. It’s interesting. That’s where we’re also trying to do things with them. And we’re also for supporting the community trying to keep talking to all people we were talking before the COVID and we’re trying to share best practices of people going 100% online between… For example, I think that it’s in Toronto, they did meet ups 100% online and they didn’t… It’s doing great for them. And so we try to share their best practices to other meetups we know, so they can, if they want, they can do it and they can apply the best practice and the guidelines of the guys in Toronto.
Augustin Prot:
And we’ll see, we’ve found out that WordCamp supports virtual WordCamps, when you do on these sponsoring booth, it’s not working that well. At least when you don’t have a big name, like WP Engine or Good ID, which are great, but they have a big brand name. We don’t have this level of brand name. So, we’re trying to find another way to give back and being visible, which is not always easy. I think there are more and more local initiatives, for example we’ve seen podcast and online courses in Spain. It’s really… There is a strong, active community over there and we’re trying to support them also. So yeah, it’s really… If you have any ideas or initiatives come to us, we always like to discuss. We will be very quick to say yes or no.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I really like your focus on local WordPress, because I think a lot of people in the WordPress community think about WordCamps and they think about WordCamp US and WordCamp Europe, but there are so many local WordPress meetups and just WordPress on a somewhat smaller scale that’s no worse than the larger scale. And in a lot of cases, more intimate, you can have more conversations with fewer people, and these local meetups are great. Like our DC meetups has been awesome over the years. So, yeah. All that sounds cool man. Let’s wrap up. Discount code. Folks want to try out WeGlot premium. Can they use a little discount code?
Augustin Prot:
Sure. You can. First, you can try WeGlot without paying anything, just creating an account. And then if you’re convinced you can use a 20% lifetime discount code, which is WPBUFF20, I repeat WPBUFF20.
Joe Howard:
Nice. WPBUFF20 if people want to check out the premium version. Like Augustin has talked about on this podcast, they do support for free users as well. And they love their free users and want to continue to support them. So yeah, try it. And then when you’re ready to upgrade, feel free to use that discount code. Cool. I also like to give people your information, where can people go to find you online? WeGlot, social media, all that.
Augustin Prot:
Yeah. You can find us on our website, www.weglot.com, it’s available in French, English, Spanish, Japanese, other languages coming. You can also find us on the official WordPress directory. We have a plug-in page. We have a YouTube channel. We have a Twitter and LinkedIn, you can find us. Yeah. And if you have any question you can just send an email to contact@weglot.com or support@weglot.com.
Joe Howard:
Awesome. Last thing I like to ask our guests for is to ask our listeners for a little iTunes review for this show. So if you wouldn’t mind asking folks for a little review, I’d appreciate it.
Augustin Prot:
Oh, yes. So I’m asking a review for you on the podcast?
Joe Howard:
Yes, you are.
Augustin Prot:
Just to be sure I understand [crosstalk 00:43:11]. So yeah, we all know reviews are key. I mean, I know that I’m chasing one star reviews and turn them into five. So don’t put a one, put directly a five, it’s easier. Yeah. Rate this podcast is great, I love it.
Joe Howard:
Right on, man. Thank you. And if you leave a review, make sure you leave Augustin’s name in the comments or something you learned from this episode, that way we can get feedback and know what episodes you really liked. And then we can also shoot it to Augustin and say, “Hey, thanks for the review. Appreciate it.” If you are a new listener to the WPMRR WordPress podcasts, we’ve got a bunch of old episodes, especially during this time where we’re all working remotely, and we’re all home looking for new things to do. Don’t go binge Netflix or Hulu or HBO Max or Disney Plus or whatever. Go binge some old episodes of the WPMRR WordPress podcasts, we’ve got a hundred plus episodes in the bank on whatever topic you need to listen about. So, go check out some of those. If you have questions for us at the show, feel free to ping us with those. So we can then do more live Q&A episodes, just yo@wpmrr.com Y-O-@wpmrr.com. And yeah, well Christy and I will do some more Q&A episodes. Those are always a fun time.
Joe Howard:
wpmrr.com. If you want to check out a virtual summit all about helping your WordPress business do better around monthly recurring revenue and subscription pricing and all that stuff. Come check out the WPMRR Summit. It’s this September, and it’s going to be awesome. All the details are right on the website, wpmrr.com. We will be back in your podcast players again next Tuesday. Augustin, thanks again for being on man, it’s been real.
Augustin Prot:
Thanks so much.
Augustin Prot:
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