In today’s episode, Joe talks to Eithan Abramovich of Highly Analytics, a Medium-style tooltip made for content creators to help understanding maximize how your passive readers interact with your content. Eithan shares the ideas behind creating the plugin, features users can use in the free version, and offering premium in the future to help boost monthly recurring revenue.
What to Listen For:
- 00:00 Intro
- 03:09 Welcome to the pod, Eithan!
- 03:52 How Highly Analytics works
- 08:23 Building the plugin in a college dorm
- 11:47 Enrolling in a less taken class before it got popular
- 13:36 What’s the future for Highly Analytics?
- 14:59 Features included in the free version
- 20:48 Any new features coming out?
- 23:14 Building a premium plugin that people will pay for
- 27:29 Goals set by the Highly Analytics team
- 30:37 Plans to continuously grow MRR
- 32:05 Work plans after graduation
- 33:41 Find Eithan online!
Episode Resources:
- Highly Analytics
- Georgia Institute of Technology
- Eithan Abramovich on Twitter
- Leave an Apple podcast review or binge-watch past episodes
- Send questions to yo@wpmrr.com for the next Q&A pod
- Visit the WPMRR website
Podcast Transcript:
Joe Howard: [00:00:49] This week with Eithan Abramovich. Uh, and I hope I’m saying your last name, right? I think it’s, it should be almost there. Uh, tell folks a little bit. It was perfect. Okay. Now that cool. Uh, let’s start off. Just tell folks a little bit about what you do with WordPress in this new plugin you’re putting together.
Eithan Abramovich: [00:01:05] Yeah. And so I’m a computer science student at Georgia tech, and we’re working on a WordPress plugin that helps users. Promote their blog make their blog interactive. By allowing users to highlight and share specific phrases within each blog and share them on social media.
Joe Howard: [00:01:19] Yeah. I think it’s really interesting the capability coming within WordPress to kind of how to connect your WordPress blog with social media platform. And it sounds like in your case, it’s Twitter, that you’re kind of making that connection with. I seen some of this functionality before in previous tools where you have like a. Key phrase that you want to kind of share with your audience. Someone wrote something cool. Oh, this is a cool, you know, statements that were made.
You can highlight that. And I guess using your plugin, you can click to share it on Twitter. Is that like the general functionality of how it works?
Eithan Abramovich: [00:01:50] Uh, yeah, so actually you can share on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn and Pinterest, that it was originally inspired by medium, by the medium highlight and share feature.
And the whole idea behind that is that, like you said, a lot of blogs have all these share buttons here on the side or on the bottom. But that doesn’t encourage as much sharing since it’s not natural. You have to either scroll to the bottom or go to the side and then share it. And the idea here is that it’s just an extension of how the user behaves.
Um, you’ll be surprised how much highlighting is going on when you sit there going through a blog. So we figured if we could help them save it, see Thailand and share a specific freeze on social media. There’ll be doing that more. Um, so it’s a good way to, you know, promote more shares. Um, and, and, and, and also make the, make the blog interactive, you know, stand out from other blogs.
Joe Howard: [00:02:44] Yeah, we have a pretty powerful blog at WP boss, pretty visible. We get a lot of traffic from it, but the sharing is like pretty terrible. If I’m being honest, like you’re totally right. I think that we have shared buttons, like at the top left where you can pretty easily share, but I think most people are probably not going to share like right when they land on the page.
So it’s kind of like, Are those share buttons, really active, you know, we can measure analytics and clicks on that. It’s not a ton. And it’s probably because when people lay on, they want to read, they want to see if it’s good before they share it. So it’s probably why we have low clicks there. And then we use like an embedded, like click to tweet, which is like a, it’s just a box that appears kind of.
In content and you can fill out the content you have, like, you want people to tweet with like, Hey, I just read this cool article on how to fix your SSL certificate. I dunno, socially share worthy. That kind of content is, but people can click to share like there, but that’s also like a very specific point in the content.
That’s kind of telling people what to tweet. And I, when I was looking through your tool, I thought it was cool because. It gives folks the opportunity to share the exact piece that they want to share and pretty frictionless. And I think that’s how you probably engage more. Is that what you found with the plugin?
Eithan Abramovich: [00:03:55] Yeah, no, you’d be surprised even. So some of our clients, even very low traffic blocks are getting. A lot of shares in each blog because it’s such a natural thing. And the way we came to figuring out how much people are actually highlighting stuff is, is it’s an interesting story. So, you know, last year, just as a pool project, we launched the Chrome extension, basically a lot of people to highlight anything.
And then they will see a tool tip at Harvard of more information on that word or that phrase. Uh, part of what we were tracking was actually number of highlights that users were doing in each, you know, as they were surfing the web, we, of course we weren’t seeing the users or, or necessarily what they were highlighting.
We were surprised the number of highlighting that people were doing, you know, just all the time going through any kind of content, even if it’s just for copy paste and they were highlighting a lot. And that’s what sort of, you know, gave us a week of class eight. Wow. You know, this is a really natural function of users.
It’s just the way they’re interacting, interacting with the content they’re reading. And so that’s when the idea sort of began to pop into our heads that peop users are already doing this. Maybe they want to share with other people what’s calling their attention to highlight.
Joe Howard: [00:05:05] Yeah. I think most small, small businesses and startups and people who are just starting a website are just starting out.
They’re looking for that thing. That’s going to give them a like disproportionally. Good amount of results for the input, because there’s a million things you could do to grow a blog or grow your traffic, or to grow your sales or revenue or whatever. But if you’re seeing a lot of folks with smaller blogs and not as much traffic get a disproportionate disproportionate amount of shares through this, like that’s a really cool piece of analysis.
Eithan Abramovich: [00:05:35] Yeah. It’s really unbelievable. You know, I’m really surprising, like, you know, our users are reaching out to us and they’re saying, well, I’m getting shares when I wasn’t getting shared before.
Joe Howard: [00:05:44] Yeah, that’s so cool. I love that feeling because you helped me, especially helping people who are just starting off.
Like, I remember that feeling when we got our first sale WP buffs and it’s like, when I see someone on Twitter, like sharing our content for the first time, it’s like, wow, it’s like a cool feeling. So it’s nice to be able to share that with others. I’d like to rewind a little bit to kind of who you are. A little bit as well, because the way that, uh, introduced to me, it was actually just through an email.
You just emailed me. You said, hi, Joe, a couple of friends and I at Georgia tech just launched highly a WordPress plugin that allows bloggers to add a highlight and share tool tip to their blogs. So readers can highlight, share and share individual phrases on social media. It was a super short email. And at first when I received it, I was like, okay, another cold email.
I usually open them. And then I, I usually don’t trash them, but I just don’t. Answer them most cold emails, but the way you started, this was, you said a couple of friends and I at Georgia tech. And that actually like, kind of intrigued me a little bit and I actually replied to you and I looked at the plugin, it didn’t have a ton of downloads.
So I said, Hey, like, why don’t you get back to me when you’ve reached a thousand downloads and then we can chat. And then actually like 10 minutes after I sent that, I was like, That was stupid. Like why not? Like chat, like just cause he doesn’t have a thousand downloads doesn’t mean that the plugins not valuable or proven, like we should chat about it on the podcast.
And so I actually said, okay, let’s jump on the podcast. But I think the thing that made me really want to get back to you was like the fact that you said it’s just a couple of friends and I had Georgia tech just launched it. So tell me about building this plugin while at college at university, I’m sure you have.
Class loads. And maybe during COVID the social environment, isn’t quite as active as you would like it to be here as, as, as it should be. But I’m sure you have a lot of stuff going on. How are you finding time to put this plug in together while also attending Georgia tech also?
Eithan Abramovich: [00:07:23] So I’m a senior I’m graduating God-willing and. Next week in ties.
Joe Howard: [00:07:27] Congratulations.
Eithan Abramovich: [00:07:29] Yeah. So it’s definitely a priority when I came to university and it was just the mentality that, you know, I want to get a degree that is prestigious because I think that that was important. But at the same time, the most important thing for me was meeting people that were interesting.
Um, being around really intelligent people and then learning what I wanted to learn. So it’s actually interesting how I met my co-founders, you know, with that notion in mind. So our second year of college, I took this class, which was a startup class during the thick gives you some money and you, and you start a business, whatever you want.
But before you start the business, you actually meet your co-founders. You go into a room with all these students that are in the class and you start, you know, talking to people. And just, you know, meet your co-founder. So it’s interesting. The way I went about, I didn’t know anyone in the class, the way I went about meeting my co-founders.
I don’t know how, you know, how smart this was, but it actually worked out nicely. And I went around asking people whether DPA’s were probably the only person, you know, what’s your GPA, what’s your GPA. Of course, it’s not straight up, but I didn’t do that. Then I found the two smartest people. I found the room and, you know, that sounded the smartest and the most experienced and also had the highest GPA’s and we started working together.
And that was two years ago. We’ve worked on a lot of products in Zen and not this plugin, eh, at all. But the reiterations and always the same team is our King to work on this.
Joe Howard: [00:08:59] Yeah. Well, you know, you’re young, you don’t have as much of, you know, as big networking opportunities or is probably as big of a network as someone who may be a little bit older, who’s been around the block a little bit.
So you have to find some way to find, you know, the people in the room who are gonna work the best with you. So it’s interesting. I never heard anybody use that strategy before, but clearly it’s worked. To a degree. I mean, you found a couple of folks who you’ve worked on some cool projects with and, you know, have gained some traction with them.
So, okay. Found a couple of folks who you’ve been working with on this for a while. Did you think at all, like when I think about someone who has a pretty good GPA. Especially at a school like Georgia tech. I think about someone who’s probably like really good at school. Someone who’s really like has a pretty high IQ and probably someone who, because they may be really good at school.
I don’t know if that would make them a good entrepreneur. I think in a lot of cases, there may not be a correlation. Did you have any thoughts there in terms of like, well, if they’re good at school, like, are they going to want to like start a company and like start this little business on the side? Or were you just kinda like looking for smart people and that was kind of your goal.
That’s a good point. But the truth is that this class, it wasn’t a well-known class at all. Now it is. But back then, it wasn’t. And if you wanted to take the class, you have to go through a lot of hoops to take it. You have to apply and write this essay. Whereas you didn’t have to do that with any other class that you could just sign up.
Four and you have to get accepted to take the class. So that was already an indication that, you know, wherever was here wanted to start a business. And Georgia tech has, you know, over the past couple of years, been incredible with getting intrepreneurship on campus. They have this mission that they want every single student on campus before they leave to be, you know, exposed to some aspect of entrepreneurship.
And whether that’s through entrepreneurship classes that they they’ll have, they have an accelerator, which we also went through and where they give you also a nice, small, nice grant where you get to work in the summer. I mean, incredible networking opportunities. So just by them being in that room was already an indicator that they wanted to work for themselves.
Yeah. So there sounds like there was some kind of vetting in place already for folks like that. So, cool. Okay. So highly analytics. And if people want to check this out, it’s just highly analytics.com and people can also find this on the, uh, the plugin repository, wordpress.org, plugin repository. Search highly.
It’ll probably come up, but it’s called highly highlight share social media plugin. What’s your future with this plugin look like right now, it looks like I’m checking out the plugin repository. It looks like it was last updated one day ago. So clearly you’re keeping the plugin itself updated, which is great.
It looks like you’re still in double digit. Active installations. So it looks like it’s still kind of in its infancy and growing, is this a project that is kind of has come out of university and it’s more, you know, something you’re just trying out right now and you’re thinking like, this is a cool project.
I want to see how far I can get this. Or do you really feel like you want to kind of hit the gas on this and like make it, you know, something you want to continue to work on in the years to come and continue growing and expanding.
Eithan Abramovich: [00:11:52] We’ll see what happens. Based on the traction that we get that would love to work on it full time.
But actually we do have, so Hy-Vee analytics allows you to get this plugged in on any site. So that’s been going on already for a couple of months. And the newest thing is the WordPress blogging, which is sort of a free version of just the plugin without all the analytics behind it. And we can talk about those analytics if you want.
Joe Howard: [00:12:15] Yeah, the analytics are really cool. That’s actually what I wanted to dive into next because the social sharing and seeing like how many people have shared, like that’s cool metric, but it’s also kind of like a vanity metric. I mean, obviously, like you want to know that people are sharing, but if you really want to know how to.
You know, use that actual shared data to influence decisions or to make changes in your business. Like you really have to know like some of the analytics behind, like what exactly people are sharing. And it’s just on highly analytics.com. I see some of the things where you can like, see, not only like how many shares, certain things are getting, but you can like see your most popular.
Phrases that are shared. So like the example here is like, find out what resonates the most to the readers by seeing top shared highlights and react to phrases within each article, which is cool. So it sounds like that may be something people will get with the free version right now, or is it something right now they’ll need like a premium version or how does that work?
Eithan Abramovich: [00:13:10] Yeah. So right now they can get there with the free version, with the free version. They just get the actual pool too, that allows people to share, highlight and share. But regarding the analytics, you know what we found, I mean, using this with your blog, also, this is what we were hearing a lot of people seeing as well.
You know, they have no way of knowing how people feel about their content, if they’re not commenting. Right? So if people comment on your blog, then you know how they feel. And also if you find that they’re sharing something, you know, on social media, they’re sharing something on Twitter, all that. No, that’s good.
They shared this article. They liked it. It was already go got a lot of shit. But beyond that, there was not really so much of a way for users to see how for a blog, see other users felt about their content. We thought that that was missing and the data’s there. So where the analytics comes in, you know, after the sharing.
So it’s sort of a two, a two-sided thing. Once you have to share and making the blogger interactive and more shareable, you know, increasing site shares, making it interact, making it fun, helping you stand out. But then you also have to know the analytics part of it, which is okay. What were the phrases that were shared at the most, and only what were the shades that were free that were the three that were shared the most, but also not the, not, not the WordPress plugin yet, but with the JavaScript version of it, you could also react with emojis.
So you could say, you know, highlight something and give a happy face. I start fees. Et cetera. And that also gives a blogger a sense of within each post, you know, what feelings are resonating within their audience, and that’s where the analytics comes in. And so our idea is to get as many free users as we can as large an audience as we can through the WordPress plugin for them to be hooked on, on the interactive and shareable part.
And then, you know, to begin wondering. Okay. I see, you know, I want to know who’s sharing it or not. Who’s sharing it, but where are the shares and what are they sharing? And hopefully that’s where, where the analytics part will call me.
Joe Howard: [00:14:54] That part is really cool for someone like me. I think that’s actually more valuable would be more of a reason for me to.
Implement a plug in like this. So on our blog, we tried to, I mean, we have hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, so it’s like, it’s not the biggest blog in the world, but it’s steady traffic, a lot of organic traffic coming through that blog. And that’s that we get a lot of readers, you know, I can go onto like the live analytics and see 20, 30 people at a time on the blog at any.
Given time. So it’s a good amount of traffic. And we tried to implement this little piece of text in the top, right corner of every blog post, just like a blog template that was like, Hey, have any feedback for this article click here. We’ll like give you some free merge. It went through like a type form questionnaire that was actually super short.
It was like three questions. And it’s just to get a little feedback and we got like one response. In like a month out of hundreds of thousands of visitors. Yeah.
Eithan Abramovich: [00:15:42] And so, yeah, no, that’s, and that’s exactly the point and, you know, bloggers are craving this and if I show you, like, for example, it gives us a sample dashboard on any of our, of our current users.
It’s interesting to see you and behavior and how you have, you know, a whole blog with a thousand or 2,003,000 words. And everyone’s sharing the same frame. Right. And you have no idea that it’s this one phrase, you know, that’s getting all these shares and you have no idea. That’s the idea.
Joe Howard: [00:16:07] Action piece. I think that really helps you to see it allows users to really easily, as they’re reading, engage with the content, as opposed to like, have to go to another page or like do something that’s like, literally, while they’re reading, you can just click a thumbs up.
It’s kind of like a reaction Slack. It’s like when you’re in Slack, you just react. To a post with an emoji and it’s that same ease of use. And I see this across a lot of different softwares, like copying Slack. It’s like doing the same thing. And I think this is a really interesting application to that because it allows bloggers and content producers online to get real time feedback on not just like pieces of content.
But individual sections of different contents, like maybe a ton of people are like reacting, you know, with this thing, that’s halfway down the page and they’re like, thumbs up, thumbs up heart, heart. And you’re like, why is this halfway down the page? Like, this will probably be like core to what we’re doing.
If people are liking it so much, we should create a little skip section at the top that says, go right here to read this section so that most people are enjoying the content. Probably you want to like drive more people there. So. That’s how you get better engagement. I think so. Yeah. I’m very into that idea.
Is that something that people like, if I’m a reader of the blog, I’m not the blog manager. I just, I came to the blog. I searched Google. I found the blog. Can I see, like using that plugin where other people have liked or used emojis on that blog or is it really just only the blog manager or the people with dashboard access, able to see those?
Eithan Abramovich: [00:17:28] Yes. We’re not only the dashboard manager. You know, it’s not like medium where you could see top highlights of other users, which we’ve seen. We’re exploring that as a, as a possible next step.
Joe Howard: [00:17:41] Yeah, cool. I’m just one person. So don’t just take what I say and go build it. But if people are giving more of that feedback, I like your idea of continuing to get as, as many users as possible right now.
Not because I think it’s just like a lot of folks who need to go after number of users, it’s like more of a funded company. It’s like, you want to see growth and number of users, but there’s definitely value in just. Growing and getting as many users as possible at your stage, because that allows you to get more feedback.
And that’s how you grow as you you’ll get the feedback and you build things that people want or using the analytics that you see. But if you don’t have a lot of data in that analytics, you know, you don’t have a big enough data sets. You know, statistically significant enough, you don’t have enough users.
You know, you could go down the wrong track. Cause two users at a 10 gave you something, but you really needed like a hundred or a thousand or 10,000 users to get a good sample size. So yeah, anything right now that you’re like, kind of in the process of building out right now for like new features for it, or thinking about that’s in the process?
Eithan Abramovich: [00:18:36] Not yet. We just came out with the WordPress plugin and, and that was also through a lot of, you know, discussion. I thought with our. You know, with our team and with users actually, after every customer signs off, I emailed them and ask them to get on a call with me in my third couple of weeks. Yeah. Of them using the platform.
I’ll tell you why we came up with the WordPress plugin as opposed to just the, the JavaScript version of it. So if you go to highly analytics.com, you see the two products put together, which is, you know, their leanings we spoken about then also the sharing side of it. And we found that people were, we were getting some feedback that it was sort of two products, two separate products that were mashed together.
And it was hard to convey the value. Um, and so that’s where these new strategy came in, which is, you know, release a free version of just the sharing. Side of it, the tool tip side of it. And then hopefully through those users, you know, eventually we get them curious about, you know, what’s being shared and then constantly analytics as opposed to, you know, selling it both at the same time.
Joe Howard: [00:19:29] Yeah. I see that on the website now. And I, most people who are starting out, they want to figure out how to automate things as quickly as possible and how to kind of streamline. For future growth, which I don’t think is always necessarily wrong, but I’m a big believer in doing the unscalable things when you’re starting off in order to get the feedback in order to engage with your user base in order to build a community, not just like in the sense of like, quote unquote, build a community, but build a community of users that like you.
That want to see you succeed that want to give you feedback, because if you ask everyone for feedback and one out of a hundred person gives you feedback, that’s okay. But if 10 out of a hundred give it like, wow, that’s 10 times as much feedback. And to be successful, it’s really just like solving pain points and the plugin, how it exists today may not be how the plugin exists a year from now.
Definitely may not be how it exists two years from now. In fact, I’d say probably not like you’ll probably. Move in a direction based on if you get enough good feedback. You’ll most definitely move in a direction that you actually probably didn’t even really think about, or maybe it was in somewhere in your brain, but you got that feedback from people.
And that actually pushed you to say, okay, people want this and Hey, they’re willing to pay for it. Okay. That. How you move into premium, uh, building a premium plugin that people will pay for it. Cause you’re literally, they told you like, this is what I would pay for. Or like, this is the challenge I’m having.
And if it’s a challenge that, you know, will help people themselves make more money or it’s worth swiping their credit card for it. That’s what you built. Right.
Eithan Abramovich: [00:20:55] Right. And if I actually tell you, now we got to the plug in from, you know, our original idea two years ago, it’s a. Um, and you know, it proves what you’re saying.
100%. We actually started as a, as an essay editing platform. And, you know, hear me, I’ll tell you, get from that to this, but the idea was I, no it’s still going on. It’s making money every month and with very little involvement, but the idea was to create a platform it’s called the necrotic to create a platform for real time back and forth editing, starting with college essays.
So, you know, someone submits an essay and right away we have a crowdsource, we have crowd source editors that all get messaged and start editing. And it also allows for back and forth communication between the editor and the user. So the idea was, you know, through crowdsourcing, through real time interaction, if people can get feedback on their essays from people, but you know, through, you know, a lot, we learned that.
One it’s expensive to pay people to edit essays. So that lowers margins and two, we want it to go beyond just college ethics. So, how do you create something where people could get feedback and it’s larger than college Essex. So, you know, blogging, blogging, you know, there’s nothing bigger than, than blogging in terms of content.
And this is literally, you know, the same principles for that from Eddie Craddick, which is, you know, real time crowdsource, you got users that are reading blogs, providing feedback, not through editing like you had with Eddie Groddeck, but through highlighting stuff and through reacting. And I said, too, so same principles.
Uh, fatty credit, you know, those same things we saw work then being applied to now a new industry and a new way, but with the same concept of crowdsourcing of real time, of course it has much larger, you know, profit margins. We’re charging for the software to see the headaches and new service highlights, I suppose, convenient the editors to edit your work.
Joe Howard: [00:22:45] Yeah, I think that crowdsourcing pieces really powerful. And I think you’ve kind of jumped from this old model of, well, we have this crowdsourcing model, but it’s with editors, so they still need to be paid for their time. So there’s that like, that creates some friction in terms of like a business model, both financially and just like systems wise.
It’s like, okay, we gotta figure this out. But. Moving from that into highly, you’d still using that crowd funding mentality and those systems, but it’s almost free input, right. Because people are willingly giving that feedback on articles. Yeah. Cool. I’ve been trying over the past, like six months, especially.
Maybe like a year, we’ve been trying to really like differentiate our blog, like differentiate the WPBS blog. Cause I think we have pretty good content overall. We have a YouTube channel, so we have a lot of YouTube tutorials as well. And those get embedded in blog posts, you know, our contents. Good. It’s pretty unique.
It’s helpful. The tutorials are solid. But there are a lot of WordPress blogs with pretty solid tutorials, right? It’s like, I don’t know exactly how much that purely differentiates us between other blogs. But to me, this is also like potentially a differentiator with blog because I’m thinking like how do we create lasting impacts and unforgettable experiences and positive impacts for everybody who interacts with us?
And I think this is an interesting way to do that. People came to read a blog post. Well, you can do more than just read. You can react, you can interact. We love that feedback. We want to make our blog better. Now. It’s like relationship we’re building with our readers and not just a, we wrote this thing for you to be helpful to you of course, but like come and read it and.
That’s all, it adds another layer of like relationship building the people. And I think that’s pretty important because we drive so much organic traffic. A lot of that leaves, right? Like a lot of those people don’t visit second pages. A lot of people read the tutorials and they get what they need. And then they close the tab.
But if people came and they had a good experience, they got value from that article, but they also reacted with us. They like. Built even a small piece of a relationship with us. I think that makes it that much more likely that if they saw WP buffs.com in the search engine results someplace or in a YouTube video recommendation or something that you’d be like, Oh, I want to go watch that video because those are good.
Those are people I’ve built a little bit relationship with, as opposed to maybe some of these other folks who I maybe don’t know yet, or maybe read their blog, but that’s all I did. I read it, but I didn’t have that layer of relationship building. So I think there’s something to that. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I think that. Part of that is important.
Eithan Abramovich: [00:25:10] Our goal is to go beyond just, you know, providing analytics and value for the bloggers. But like you said, also providing value for the reader. Right. We want to provide value for the reader. And right now it’s in the way of, you know, making the blog fun and interactive, but eventually that value will be beyond just highlighting that value.
We’ll hopefully call it. We talked about earlier through perhaps even seeing other people’s highlights and feeling like there’s a community. Within each block that, that, that, those highlights before,
Joe Howard: [00:25:43] that idea a lot, I think there’s a lot in that idea. I think it’s very powerful idea. It will take a lot of work to get there, but I think I’m thinking of like a product hunt sort of community.
Maybe not exactly like that, but I’m thinking about like, when I go in log in to product hunt to check out like a new product there, I liked when I see like the little circles of like other people who have liked that thing. And especially like, I don’t know what you’d call them, influencers, whatever. But like people who I know in an industry who are like, Oh, they liked it.
Like, that’s cool. I should check that out. It would be cool if that was brought into like a content experience of like, Oh, for WordPress, like Chris, lemme like, you know, I don’t know how much you know about WordPress media, but Chris Lama, like people know him in the WordPress base. If he liked, liked a blog post people would be like, Oh, like they see his little like icon in the top.
Right? Like Chris hearted, this section that adds relationship building, it adds like clout. To that blog and stuff. And honestly, it’s a pretty easy way to be able to like, build that. So again, this is just like one person’s feedback. Right. But in terms of future direction, that’s definitely an interesting one.
I could see how that could be really powerful for blogs, not just to have like. This tutorial that will help you, but like there’s some social proof and there’s some like, almost like leverage that’s like put in there as people like, cause people comment that it’s not just a little sidebar that people it’s like it’s gotten 300 shares.
Like, yeah, that’s cool. But like who shared that it could be like 300 bots. Like, I don’t know who shared that, but like, and so when I see those, I’m like, cool, but like, whatever, for me, it’s not going to make me want to share, but like, Oh, if someone I know, like to this, well now I’m probably more interested in like, Oh, I respect that person’s opinion.
Maybe I should read more of this. So I think that’s interesting idea.
Eithan Abramovich: [00:27:22] Yeah. That, that could be further down the road since, you know, without, that would require, you know, account creation and people getting accounts in each, in each place. We’re really we’ll see what our users think, you know, we’ll hear from them.
What’s the perfect amount that we input to make their experience better. And to a point where it doesn’t become intrusive. Yeah. That’s the right answer. All of that’s the right answer. Right. And like you said, it’s, you know, people spend hours in social media because you know that you could see, eh, you know, they could like stuff, they could share things and.
And we’re sort of, you know, it’s before you had blogging and then, you know, you had social media, but we hope that highly could make blogging more of a, you know, social media, like activity itself. And yeah, those are all concepts that we’re playing with and I will see what, how users feel about it. But that’s what we’re thinking.
Joe Howard: [00:28:15] Awesome. Cool. Well, I’d like to start wrapping up, but I want to talk a little bit about like monetization of the plugin and like what your plans are for that. Cause it’s still a small plug-in you’ve got a few co-founders that three folks want to go full time on it. That’s going to require some capital to keep it going.
What’s the plan right now? Moving forward too. And I know you’re focused on user growth and getting feedback and creating a great product as you should be focusing all those things. But the financial aspect is important too. If you’re deciding, Hey, I want to go full time on this. What’s the roadmap look like to kind of continue to build MRR for highly.
Eithan Abramovich: [00:28:47] So the roadmap is getting as many free users on the plugin as possible, you know, getting 10,000, a hundred thousand a million users. On the plugin and then begin piecing them with the analytics that they could have access to. So, you know, beginning linking them to, uh, to the dashboard which they could now see in highly analytics.com.
Also, they just get the JavaScript version of it. But, you know, begin teasing them with the analytics that they could see and then hope that those free users convert to paying subscription users. Cause we think it’s much harder to get people to sign up as a subscription right away with the analytics on the, on the tool together.
That’s been our experience, but if we can get them through the free version of just a tool tip and get a lot of downloads that way, and then tell them what’s available the possibilities of the analytics that they could see, that’s our way to make a decision right now. That’s our plan.
Joe Howard: [00:29:42] Very cool. And you’re graduating here just in a couple of weeks.
So again, congratulations. On that, do you plan, I guess, to continue pushing forward on things like after graduation? Like, is this your job after graduation or do you think you may do a little contracting and consulting or maybe you get a full-time job somewhere to do this on the side? Or is this really going to be your full-time thing once you graduate?
Eithan Abramovich: [00:30:00] Yeah, no. So I’m actually, um, I have a job lined up, um, starting in June. God-willing. Yeah, I’m going to be a financial analyst. So I’ll be doing this on the side for now. And as soon as I kind of like jump, you know, full time.
Joe Howard: [00:30:12] Cool. Sounds good. I’m a fellow. Uh, I never was in finance, but I was working a full-time job doing some work on the side and then eventually starting WP buffs on the side.
I did that for about. Nine months before I went full-time on that. And maybe it was like a year, but I was doing full-time work kind of from nine to five. So I have a sense that you’re pretty entrepreneurial. And I think that jumping into finance is a good idea for now, potentially, but you may get. Bored of it somewhat quickly, you know, finances has its own interesting challenges.
And, but for someone who’s as entrepreneurial as you, I think you probably can be successful creating your own products, doing your own thing and building something yourself. And yeah, if that point ever comes, I’m always open to talking about it. Cause I know most people I’ve talked to on the podcast have worked full time job and then found WordPress and I’ve ended up jumping into it.
So who knows? You may follow that line too.
Eithan Abramovich: [00:31:06] We’ll see what happens.
Joe Howard: [00:31:07] Cool. Well, congratulations again. Cool. Let’s start wrapping up today’s episode. I appreciate you being honest is a lot of fun and I hope folks go check out highly and try it out, test it out. See what you think about it. Give some feedback to Aidan and let his team take some of that feedback and keep building the product out.
So let’s start wrapping up. Tell folks where they can find highly. Where they can find you online if you’re on social media, all that jazz.
Eithan Abramovich: [00:31:30] Yeah. So they could find the, the website on highly analytics.com or they could search us up. And on the website you have, you know, the Dallas conversional fit. If you want to find the WordPress version of it, you can find it from the website, but also, and by looking at stuff in the WordPress directory, the name is highly, highly dense, shared social media.
Joe Howard: [00:31:49] Yep. Cool. And last thing I asked our guests to do is to ask our listeners for a little Apple podcast review. So if you wouldn’t mind asking folks now for a little Apple podcast review, I’d appreciate it. I am.
Eithan Abramovich: [00:32:00] Yeah, go ahead and review this on the Apple podcast and tell us what you think.
Joe Howard: [00:32:04] There you go. I appreciate that.
Any time you can leave a review. If you go to WP, M R r.com forward slash review that you’re on an Apple device or a Mac, it takes you right there. You can just leave a star rating, but you can also leave a comment. We love comments. I read every one of them and I can also shoot a screenshot to Aidan saying thanks for helping us get a review.
Also helps us with content ideas. If we get a few reviews for this episode, Hey, we’ll do more content like this. So that is always extremely helpful for us here on the pod. If you are a new listener, we’ve got 140 plus apps and we’re almost at 150 episodes. We’ve got a ton of content in the back, all around WordPress, building a business, scaling growth, hiring pricing, all that stuff.
Go to WP mrr.com forward slash podcast, and use the search bar there. Search for whatever. Content you think would be helpful for you right now? Cool. That is it. For this week on the podcast, we will be in your ear buds again next Tuesday eight, Tom. Thanks again for being all, man. It’s been real.
Eithan Abramovich: [00:33:08] Thank you.
