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The WebWell Podcast, Episode 10 - "Products"
30 Plays1 year ago
We welcome Stephen back for Episode 10 to talk about the products we’re working on. In this episode, we shed some light on how the team at Cascade approaches our services and products. We will discuss the differences between the two and how as a company this has evolved over the years.
Stephen will introduce a few features like Multisite, Visual Editor, Language Module, and AI-Assisted Editor. We talk about why Cascade isn’t quick to chase the next bell or whistle but instead, is thoughtful about how we spend our innovation time, and how instead we work with our clients to break down barriers with technology.
Grab a cup of coffee or set your cruise to the speed limit and enjoy.
We'd love to hear your comments or product stories as well. Email - webwell@cascadewebdev.com We look forward to hearing from you!
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guests
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to the Web Well podcast brought to you by Cascade Web Development. I'm one of your hosts, Simon, along with Ben. And we can't wait to dive into all things internet, tech, web development, and web design.
00:00:20
Speaker
We'll also be discussing how we balance work and life and exploring the fascinating world of internet innovation. So whether you're a tech enthusiast or just looking for some entertainment, join us on this exciting journey as we explore the ever-changing landscape of the web. Thanks for tuning in and let's get started.
00:00:39
Speaker
Welcome everyone to the Web Well Podcast. This is what I was about to say just before I hit record. This is episode 10. So we're officially in the two digits. There's one and zero now. So huge promotion props to Ben for helping support this and allowing me to kind of
00:01:00
Speaker
make up topics and stuff as we go. Um, but I appreciate it. So Stefan, uh, is our guest today brought back. Of course. I don't even know. Can we call Stefan a guest? Like he's part of the company. Yeah. Being a guest. It's cool. Yeah. We'll call him a guest. Silky smooth. Stefan in the house today. It's fantastic.
00:01:23
Speaker
Perfect.
Cascade's Journey and Evolution
00:01:24
Speaker
Well, today's topic is one that basically listeners we're really kind of just opening up to you guys to listen in because this is a conversation that we internally have or more specifically have been having over the last few months.
00:01:41
Speaker
as we define both Cascade, our trajectory, really looking at Stephan when we talk about roadmaps of our products, if you will, as we look to Stephan to really kind of guide the roadmap for Evergreen and defining out the little features and products that are part of what we offer for our clients. So today's topic, officially, real easily, is just products, right?
00:02:10
Speaker
Just before hitting record, I was quizzing Ben about a couple kind of just historical facts when it comes to Cascade as a service company. Ben, maybe you can give us a quick recap on what you were talking about with that as we talk about Evergreen being kind of our
00:02:33
Speaker
If you will, let's see, home court advantage. It is our CMS. That is our product. That's our baby over the last 20 plus years now and shifted into like that service kind of model. Maybe you can speak to that for a second.
00:02:47
Speaker
Yeah, you bet. So if we go back before Cascade Web Development in the days of Mount Hood Software, which was the first web design company that I was a partner in from 1998 to 2001, in that case, we would just find the software provider of the day.
00:03:04
Speaker
So Dreamweaver, Microsoft front page, ColdFusion, we chase these different technologies, do our best to push them as far as we could, these standardized tool sets, push those tool sets to do what we wanted on behalf of our clients.
00:03:19
Speaker
But then you're constantly sort of chasing the bright, shining light. What's the new trending software? How much is the license? You know, how far can we go with that? What will that allow us to do that this previous software won't allow us to do? And it's a pretty uncomfortable spot for both the service provider as well as for a client because, you know, you jump on something, you make a big investment and then you find out, wow, the
00:03:40
Speaker
the key person at that agency that was leading this left perhaps, now there's a vacuum of skill. And then if you're finding someone new and they're trending towards the next thing, is there someone that can manage that for you? That's a risk that all these agencies face. And so when Stefan and I were introduced by our friend Jack, Stefan had been working on this idea of a
00:04:02
Speaker
web-based administrative environment for a content management system, which was a huge departure for me from the days of single HTML pages that you would modify one page at a time, and then you would upload them via FTP, file transfer protocol. And now all of this, and so there are version issues. If I uploaded something that overwrote work,
00:04:23
Speaker
Um, I couldn't really get that back. I had to download the file first, make the update, upload it. If someone else updated something and they didn't download the latest file, they could overwrite the work. So it was, it was, it was just a different time. And so when Stefan came along and showed me a Mount St. Helens Institute website, he was working on boy, my mind was blown. And I was thinking now there's finally something that I'm excited to go out and sell.
00:04:47
Speaker
that I can be very enthusiastic about because when I bring this back, Stefan will be able to not only develop this really cool platform, but also in those days design on top of it. So he used to wear your creative director hat as well. And so now here we are fast forward 20 plus years and we have this growing foundation of software, our product that is what allows us to very efficiently develop the service to our clients, which is
00:05:14
Speaker
these very unique websites that can scale and evolve in a variety of different directions.
00:05:20
Speaker
And so that's really nice for our clients, especially considering the insane loyalty of our staff and that the person that worked on the Advanced American Construction website when we first started building that over 20 years ago, he's still here. Wow, that's amazing. And understands all that can be done, that can't be done. Of course, with that website, it's evolved and we've rebuilt it on new versions of the software.
00:05:46
Speaker
But that person's still there with that connection to the software that knows exactly what it can do and can't do. And from there, we can make really efficient decisions for them. So here we are today. We continue to have these conversations about how do we come up with a new idea?
Innovation and Product Development Dynamics
00:06:00
Speaker
Is it client-driven? Is it industry-driven? Is it just some idea we've got that we're excited to innovate on? And then how do we roll that out? And the sales capacity, I'm like, I want to share it. I want to talk about it.
00:06:14
Speaker
And Stefan has a little bit of, there's some nice healthy tension there of like, we're not ready. Let's get this further along. And now that we've got you Simon on board and eager to help socialize and share this information, how and where we do that is key. So all the functions of the business are excited about how that's moving forward. But we're not putting news out there that we can't move on fairly efficiently and quickly if clients are showing a lot of interest.
00:06:44
Speaker
I'll pause there, but yeah, just kind of fun to unpack where it started and some of the fun conversations we have in-house in terms of where we want to steer it in the future. Yeah, I think that brings up a bunch. I think it's funny because I can picture more technical people watching this or listening to it and thinking, why in the world would you do your own CMS? And I think it's really important to keep the timeline in mind there that Ben's illustrating.
00:07:10
Speaker
This is back in 2001. And if there was a WordPress, it was in its infancy, I think, at that point. There just weren't solutions like that out there. A database-driven content management system was just something that wasn't exactly practiced. And so it's not like we were reinventing a wheel. We were inventing our own wheel to go along with. And I think at some point,
00:07:36
Speaker
there was definitely a fork in the road where we could think about open sourcing it and going down the road that a lot of other systems have gone down, but we decided not to. And there's debates to be had there. But I think in a sense of just kind of rolling our own on that kind of timeline, it's given us tremendous freedoms among many other benefits. And I also think it's probably helped with some of the fairly unreal employee retention we've had.
00:08:06
Speaker
You know, the idea that we're all sitting here contributing to something like this. And if we, you know, if one of our guys has an idea for a feature and it makes sense, we do it. There's no board to go through. There's no, you know, standards, organizations, we have to push it through. We just do it. If client wants something that we've never done before and never thought about, and it's a good idea, we do it. And so I think those freedoms have been really cool to have.
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think fast forward to without skipping ahead, some of the questions of like, okay, Ben was talking about how do we sell this? Is it too early? If we were to rewind that, Stefan, can you think, so we had Evergreen, that's the CMS. Can you think of other features that we could call products that have come up along the way? Could you talk about some of those?
00:09:00
Speaker
And I know just a heads up, we're going to talk about some that we're working on currently, but can you name some of the ones that we've had in the past that, that were triggered by clients were triggered by need. And we were able to actually pursue and execute on. Yeah, I can think of two right off.
00:09:21
Speaker
you know, white pass with kind of our own driven internal system, uh, because of the time there, there weren't really a lot of great systems out there that were web-based and flexible enough to, to really create your own kind of intranet on. And so we started putting together a system that helped us track projects and, and it was a very iterative process that started out fairly simple and got more and more complex as our needs grew and as we had time to work on it.
00:09:51
Speaker
And we did sell that, I think, to a couple of clients. But
Cascade's Major Products and Spin-offs
00:09:56
Speaker
the tool set outside of that grew mature enough and fast enough to where we eventually moved on to use other products for that, for those purposes. The other one I can think of would probably be Brand Live, which is a whole other thing. And that not only grew into its own product offering, but its own company.
00:10:16
Speaker
Awesome. And I can layer on top of that a little bit with white pass. That was something where we needed project management software. That was the core. We were trying to track things with email, with spreadsheets. It just wasn't efficient. And we were looking at alternatives like Basecamp. And I think we drew a lot of inspiration from how they approached software, but then put the stuff and spin on it. And that's one thing that I've
00:10:44
Speaker
learned early is, you know, Stefan brings a skill set to the table that I can trust and hand a lot of responsibility over provide a tremendous amount of autonomy to drive those things forward. And so the core difference between White Pass and Evergreen in my mind was on Evergreen
00:11:01
Speaker
you would consume content on the front end, maybe you could submit things in a form, and then you go to the back end to administer changes. With White Pass, you had the back end for administrative changes, but for the most part, you are interacting. So not only were we doing what is very ubiquitous today, but managing things, submitting it all in real time, multiple people, but then also
00:11:23
Speaker
we were able to push that in directions where it was software for a catering company to be able to make available all of the events that they needed people to sign up for that were their staff. The staffers could come in and request it. The catering manager could come in and say, yes, you're booked on this date. There was messaging. Having that ability to interact on the front end of a website and start to automate business practices and processes basically was a huge game changer.
00:11:51
Speaker
And so as stephan said there were a number of things that led to us no longer using that today for project management but so many examples of websites where you continue to be able to interact on that front end user experience sometimes in a password protected environment sometimes not and kind of blew the doors open and then.
00:12:10
Speaker
With Brand Live, I think the key there was for years we had said, hey, we're building really cool tools for our clients to innovate, to disrupt, to do things that aren't available. What if we came up with our own idea? So I kept challenging the team, be innovative, be thoughtful. Where can we make investments? And one of the members of our team took me up on that. And this whole notion of adding video to the e-commerce environment is what sort of hatched Brand Live. And then it was pursued pretty aggressively and to the point where
00:12:39
Speaker
We incubated it and then spun that out of Cascade on our software largely. And that company continues to exist today. It's followed a pretty predictable path of ups and downs in the funded startup world with the way the economy has evolved. But there aren't that many companies that can
00:13:00
Speaker
can hatch that and and then continue on I mean re I did kind of recreating our identity after we spun out brand live that took so much of our Energy and our our identity was was not a small challenge But I'm I'm really proud of this team for sticking together and and continuing to find our way and I feel like now we You know, that's a really exciting part of our past but it's by no means defines our our identity at all and
00:13:26
Speaker
You said that term before, Ben, of hatching it out and then talking about the after. It's almost like a postpartum identity issue, right? Like where you've gotten the product out and it's out, now what? Like do we do another project? Do we figure out another thing? Because we let this one go. We need to watch it grow up, you know? So that's interesting. Stefan, maybe you can talk about some of the, you mentioned White Pass and Brand Live.
00:13:55
Speaker
Maybe you can talk about some of the process that we take when it comes to bringing a product to life from the start, whether it's client or internal desire to create that. Maybe on your side for the development side, maybe you can talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I think overall, there's generally some kind of external stimulus that drives a lot of it.
00:14:23
Speaker
we pretty rarely go, let's just do this. It's generally an idea. And when I say external, that's a stretch. I think a lot of times it is client driven, but in the case of White Pass or Brand Live, as a matter of fact, that was internally driven, but there were things that we need.
00:14:39
Speaker
Somebody's got a need and we do it. It's a different process, I think, when we do an internal project like those two. We're a closed loop and we can iterate a little bit faster and the decision-making is a little bit easier. Then moving on to the more common scenario of having that driving force really be a client and then beyond that, it's their users or their clients.
00:15:08
Speaker
It gets a little bit more complicated but i think it's a fairly standard product development life cycle you know it's there's an idea coming from somewhere. We talk about it can sketch out.
00:15:21
Speaker
ideate and prototype and start building it at some point and testing it and and I think we've always kind of instinctually Followed a model where we don't try to get it a hundred percent. Perfect. We don't try to Include every possible feature that everybody can think of It's it's really this
00:15:47
Speaker
fundamental idea now of working on the most important part of it. You know, here's what this really needs to do. Here's, here's what it's being used for. And then we focus on that, um, and, and get it working and then start making it look pretty. And eventually it turns into kind of this, this circular, uh, uh, cycle where
00:16:13
Speaker
you're constantly hopefully improving it and making it better. And, you know, roadmaps are drawn and lists are made of would be nice features, have to have it features, you know, things that are critical and those things are prioritized and added. And when it gets to that, it starts to become a little bit more similar to internal things. I think once we're at that point where we're iterating through
00:16:41
Speaker
ideas that we've already developed and even published or gone live with, with a client. By that point, I think we generally have enough client trust to where it starts to look more like an internal project, but that's, it's, it's, it's just kind of an alchemy that happens where there's an idea that's coming from somewhere and it turns into a thing and, and hopefully the thing works and then it gets better.
00:17:07
Speaker
Along the way, has there been a thing that basically didn't work out? Can you think of a feature or product that we've made where we tried to apply it, it didn't work? Or even maybe better put, it's not that it didn't work out, it's that it turned into something else. We talk about, I'm trying to think of products
00:17:30
Speaker
that started out one thing and ended up turning into another thing, insulin, right? Wasn't insulin or is it, it was like, it was something that was intended for something and discovered it actually worked better for something else. Could you apply that kind of same logic or at least mindset to software and was there one that we've done that turned into something else?
00:17:52
Speaker
Well, I think on the first version of the question where something just ended up, it didn't end up working out. I think again, white pass, you know, that's something that we worked on it for a while. We use it for a while. It was good. It worked. But as I said before, the external tools that were available out there caught up with it and surpassed it in a way to where it didn't make a ton of sense for us to keep
00:18:15
Speaker
churning on it when we just use something else. And so we made that decision to kind of put that aside and use something else. On the second version of your question, I think EG itself is largely that. I know the first couple of sites we did it for, there was such a simple use case. We had clients that didn't want to be trained on using FTP.
00:18:37
Speaker
They didn't have the appetite for the learning curves that were necessary. That's why EG started, but it was this very simple use case. That turned into things like White Pass, which when we first started the EG development, I would have never imagined that it was capable of those type of things. Turned out today, I think the needs that clients come to us with,
00:19:03
Speaker
are sometimes not all that predictable. I think it turns into a brand new thing and morphs all the time. Some of the features that we'll talk about, multi-site. That's something we're working on now. That's why I don't think
00:19:20
Speaker
I don't think that's something we could have foreseen for a while, the need to manage multiple sites within kind of one interface like that. And so I would say that itself is something that at least I didn't fully anticipate. So before we dive into multi-site. Yeah, if I were to, oh, I'm sorry to cut you off there, Simon. And I love thinking about that, right? And when I go back and I think about our first, I believe six months together,
00:19:49
Speaker
and the serious lack of revenue we were able to fetch and the value we were able to convey and deliver our clients and how hard it was in the infant stage to show up with, you know, 22, 25 year old, like making promises and you want how much?
00:20:08
Speaker
And it was really challenging. And I keep telling that story recently where, boy, after 20 plus years, the things we're able to build on top of the 20 years of commitment to this platform is really remarkable in my mind. I'm certainly very excited about it. And it's talking to a lot of my friends in the working
Evergreen CMS - Development and Adaptability
00:20:27
Speaker
world. A lot of them aren't finding a ton of inspiration, perhaps, in their late 40s and beyond. And I just feel like, oh my gosh, each day, each month,
00:20:37
Speaker
We're being faced with a new challenge and able to say, yeah, why don't you give me just a little bit of time and I'll see if I can figure that out and then come back and deliver. Uh, obviously our, our developers are, are Jedi's in their craft, but a lot of that is because we've, we have stayed true and, and, and know this system so well.
00:20:55
Speaker
And I think maybe Stefan can go into this a little bit later, but there's work that happens sort of on the server level for that website oftentimes initially. And then we try and bring that into the core of Evergreen that is available for more of our clients. And so it's this, you know, so much of the world we live in now is planned obsolescence. And I feel like with Evergreen,
00:21:15
Speaker
it continues to innovate and add more value over time. And it's really exciting. So yeah, it is fun to reflect on where we started, how humble those beginnings are and what it's gotten us to today is pretty remarkable. Just that story of perseverance and commitment to the cause and keeping the team focused on that challenge. Yeah. And I would say another more specific example of that
00:21:39
Speaker
Would be yeah i don't remember how long ago ben and i started talking about headless cms and evergreen's potential to fill that that that whole
00:21:51
Speaker
We started talking about it, and I started thinking about it, and we'd already kind of done it. And that's something I didn't expect at all. Looking back at some of the past projects, it effectively had acted as a headless CMS for at least one project, where there was an app out there taking data out of Evergreen.
00:22:12
Speaker
I think it's a great example of something that we certainly didn't intend it to do, didn't know it could do, but our developers had a project with that need and it filled it. That's awesome. Before we go down the rabbit hole of what multi-site is or any other features that we agreed to talk about,
00:22:35
Speaker
At what point, Stefan, are you comfortable talking about products that we're working on? Obviously, if we have a relationship with our clients and we're giving them heads up or cueing them on things that we're doing behind the scenes, that may be a little different, but at what point do you give me the marketer permission to start really promoting a product in its journey?
00:23:02
Speaker
And I love how this is being presented as part of the podcast and just a question for the podcast. But for anybody listening or watching, this is actually Simon asking me this. He's asking the question to me. I'm taking notes. I come from a weird place mentally where, yeah.
00:23:19
Speaker
I come from this place mentally where I've kind of got this fantasy scenario of the idea that really good companies are publishing features that they've had for five years and they've got features already on the books that they're pretty much finished with that you're not gonna hear about for another five years. They're generations ahead of where you're seeing almost this kind of conspiracy theory mindset. And that's kind of my fantasy. And so for me in my head,
00:23:49
Speaker
there's this tension where I realize we have to talk about things and we have to market things, but my default is to not want to do that until something is fully tested and just as secured as we can get it and just as perfect as possible. But like I said before, that's not how we do things. I think when it comes to those external stimuli from clients,
00:24:14
Speaker
We can't do that the client want something they want it pretty much now and we work through that normal cycle until we've got the minimum viable product and we release it and iterate we go through that normal life cycle. On the rare occasion that they are things that are more internally driven.
00:24:34
Speaker
And a lot of those at this point, I think are just things that maybe they haven't necessarily been asked for, but we know they're going to be, and so we're starting to work on it now. I think it probably gets there anyway to where, you know, we start talking about a little bit, we're going to get asked for them, and those things are going to be kind of dictated for us a little bit.
00:24:59
Speaker
long way, long way of saying my deal, when we're when we're completely done with something, but but realistically, I think when we've got that that MVP, at least working in a sustainable way, that we can demonstrate really, you know, I don't, I don't love the idea of talking about things before we've even been able to approach, you know, seeing it and touching it and using it.
00:25:25
Speaker
That's funny because when I was taking those notes just now, I kept thinking, okay, you mentioned multi-site. Can you go ahead and define it then? Tell us all what it is, what it could be. And obviously in a dream world, you would have already had all these definitions, but in reality, there is some gray matter still out there of like,
00:25:51
Speaker
some possibilities of what it could be used for, we haven't thought of yet. Admittedly, listeners, this isn't maybe a fully baked thing, but it is something we're doing and something that is active with some projects currently. We can say that. Maybe, Stefan, you can talk about defining what multi-set is. What is it to the listeners?
00:26:14
Speaker
And it's funny because again, I picture the technical listeners out there looking at us in a way they would look at Apple for finally giving people copy and paste on the second or third version of their operating system for their phone. Because it's not a thing that's not out there. Sites do have the ability to administer content from multiple sites in one interface. But traditionally, we have not. We haven't had that need.
00:26:39
Speaker
But as is often the case, it seems like multiple clients kind of on their own start coming to us wanting, having a similar need. And so multi-site is really just that. It's the ability to administer content or data for multiple sites in one interface.
00:27:02
Speaker
and the complexity or simplicity of that is pretty variable. And that's really something we challenge ourselves with on EG all the time is finding that balance. How can we serve the most common use case while still making the edge case
00:27:29
Speaker
attainable that's inevitably going to come at us and making it to where we're not cutting ourself off from that. Currently, we're down to the level where I think we can present variant versions of content down to the block level, depending on what site you're looking at. But from what I've seen so far, it's flexible beyond that.
00:27:57
Speaker
I think in its simplest form, you're presenting a different layout or look or header or logo, depending on what site is being visited, but you're editing the about page for multiple sites in one place. And then you take that down to a more complex level where you're adding a block to the about page that's going to be viewed on site A, but not necessarily come up on site B.
00:28:22
Speaker
Um, or maybe it's viewed on both, but it looks slightly different or even function slightly differently. Okay. So specific to multi-site and Ben, you may jump in on this one too. Then as a marketer, the next thing, obviously we define it. The next thing would be that we talk about identifying the market. So Ben, maybe you can jump in on that and then add any additional value to that.
00:28:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a great example. One thing that we realized in the brand live example was where we started, our vision for what it was going to be, and then the path that led to where it ended up, very nonlinear. And a lot of that goes down to, hey, I've got a great idea. I'm excited about it. Can I get anyone else excited about it? Hey, here's a process I think could work, but let me go talk to people that actually have to execute on that.
00:29:16
Speaker
And so when it comes to multi-site, there are a couple of examples that really jump out at me. One of those is, hey, do you have an administrative team responsible for managing multiple sites that may or may not be connected from a public perspective?
00:29:28
Speaker
So if you've got a holding company that owns multiple brands that may or may not be similar or even in, even in like most of them are like related industry, but maybe they're not that closely related, but Hey, from an administrative environment or perspective, we've got a team that's managing both sites and we want to make it easy on that. We want to be familiar. We want to cut down hosting costs. We want to, you know, minimize certain just infrastructure level challenges that exist, or if you've got,
00:29:55
Speaker
if you've got like, let's say member areas or secured dealer areas and you want to allow them sort of a broad stroke of access as well. Again, it's kind of an internal need. It's not a public facing need where you're serving that client to say, hey, log into this one place to manage all those different things. And then perhaps the public facing websites may look different. They may have different features and options, different, you know,
00:30:20
Speaker
as Stefan was saying, whether it's a block or from a product mix perspective, comparison capabilities, configurators, all of that could be different. And then on the other hand, let's say that you've got a distributor that's selling very similar products, and then all of a sudden they wanted to go and offer an
00:30:35
Speaker
additional layer of service to their their customers, these brands, and say, not only can we create this distributor level website that has all of our products, but all these products are in the same place. What if we were just to like fork those off and make these brand specific websites again, environmentally, the
00:30:54
Speaker
the folks in the back and managing that content, they've got one source of truth, again, very familiar, administrative environment, very easy. And then you're, you're, you're limiting the amount of ongoing costs and fees associated with hosting and redundancy and those kinds of things. So
00:31:11
Speaker
Those are just a couple of examples of how it can be used dramatically differently, but a lot of that does come down to making it easy on the client and the administration team, and then creating really predictable, rich experiences for the public that's going to be consuming this and or the other members.
00:31:28
Speaker
And that can take on a lot of different shapes and sizes. So this is our constant challenge as a highly customizable software producer is we're not creating standardized tools that we're asking clients to take their whatever size peg and put into our whatever size hole. But instead, we're saying, no, we can really customize this to what you're looking for with these general parameters around multi-site capabilities.
00:31:54
Speaker
And I think for a lot of our clients that are out there saying, hey, you know, Shopify does this, but I needed to do this, or, you know, WordPress does this, but I needed to do this, that we're able to deploy those solutions. But instead of kind of cobbling together a bunch of disparate
00:32:10
Speaker
bits of code that weren't intended to work a certain way and get it to kind of work. We're saying, no, let's do that in a more purpose-built way. And if we can earn that trust, I think over time we've proven we can deliver these really profound
00:32:26
Speaker
scalable, rock solid solutions that as we deploy it and then we get all that valuable feedback from the client, from their users, their members, we can build upon that versus saying, wow, it was pretty miraculous. We got this thing to launch and work at all. Now you want to add more to it? Well,
00:32:42
Speaker
we're not really in a position to do that because the duct tape and baling wire approach we used isn't conducive to that. So does it scale well? Does it attract a bunch of funding and millions of customers? Maybe not, but are we able to look our clients in the eye and say, we can really help add a ton of value and move your organization forward? I think we're in a better position to do that with the way that we build websites. And I know our team takes a lot of pride in that.
00:33:07
Speaker
Yeah, I see how multi-site will be extremely valuable, specifically with the clients that we're working with for it, but also I can see that being a huge benefit to big organizations or other organizations out there.
Multi-Site Capabilities and Comparisons
00:33:20
Speaker
that could come in from, like you said, the environments of Shopify or WordPress, which, good grief. I can only imagine that conversation with any WordPress rep. How many plugins it would take to make that work would just be a nightmare, personally, just saying that part.
00:33:41
Speaker
Stefan, I have a list on my screen of a couple other tools, but I want you to introduce them just so I'm speaking accurately on it. But the next one on the list, Visual Editor. This is another tool that we heard from clients a need, right? You wanna tell us a little about it and where it's at maybe in its life cycle, where we're at on creating that.
00:34:08
Speaker
Yeah, so this is something where I don't know that we did hear from clients specifically that, hey, here's something we want. What we heard was and experienced really was the driving force was the need. I think again, when we started out,
00:34:25
Speaker
the use cases were fairly simple, and we were able to build tools that were simple and easy to use to fill those use cases. And those use cases became more and more complex, and we kept building these tools that were fairly simple and easy to use to do it, but they've gotten complicated and really,
00:34:51
Speaker
The driving force for me was using our own product for some of the more complex projects that we've had to date. And I am actually in there trying to, to put content in or change content. And there's this process where you're going back to the administrative backend.
00:35:14
Speaker
and using these tools that were built for a different use case to go through and find this content you're trying to edit. And you can do it, it's there, but the process really for me did not meet the mark. It was...
00:35:29
Speaker
it wasn't successful to me. And so we started talking and iterating very quickly on a different way to do that, which was, it's funny, Paul likes pointing out that, you know, it was the way EG started, right? Because we forget that, you know, in the very, very beginning, in the first couple of iterations, you essentially edited a site from the front end after logging in.
00:35:53
Speaker
And so the visual editor kind of goes back to that so that if you're on a screen with something that would have you five menus deep in the administrative interface, you can just click on it and edit it right there.
00:36:09
Speaker
And so to put that more succinctly, what we're looking at now is an interface, in addition to the classic administrative interface, where you're able to sign in and then start browsing the front end of the website. And when you come across something, you want to edit it, you edit it. You click on an edit tool at the top of the screen.
00:36:33
Speaker
click on the element you want to edit and click edit and you're there. In that process, I think between now and when someone's actually using it may change and hopefully get even more simplified, but that is it in a nutshell. That actually just adds that layer like you said of simplicity of
00:36:55
Speaker
admin that may not have the experience and knowledge to be able to identify and localize that one element quicker. You said five menus deep or five clicks deep, which on some of our complex sites for you listeners is reality. I mean, that happens a lot where it's a block or a module within a module
00:37:17
Speaker
that actually administers that content. So even for Stefan or myself who didn't build the thing coming in and trying to identify what modules controlling this, where is this image changed can be difficult. And I think the visual editor is really going to be helpful for a lot of admins as they're trying to update content.
00:37:40
Speaker
What's another example? I think there's a lot of ways to accomplish what we're accomplishing where we could probably stay within the administrative interface. But again, I really like the idea of going back to the beginning when
00:37:59
Speaker
There was very, very little training necessary on sites and even through some of the more complicated sites training was pretty easy and we're getting to a point now to whether it's not necessarily true. And I think no matter what way we do it inside of administrative interface.
00:38:18
Speaker
there's going to be too much of a learning curve for my comfort. Anybody can browse their own site. If you can browse the front end of your site and see the information you're looking to edit, and you can edit it from there, that checks all those boxes for me. You don't have to go through the backend and search for it.
00:38:37
Speaker
Yeah, other examples, I guess that we've got the language module on deck. And this is something where we've kind of approached it in a couple of different ways. And I think realistically moving forward, we'll probably still be experimenting with that. I don't know that we found
00:38:59
Speaker
the perfect way to do it because I don't think a perfect way exists. I think that that's probably one of these things that's going to continue to be a bit different per client as per the needs. But that's what it's all about. Again, none of this is one size fits all. This is focusing on the need, the specific need. We've got some parameters that we found fit most of the patterns.
00:39:24
Speaker
But exactly how we execute that is really designed and developed per client. And I think that the language module will continue down that road to be a little bit more tailored per client for now. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Yeah. Our last one that we had listed in there.
00:39:45
Speaker
for features that we kind of have behind the scenes is a topic we've had actually, you were on that episode, but talking about AI, like incorporating AI into Evergreen somehow, maybe you can add to that.
00:40:01
Speaker
Yeah, and it's funny because as I was going through the pre-show notes, that's not a secret that we have pre-show notes, right? Is that taking some of the Hollywood mesh golf? We can edit it out if it is. Going through there, just looking at terminology, I was tempted to change it again because I like Apple's approach where they're introducing all these AI features on their new versions of their operating systems, but they don't say AI once.
00:40:30
Speaker
They're talking about machine learning and large language modules, and it's kind of clever and kind of a cool way to stay away from the trends and things that might change. But we've already been there, so right now we'll just call it AI. And again, what I'm calling it internally so far is AI-assisted editing.
00:40:53
Speaker
I think that might be something we mentioned on that episode where we're talking about AI is, I think there's an initial approach to all this stuff because it can be done and it's so cool just to hit the button and have it generate all your content for you. But that's not how I hope people use it.
00:41:13
Speaker
The real idea here is to have it help you write content. And we do have some pretty exciting stuff in the works where the kind of MVP version of that is pretty much working right now. We've got a working prototype for that.
00:41:32
Speaker
And it's just, uh, it's kind of in the, in the, I don't want to say final polishing stages, but we're polishing that up to make it look pretty and work a little bit better. And in the end, I think we're going to be able to do some pretty exciting stuff. I think, you know, in, in the case of something as simple as a tool to help you write content for a blog, you know, what we're looking at now is, is there's, there's a,
00:41:59
Speaker
There's a way you can generate topics for you and then choose which topic you want to write about. There's so many questions coming into this stuff. What are the topics about? How do we know what to prompt it on the back end to give us topics about?
00:42:17
Speaker
But I think there's some pretty clever things we can do in terms of actually going out and looking at the site that it's editing and having it look at the title and having it look at certain pieces of content to get some context as to what the author might want to write about, look at past blog entries. And so I think there's some things that we can do that hopefully will feel pretty magic to the user.
00:42:46
Speaker
We're doing that with a blog module to start with, just as kind of a proof of concept. And then, you know, we'll be looking, I think at that point for, for some client input and, and, you know, what, what best serves our clients with, with this technique. Yeah. I think, uh, just to educate our listeners on, on some of what you're talking about, especially when it comes to content, I use chat GPT to help produce some content pretty often.
00:43:15
Speaker
But the word assisted in there I think is a key part because I would never and could never just copy and paste what chat GPT produces for me. It takes, I go through it and you have to reread it and you have to edit it again. So it's certainly an assist part that comes in there. And I'll share it probably in the notes here. I'll share it with you guys after the episode.
00:43:39
Speaker
There was a social media post on LinkedIn the other day. 100% was chat GPT. And there's a bunch of words that I know that chat GPT keeps trying to plug into my content. The word delve. We're going to delve into or dive into
00:43:57
Speaker
This journey, it loves the word journey. We're taking this internet journey. Chat GPT pulls these words and they're in there. Also for you listeners, if you're using chat GPT to do social media posts, it really loves emojis. So it's, there's an emoji after every phrase or sentence. Okay. Again, the screenshot I took and I'll share with you guys after is a hundred percent. The guy just copy and pasted chat GPTs.
00:44:24
Speaker
post in there. But there is, it is an art to figuring out how to make it my voice or your voice, Stefan, to make it apply to our product, our business, the words we use. And that's not, that's an art. So it's that AI assist because it really is, it takes a lot more with those prompts to make it really us or unique and inaccurate too. Right. So that's awesome.
00:44:55
Speaker
Yeah. And I think too, it's worth kind of pump, you know, mentioning as Stefan, I think alluded to is that there have been a lot of hype trains that we just never boarded over the years.
Integrating AI into Evergreen
00:45:06
Speaker
And an AI is one of those examples where I said a fever pitch. And for a lot of folks, it's new.
00:45:12
Speaker
Uh, for folks in the industry, a lot of folks in the industry and, and that have been chipping away at the stuff. It's not new, but it's just really accessible. And, and it's, you know, we have access to it, but that's been our challenge always is we're not looking to just, you know, grab headlines.
00:45:28
Speaker
and get the quick easy win or sale, but it's like, how do we meaningfully integrate this and have that small win that then we can parlay into more meaningful updates as compared to just waving our hand in the air and saying, AI, AI, AI, and trying to hook the people that are flowing by at the time.
00:45:50
Speaker
Yeah, I think we've we've arguably left some money on the table over the years, but I like the the much more value based approach to a lot of this new technology in terms of how we deploy it versus a bunch of things that, you know.
00:46:05
Speaker
allow you function but don't allow you necessarily a lot of value. So that's something we struggle with, but I'm excited to see us deploying and integrating AI in ways that we can learn from cleanly and then hopefully evolve how that benefits our clients over time to benefit from some of those efficiencies. But really funny how you talk about how it's got some
00:46:25
Speaker
some big terms it likes to use, right? Business jargon, agency jargon, everything's got jargon, and now it sounds like we've got some chat GPT jargon that we've all got to work hard to not necessarily load up our content, but also kind of identify whether or not we've been using some of these tools. Yeah, and that's a good answer, I think, to some who may question, why is it taking you so long?
00:46:48
Speaker
because we did have conversations when the stuff was really hitting the press and on all the major news networks going, hey, nobody's actually using this yet in a public way. Nobody's at the time, it's not really worked into any kind of blog input tools or anything like that. And we could work it in really quick and we could probably get some good local press at the very least.
00:47:11
Speaker
But A, we didn't really need to, and B, I think one of the benefits of doing business for so long is that we've got some wisdom to understand when we shouldn't do things we can do.
00:47:27
Speaker
And I think this was something that was pretty deliberate on our part to let some of the things mature a little bit, see where some of the pain points are, learn to use the tools out there. I think, again, I think some people could ask, why is it taking so long? Why haven't you done this already? The thing Simon is talking about, and I would add, in summary, that it always puts on the end, you've got all these things that it does that you don't want it to do.
00:47:56
Speaker
Right and a lot of the solutions that I still see out there that haven't really been been changed or they haven't they haven't modified their prompt engineering yet. They don't account for any of that and so.
00:48:12
Speaker
The second question people will ask is, why do I want this built into my blog manager? I can just go to chat GPT and copy and paste it in. Well, the answer is because we can account for some of this stuff and we can build it into the prompt that you're not having to write. We can hopefully build some of that magic into account for those problems and filter some of those things out of the gate without you having to go through months of learning how to prompt engineer to make that happen.
00:48:43
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that brings up another key point here is when we think about what we want these tools to do, we really wanna add that value and we want this thing to work in intentional ways. But what we've talked about almost this entire podcast is what we're building, but a huge value of Evergreen that I think is worth really highlighting here is integration with third-party software.
00:49:13
Speaker
So I think back about one solution we created years ago was integrating this email newsletter module, right? And this wasn't something where we wanted to send emails from our platform, although I think we dabbled in that on a couple of executions. But then very quickly, we realized, oh, with these CAM spam laws, as those came online,
00:49:34
Speaker
we don't want to be in the business of sending them from our system and then potentially getting blacklisted and charged with spam. But what we can do is we can, instead of having the client build, you know, create content on their website and their blogs and their about pages and their, you know, team pages, and then go to, let's say, MailChimp will
00:49:54
Speaker
pick on MailChimp and then use their administrative environment to build out the email newsletter with all very different administrative capabilities. Instead, what we were able to do is say, okay, we're going to actually create a module that very consistently allows you to build a webpage that looks and feels like an email newsletter.
00:50:12
Speaker
And each one is going to have a similar flow. So as you receive these weekly, monthly, you start to know what to expect and how to sift through and get the information you want. We basically gave them this very, what we would consider at least a consistent and predictable administrative environment in Evergreen. And then there was just this prompt to copy all the HTML code that built that page, go over, bypass the actual editor within Mailchimp,
00:50:39
Speaker
and just drop into their HTML code editor, our code, hit save, and then essentially when they would hit send,
00:50:47
Speaker
Mailchimp would rebuild that webpage in a person's email client to look exactly like it did on the website. It would be pulling assets and formatting from our HTML code. Then when you clicked on those links, it kicked you back to the website. That was our goal ultimately was to get them back to the website. That was one that I was really proud of from intelligent way of saying we're going to eliminate or minimize the number of administrative environments that you have to be really adept at using.
00:51:14
Speaker
And we're going to allow you in cases where, hey, we're not going to recreate what, what QuickBooks can do. We're not going to recreate what Square can do. We're not going to recreate, you know, a lot of these other functions that, you know, Salesforce is offering. But we can integrate all of that and perhaps reduce the number of environments that your team has to jump into. And I think that's one, one of the drums that I've been beating over the years that some people get and appreciate. Most don't.
00:51:37
Speaker
I would say, in my opinion, is that we want to make this a pleasurable experience for the administrators of the website. They're in there all day, every day in some cases. And it needs to work and function smoothly. And so if we can do this really smart integration where it doesn't make sense to build. And what we found over the years, too, I think Stefan might have some comments on this is oftentimes like, hey, the easy button is let's integrate third party software. All right, we did that. Great. It's done.
00:52:03
Speaker
Now, we've used it, now I want to do this. And sometimes what we find is, well, we can tweak the integration, or at some point we can simply get rid of that third-party software and really create that purpose-built solution for them. But it's really nice to say, hey, we want to meet you where you're at. We're not going to force you to use our code if it doesn't make sense.
00:52:22
Speaker
But if we can prove to you that we're the right bet to create this user experience you're looking for administratively or to serve your users, we're here for it. And so I think that's been another huge value is yeah, we can build the product you bet. But if it doesn't make sense to for whatever reason, then integration is another huge strength that it's worth noting. Yeah, for sure. It's an interesting balance because I think
00:52:46
Speaker
On a very technical level, when we're coding stuff out, we have an unusual phobia of dependencies, I think.
00:52:55
Speaker
to get really deep into the geek pool with a lot of solutions out nowadays, everything is about dependencies. And there's just megabytes to gigabytes worth of dependencies for anything you want to do on a coding level. And we've done, I want to say a good job so far staying away from that. And we kind of, where it makes sense and it makes sense in a lot of cases,
00:53:20
Speaker
we try to do it ourselves. We've got 20 years of examples to pull from, so it's usually not something where it's just a brand new thing that we've never done before. But that's on a technical level. On a higher level where there's just more functionality for something like chat GPT or MailChimp or a lot of these solutions out there, Postmark,
00:53:45
Speaker
there's just a higher level of functionality that it obviously makes more sense just to take advantage of that. But it is interesting then that sometimes it kind of comes full circle and where we were getting that third party functionality and essentially using it by consuming it, sometimes it does make sense to start to roll that back into something where we're replicating that and fine tuning it and coming up with their own version depending on the client needs.
00:54:15
Speaker
That's awesome. I appreciate that insight about the fact that we don't jump at every opportunity that we hold back. Use the word wise, Stefan. I honestly, again, new employee here of three years, I would say mature. I've worked at some other companies that did just jump at every little
00:54:40
Speaker
new bell and whistle. And I think it screwed them, like overall. And then going all the way back to the beginning of the episode, we talked about longevity of employees. We talked about Michael and Paul being here for so long. I think a lot of that maturity, a lot of what they've learned, what you guys have learned are what keep people around, right? Because I think if we jumped at every little bell and whistle, I did this thing and then it failed. Man, no one's going to want to stick around for that.
00:55:08
Speaker
No one wants to help support that. They're gonna move on to the next thing. So again, new guy here. Kudos for you guys keeping Cascade mature, if you will. But definitely kind of having that trajectory on how we look at products, how we unveil products, how we build products for our users. So I think that's a good place to stop for this episode. Listeners, I really appreciate
00:55:38
Speaker
I'll just say Ben and Stefan coming in and talking about this topic as we continue to evolve, as we continue to build products. And Stefan, thank you for allowing me to ask you questions on
00:55:52
Speaker
the air, even if it's recorded about where we're at with stuff. And then hopefully our listeners will be able to hear the success. We'll check back with these specific products, but probably in the future, we'll maybe unveil them as well. So listeners, thank you for joining this episode, episode 10. Thank you, Ben and Stefan for participating. Thanks for having me on, man.
00:56:22
Speaker
Excellent. Thanks, gentlemen. Talk to you all soon. Bye.