SaaS UI Teardown: With The Team From Dollie

Dollie is a cloud platform builder that sits inside WordPress, giving you a plethora of new possibilities and functionalities. Peter conducts a SaaS UI teardown with the team from Dollie, providing suggestions and offering advice on how to improve their user interface.

[00:00:00] – Peter

Okay, so today we’re looking at a UI teardown. We’re going to be taking a look at Dollie, which is a platform for managing cloud services for WordPress hosts. I’d like to introduce Stewart and Bo from Dollie. Do you want to just give us a quick intro and correct me or give a better explanation of what it is that Dollie does?

[00:00:28] – Stuart

You got it right. Hi, guys. My name is Stuart. I’m the head of customer success at Dollie, which is a cloud platform builder that sits inside of WordPress. So you are able to do many things within Dollie that you previously weren’t able to do inside the WordPress ecosystem. You’re able to manage your client sites if you’re an agency. You’re able to sell your products and launch pre-built sites if you’re a theme or plugin developer. And you’re able to build websites as a service. So you can sell an automated turnkey solution, which cells are pre-built website out of the box on the WordPress environment. In a nutshell, there’s a lot more things to add to what you can do within Dollie, but they’re the bare bones of what we’re achieving here.

[00:01:32] – Peter

Great stuff. Who would you say is your main or your biggest kind of customer profile? Would it be agencies or hosting providers?

[00:01:47] – Stuart

I’ll pass the buck onto both of that one because as head of product, he’s worked on this for a long time and he knows the WordPress environment inside and out.

[00:01:57] – Bowe

Well, I would say, hey, I’m both. I’m the Co-founder and head of product and the audience finding an audience. If you built a very kind of insane product in terms of what you can do, you also end up with several different target audiences. But we mostly target people that are entrepreneurs in the WordPress ecosystem. So you could be an agency or you could just have a good idea, for example, sell premade sites. And often also these kind of businesses overlap. So you have an agency that has some sites that they offer to their clients, or you have, for example, a theme marketplace author who has like, a premium workplace plug in or theme.

And then we allow them to automate selling of those sites into our private cloud so they don’t have to think about infrastructure or taking care of all of the technical stuff behind the scenes. They can just create pre-made sites based on their premium products and sell them. So it’s a wide market, but what we’ve seen so far is a lot of agency interest and also the site builders that just want to take their products and take them to market much quicker using our turnkey cloud platform. So that’s the target audience.

[00:03:06] – Peter

Fantastic. Okay, thanks, guys. We got a really good, clear idea of Dollie. So I’m going to jump in and what we’re going to do is basically go through this onboarding process, sign up and onboarding and just do a general tear down of how that process looks. Are there any challenges? Is there any friction? Is there anything that we can improve or suggest? So I’m going to share my screen, and what we’ll do is jump into that right away. Here we are on the Dollie homepage.

So I’m going to go straight into Get Started for free. Get Started and we’ll sign up. So I’m going to put in my business details here. So we’re user active. We are actually an agency. I kind of fit the profile, but we don’t do website development. We’re just product designers, so we stick to design. So I’ve got my business name. Business URL. Now, what describes your business model best? I’m going to pretend that your agency fit right. That we are a website developer and we manage and create a lot of WordPress sites for our clients. So I want to say agency great. So far, so good.

[00:04:30] – Peter

It’s quite clear. Okay. I didn’t put in the right format for URL, so usually what I do here is I go get our one. I copy and paste it because, I don’t know, sometimes I’m not super clear if it wants http did you notice that I was just trying to enter my URL into the back? So that’s weird. I wouldn’t necessarily move text field. That’s why that happened, because we moved the text field out of the way. So that’s a little bit of a strange treatment, I’d find, but I understand why and how that happens.

That should work. Now, if I was going to suggest something to bring this page to life a little bit, I would maybe just create some little tiles for graphics for each of these to make it a bit more friendly. I mean, the design is already pretty nice. The other thing that threw me straight away was the login create Your Account. Okay, we’ve got tabs there. And then this is a step up for the process to add your business details, then add your account. On very first glance, it looked a little bit like another tab to me.

[00:05:47] – Peter

I’d indicate that this might be step one, step two, even if we put a little one and a two in there, just for those kind of really quick moments where you do something rather than take a lot of time to read it, which is obviously how most people fill these things in. Okay, so it looks like this form is validating before I’ve entered anything. It’s a little off to see that much red. Is that correct, or have I done something that triggered validation?

[00:06:16] – Bowe

It’s like a multi step form. And I guess what happened is because it didn’t allow the URL in the first step, it validated the whole form. So I guess, Gabriel, what we can do is just make sure to clear the validation after the first page. So that’s actually a good tip. We’re making notes as well. That’s why it’s a good superstar.

[00:06:35] – Peter

Yeah. Okay. Do you use a WordPress plugin to do the validation? Something like there was one called Contact Form Seven, and there are a bunch on there. There’s gravity forms, heaps of plugins for this. Do you use one yourself?

[00:06:49] – Bowe

Yes, we use ACF Forms, which is like an advanced custom field extension, and we use it quite heavily. And also here during the sign-up, we’re very kind of picky with the URL and everything because it’s very important during the onboarding. So we’ve been maybe too strict. But for example, if you would give in a wrong URL, it would actually lead to problems during our onboarding. So that’s the reason. But it still can be a bit more user friendly, I’d say.

[00:07:17] – Peter

Yeah, okay. Yeah. And just for the validation, without moving the form fields. Fields feel a little strange to me. I mentioned that already, but I don’t know if there’s something you can do to adjust that. So business details and then we’re still on business details. So there’s a few steps within. You see, this is three steps now, isn’t it? So I would update the stepper and add the steps in. Oh, no, we’re on your account. We are on your account.

[00:07:52] – Bowe

Yeah, it’s more the CSS. The highlighting is not clear enough.

[00:07:54] – Peter

Yeah, right. Because I think the previous step had a grey background slightly on the previous steps. Maybe that’s slightly different, how the active step is treated. So I’ve hit Create account and it’s just currently loading. I assume there’s a bunch of things that happen on the server to get my account set up. Right. Okay. Dollie, your agency platform is almost ready. With Dollie, you get the freedom to build your platform inside any WordPress environment. 100% under your control is called the Hub. Okay, nice. Freedom to build your platform inside any WordPress environment.

Okay. I like the way on this left-hand side here, you have the Hub explained. That’s really nice. It’s powered by WordPress 100% white label. Add new features to your Hub by installing any WordPress plugin. You own all of your customer data, hosted anywhere you like. Use WooCommerce for selling and integrate into any existing WordPress installation. I feel like this sounds more like features than the Hub explained. These seem like benefits of what you can do. I know you briefly explain this to me, but I’m still thinking, what is the Hub? It sounds like it’s one WordPress instance where I can manage many other WordPress instances.

[00:09:32] – Bowe

Yeah. What you touch upon now, and that’s also why we’ve gone through several onboarding stages where to define because people come into Dollie with an idea. Right. I want to start selling cloud services, so I want to do hosting, I want to do agency work. And then what’s unique about Dollie is that if you sign up for a managed host, like WP Engine or Flywheel, you sign up and then you’re stuck in their dashboard. And if you say, hey, I want to resell hosting, then that host has to say, okay, well then you have to use, for example, stripe for your billing because that’s how we’ve built it with Dollie.

We say we give you a worker’s install or we give you the Dollie Hub plugin and then you can use WooCommerce or any other plug-in to build it out. And that concept of your hub that needs to be explained during onboarding. But then the problem is how far do you want to go with explaining it because you also want them to actually continue. So we’ve had first an accordion with like what is the hub, what can you do? How does it work?

[00:10:37] – Bowe

But then people start to click on that and then you realise that they would get confused because they would either not understand all of the moving parts yet. So we’ve tried to kind of give you the benefits where it’s like, okay, this is what you can do and this is how great it is. But then hopefully once they log into their hub and that’s why we have the recommended box on the Quick Start. So we try to make it almost like okay, even if you don’t know what you’re doing, then just choose Quick Start or recommend it. But I agree with you and internally we’re still trying to figure out what is the right balance between informing the user but not making them drop out because they get confused. So it’s an ongoing problem for us, to be honest.

[00:11:22] – Peter

Yeah, I would present it in the term use cases. Am I able to go back to previous here to see you cannot go.

[00:11:36] – Bowe

Back to your account is already created so that previous button doesn’t have to be there actually. It should only show up if you.

[00:11:43] – Peter

Go to the second the next step. So what I would say here is the previous step. It was actually step one of the creating the account which it asked which best describes you when you’re on the thing and there’s agency or that I think this could be a point where you present use case a little more. So if that was redesigned and they were tiles and you had a bit more space in each one, you could say please select which of the following best describes yourself and they could be presented as use cases.

So we’re an agency, we would like to use Dollie to create and manage other WordPress instances from one WordPress account using Dollie that almost gives a description with the use case and the Identifier. Because the nice thing about having them identify themselves, what they do is that it enables you to understand how they’re going to do it, but it also gives you an opportunity to explain their use case and get it clear in their mind as they go. I think you might have touched on that in that step already, but I think you could elaborate on it and I really like it’s great that you’ve listed out the features.

[00:13:04] – Peter

It just shows how flexible this is once you get in. Once you get in. So one of the things that I find, and this could just be me, and I might not be a representative all of your ICP’s, but the description of building the platform, this is quite an ambiguous term. So with Dollie you get the freedom to build your platform inside any WordPress environment. And I wondered if this could be elaborated on. What kind of platforms do we have? And there might be three types. Okay.

A managed hosting provider, an agency managing websites. And then you’ve got, I think you mentioned one or two more. It could be a visual or design way to elaborate on what we mean by platform. What could platforms be? Okay, where would you like to set up? Your hub will be built inside any WordPress site. Choose to set up a works best for you the way you have the text is very descriptive and it’s quite clear. So I think you’ve done a good job and copy and I imagine you’ve iterated a lot on this to get to this stage.

[00:14:22] – Bowe

Oh, yeah, I think it’s been like several revisions. Stuart and I have been sweating bullets, words, commas sentences, trust me, you should have seen our first onboarding. It’s like we made decisions for the user and everything you just said before. I completely agree. It’s just that also it’s so hard to then identify the use cases because people also often don’t know what they want. So if then their use case is not described, they think, oh, it’s not for me.

So I think the more we understand our users, the better it is for us to revision our onboarding. And I think we’re improving. But like you say, it’s also very clear just by going through this with you that there’s opportunities to kind of further identify these use cases as we grow. And it’s exciting but also frustrating because sometimes you look at your own process and you’re like, we dropped the ball with this part.

[00:15:22] – Peter

Yeah, well, what jumps out to me is that I get the impression that because it’s so flexible and customizable and the use cases vary. I haven’t seen anywhere where it says it’s super flexible. I’m sure you have this in your copy somewhere, but hey, it’s really flexible. So if you’re not one of these use cases, maybe you present them with the four. And there’s other saying, other use case. Dollie is very flexible and customizable to fit your unique requirements, whatever they might be.

There might just be a way to explain that because the thing that stood out to me a lot is this Word platform. And then the question that jumps up is what kind of platform? But maybe if we explain this platform can kind of be what you need it to be, it’s very flexible and customizable and it could even be a subheading that you have explained. Create the unique platform based on your requirements and needs to manage or administer your environment using the following features or the following key.

[00:16:45] – Bowe

I think also now that we’ve called it a platform builder, we’re trying to lean into that a bit more so that then once you define, hey, if you ever built a page in WordPress, what if you could build a platform in WordPress? So then just like a page is very generic, a platform can be generic as long as they understand I build it and it’s mine. And that is also it’s complicated because we are a platform allowing you to build a platform and we give you a WordPress site that allows you to launch WordPress sites.

So there’s all of this inception type of magic going on that once they understand that, like if they understand to install elementor inside a WordPress site to build pages, we can use the same kind of terminology to say install Dollie inside a WordPress site and build platforms. So we’re getting there. It’s an ongoing kind of terminology. I’d say terminology that people understand is.

[00:17:41] – Stuart

Hard and the updated website that we’re working on at the moment as well, it clarifies a lot of that. So we’ll have case studies or use cases where some of the use cases will then be agencies, wire, spenders, enterprise, etc. And we’ll also have a features page in there as well so you can actually quickly see what can you actually do with Dollie.

[00:18:08] – Peter

Fantastic, that sounds like a great move. Yeah, so they’ll kind of get more insight even before signing up. It’s just kind of getting clearer for them there. And I see even this subheading, if you can imagine that you can build it with Dollie. You have referred to the flexibility in the builder and WordPress cloud platform. So yeah, I see you’re learning how to articulate it in a way that your ideal customers will understand. Okay, so I love the fact that we’ve got a recommended quick start set up. So that’s what we’re going to do. Start with a beautiful pre made Hub hosted in our Dollie cloud for free. Great. Okay. Hub is your word for this, right? So I just wondered if because we’re using platform and then the platform is called Hub yeah, we could maybe say.

[00:19:11] – Stuart

That your agency platform.

[00:19:17] – Bowe

Because there’s also and this is once again you picked that up very quickly and also there’s an idea behind it because for them, in our opinion at this moment, that could change. But they also have to learn that it’s not just the Hub that they use. The Hub is the customer facing environment they built, but then their platform also has moving parts behind the scenes. So there’s an additional management layer to kind of manage the sites that are launched through the Hub.

This is also one of those things where if you would call everything platform or everything Hub, which is what we did in the beginning, there was no distinction. So then the products or the use cases would start to overlap. So in a redesign, we basically look at the moving parts, right? You have Dollie cloud, which is where the sites go and you’re up where you build the platform. And that together is your white label platform. And also there we are in the process of kind of structuring that so that if someone says, okay, what are the cloud features? Like, how fast is every site that I host?

[00:20:21] – Bowe

How to connect my white label domain? That’s a Dollie cloud feature. And then it says, how do I charge for my services? We say you charge through your Hub by using ecommerce. So we kind of started preparing for that distinction, but now, since we don’t have that terminology and that logic across our entire sales funnel, you ask a question like, okay, but what’s the platform? What’s the Hub? Aren’t they the same? No, but yes.

[00:20:53] – Stuart

It’S one part of the platform, which is the biggest thing.

[00:20:58] – Peter

As you guys are explaining that and talking to me, I got this impression that what would be really powerful is like a graphic that represents how this all sits together. And you see you’ve got this nice WordPress graphic here. It could almost be something to replace this, and you still use the word, the familiar WordPress logo, but then you just show a bit more of how that ecosystem fits. Like the Hub, you’ve got the platform, you’ve got WordPress, then you’ve got any add ons. It might not be your hero image, but it could be something coming further down here.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the company segment, but I’ve always thought they’ve done an amazing job on this. And let’s just say I haven’t seen their website for a while, but they’re always good at showing because they have a very complex thing to articulate. So it’s connecting data streams with platforms and then assimilating that data. So you even see that graphic here is an attempt to show a case segment, is activating something in the middle of here, connecting with other apps and grabbing data. And as you go through, they do a really nice job in articulating the flow of how things sit and work together.

[00:22:13] – Peter

So it’s a good one to use for inspiration. I love communicating complex things in the most simple and visual way.

[00:22:25] – Bowe

I love that because what we could do is we have our logo, the Dollie logo, and then there’s a rotation of elements that build your platform, right? So if you structure that maybe horizontally, where it’s like, okay, it’s your business idea, it’s Dollie, and then there’s like the moving parts and together is the ultimate tool for your WordPress business. That visualises, that. So. I love that idea.

[00:22:49] – Peter

That’s nice. Yeah. And it shows the power of Dollie being in the middle of this kind of ecosystem of functionality. Right.

[00:22:55] – Bowe

I love that.

[00:22:56] – Peter

Also, I just noticed you do have this nice thing recommended for, so that’s lovely. Okay. Right. You’re making all the efforts to explain and be clear about things. That’s nice. I think there is some nice graphic here. WordPress graphic. Maybe there could be a little graphic for each of these. But, I mean, that’s just embellishing visual elements for something that you’ve already got here. So I’m going to go through the rest of the launch process. I’ll try and move pretty quickly. Okay, so you’re all done. Let’s launch your hub. We’ve got everything we need to set up your hub. All that stuff is pressing create my hub button below. I wondered if on the previous step, a video might be nice or at some point a video that does a bit of a- 

[00:23:43] – Stuart

It’s coming Peter!

[00:23:54] – Peter

Okay, I’m going to create my hub. So this screen I think we don’t need. You see how that screen we were just on, we didn’t need the sidebar anymore and we didn’t need the header anymore. So sometimes what we do when we’re taking users through a SaaS onboarding flow is we make a really big deal of the welcome and the congratulations to just really confirm that they’ve just gone past a really important step. And it also makes them feel good to try to uplift them psychologically and get them pumped for the next step, which usually has some friction as well.

So boost them up, get them ready for the next step. The screen is great because we’re seeing looks like I’m landing in my hub here, so yeah, here you’ve got nice messaging. So awesome news, peter, your hub is launched and is ready to be used. Go ahead and log into your brand new hub to continue building your platform. Okay. I love this visual. It’s making it personalised. I can see my company name here as well, so that feels exciting to your user. There’s some personalization you’ve got a video already.

[00:25:09] – Stuart

What you didn’t see as well is once the hub was being created, there was a video embedded in that creation page. So that was the easter egg.

[00:25:21] – Peter

Yeah, I paused it because it came on loud and I didn’t want it. Is it the same as this video here?

[00:25:28] – Bowe

It’pre-launchings almost the same, but basically if you go to onboarding very fast because behind the scenes you sign up, then behind the scenes we start pre launching the hub. So we use our own Dollie cloud to set up the WordPress environment, do everything. And that usually takes about one and a half minutes. So if someone goes to the onboarding very quickly, it could be that it takes 20 seconds to fill in. What choose your hub? What’s the hub setup you want? And then they were looking at a loading spinner for a minute. So we added a video, which is not essential, but it’s me just saying, hey, welcome to Dollie.

We’ve made a massive upgrade to our platform, Dollie 2.0. We cannot wait to see what you’re building. And then you get redirected and the video doesn’t have to play. It’s just kind of like a placeholder just to get an impression. And then once they actually land on this page, we already start educating. Right. And we’ve hidden all of the distractions as much as possible, so you can not miss the law, but sometimes people do. So we actually added two, which is frustrating from a design perspective, but we saw that people just sometimes they just misread or they just don’t see buttons.

[00:26:48] – Bowe

It’s just the way it is.

[00:26:50] – Peter

Yeah, can be the case. Okay, so I like this. You’ve got some tutorial here straight away or tutorial. So that’s really nice. Let me just see this. The is place where your customers so this is you again, you’re presenting a roof or think, okay, that’s great. Really nice to see that. And you’ve differentiated the buttons, so that’s really cool too. I think I can probably start navigating around a bit already here. Does it let me if I click on things yeah, exactly.

[00:27:27] – Bowe

Now you can see that this is our cloud dashboard. And now once you’ve logged in for the first time, we actually have a different layout because then you’ve logged into your hub and then you’re more familiar with the product. So then we kind of give you more things to do. But yeah, the idea is definitely that once people get familiar, dashboard is probably a good idea because once again, we kind of show you, okay, this is how everything works together.

[00:28:01] – Peter

So you see I see it’s great because I’m able to navigate around a bit and see everything you’ve got and then also see your kind of start your subscription upgrading process there. I’m just going to jump back. How do I get back to the part manage your Dolliehood? So that is the part where I have to set up my login.

[00:28:29] – Bowe

Now you get the advanced view because the first screen you saw is basically login for the first time. You navigate it away, which is fine, but the second time you come back, we assume, okay, now I’m familiar with that. This is a WordPress install. And then we show you info. Right. Which plugins do you have active? Which steam are you using? And you can use the power tool. So we use Dollie ourselves to build out the experience. So the dashboard you’re looking at now, that’s actually kind of like an advanced use case of using your own product, which is super fun to use your own product. Yeah.

[00:29:02] – Peter

Right. So this is your platform that you created using Dollie for the main customers. I like it. How important is it that you get users logging into their hub? The question that’s on my mind right now is why are we showing them so much and allowing them to navigate across everything? Is it to get them familiar or should we prioritise getting them to log in and the minute they log in, then we show them everything. What’s the reasoning and thinking around that?

[00:29:40] – Bowe

I think what we should probably do is make that third step. So you have signing up, create your hub, then log into your hub. Maybe that should be mandatory. So like you say, there’s no chance because maybe if you’re like a curious user, like you start clicking on stuff and then you kind of forget about your own hub and you’re like, okay, what’s next?

Right, because now if you click on the login to your hub, you actually complete the onboarding. I think at that point we got you to the point where you should be at least vaguely familiar with like, okay, this is where I built my platform. So you’re right. I guess that third step with the login, your hub is ready log in. It should probably still hide the sidebar and the top bar so that you kind of have no options to navigate away.

[00:30:26] – Peter

Yeah, and I think it could even be a step where we just removed this whole part of the experience or we postpone it until they’ve logged in. Because the thing is, the user has already created one login. Right, I created one for Dollie. And now the user must create the next login, which is for their hub.

[00:30:48] – Bowe

Yeah.

[00:30:52] – Stuart

This user interface here is the cloud, which connects you to the hub as well. That makes sense because you don’t want the whole part of your business to be inside a WordPress admin plugin. Because then if you can’t get into your WordPress admin, then you have a security issue. So this is the cloud part of the product.

[00:31:21] – Peter

So I would maybe need to explain.

[00:31:23] – Stuart

That a bit more.

[00:31:27] – Peter

I’m actually still finding it a little confusing and I’m wondering if this login here is a WordPress login.

[00:31:33] – Stuart

Yes, it is.

[00:31:35] – Peter

And this login here is my Dollie login, which is a cloud login.

[00:31:43] – Stuart

Yeah, exactly.

[00:31:47] – Peter

I’m going to log out and just see, remind myself how have I logged out there?

[00:31:55] – Stuart

Yeah, click confirm and log out.

[00:31:58] – Peter

Yeah, it’s quite interesting. There’s no way to get around having two logins, right? Is that correct? Because they have to have a WordPress login and then that has to be seen within.

[00:32:10] – Bowe

Yes. What we’re now doing is we’re actually trying to solve some of these issues with a better email welcome series so that once they’re out of this dashboard, they get an email saying like, hey, you just signed up for Dollie, this is the cloud dashboard. But don’t forget, you also launched your own hub, which is where you built your platform. And then once again we explain. Watch the video. Here it is, here you can find it. And now you can see now. You’re basically in your own hub and that is the WordPress site. So if you’re familiar with WordPress Now, I think you’re like, okay, I’m more familiar with what’s going on here. But you’re right, this is the critical on boarding step that if they don’t they don’t get that or they get lost, they don’t convert, they don’t come back, basically.

[00:33:00] – Peter

Yeah, I think it feels a little overwhelming. But then again, I know that your ICP, they’re Savvy, they know WordPress. They’re very familiar with this. So they’re familiar with having a lot of WordPress logins for many different websites of the admin.

[00:33:23] – Stuart

If you compare to some of the big WordPress cloud hosting providers out there, like you get Flywheels and your WP engines, et cetera, you have a login to their cloud environment first and then you have separate logins to each of your sites within there. So that journey is fairly similar to the hosting kind of competitors that we have.

[00:33:52] – Peter

Once you log in here, it’s a WordPress site and you can just get your password right? You can set a password for that user. Sorry for this is the one we use. We use this one now.

[00:34:10] – Bowe

Peter, if you log in here, it feels natural, right? It’s like, okay, I’m just logging into SiteGround and I guess if SiteGround Now would tell you, okay, let’s build your white label hub to sell your side ground sites. I guess you’re already more familiar because I’m already inside ground and now they have a service where they allow me to maybe white label or resell sideground sites. What’s complicated with us is that we kind of make that mandatory because that’s the whole product we have, right?

So if you come into Dollie and we don’t call ourselves hosts and you’re not a customer with us, and then we launch a WordPress site for you and that is then something you have to work with. That’s a lot of things to kind of grasp at once, but there’s also no way for us to not do that because that’s our product. So it’s definitely we lose people that don’t know what they’re doing at the same time. People that are experienced or they’re selling WordPress solutions, they get it very quickly and they are extremely excited because they’re like, oh, this has never been done before. And they love it.

[00:35:21] – Peter

They see the flexibility. Yeah.

[00:35:26] – Stuart

There is no in between right now. Right. If you’re a knowledgeable, experienced WordPress developer designer, then they do get it and they love it because this feels like the future of WordPress for a lot of our users and it allows them to really leverage what they’re doing already and take that to the next level. The challenge right now is definitely for someone that isn’t really that familiar with the WordPress environment to allow them to still do this and develop their business within Dollie using the WordPress environment.

[00:36:09] – Bowe

Now that I see you stuck on this page. I also realised that what we would like you to do now is to figure out yourself, how can I play around with this product? How can I start launching sites inside my own hub? So I can see, for example, what my customers experience. So, yeah, that’s the right place to go. And here, this is where you would land if you would have not have navigated away during that, right?

[00:36:38] – Peter

Yeah, this feels like the right place to land. And this is presented nicely. One thing that I was thinking about is like, okay, so where’s my Dollie cloud? But we stayed in the same tab the whole time, right? And I think there’s one way that might help differentiate is to present the cloud in a different tab. I could go to my cloud here, right?

[00:37:08] – Bowe

Yeah, that’s actually such a simple solution that you provide and that’s actually brilliant because then you just keep them there and they don’t feel like they’re still in the same environment. We make it very clear we should also add an icon there when you log in. So it’s like an icon of like a new window so they realise, okay, I’m actually going to my hub and I’m not still in the cloud dashboard. That’s a brand new suggestion. I love that.

[00:37:34] – Peter

The one thing that SiteGround would present this in a similar way. So I’m clearly logged into the hosting provider and then if I want to go to one of these websites, this website is currently down my personal one because we focused on our one. But now I’m coming around okay, yeah, this is a different account. Simple thing like that, it just gives you differentiation between the platforms.

[00:38:10] – Bowe

The homepage of our cloud dashboard, we do have the same as they do, because you’ll see, we do show like, okay, this is your hub. And you see, we do that where it’s like, okay, this is your hub, and manage it at this point, but we don’t identify itself as a host. So that distinction of like, okay, I’m hosting websites with Dollie, in this case your hub, it’s not clearly fine or defined.

And there’s other complexities here as well, because if you decide to install the hub somewhere else, for example, inside ground, you could download the Dollie hub plugin, go into one of your SiteGround sites, activate it, and you would have the same experience. So that’s even weirder because you have a hosted SiteGround site and you’re launching sites into the daily cloud hosted with us. So that’s also an enterprise set up that’s very popular, which is also unique because no one does that.

[00:39:13] – Peter

Yeah, it’s so flexible. There’s so much you can do. And if you start restricting things to one use case, you almost focus on that one at the cost of others. It’s almost like if you do do that, then you want to do several versions of Onboarding and change it completely for each person. But while still letting them know about the flexibility of the platform. You can see a few places where there might be a bit of ambiguity, a little overwhelmed with the amount of options.

So my thinking would be to how we simplify that journey and reduce the amount of information that the users having to take in. Also, that second sign in, I think we could present that in a clearer, more focused way because it seemed like it was one thing in the middle of a whole experience that I’d landed in. Yeah, those are the things that jump out. But I think with this you have a complex product, complex flow, so it’s something that always needs a lot of thinking of work. I appreciate the complexity of the problem as well.

[00:40:40] – Bowe

What I hope personally for our product is that once we get a bit more exposure to people that are making videos and are enthusiastic about a possibility that they just say, hey, here’s a YouTube tutorial about setting up an agency platform using Dollie. Because then we have a third party just saying like, that they know their audience, right? Because if we do a demo for a WordPress plug in creator, we just make a demo for plugin demo and we show them, okay, this is your plug in.

You build a Blueprint so your customers can launch a site with your plug in and then you install your licences or anything that you want to do custom. And if you’re a WordPress developer, you build your platform in WordPress. So within 20 minutes they’re like, okay, so I can install the Dottie plugin into my customer dashboard, activate it, and then they can start launching sites. And we’re like, yes. So they’re like, okay, this is the best thing since sliced bread. I love it. But if you come in with none of those expectations or use cases, then we have to guess, what’s your skill level?

[00:41:45] – Bowe

What do you want to do? And we actually had conversations, do we even want these people to convert if they have no idea what they’re even doing? Because they will take up our resources and the cloud infrastructure that we built and we’ve seen them not being able to execute, which sucks for them. But then you would almost have to say, like, hey, maybe define what you’re trying to do and just get familiar with building your business with WordPress and then we’re there for you as soon as you’re ready. But you cannot say that to your customers because it’s not nice. So it’s a challenge.

[00:42:24] – Peter

Yeah. One thing we worked on quite a lot was with a recent SaaS, the platform was qualifying. They got a really good idea over years. They got a really good idea of which customers were successful, which were a good fit. And there are actually a couple of profiles that would often try the products. They thought they’d be a good fit, but they actually weren’t and they couldn’t ever become successful. So as part of the onboarding, we kind of qualified them and there were one or two instances where we actually gave it was an automated flow and depending on what they clicked on was like, do you have this, do you have this platform that you can integrate with?

And do you have this other there were two integrations required and if they didn’t have either platforms, we served them up with a screen that said, thanks, but actually you’re not going to be a good fit for the product, we’re sorry. It would just really help them reduce this resource requirement that was occurring. And then also the other end of that was a disappointment.

[00:43:28] – Stuart

I do definitely think that having some familiarity with WordPress in our current iteration is almost a prerequisite right now. If you have that knowledge of working within the WordPress environment, then you’ll get to grips with this fairly quickly. What we also offer as well is a white glove onboarding process. So during your 21 day trial, if you want to jump on a call with us and discuss your use case, what you’re looking to do within Dollie, then we’ll actually help you develop that in the first 21 days so that you have an MVP there, ready to go, ready to rock and roll, ready to start selling to your clients.

We found that really hugely successful for the clients that have worked with us to expedite the process so that they can really get to know the nuts and bolts within Dollie and put together what they want within the environment and they’re like, wow, this is something that could have took twelve months, has been done within twelve days. It’s crazy.

[00:44:39] – Peter

The benefit of that process is that you get better and better idea of the real ideal fit customers by doing that over and over again and it becomes clearer and clearer. So that’s great. Hey guys, we’re going to have to wrap up. I’ve really enjoyed taking a look at Polly and discussing it with you, so thanks for your time and thanks for sharing it with us. You’ve got a great platform. It looks like it’s feature rich and very complex and super flexible. So I’ve enjoyed taking a look and wish you all the best on iterating and improving as you always do.

[00:45:12] – Stuart

Yeah, pleasure, Peter. Thank you very much.

[00:45:14] – Bowe

Thank you, Peter. That was incredible to be helpful and it was a joy to walk through our complex product with you. So thank you so much for your time and your feedback. It was amazing. I loved it.

[00:45:23] – Peter

Thank you, guys.

Final Words

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