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Episode 48: Jeff Matson

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Manage episode 205497810 series 1452699
Content provided by Topher DeRosia and Nyasha Green, Topher DeRosia, and Nyasha Green. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Topher DeRosia and Nyasha Green, Topher DeRosia, and Nyasha Green or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.

Hallway Chats: Episode 48 - Jeff Matson

Introducing Jeff Matson

Jeff Matson is the head marketing guy for Gravity Forms and he looks after everything marketing and sales related. Jeff is married to Jamie and they have two dogs. When not working at Gravity Forms or on his own side-projects, Jeff likes to hang out in his own garage arcade.

Show Notes

Website | jeffmatson.net
Twitter | @thejeffmatson
Work Twitter | @gravityforms
Work Facebook | facebook.com/GravityForms

Episode Transcript

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 48.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Jeff Matson. Jeff is a head marketing guy for Gravity Forms and he looks after everything marketing and sales related. Jeff is married to Jamie and they have two dogs. When not working at Gravity Forms or on his own side-projects, Jeff likes to hang out in his own garage arcade. Hey, Jeff.

Jeff: Hey, how’s it going?

Tara: Welcome, nice to see you here. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Jeff: Sure. I work for Gravity Forms and we make a form plugin if you’re not familiar with us or anybody who’s listening is not familiar with us. My job here is to make sure that we get our name out to as many people as possible and we sell as many copies of Gravity Forms as possible.

Tara: Well, I think probably of any form plugins out there, Gravity Forms, just about anybody who works with WordPress has heard of it. Hopefully, that makes your job a little bit easier. Can you tell us about your background? How did you end up there?

Jeff: So my background is ranged from a lot of different places. I’ve done everything from being a jeweler’s assistant, I worked with hosting, I owned my own cell phone repair shop at one point, I worked at an arcade. I did all kinds of different things. But what mostly brought me here was a few years ago, I decided that I wanted a change and I was living in Charlotte, North Carolina at the time and I decided to go work for InMotion Hosting and moved six hours away to Virginia Beach. At that point, I kind of worked my way up at InMotion, and because of my huge passion for WordPress, I became kind of the top WordPress guy over there. Eventually, I kind of outgrew them a little bit. Awesome company, just kind of not the direction I really wanted to be in, and I decided to make a change. Then I got a job offer to work with Gravity Forms. They just happened to be here in Virginia Beach so it worked out really well. Decided that about three years ago and I’m still here.

Tara: Are you a programmer/developer or just– where do your tech skills lie? You’re doing marketing so that’s why I’m asking this question.

Jeff: I’m the developer. Over the years, I do a lot of freelance work on the side as well, various Gravity Forms development-type projects. Even in the marketing side here I do a lot of development, whether it be just anything that we need to do on the site or just anything that I need to tweak. Even if I find a bug real quick at Gravity Forms or something, I’ll usually just fix it myself. Really how we operate a lot here is basically that if you have the skills to do it, just kind of do it. It’s a lot faster sometimes to just fix a quick bug that you find, rather than submitting a ticket and all those other things. That’s kind of where I am right now. Before I switched over to the marketing role, this is actually my second role here at Gravity Forms, previously I did documentation. I did a lot of our developer documentation or userbase documentation to make sure that everybody was able to use the product to the best of their ability. But after a little while, we decided that we maybe need a little bit of an extra push in marketing. Because of that, they decided that I was the best fit for that and offered me the position about six or eight months ago. I decided, yeah, let’s go for it.

Liam: Yeah, I like that. That’s an interesting story of transition, how it all came together for you. Tell me a little bit about documentation? You’ve mentioned that you’re a developer by background. Documentation is one of those things that we all love when it’s done well, we all curse when it’s terrible and it’s such an unsung task because nobody really wants to write it but everybody wants it well-written. Tell me about what you process of creating documentation and how did you go about that and how do you address it for something like Gravity Forms which can be used in a very very simple way? “I just need a contact form that’s well-made and can handle this newsletter subscription.” Of course, there’s other users who are using Gravity Forms in hugely advanced ways. Your documentation, I imagine, has to speak to both at some level. How did you go about that?

Jeff: It’s actually a really, really good topic and I can go on all day about it, but I’ll try to do the cliff notes a little bit is that it’s basically kind of all about segmenting your users a little bit. Your developers will kind of figure things out on their own, they’re a lot easier to work with. As long as you make sure that the code has all been documented, as well as the hooks are somewhere so that they can easily just do the search for, A, if I need to do something for submission, then they can be able to find it. But a lot of this traffic that you’re going to get the documentation is through Google searches. As long as you can get those right keywords to kind of push them in the right direction, whether it be something like, “How do I set up notifications on my forms?” Making sure that you have those kind of keywords that are going to pop up on the Google search because they’re likely going to search Google before they search your site, is key, as well as having all of that dev documentation. While it’s important to have plenty of developer documentation, it’s even more important to document inside the code a little bit better as well as just kind of at least have something there for developers. But your users, you do want to do a lot more hand-holding, a lot more tutorial-like aspects to different things. If you can kind of walk them through something, then they’re really going to be able to find exactly what they’re looking for.

Tara: Yeah, I’ve spent some time in the documentation there as a user and found it pretty helpful. I’m going to ask about your marketing role a bit and I’m probably– I don’t know if I’m going to hit on a sensitive point so we’ll see if we’re going to have to edit this out afterward or not. [laughs]

Liam: She’s setting you up, Jeff. She’s just setting you up.

Tara: I am setting you up. So you started out in this marketing role for Gravity Forms which I imagine is the longest standing form plugin that’s used. I don’t know in terms of installs how it stands but a few years ago, some other companies decided to jump into the forms space because there’s space there, right, and they also make forms, so they’re making some headway into the market. How is that for you coming in? I’m just making a guess that you’re coming in because the competition has grown for premium form plugins, how are you finding that role and am I correct in that assumption?

Jeff: Yeah, things have changed over the years, especially— Gravity Forms came out eight or nine years ago, and there really wasn’t competition out there. It really didn’t exist, there were a few others form plugins, of course, Contact Form 7 is around forever. But me transitioning into this role, a lot of it was just kind of we’ve never had a marketing team before. So it’s kind of like, “Why are we not doing this? There’s more competition coming out there and we need to stay on top of things.” We definitely have the highest install base at this point. We are, I think, the largest premium WordPress plugin on the planet at this point. Still, we’re running on millions of sites, even as being a premium plugin. But there’s been a lot of this kind of need to kind of get everything together as a single point of contact for marketing. Previously, it would be a lot of talking to different people or just different kind of partnerships that kind of happen organically or any kind of word of mouth type of thing, because we haven’t really did anything prior to me coming to this position other than just word of mouth. It’s great that you are able to go as far as we were with just word of mouth, it’s kind of mind-blowing. And how we decided that, well, if we can go this far with just word of mouth, what happens when we kind of have a direct contact and go to these conferences to handle sponsorships or affiliates or anything like that. And it turned out to be a really, really good thing, it’s taken a lot of the burden off of the founders, of course, from things like handling sponsorships or even paying the sponsorship bills or billing route. At some point, when you start growing larger, and larger, and larger, you can’t always have the founders of your company being the face. They just kind of decided that this was the best way to do this, I was already very much inserted into the WordPress community, very much known for Gravity Forms and it just made perfect sense just to kind of roll me in and that way I can consolidate things, I can kind of make sure our budgets are okay, know where to spend money, where not to spend money, better tracking and data that’s worth it.

Tara: That makes sense. Thank you for answering that, that’s kind of what I assumed, thanks.

Liam: Jeff, I’m going to change gears on you here. You’ve shared with us a brief version of your career and where you got to where you are now, we heard in the introduction that you’re married. I wonder if you can share with us your definition of success, be it personal or professional or a mixture of both? How do you define success?

Jeff: We actually talked about this at WordCamp US, me and you did.

Liam: We might have, yes.

Jeff: People do things for different reasons, some people do things for money, some people do things for fame. Some people do things just for their own personal ego. For me, a lot of things are ego-driven, my success is based on a lot of how people look at the things that I’ve done and how I feel about things that end up. It’s a lot more than just money, it’s very much, if I can make this awesome product or be part of this amazing product, this huge, huge thing, I need to tell everybody I work for Gravity Forms and this is what I did. Especially since moving into this marketing role where previously, in documentation, you don’t really get any of that, it’s kind of just the endless drone of the same thing over and over again, documentation is absolutely never complete. With this, now that I transitioned over this marketing role, I’m able to now see the direct results of my actions. If I did certain things and I made certain changes and I go, “Oh, wow, last month, we just bumped sales 10%.” Or something like that. Wow, this is something that I did, this is something that I can own and I can claim and just kind of bask in the glory of it. That’s kind of how I define success. I define success in a way that is more along the lines of, “Are you happy with what you’re doing?” I’m the kind of person that I can have billions and billions of dollars in the bank, but if I made them on selling machines of war or something like that, then I’d never ever be happy, I’d never consider myself successful. I’m the kind of person that really has to do what they love or else they just have to stop doing.

Tara: Where do your arcade games fit into this?

Jeff: My arcade games actually kind of are still a little ego-based. These people come to my house and they’re like, “Wow, you’ve got an arcade at your house?” It’s partly that, but mostly the arcade games are kind of a, go back to my childhood. I grew up in Laconia, New Hampshire a little bit so I was about 10 years old. I grew up from a really, really poor family. In Laconia, New Hampshire, there’s actually the largest arcade in the world is a little further away from the Weirs.

Liam: Been there, played it.

Jeff: It’s unbelievable, it’s a great place, it’s my whole childhood right there. It’s awesome that I could play. Since I’ve spent a lot of time there, especially since we were a really poor family, sometimes really cheap, unbelievably cheap. You can get tokens upon tokens, upon tokens for 20$ and then you have a coupon for buy 20$ get 20$ free, we’d always have these coupons. That was the one thing that I could do and it kind of put me on an even playing field with everybody else. I had a big cup of tokens and the other kid that’s got good money and stuff like that, their parents are doing well, they all have those same tokens, and then I can stomp that kid on a high score. It really kind of made me realize that even though if you grow up a little disadvantaged or anything like that, you can just find those things that really make you stick out. Because of my love for arcade machines when I was a kid, I had loved it ever since. Now, of course, I spend more time fixing them than I do actually playing them but at the same time, it’s just something that– being able to play these games and to take a piece of history and to teach something that I truly remember from being a kid as being one of the greatest parts of my childhood is a huge deal.

Tara: Is there a category of game? I went to arcades a bit on the shore when my kids were little and I relate my life to this one game, there’s the spider and you have to stomp on it. It pops up all the time, there’s one popping up and you have to step on it. I always think life’s like that, things always popping up and you have to stomp them down, especially in business. Is there a category of game that you like and one that would translate to your view on life, I guess?

Jeff: I don’t know if there’s– I think the best way to translate that would be high scores. When I play video games, I’m not huge into online games or anything like that, I’m just trying to beat the high score, I’m just trying to beat whoever else was the best. And I think that’s really where I come in is that my goal is always just to overcome whatever I can and just to work really, really hard at a high score. I was just up in Chicago at the Galloping Ghost, which is actually the second largest arcade in the world. One of the reasons I went to WordCamp Chicago last weekend. I sat there for a solid two hours and continuously just tried to work on this high score on a game called Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo. It’s a little bit of a mouthful but it’s that working really hard at that high score and getting so close and keep working on it, and keep working on it, and keep working on it is, I think, where I really translate life in general. I think those are the kind of games that I’m looking for usually. I don’t really do like to take redemption games or anything like that, I’m always looking for that game that I can look at and say, “Alright, this guy worked really hard for this high score, let me see if I can beat it.

Tara: Yeah, little competitive.

Jeff: It’s like that in my house. I recently just got a Megatouch, you’ve probably seen them in bars a lot in the ’90s, like ’90s and 2000s. That’s now the thing in the house where my wife actually grew up– she had an alcoholic father and she grew up spending a lot of times in bars and that’s the one thing she remembers from her childhood, spending a lot of time sitting down and playing that Megatouch at the bar. So I got her one and now it’s been a continuous war at the house all the time over those high scores. And I get home and I look at a score and I say, “Oh, she beat me last night. This is crazy.” I will sit there for an hour just trying to beat her high score. Those are the kind of games, it’s mostly just anything I can beat high score is great. If I had to pick a genre, it would probably be shoot ’em ups or space shooters and stuff like that, but definitely, anything that I can work really hard at for a good high score.

Liam: Two questions for you, Jeff. One, what is your favorite game that you have currently? And two, Do people like to come over to your house and play video games because it never sounds like, “We’re just going to spend a few hours relaxing and playing video games.” It’s, “Must get high score.” [laughter]

Jeff: Favorite game of mine is a game called Viper Phase 1. It actually happens to be the first game we ever got, we found it in a junkyard for $60. This is a game that is exceedingly rare There’s a game called Raiden that came out many years ago that was a little bit of a space shooter type of game. It was more just an airplane shooter, the original ones were, but Viper Phase 1 is the same game but it’s in space. But we managed to find it and I did some work to it, got it up and running, and we still have that same game and I absolutely love it. It’s exceedingly rare and I’m so glad that I have that game. I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of it, we’ve even talked about it a little bit, we’re like, “We can sell this thing and buy a pinball machine I can’t get around, there’s a little bit of emotional connection I think. And people will come to the house and play games, they usually can’t come anywhere near a lot of our high scores, that’s unbelievable. [laughter] Both me and my wife play these games and between me and her, we’re always kind of back and forth on high scores, we’re taking different positions on these games. But yeah, when people come in-house, not a chance. [laughs] They’re just playing games, having fun and that sort of thing.

Liam: Jeff, let me change gears on you. Let me ask you about your biggest challenge to date. What’s been the biggest challenge you faced? And it can be personal, professional or otherwise. And how did you address it, or if it’s an ongoing challenge, how are you coping with it, how are you addressing it? How are you trying to get over it, how are you trying to get a higher score on that challenge?

Jeff: I think there’s a few different challenges that I have to kind of put as my greatest ones and just kind of put have them in different boxes. One of the problems is that I have severe ADHD, as well as severe panic disorder. So what happens is I’m freaking out, I’m looking at everything else and it’s causing me to have panic attacks regularly throughout the day. Crazily enough that I’m a marketing guy, I’m very introverted which is weird but somehow it works and they put me on my own and it goes. But that’s one of them and that’s kind of something that I deal with every day, I’ve just kind of learned to have different coping mechanisms with things like that, different ways to relax. Things like Adderall are great for ADHD and everything, keep it really focused. Other challenges are kind of a dent to myself. Being that guy that’s always trying to beat that high score, I’m always trying to beat my own high scores, too. That’s kind of where it’s both a blessing and a curse where I’m always trying to make everything perfect, when in reality, sometimes I just have to step back and go, “This is good enough.” When I write code, I will go over iteration after iteration after iteration just trying to make the perfect thing. If I can shave this tiny, tiny bit of performance off of it, I definitely will. But if I can just make this a little more user-friendly or just a little more appealing than my high, I’ll definitely do so. And a lot of times, I have to just stop. Usually, I do that, I just set a deadline on something and say, “Keep pounding away until the deadline. Once you hit the deadline, you have to break, there’s no option.” I think those are the two biggest things that I kind of struggle with a little bit. But I make it work and I think, at the same time, while they’re challenges, they’re still parts of my personality that make me who I am and actually make me as productive and successful as I am.

Liam: Yeah, I love that embrace of the challenges that you’re facing and from what you shared with us, your capacity to figure out, I’ll call it a coping mechanism. It sounds like it’s more of a way to help you flourish and coping sounds like it’s negative and it sounds like more you’re buttressing yourself to empower yourself, and I like that. Thank you very much for sharing that. I’m going to go ahead and ask one more question and maybe I’ll steer it around a little bit here. You’ve talked about marketing and this is going to be a little different, Jeff, but you talked about marketing and how you liked getting those wins for Gravity Forms and they’re measurable, right? Sales are up or sales are down, that kind of thing. What’s your favorite thing to do within your new marketing role?

Jeff: I think my favorite thing is to chat with people like you guys, it’s to be able to connect with different people and have the ability to do some traveling the WordCamps and to speak and really just share my knowledge. It’s something that I really enjoy doing quite a bit. In terms of more the everyday type stuff, I think the biggest thing I enjoyed doing is finding the answers in the beta. There’s always some sort of data that you can find and answer it if you dig hard enough. What I’m trying to figure out, a different way to do something or if I’m trying to figure out if something that I’m doing is working or why it’s maybe not working. If I can sit and dig through data for hours and hours and hours, I’m actually pretty happy. I think really just the number-crunching is the thing that I really enjoy, especially because once I find that answer, I’m yelling at the office. Everybody knows that I found my answer because I’m like, “I found it!”

Tara: I’m going to ask you a different question now and it’s about advice. It sounds like you have traveled at half and I appreciate your sharing. I feel like I know you pretty well just in terms of your personality, based on how you approached these video games and all the things that you do and describing the struggles that you’ve had, I appreciate you sharing those with us. Along the way in getting to where you are, have you had some advice that you’d share with us that has had an impact on you and that you’ve incorporated into the way you do things?

Jeff: There’s two things. There’s, Alex would tell me all the time, he’s one of the founders of Gravity Forms and usually who I report to most of the time, he’ll tell me over, and over, and over, “Just get it done. It’s not going to be perfect, just get it done.” That’s something that I really try to think about every day is how can I just get this done and get it shipped and get it out there? Another thing that I really learned, it’s not necessarily as much of a piece of advice as it is just guidance was that a little over a year ago, thanks to my friend Kiko, I was able to climb Camelback Mountain. I was completely out of shape, it was absolutely a horrible mess. I was maybe a tenth of the way up there, I was like, “I’m done. Turn around, it’s not going to happen, I’m way out of shape. This is not for me.” He looked at me and he goes, “Can you take another step?” And me being a little bit of a smartass to him, I said, “Yeah.” I took one step and I was like, “Alright, I’m done. Turn it around.” He goes, “No, no, no. Keep going. Keep taking those steps.” I learned that my limitations really aren’t what I think they are. A lot of the times, my brain is stopping me and saying, “No, you can’t do this, you can’t do this.” But once I had the assurance that I wasn’t going to be allowed to fail, that I could trust somebody enough to say, in this case, that if I fell over or something bad happened, that he was going to carry me down the mountain. It was a little bit of a middle finger to him of saying, “Alright, whatever. I think I ended up all over so you’re going to have to carry me down.” Saying things like that. But as I was getting up there, I started realizing, I am really going a lot further than I thought. I thought I’m an absolute winner and I wasn’t even close, and I made it up that mountain. I think that really changed something in my head to the point that I was like, there’s really people who don’t realize what their limitations are. Their limitations that they think exist really aren’t there. As long as they keep pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing, there’s really no limitation.

Liam: Yeah, I think I would very much agree with that. Yes, at some point, there is a limitation but it’s nowhere near as close as our own limitations think they are. The fears and anxieties we have, the internal trust we cause ourselves. And I love that, just get it done, I just love that. My wife’s side of the family, I think it’s my wife’s grandmother, had this phrase, “If it’s worth doing right, it’s worth doing badly, just get it done.” Kind of addressing it from a different standpoint and I just love that, that it is very easy to want perfection and perfection’s great but not always possible.

Jeff: I think one of the reasons I actually try to be so perfect about everything is I was told for so long, “Do it right. If you’re going to do something, do it perfectly, do it the right way, not the bad way.” My dad used to always talk to me about that. I’m in tech, I find faster and easier ways to do something. That’s what I made my entire living off of is finding faster and easier ways to do something. He absolutely hated that growing up. Because if he’s like, “I need you to write this paper.” I’m like, “I’ll find a way to automate it. I’ll find a way to do something, I’ll write a little program in my graph calculator to do my own work for me.” He wasn’t a fan of that. I think that kind of sucks but I think, in tech, we have to learn more to just get it done. As we do that, we can always iterate, we can always change, but getting it done is that first step.

Tara: What an excellent segway to the fact that we’re done. [laughter] It’s been great, though. It’s not been a just get it done thing. I really enjoyed hearing your story, Jeff. Thanks so much for sharing with us. Can you tell people where they can find you online?

Jeff: They can find me usually on Twitter at @TheJeffMatson. You can also find me posting on the Gravity Forms Twitter or Gravity Forms Facebook, as well as Jeffmatson.net, is my site. I don’t update it too much but you can find a little bit more about me and kind of what I like to do there.

Tara: Great. Thank you so much for sharing your story.

Jeff: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.

Liam: Jeff, thanks for your time today. It’s been an absolute hoot. Have a great one.

Jeff: Thank you, bye.

Tara: Bye.

Liam: Bye-bye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

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When? This feed was archived on May 15, 2018 10:06 (6y ago). Last successful fetch was on November 18, 2023 09:52 (4M ago)

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Manage episode 205497810 series 1452699
Content provided by Topher DeRosia and Nyasha Green, Topher DeRosia, and Nyasha Green. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Topher DeRosia and Nyasha Green, Topher DeRosia, and Nyasha Green or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.

Hallway Chats: Episode 48 - Jeff Matson

Introducing Jeff Matson

Jeff Matson is the head marketing guy for Gravity Forms and he looks after everything marketing and sales related. Jeff is married to Jamie and they have two dogs. When not working at Gravity Forms or on his own side-projects, Jeff likes to hang out in his own garage arcade.

Show Notes

Website | jeffmatson.net
Twitter | @thejeffmatson
Work Twitter | @gravityforms
Work Facebook | facebook.com/GravityForms

Episode Transcript

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 48.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Jeff Matson. Jeff is a head marketing guy for Gravity Forms and he looks after everything marketing and sales related. Jeff is married to Jamie and they have two dogs. When not working at Gravity Forms or on his own side-projects, Jeff likes to hang out in his own garage arcade. Hey, Jeff.

Jeff: Hey, how’s it going?

Tara: Welcome, nice to see you here. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Jeff: Sure. I work for Gravity Forms and we make a form plugin if you’re not familiar with us or anybody who’s listening is not familiar with us. My job here is to make sure that we get our name out to as many people as possible and we sell as many copies of Gravity Forms as possible.

Tara: Well, I think probably of any form plugins out there, Gravity Forms, just about anybody who works with WordPress has heard of it. Hopefully, that makes your job a little bit easier. Can you tell us about your background? How did you end up there?

Jeff: So my background is ranged from a lot of different places. I’ve done everything from being a jeweler’s assistant, I worked with hosting, I owned my own cell phone repair shop at one point, I worked at an arcade. I did all kinds of different things. But what mostly brought me here was a few years ago, I decided that I wanted a change and I was living in Charlotte, North Carolina at the time and I decided to go work for InMotion Hosting and moved six hours away to Virginia Beach. At that point, I kind of worked my way up at InMotion, and because of my huge passion for WordPress, I became kind of the top WordPress guy over there. Eventually, I kind of outgrew them a little bit. Awesome company, just kind of not the direction I really wanted to be in, and I decided to make a change. Then I got a job offer to work with Gravity Forms. They just happened to be here in Virginia Beach so it worked out really well. Decided that about three years ago and I’m still here.

Tara: Are you a programmer/developer or just– where do your tech skills lie? You’re doing marketing so that’s why I’m asking this question.

Jeff: I’m the developer. Over the years, I do a lot of freelance work on the side as well, various Gravity Forms development-type projects. Even in the marketing side here I do a lot of development, whether it be just anything that we need to do on the site or just anything that I need to tweak. Even if I find a bug real quick at Gravity Forms or something, I’ll usually just fix it myself. Really how we operate a lot here is basically that if you have the skills to do it, just kind of do it. It’s a lot faster sometimes to just fix a quick bug that you find, rather than submitting a ticket and all those other things. That’s kind of where I am right now. Before I switched over to the marketing role, this is actually my second role here at Gravity Forms, previously I did documentation. I did a lot of our developer documentation or userbase documentation to make sure that everybody was able to use the product to the best of their ability. But after a little while, we decided that we maybe need a little bit of an extra push in marketing. Because of that, they decided that I was the best fit for that and offered me the position about six or eight months ago. I decided, yeah, let’s go for it.

Liam: Yeah, I like that. That’s an interesting story of transition, how it all came together for you. Tell me a little bit about documentation? You’ve mentioned that you’re a developer by background. Documentation is one of those things that we all love when it’s done well, we all curse when it’s terrible and it’s such an unsung task because nobody really wants to write it but everybody wants it well-written. Tell me about what you process of creating documentation and how did you go about that and how do you address it for something like Gravity Forms which can be used in a very very simple way? “I just need a contact form that’s well-made and can handle this newsletter subscription.” Of course, there’s other users who are using Gravity Forms in hugely advanced ways. Your documentation, I imagine, has to speak to both at some level. How did you go about that?

Jeff: It’s actually a really, really good topic and I can go on all day about it, but I’ll try to do the cliff notes a little bit is that it’s basically kind of all about segmenting your users a little bit. Your developers will kind of figure things out on their own, they’re a lot easier to work with. As long as you make sure that the code has all been documented, as well as the hooks are somewhere so that they can easily just do the search for, A, if I need to do something for submission, then they can be able to find it. But a lot of this traffic that you’re going to get the documentation is through Google searches. As long as you can get those right keywords to kind of push them in the right direction, whether it be something like, “How do I set up notifications on my forms?” Making sure that you have those kind of keywords that are going to pop up on the Google search because they’re likely going to search Google before they search your site, is key, as well as having all of that dev documentation. While it’s important to have plenty of developer documentation, it’s even more important to document inside the code a little bit better as well as just kind of at least have something there for developers. But your users, you do want to do a lot more hand-holding, a lot more tutorial-like aspects to different things. If you can kind of walk them through something, then they’re really going to be able to find exactly what they’re looking for.

Tara: Yeah, I’ve spent some time in the documentation there as a user and found it pretty helpful. I’m going to ask about your marketing role a bit and I’m probably– I don’t know if I’m going to hit on a sensitive point so we’ll see if we’re going to have to edit this out afterward or not. [laughs]

Liam: She’s setting you up, Jeff. She’s just setting you up.

Tara: I am setting you up. So you started out in this marketing role for Gravity Forms which I imagine is the longest standing form plugin that’s used. I don’t know in terms of installs how it stands but a few years ago, some other companies decided to jump into the forms space because there’s space there, right, and they also make forms, so they’re making some headway into the market. How is that for you coming in? I’m just making a guess that you’re coming in because the competition has grown for premium form plugins, how are you finding that role and am I correct in that assumption?

Jeff: Yeah, things have changed over the years, especially— Gravity Forms came out eight or nine years ago, and there really wasn’t competition out there. It really didn’t exist, there were a few others form plugins, of course, Contact Form 7 is around forever. But me transitioning into this role, a lot of it was just kind of we’ve never had a marketing team before. So it’s kind of like, “Why are we not doing this? There’s more competition coming out there and we need to stay on top of things.” We definitely have the highest install base at this point. We are, I think, the largest premium WordPress plugin on the planet at this point. Still, we’re running on millions of sites, even as being a premium plugin. But there’s been a lot of this kind of need to kind of get everything together as a single point of contact for marketing. Previously, it would be a lot of talking to different people or just different kind of partnerships that kind of happen organically or any kind of word of mouth type of thing, because we haven’t really did anything prior to me coming to this position other than just word of mouth. It’s great that you are able to go as far as we were with just word of mouth, it’s kind of mind-blowing. And how we decided that, well, if we can go this far with just word of mouth, what happens when we kind of have a direct contact and go to these conferences to handle sponsorships or affiliates or anything like that. And it turned out to be a really, really good thing, it’s taken a lot of the burden off of the founders, of course, from things like handling sponsorships or even paying the sponsorship bills or billing route. At some point, when you start growing larger, and larger, and larger, you can’t always have the founders of your company being the face. They just kind of decided that this was the best way to do this, I was already very much inserted into the WordPress community, very much known for Gravity Forms and it just made perfect sense just to kind of roll me in and that way I can consolidate things, I can kind of make sure our budgets are okay, know where to spend money, where not to spend money, better tracking and data that’s worth it.

Tara: That makes sense. Thank you for answering that, that’s kind of what I assumed, thanks.

Liam: Jeff, I’m going to change gears on you here. You’ve shared with us a brief version of your career and where you got to where you are now, we heard in the introduction that you’re married. I wonder if you can share with us your definition of success, be it personal or professional or a mixture of both? How do you define success?

Jeff: We actually talked about this at WordCamp US, me and you did.

Liam: We might have, yes.

Jeff: People do things for different reasons, some people do things for money, some people do things for fame. Some people do things just for their own personal ego. For me, a lot of things are ego-driven, my success is based on a lot of how people look at the things that I’ve done and how I feel about things that end up. It’s a lot more than just money, it’s very much, if I can make this awesome product or be part of this amazing product, this huge, huge thing, I need to tell everybody I work for Gravity Forms and this is what I did. Especially since moving into this marketing role where previously, in documentation, you don’t really get any of that, it’s kind of just the endless drone of the same thing over and over again, documentation is absolutely never complete. With this, now that I transitioned over this marketing role, I’m able to now see the direct results of my actions. If I did certain things and I made certain changes and I go, “Oh, wow, last month, we just bumped sales 10%.” Or something like that. Wow, this is something that I did, this is something that I can own and I can claim and just kind of bask in the glory of it. That’s kind of how I define success. I define success in a way that is more along the lines of, “Are you happy with what you’re doing?” I’m the kind of person that I can have billions and billions of dollars in the bank, but if I made them on selling machines of war or something like that, then I’d never ever be happy, I’d never consider myself successful. I’m the kind of person that really has to do what they love or else they just have to stop doing.

Tara: Where do your arcade games fit into this?

Jeff: My arcade games actually kind of are still a little ego-based. These people come to my house and they’re like, “Wow, you’ve got an arcade at your house?” It’s partly that, but mostly the arcade games are kind of a, go back to my childhood. I grew up in Laconia, New Hampshire a little bit so I was about 10 years old. I grew up from a really, really poor family. In Laconia, New Hampshire, there’s actually the largest arcade in the world is a little further away from the Weirs.

Liam: Been there, played it.

Jeff: It’s unbelievable, it’s a great place, it’s my whole childhood right there. It’s awesome that I could play. Since I’ve spent a lot of time there, especially since we were a really poor family, sometimes really cheap, unbelievably cheap. You can get tokens upon tokens, upon tokens for 20$ and then you have a coupon for buy 20$ get 20$ free, we’d always have these coupons. That was the one thing that I could do and it kind of put me on an even playing field with everybody else. I had a big cup of tokens and the other kid that’s got good money and stuff like that, their parents are doing well, they all have those same tokens, and then I can stomp that kid on a high score. It really kind of made me realize that even though if you grow up a little disadvantaged or anything like that, you can just find those things that really make you stick out. Because of my love for arcade machines when I was a kid, I had loved it ever since. Now, of course, I spend more time fixing them than I do actually playing them but at the same time, it’s just something that– being able to play these games and to take a piece of history and to teach something that I truly remember from being a kid as being one of the greatest parts of my childhood is a huge deal.

Tara: Is there a category of game? I went to arcades a bit on the shore when my kids were little and I relate my life to this one game, there’s the spider and you have to stomp on it. It pops up all the time, there’s one popping up and you have to step on it. I always think life’s like that, things always popping up and you have to stomp them down, especially in business. Is there a category of game that you like and one that would translate to your view on life, I guess?

Jeff: I don’t know if there’s– I think the best way to translate that would be high scores. When I play video games, I’m not huge into online games or anything like that, I’m just trying to beat the high score, I’m just trying to beat whoever else was the best. And I think that’s really where I come in is that my goal is always just to overcome whatever I can and just to work really, really hard at a high score. I was just up in Chicago at the Galloping Ghost, which is actually the second largest arcade in the world. One of the reasons I went to WordCamp Chicago last weekend. I sat there for a solid two hours and continuously just tried to work on this high score on a game called Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo. It’s a little bit of a mouthful but it’s that working really hard at that high score and getting so close and keep working on it, and keep working on it, and keep working on it is, I think, where I really translate life in general. I think those are the kind of games that I’m looking for usually. I don’t really do like to take redemption games or anything like that, I’m always looking for that game that I can look at and say, “Alright, this guy worked really hard for this high score, let me see if I can beat it.

Tara: Yeah, little competitive.

Jeff: It’s like that in my house. I recently just got a Megatouch, you’ve probably seen them in bars a lot in the ’90s, like ’90s and 2000s. That’s now the thing in the house where my wife actually grew up– she had an alcoholic father and she grew up spending a lot of times in bars and that’s the one thing she remembers from her childhood, spending a lot of time sitting down and playing that Megatouch at the bar. So I got her one and now it’s been a continuous war at the house all the time over those high scores. And I get home and I look at a score and I say, “Oh, she beat me last night. This is crazy.” I will sit there for an hour just trying to beat her high score. Those are the kind of games, it’s mostly just anything I can beat high score is great. If I had to pick a genre, it would probably be shoot ’em ups or space shooters and stuff like that, but definitely, anything that I can work really hard at for a good high score.

Liam: Two questions for you, Jeff. One, what is your favorite game that you have currently? And two, Do people like to come over to your house and play video games because it never sounds like, “We’re just going to spend a few hours relaxing and playing video games.” It’s, “Must get high score.” [laughter]

Jeff: Favorite game of mine is a game called Viper Phase 1. It actually happens to be the first game we ever got, we found it in a junkyard for $60. This is a game that is exceedingly rare There’s a game called Raiden that came out many years ago that was a little bit of a space shooter type of game. It was more just an airplane shooter, the original ones were, but Viper Phase 1 is the same game but it’s in space. But we managed to find it and I did some work to it, got it up and running, and we still have that same game and I absolutely love it. It’s exceedingly rare and I’m so glad that I have that game. I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of it, we’ve even talked about it a little bit, we’re like, “We can sell this thing and buy a pinball machine I can’t get around, there’s a little bit of emotional connection I think. And people will come to the house and play games, they usually can’t come anywhere near a lot of our high scores, that’s unbelievable. [laughter] Both me and my wife play these games and between me and her, we’re always kind of back and forth on high scores, we’re taking different positions on these games. But yeah, when people come in-house, not a chance. [laughs] They’re just playing games, having fun and that sort of thing.

Liam: Jeff, let me change gears on you. Let me ask you about your biggest challenge to date. What’s been the biggest challenge you faced? And it can be personal, professional or otherwise. And how did you address it, or if it’s an ongoing challenge, how are you coping with it, how are you addressing it? How are you trying to get over it, how are you trying to get a higher score on that challenge?

Jeff: I think there’s a few different challenges that I have to kind of put as my greatest ones and just kind of put have them in different boxes. One of the problems is that I have severe ADHD, as well as severe panic disorder. So what happens is I’m freaking out, I’m looking at everything else and it’s causing me to have panic attacks regularly throughout the day. Crazily enough that I’m a marketing guy, I’m very introverted which is weird but somehow it works and they put me on my own and it goes. But that’s one of them and that’s kind of something that I deal with every day, I’ve just kind of learned to have different coping mechanisms with things like that, different ways to relax. Things like Adderall are great for ADHD and everything, keep it really focused. Other challenges are kind of a dent to myself. Being that guy that’s always trying to beat that high score, I’m always trying to beat my own high scores, too. That’s kind of where it’s both a blessing and a curse where I’m always trying to make everything perfect, when in reality, sometimes I just have to step back and go, “This is good enough.” When I write code, I will go over iteration after iteration after iteration just trying to make the perfect thing. If I can shave this tiny, tiny bit of performance off of it, I definitely will. But if I can just make this a little more user-friendly or just a little more appealing than my high, I’ll definitely do so. And a lot of times, I have to just stop. Usually, I do that, I just set a deadline on something and say, “Keep pounding away until the deadline. Once you hit the deadline, you have to break, there’s no option.” I think those are the two biggest things that I kind of struggle with a little bit. But I make it work and I think, at the same time, while they’re challenges, they’re still parts of my personality that make me who I am and actually make me as productive and successful as I am.

Liam: Yeah, I love that embrace of the challenges that you’re facing and from what you shared with us, your capacity to figure out, I’ll call it a coping mechanism. It sounds like it’s more of a way to help you flourish and coping sounds like it’s negative and it sounds like more you’re buttressing yourself to empower yourself, and I like that. Thank you very much for sharing that. I’m going to go ahead and ask one more question and maybe I’ll steer it around a little bit here. You’ve talked about marketing and this is going to be a little different, Jeff, but you talked about marketing and how you liked getting those wins for Gravity Forms and they’re measurable, right? Sales are up or sales are down, that kind of thing. What’s your favorite thing to do within your new marketing role?

Jeff: I think my favorite thing is to chat with people like you guys, it’s to be able to connect with different people and have the ability to do some traveling the WordCamps and to speak and really just share my knowledge. It’s something that I really enjoy doing quite a bit. In terms of more the everyday type stuff, I think the biggest thing I enjoyed doing is finding the answers in the beta. There’s always some sort of data that you can find and answer it if you dig hard enough. What I’m trying to figure out, a different way to do something or if I’m trying to figure out if something that I’m doing is working or why it’s maybe not working. If I can sit and dig through data for hours and hours and hours, I’m actually pretty happy. I think really just the number-crunching is the thing that I really enjoy, especially because once I find that answer, I’m yelling at the office. Everybody knows that I found my answer because I’m like, “I found it!”

Tara: I’m going to ask you a different question now and it’s about advice. It sounds like you have traveled at half and I appreciate your sharing. I feel like I know you pretty well just in terms of your personality, based on how you approached these video games and all the things that you do and describing the struggles that you’ve had, I appreciate you sharing those with us. Along the way in getting to where you are, have you had some advice that you’d share with us that has had an impact on you and that you’ve incorporated into the way you do things?

Jeff: There’s two things. There’s, Alex would tell me all the time, he’s one of the founders of Gravity Forms and usually who I report to most of the time, he’ll tell me over, and over, and over, “Just get it done. It’s not going to be perfect, just get it done.” That’s something that I really try to think about every day is how can I just get this done and get it shipped and get it out there? Another thing that I really learned, it’s not necessarily as much of a piece of advice as it is just guidance was that a little over a year ago, thanks to my friend Kiko, I was able to climb Camelback Mountain. I was completely out of shape, it was absolutely a horrible mess. I was maybe a tenth of the way up there, I was like, “I’m done. Turn around, it’s not going to happen, I’m way out of shape. This is not for me.” He looked at me and he goes, “Can you take another step?” And me being a little bit of a smartass to him, I said, “Yeah.” I took one step and I was like, “Alright, I’m done. Turn it around.” He goes, “No, no, no. Keep going. Keep taking those steps.” I learned that my limitations really aren’t what I think they are. A lot of the times, my brain is stopping me and saying, “No, you can’t do this, you can’t do this.” But once I had the assurance that I wasn’t going to be allowed to fail, that I could trust somebody enough to say, in this case, that if I fell over or something bad happened, that he was going to carry me down the mountain. It was a little bit of a middle finger to him of saying, “Alright, whatever. I think I ended up all over so you’re going to have to carry me down.” Saying things like that. But as I was getting up there, I started realizing, I am really going a lot further than I thought. I thought I’m an absolute winner and I wasn’t even close, and I made it up that mountain. I think that really changed something in my head to the point that I was like, there’s really people who don’t realize what their limitations are. Their limitations that they think exist really aren’t there. As long as they keep pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing, there’s really no limitation.

Liam: Yeah, I think I would very much agree with that. Yes, at some point, there is a limitation but it’s nowhere near as close as our own limitations think they are. The fears and anxieties we have, the internal trust we cause ourselves. And I love that, just get it done, I just love that. My wife’s side of the family, I think it’s my wife’s grandmother, had this phrase, “If it’s worth doing right, it’s worth doing badly, just get it done.” Kind of addressing it from a different standpoint and I just love that, that it is very easy to want perfection and perfection’s great but not always possible.

Jeff: I think one of the reasons I actually try to be so perfect about everything is I was told for so long, “Do it right. If you’re going to do something, do it perfectly, do it the right way, not the bad way.” My dad used to always talk to me about that. I’m in tech, I find faster and easier ways to do something. That’s what I made my entire living off of is finding faster and easier ways to do something. He absolutely hated that growing up. Because if he’s like, “I need you to write this paper.” I’m like, “I’ll find a way to automate it. I’ll find a way to do something, I’ll write a little program in my graph calculator to do my own work for me.” He wasn’t a fan of that. I think that kind of sucks but I think, in tech, we have to learn more to just get it done. As we do that, we can always iterate, we can always change, but getting it done is that first step.

Tara: What an excellent segway to the fact that we’re done. [laughter] It’s been great, though. It’s not been a just get it done thing. I really enjoyed hearing your story, Jeff. Thanks so much for sharing with us. Can you tell people where they can find you online?

Jeff: They can find me usually on Twitter at @TheJeffMatson. You can also find me posting on the Gravity Forms Twitter or Gravity Forms Facebook, as well as Jeffmatson.net, is my site. I don’t update it too much but you can find a little bit more about me and kind of what I like to do there.

Tara: Great. Thank you so much for sharing your story.

Jeff: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.

Liam: Jeff, thanks for your time today. It’s been an absolute hoot. Have a great one.

Jeff: Thank you, bye.

Tara: Bye.

Liam: Bye-bye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

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