Hello guys How are you doing? We are here again another week with an amazing webinar from proud school We have an amazing speakers tonight today depending on your time zone from transfer wise He's saying sorry, but before we start with the with the webinar I wanted to introduce a proud school for for those of you who are not familiar With our events or courses. So this way you at least have a little bit more of context So what we do at product school is to train Spying product managers on how to break into product management for that We organize these weekly free events where we bring amazing Speakers such as Eric to talk about their experience or different topics that we like to discuss every single week So for that that's amazing if you are thinking of breaking into product management It's a really good resource for you to start learning more and Also, if you want to take it to the next level and read and you are really excited and committed to breaking into product management We also offer on-site courses We have campuses all around the world, especially in the US, but we also have in London and Canada so please take our campuses around the world and see all the courses that we are offering right now We are offering four courses The main one is about product management and here we teach the fundamentals of product management and how to build products that people love and then during the last two weeks of the program We teach how to get a job as a product manager because it's good to learn how to build good products But also you need to get trained on how to land your first team job So these courses are part-time so they are compatible with your regular work schedule And they are amazing because all the instructors are not instructors to say they are Product managers working for the best companies in the world such as Google, Facebook, Tesla, Snapchat, you name it So yeah, that's what we do. If you guys are interested in learning more about product management or any of The courses that we are teaching go to productschool.com and then you'll find more information So tonight we are super excited to have with us Eric, I've been talking to him this week. He's been telling me his experience And it's a real honor to have him with us today. How are you doing, Eric? Can you hear me well? Yeah, thank you very much. I'm very excited to be here. So thank you very much for the invitation Amazing, amazing. Thank you for being here today. So yeah, I'll let you introduce yourself and and I'll let you Do your presentation and then we'll have Ten minutes for ten minutes for Q&A. So this way if you guys have any questions for Eric He will be more than happy to answer them. So yes, feel free to type them in the comments And then I will read them at the end of the event. All yours Eric. Good luck Thank you very much. So I brought two slides with me. So I'm gonna share them with you So yeah, my name is Eric Eden and I'm a product manager at TransWise And I'm gonna share a bit about what I've learned along the way as a product manager at TransWise And first quickly about my background. So I started at TransWise back in 2015 I have a background in finance and accounting. I mean from Finland to London to start an internship at TransWise where I then work as a growth analyst looking at viral growth And I've been a product manager since 2017. So I have about a year and a half of experience in product and before I get into my transition into product prompting an analyst And what I learned along the way, I'll give you a brief overview of how we think about product at TransWise And for those who don't know, TransWise was started by these two guys, Talbot and Crystal back in 2010 Two guys Crystal was in London and Talbot was in Estonia and they had to change money between the two countries And it was a big hassle. It was really expensive and really slow And they met up and they got talking and they said what would you swap the money between yourselves? And that's really the core idea of TransWise is people helping each other to save money on international money transfer And it's now this is from 2017. We've grown quite a bit since then And I'll share some of the things that has fueled this growth and how we use product to fuel growth at TransWise And at the core of it I heard one thing So I'm seeing that some people are saying that the audio the audio is a little low So if you can speak a little louder, that would be great. I'll try to speak louder. Okay. Thank you very much. Nice. Nice better All right, that's great So so at the at kind of the core of TransWise product is our product pillars Which is about making money move Quickly easily at a low cost and conveniently so it should be cheap fast and convenient to send money abroad and We do this by first of all being which strive to be 10 times cheaper than the banks That's kind of the starting point. And that's why most people decide to use TransWise We also want to delight you with sending money really fast, which is why we for instance integrated with Bank of England in the UK, which now lets us send money instantly to to anyone in the UK and similar projects happening all over the world And we want to make it really convenient. So that's why we have our apps for instance That's why we recently integrated with Monso so you can send money from the Monso app as well And we have more of these convenience products as well And this has resulted in something quite quite exciting, which is people recommend us to their friends and The TransWise growth story wouldn't really have been possible if it wasn't for our users Being in love with the product and telling their friends about it. And that's how we grow And that's what we call product driven growth or viral growth at TransWise And this has gotten us to this place today where we have three million users We have about two billion volume per month. We're growing 100% year-over-year And we're actually making money since 2017 pretty exciting So product release about growth and My journey was as I started at TransWise as as an intern And moved from Finland to London and thought I'll give this a shot. Maybe I can make it work And I spent about two years after the internship as an analyst I was working on viral growth analyzing what made customers tell their friends about TransWise How can we get them to recommend us more And along the way I picked up a bunch of skills that turned out to be really useful When you want to be a product manager And so I listed three here, which I think are really key things. So I think any product manager starting out anyone aspiring to be a product manager should figure out What is your superpower? What's the thing that you know that can really contribute to your team and and help your your users? And the second thing is you should try and talk to as many users as you can And and product management is really about representing the user inside the company and being the voice of the customer And what often happens is you have a big team. Everybody's very busy Everybody's everybody knows they should be talking to their customers But not everybody has time to so If you can be the voice of the customer, then you're taking a great step towards that role as a product manager And the last thing is you should get into the details. I'll cover that a bit more later as well so What what's a superpower and so that can be many things And product managers come from a range of backgrounds. It can be designers or engineers analysts You name it. But my thing was really I I love data. I love analyzing customer behavior And I love love understanding how things fit together And coming into to trans wise I guess my things I knew from before was a bit of SQL it's very handy to excel as everybody in finance We know and a bit of are which is a great language for automated things and the analysis And do my years as an analyst. I really hold in on this ability to understand complex data sets And uncovering insights from it And this is an amazing assets even as a product manager. You spend a lot of time thinking about data analyzing your kpi's understanding customer behavior And if you already have those skills, you already one step ahead The next thing is talking to users and I got this small anecdote here, which is as an analyst I I got to talking to some of our customers and this guy in the middle is called yet And he is really my my favorite customer in all of the world And he was he was a big fan of trans wise He was working for a company called bonus bay and they were paying out Cashback rewards to people all around the world and using trans wise for this But poor yet. I had spent all of his time just making payments one at a time And we actually would build a tool for yet. We shall talk a bit about more later That really helped him and his company and many more companies afterwards use trans wise more And in this picture here, you can see us giving a trophy to them for being our most frequent customer back then Having made a couple of thousand payments, which today is really nothing but then was a lot And my point here is as A person aspiring to be a part manager If you're already inside a team or inside a company where you're trying to transition into a new role Then being close to the customer and talking to lots of customers Getting those insights and bringing those back to the team Also puts you ahead and gives you One step further being being a great part manager And the last thing is getting into the details and this is probably the hardest one on the one that That you maybe you want to skip and I thought what was getting into the details meeting at trans wise, right? So in any product team, there's the code, right? And the more technical you are The better your chances are of doing a good job. That said You shouldn't Have to get a CS degree or computer science degree to be a product manager. It's definitely not necessary but you shouldn't be afraid of code either and If you have a hobby project or something to show that you do understand what it means to to build products and to to write code That's a great great sign In a fintech company like trans wise, there's also this regulation And no matter what company you're going to work for there's always going to be some company specific complexity That people shy away from and a trans wise understand what regs mean Is crucial to building great products if you don't understand what they say You're not going to do a good job And that's also a great way to put yourself ahead and get noticed is if you're an expert in what's actually The rules of the game You'll be able to make better decisions Uh operational process is an interesting one. Maybe not every company has this but certainly it trans wise understanding how How the sausage is made or how the payment actually gets made in the in the background how problems are handled by operations That will let you uncover a lot of opportunities Now let you uncover problems in the product that can easily be fixed But it takes time and effort and an aspiring product manager has a great opportunity there to go and understand What's the problem and then define it and bring it to the to the product team to fix? and lastly user needs and understanding the details of what the user needs is is really crucial and Lastly growth Is learning so this is a slightly slightly different topic. It's something we'll be working on more and more inside trans wise, which is Product living growth is really a function of the rate at which you learn And in in its essence every new product idea is an idea for an experiment And there's this idea about making your product hypothesis explicit. Now, what does that mean? It means you can use the idea of the experiment to get buying from the company for your idea And then once you test it you'll learn something about the customers And even if you fail at achieving the objective, you'll have learned something valuable about the customer So at at trans wise it looks like this We go out we talk to our customers And I'll give you an example here. So my remit as a product manager trans wise is our business customers So for me talking to customers means going out and understanding what do businesses need from From their payment provider. What specific problems do they have and going back to Yeda again? It's about understanding How can we make his life better? And once you have talked to the customers you can form a hypothesis about the problems And once you have the hypothesis, you can do some tests and then you can learn from it I'll show you a bit more detail about this. What does that mean in practice? So we have my my favorite customer here And he spends hours every day creating payments And we thought can we not speed things up with a single prototype and And make life better for him So of course just helping one customer isn't enough right you gotta gotta have a big impact For a party to be willing to go out and invest time and effort into it and We said if we get 10 customers to really use it We think we're on to something if we can build a small enough test Try it out Now we did we built a got an intern to build a hacky java script Uh script in the front end to just create payments really quickly And even at that basic state The most simple solution They loved it Right, so they really got the benefit from it Even though we just spent a couple of days building it and then you know it's time to get to work And this is kind of the transition so you start out And blue here is overall growth and orange is the new product goal And you always start with a small test to see what this work will customers use it And as you can see here You tried it out a couple of years ago And it started growing and once it started growing, you know, it's time to actually build the proper thing once you have Have those first 10 customers using it and loving it. You know, it's time to build And eventually you get to a point where where you realize you have to scale up as well And that's where we're at today where we're We are taking the platform to scale it up to work for a hundred times more growth or a thousand times And once you got into a point where you actually have customers, right? So you've You've built something that that's valuable and now you want to improve on it then You should really look at the bottom of the funnel So as a product team your role is to to get grow for the company and A common mistake that product managers make is they start too high up in the funnel They start thinking about engagement or education or even awareness and What we've seen happening time and time again is you can move conversion rates at the top of the funnel You can get more and more customers down through but at the end they all churn Now why is that? that's because You're gonna get high-intent users. You're gonna get low-intent users coming through your growth funnel And the high-intent users they're gonna convert no matter what and the low-intent ones They're gonna be very hard to convert So you're always best off looking at your your happiest customers. What's stopping them from using your product? How can you get them to use you more and then working your way up from there? And this is what we've got to today. So we built this batch payment tool That lets customers process thousands of payments at once We started out with a very humble experiment and it's now one third of all business transfers are trans wise That really shows how you can start from a very small experiment and iteratively by listening to your customers work your way towards something that's truly scalable and truly usable and That's what we got to today Now this is an example of a successful experiment But you shouldn't shy away from failing either sometimes failure is even more valuable and I always get a bit suspicious when people only have successful experiments So a failure is equally valuable because that learns teaches you something interesting about what your users don't want and that's very valuable information for a product team as well all right, and kind of to rough up a bit so We had this one customer yet a who I started talking to two years ago just before I became a product manager and he was making payments day in day out and he was Sweating away by his keyboard using our regular one payment at a time interface We listened to him we listened to our customers and we built something that's better for them and and this is him from our our company conference this summer Speaking about how they have managed to grow their business thanks to trans wise and how they've managed to launch new markets And how excited they are about all the new things we're going to build for them this one in the future And yet it's now busy advocating for trans wise to all of his friends. We're getting referrals from them And thanks to you the product keeps on growing more and more even beyond the company where he works at and then the last point right so It doesn't stop when you get the job you always have to keep on learning and The best way to learn is always talking to customers But you should also think about what other books or what other Events can I go to? I think Progress school is a great example of a place you can go to learn about building great products And I just wanted to bring out three of my favorite books here. The first one is the mom test So it's all about how to talk to customers Without leading them or without having them say what you want them to say But it's really truly listening to what their problems are The second one is more And it's a great book for anyone who isn't very familiar with statistics And that still want to do experiments and to to really make sure that they're doing the right experiments It's called qualifying user experience and it's one of my favorite books about statistics. It lays out how to build Proper tests and I really play language And the last one is maybe my my my absolute favorite one is called build better products And I would say it's mandatory really for any aspiring product manager All right, so here are my takeaways for you. Thank you all very much for listening So first of all ask an aspiring product manager Figure out what your superpower is and get really good at it. For me. It was analytics data Maybe for you, it's design. Maybe it's A special insight into the customer needs Maybe it's that you're a great writing code and and helping developers The second thing is talk to as many users as you can and I think one of the most impressive product manager interviews I've done was A person that had actually gone out and done user research on our product before coming to the interview Really sets them apart in in the pack is they have truly understood that it's all about the user The third thing is figure out What's the nitty gritty details that everybody finds a bit too boring to get into and figure out what's in there For us, it's the regulation operational process But whatever your line of businesses, maybe you're in a company already with transition Figure out what's the hairy details of your product that you could become the expert in And then once once you are product manager It's about running experiments and learning about your users needs based on what those experiments tell you And lastly Continue learning. So once you got the job, don't stop there. Make sure you continue evolving continue developing as a product manager And I got two more minutes. Uh, so I have this bonus tweet from no aways from He's uh I can't remember the company now, but he's he's excellent. I'd recommend anyone to follow him twitter He's got great, uh, writing about being a product manager. And maybe this is the best one, right? So Pms have diverse backgrounds, lurker responsibilities and wildly varied expectations across companies, right? So that's one thing to take away that There's no one way to be a product manager. Everyone does it in a unique way But nevertheless, he shares some great just commonalities in one part managers So with that, I'm gonna flip back to my key takeaways And uh, I'll think I'll wrap up there. So thank you very much for listening and I'm looking forward to your questions Okay, Eric. That was amazing. Thank you very much. It was very insightful and I Feel very inspired with the with your favorite customer because I'm a big fan of transfer wise and you guys are a really good example of How to disrupt a whole industry? Uh, so yeah, congrats on this presentation On this presentation because it was great. So now I'm going to be taking some questions from the audience So if you guys want to ask any question to eric, I will read them now The first one is from lora brashwell. She's asking How did you start the process of reaching out to customers and building relationships with them? Ah, that's a that's a great question And it's almost like the secret sauce, right? You sit there in your your job and you figure How do I actually talk to these these customers? How do I get home the emails or how do I? just talk to them and The best first step right is if if you know someone that used the product, right go talk to them But maybe you want to get get more out of it and it really depends on what the product is But in the case of trans wise I had the fortune of being an analyst. So I had access to I was working with marketing and with product So emailing out customers was not a problem So I wouldn't be afraid to get a hold of some emails of people who think could have good feedback for you And and send some emails out to them get on the phone call them And what we at trans wise love doing as well is we always work with customer support So a couple of times a year everybody goes to our office in talin and we take customer support calls And you learn a ton from that Nice, nice answer. Okay. The next question comes from arty patel She's asking about Your integration with monso So what she wants to know is how did you work with them to better understand their users and their needs and Give me a second Yeah, so basically it's how did you work with them in order to understand better their users So no one understands their users better than they do So in that case we might a lot on on their product teams to understand what the user is expecting from it But of course, whenever you're working with partnerships, it's more tricky, right? But how do you get access to the customers? But we're fortunate in the sense that all the Monso customers using integration will also become transverse customers. So we do get the opportunity to talk to them as well Yeah, I totally agree. Okay. The next question comes from alexandra kadilokva Kadikova sorry for the pronunciation So, how often do you Now talk to your customers. What's your favorite approach interview? User testing ab testing Um, yeah, how do you find the customers you want to talk to? That's a really good question and I said there's maybe It's quite a lot of different channels. So you talk to customers all the time and that's one of the reasons I still love the job so much is that I get to speak to all these amazing customers So let me lay them out for you. One is I email loads of customers whenever I see someone doing something interesting I'll send them an email and ask hey I'd love to speak to you. Can you get on the phone with me? The second thing is customer support. So all the customer support calls as well Go out to our support team and just listen into customers to see what what problems do they have and then What else I had a couple in mind we use Give a shout out to use testing.com. It's a great service where they'll actually send users to An invitation page and they'll leave feedback along the way and they'll get prompting questions So that's a great way to get lots of feedback quickly And then finally the trickiest customer interview is the one you don't have yet And there I really recommend if you can use an agency that can recruit customers with a specific profile for you So when it comes to business customers, I have a very specific user in mind. I can't just find through the street So it's got to be 50 more 50 or more employees. So so many transfers, etc Agencies are great for those very specific requests Nice So the next comment comes from I mean smart He's saying what do you think about pushing new features to the users? I mean not always getting their opinions Then making for them. You think they need something you make it. We used to be very careful about Big bang releases or about dedicating a lot of resources to To the idea itself So we really want to focus on getting something small out first And maybe that's just some slides and walk up and validating it So we get lots of feedback before we actually start building anything And once we were to build we always release it as a split test So we put hot traffic onto the new version of the old and then we make sure that Our hypothesis was the new one's going to be better and then we measure if that was true or not Okay, that sounds great. So the next question How is your day typically organized? For example, how much time do you spend on experiments talking to customers, etc There's no data to like except for the stand-up. So we start every day with a stand-up at 9 30 And then it really depends on what's needed, right? So The role of the PM really fluctuates depending on what part of the part life cycle you have to be So at the beginning I'm working closely with Our design team to come up with prototypes. I work with Lots of user research We have actually now a user researcher will help me but also just Collecting customer feedback and understand what they need and once you get past that phase to get into implementation Then it's about working with engineers to come up with a strong plan That's narrowly scope that will deliver maximum customer value at the shortest possible time And then once you pass that phase Then it's about the rollout and then you got to work with marketing or sales And then you got to iterate on so you do the whole thing again And the quicker you can iterate on the product the quicker you'll improve as well Okay, um, the next question is uh, how Um, do you adjust your product to different types of clients? Big and small do you have any example of a case where a solution was good for a big one but not for small one or vice versa Oh, yeah, so many of them and that's really Part of the remit of my team is making transverse better for for businesses. So we started out as a very consumer focused company and That meant our entire user experience and back in most fields around people making a couple of payments And then we brought in some customers that made tens of thousands of payments And in the back end all the processes broke. So we had to quickly fix everything to make it scale So whenever you introduce a new customer type, it's not just the front end that you got to change but it's Everything's gonna gotta kind of level up to to meet the needs Hey, I think we lost your sound there Sorry, now we're now we're right. Okay. So paul is asking at what stage of growth does an earliest An earlier state start up need a product manager Oh, that's uh, that's a great question. And I joined transverse when we were about 200 employees and You already had a couple of product managers then But I think you can go quite a while depends on what the strength of the founder is if you have say If you're a technical founder, you might want to bring that in sooner But if you're more of a product founder, you're probably gonna gonna do most of the product yourself for quite a while But I'm no expert. So it's hard to say That's that's a pretty good question. Especially when you start the company You are the product manager. You are pretty much everything. So it depends on your product Uh, but yeah, it's a hard one. Um, I would say in the moment Like you are able to shape a product thing in the moment you have a designer and also an engineer That's probably the the moment when you start like shaping the product Probably if you are the founder, you're gonna be the product manager as well And then in the moment that thing grows a little bit. That's probably the moment where you will need to hire A product manager. So yes, um, I have one last question for you Uh, Eric, which is a question that I always ask to all our speakers Which is like Which is your biggest piece of advice for someone that is uh, willing to break into product management? I know that you spoke a lot about this, but if you have to give one tip Uh, yeah, I would like to know it It's definitely that's easy. Just talk to as many users as you can You can never talk to too many and make sure you uh, you share the learnings with the rest of the company and with the team That's the the one thing I would say you have to do Nice nice, okay, Eric. It was amazing having you with us today. Uh, it was very insightful. It was fun Thank you very much for taking the time to be with our community as you see We have so many people watching this live over a hundred people now. We had over 200 before it This is just amazing. So thank you very much for your time.  So we have more events coming up These three events are great for you to learn more about product management As you see we bring amazing speakers working for the best companies in the world as a transfer wise Facebook, netflix, you name it. So if you guys want to learn more about um product management Feel free to join these weekly webinars. We also have um weekly AMAs which stands for ask me anything on our Slack community every Tuesday And then we have in-person events every week in each of our campuses So if you want to check the list of campuses that we have, please go to our website productschool.com and see What are the locations that are closer to you? And then if you are thinking of taking these to the next level and get a job as a product manager That's what we've been doing for four years so far. We train people on how to get a job as a product manager We have four courses for now The first one is about product management. The second one is coding for managers The third one is data analytics for managers, and then we have a fourth one called Blockchain for managers because that's what we do. We train people on how to become a manager or a product manager In a software company. So if you guys want to see dates Instructors and more news, uh, please go to productschool.com and you'll see all the information. So yeah guys, it was great One more time. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you, Eric. It was a big pleasure I hope you have a good rest of the day. Take care. Thank you very much. Bye. Bye. Bye


From the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California, it's The Cube. On the ground at Dreamforce 2014. It is your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here at The Cube. We're on the ground at Dreamforce 14 up in San Francisco where they've converted Howard Street into the Dreamforce Plaza, food plaza here, joined by Howard Ash with the food bank. There's a lot of food to give away, two million meals, what do you think? Well this is fantastic for us, you know, the match of asking the Dreamforce participants to bring in a million pounds matched by Mark Benioff and Tony Robbins, it's a fantastic opportunity for us to increase the amount of service we provide. So what does a boost like this mean to you guys? Obviously Thanksgiving is coming up, a lot of people think about giving in the holidays, but this must be a pretty significant boost to the whole program. Well you hit on it, we're coming right up to the holidays where we try to almost double up and give people even more food because we know their budgets are strained during the holidays trying to put a good meal on the table for Thanksgiving and then they go right into the Christmas, end of year, New Year's holidays. So this will mean a lot to us and to the people we serve. What happens when the holidays go away and the Salvation Army cans get put away, I mean does it really impact you guys, how should people contribute year round to really help out? Well Dreamforce is once a year, but that's not the end of Salesforce's commitment. They are sending volunteers out every week to volunteer at our warehouse. In fact part of the new employee orientation is to come out and spend a day at the food bank. It's that big of a commitment. To actually spend a day. Yeah, volunteering. That's great because there's nothing like really feet on the ground, right? Getting your hands on and getting to know what it's like. Alright, well thanks for spending a couple of minutes with us. Jeff Rick, we're on the ground at the Salesforce Dreamforce 14 in San Francisco, California.


All right, so thank you so very much for having me here today very delighted to be back. This is only my second time here And so here's why so have you ever gone to the grocery store and just for one thing right just one thing, okay? Maybe two things, you know when I was growing up my mother would say I'm just going in for one thing And of course we would come out with more than one thing So okay, maybe two things that you can easily carry in your hands. All right. Do you grab a shopping cart? All right, if you're like me, you probably don't right because you don't need one Okay, you're just going in for one thing and if it's one of those stores that you know those stores where the They normally only have one check-in-out line open All right, and so they let the line just build up and build up and build up and you're like, okay I just want to get in and get out, please so That's why I'm here because Most of the time people equate E-commerce with a shopping cart, okay I'm sorry. You've been here all day diving into a shopping cart plug-in and here I am I'm gonna talk about something else And so e-commerce doesn't necessarily equal shopping cart Just like you can go into a physical store without grabbing a cart You're just going for for one thing you can have an online store without needing a shopping cart Okay, and so let's let's say you you're going to someone's website and I can pick on Brian This is Brian who does a post status. I've picked on him before so you go when you're just buying Let's say a membership, right or it's Here he has this post status membership club. You get an online slack channel things like that All right, and so you click the sign up or the purchase button and then what do you see? This product has been added to your cart and you're like, huh what product cart I was just buying a membership, right? Why do I need a? Products and carts, you know, this is just something digital. All right, so you're like, okay. Well, let's go with it So you're sent to the shopping cart, right? And then you have to go through this whole multi-step process All right, they want your contact information and billing and shipping and all that and you're like, okay Why do I have to click on all of these things? This is so very simple. I don't need this, you know four-page process and so Has anyone else had that experience anyone? Yeah, okay I thought maybe I would be the only one but I'm not okay And so all of this for just a simple payment when it doesn't need to be that way Okay, and if you have a WordPress site, then you probably already have what you need and that's a form builder Okay, and you might say well, what's a form builder? Well, you know that thing that you use that you use to add a contact form to your site That's a form builder. These are some of the popular ones All right, and so most of us I think Michelle just talked about it You're gonna add a contact form to your site, but it can actually do so much more Okay, and one of those things that it can do is take payments. That's why I'm here So let's look at what you may need to have In order for people to buy from you online All right, the first thing you need to be able to do is take their money I mean, that's what we're talking about payments All right, and so all of the professional form builders that are out there They provide some type of payment processing add-on whether it's PayPal or Stripe or something else Okay, all of them have it and so if we want to create a payment form We would add let's see here. This is gravity form So we would add a product field and a credit card field All right, you just take the field on the right and you drag it over to the left as simple as that Okay, and then here's your form and someone can come she just talked about you know Make make sure that you only have the fields that you need So that's very simple two fields. They put in their credit card information and you have money, okay? You've been knee-deep in setting up WooCommerce. I'm sorry Good luck. No, I'm just saying I know they've done a great job with you All right, and if you use ninja forms, it's the same type of thing take a product field and slide it over to the right and You'll be able to take your payment. All right, there it is. That's the form on the front end and Here it pops up. They're using the Stripe pop-up and the person inputs their credit card information All right. Now the next thing that you may want to be able to do is you may need their contact information Awesome. This is actually perfect for a contact form. All right, so on the right you have your name field Your email field and maybe an address field if you need that and you add that to the form and there you go You have complete control of the information that you need to collect Okay, without needing to customize any payment templates or doing any code or anything like that All right, and so here's an example of someone who has customized their payment form okay This looks like this is some kind of what is it 147 a month for eight months Contact information billing information the payment method and that's it Okay. All right. The next thing that you might need to do is collect specific information for a product Here it is if you've ever purchased a computer you may You may want to be able to Select what you want, you know what process or memory all that kind of stuff Well, if you're using a shopping cart plug, and I don't know if you've noticed, but you actually can't do this By default. Okay, and it's it's crazy because you actually have to purchase an add-on To integrate with your form builder in order to do this This is using the WooCommerce gravity forms add-on So it's like well, why do you need to use a form builder to use your shopping cart? All right That to me that that just doesn't make sense and if you're just selling something simple then you know Why not cut out the whole shopping cart and just use a form builder?  I'm sorry But just an alternative something that may work for you All right, and so now we're going to look at something a little more advanced All right, you may want people to be able to subscribe to a recurring plan subscription You know where they get charged every month or every week Anyone here ever subscribed to one of those boxes that you get every month? Yeah, so I know people that use a form builder for that. They don't use a shopping cart plug-in So here this is a product field and then on the product field they are Saying they're checking the box there and saying hey, this is a subscription product and they can set if there's a trial They can set that they can Create a custom plan if they need to so that's a little bit more advanced and what you're used to is just a simple contact form right The next thing that they might want to be able to do is reuse their billing information All right, and so here it is. We have a form again people. This is actually for a Donation form that we created people could either pay one time with you know Give a one-time donation with either PayPal Or their credit card or they could give a recurring donation with either PayPal or their credit card and over here to the right You'll see that if they came to our site before and they paid with some information They have the option to choose if they want to reuse that same Credit card information without having to re-input that Okay, another thing that you might want them to be able to do is either update their billing information or their subscription So here we have an option where they can update their credit card if they have something new They can either cancel their subscription maybe change to a different plan and again This is all with a form builder Okay Another thing you might want them to do is maybe pay in their own currency If you have the international user so here is a currency field Where you can either Allow anyone from any currency to choose or you can say well here are the set currencies on my form You know you can only choose from you know these two or three Let's say taxes You can either do manual tax calculation or you can use some of the available tax API This is the tax field. You can see one of the API is there is taximo. There's another one here. That's a sponsor at Ava tax So that's again, that's something that you can use do with a form builder Shipping a shipping field Okay, if you need to send customer seats Maybe through PDFs. There's a PDF add on for that. Okay, you can sit there Sorry, you can come here and you know select What you want for your PDF? There's a whole process here. I won't get into that, but that's an example You can track your orders if you're using Google analytics e-commerce tracking Also, there's this concept of abandoned carts, right with the shopping cart plug-in And so form builders have the concept of abandoned forms Okay, so If someone comes and they don't fill out all the information you can you know send them follow-up saying hey Did you forget what was on your form? So, you know, this is not just a Contact form type of thing form builders can either be as simple or as advanced as you want them to be All right, and so any any contact form that you have will do There isn't much that a form builder cannot do except be a shopping cart Okay, so if you just like you wouldn't grab a shopping cart if you only need, you know one or two items that you can carry You know you wouldn't I'm talking about in a physical store for an on for an online store If you just need to collect simple payments, you know a form builder may be Maybe a good option for you Okay Just use the form builder you already have and you're in complete control. All right, so This is what you do not want to do with a form builder Okay, and this is from this is from someone's actual site, and I didn't like that on purpose All right Because they had the bright idea of creating a store with a form builder And so I think they're They're about 12 products on that page and you just kind of have to scroll down and select which one you want No, don't do that. Just use a shopping cart plug. Woo. Commerce is great. Just do that. Okay All right, so part of what I was going to do was kind of go through a demo, but we're trying to Wrap it up here. So what I'm going to do is I Have a few bonuses for you. Yes have a few bonuses for you So if you'd like all the slides that I went through as far as well as a detailed write-up and the list of everything that I used For those different options there as well as I also have if you're interested in a form builder I have some attendee only discounts from the plug-in authors So gravity forms and Caldera Wp And I also have a couple of case studies for how people have used Form builders for e-commerce Including I kind of alluded to it to it there, but a charity water type of crowd fundraising system, which is really cool I really love it. I talked about it last year. So That's the link where you can get the slides I am going to take it down when I leave here So make sure that you go ahead and and get that because I just I get people coming to the forum and Spamming it for some reason so I'm going to take it down and I'll also be around for the rest of the day I know we're running out of time, but I'll be here for the rest of today And I'm happy to answer any, you know, can my form builder do this or is this a good job type of questions? Yes Yeah, sure. Um, so and I'll just do this really quickly and then we can probably talk about it afterwards But like I said any professional form builder you saw that all of them as far as taking payments They all have the payment add-ons you might find one that maybe doesn't have Authorized net or brain tree, but striping PayPal, which are the main two all of them have it So it really just comes down to Some of those advanced things that I talked about a particular form builder might not have Something like that so they might not have an integration with the tax system Or they might not have the ability for people to come back and you know reuse their billing information or update So we can you know, I can talk about that with you afterwards Okay Excuse me Yeah, yeah, they are they're they're similar Yes Like I said if you just need a Simple payment something simple like I said, you know, you're going into the grocery store You're just grabbing one or two items that you can carry Then I think that form builders are a great option for those types of things you don't need a full shopping cart for that Okay, yes, I'm done. Yes No, no, I'll just be here today. I'm sorry. Yeah, absolutely.


We're here today at the Fisher College of Business at the Ohio State University. This is our Fisher Graduate Student Recruiting Event. This is the premier event in the fall semester for our graduate students in the Fisher program. So these students are here for a great opportunity to network with employers, to meet employers from the companies that they have an interest in working for and learn even more about their opportunities to work in full-time and internship positions. It's great so far. You know, there's a lot of local companies, which is good for me. I want to stay local, but there's also a lot of international and national opportunities as well. It's a great practice, I think, to go around and network, to talk to everybody. You're always told in the career management office about our elevator pitch, this is a great chance to kind of put that to use. Just thinking about the different resume workshops that I've been able to take advantage of, things that have allowed me to be at my best when I step to a recruiter's table at a career fair. So the interview process has really been helped by career management, and so has the resume process. And it's so good to be able to come here with a limited crowd to be able to get that important personal interaction with the recruiters. And there's really great companies here, I spoke with J&J, and Target, and Nestle. I'm very excited about Ohio State, about Fisher. I knew the caliber of the program. I also know that it's like a smaller program, but it still has the resources of the big university. I was interested in getting my MBA from Fisher because of the relationship that the university has with the local community. I'm interested in operations and supply chain, and Fisher definitely is one of the top ranking colleges in this area. Plus, when I was researching by the colleges, the professors here do very impressive research work, and I think that was something that was very valuable to me. Employers primarily attend the graduate recruiting event because it's a smaller venue. It's a very targeted group of students, and it's a good opportunity for them to interact with students on a slightly smaller scale. Our students are going to be ready. They're well-prepared through the programs we have in the Office of Career Management. The companies understand that. They recognize that the quality of our students is among the best we're going to find in the country. We recruited Fisher quite simply to position ourselves to attract top talent. And we're very impressed with the education which they're receiving here, and we also have a track record of multiple hires out of Ohio State, out of Fisher that have done very well at GRIF and are having very promising careers. When we come to Ohio State, the diversity is what we're looking for, and that's why we keep coming back. It's just the breadth of students, the different experiences. We love to come to Fisher because the majority of the students we see have some significant work experience. The reason that we come back to Fisher is, number one, I'm an alumni. Number two, your career center is awesome. And number three, we've had success with people that we've hired.


One thing that we don't have a shortage of is menu applications. Think about it, we have hundreds of menu applications available to us in Linux. But the problem with most of these menu applications is they're designed to work with one desktop environment or window manager. That's, they're specific to one particular desktop environment or window manager. They're typically built in to the panel that's built in to that desktop environment or window manager. Think about it. Think about the menu system in the GNOME desktop environment. Completely different than the menu system that's built in to KDE Plasma, which is completely different than the menu system built in to XFCE and Cinnamon and LXQ, et cetera, et cetera. Wouldn't it be great if you had some third-party menu application that you could customize and configure to your liking and use it with any desktop environment or window manager? It doesn't matter. You could log in to different desktop environments or window managers all the time and you would still have that particular menu application to work with. It's the same one. You don't have to worry about changing your workflow depending on what desktop environment you happen to be in that day. So I came across this application called XMenu. And XMenu, it's very similar to OpenBox's right-click menu. It's very similar to that, meaning you just create this little configuration file that tells you exactly what's gonna be output in that menu system. You could even script some dynamically generated stuff to output in that menu system if that's what you wanna do. And it's pretty easy to configure this thing. It's a very simple program. It's written in C and the config file is a shell script. At least the default configuration file that they ship with here is a shell script. You could probably rewrite that in anything you wanted to. All you need to do is get clone the XMenu repository here from GitHub and then run a very simple pseudo make install. And it should be installed on your system.  Let me go ahead and grab this. I'm gonna go ahead and get the GitHub URL for XMenu. And I'm gonna go ahead and clone this. So let me pull up a terminal here. I'm gonna run a get clone and then the URL for that repository. And now that we have cloned XMenu, what we need to do is CD into this new XMenu directory that has been created here. And the first thing I wanna do is I think I wanna go ahead and check out that config.mk. So I'm gonna open this in Vim. And this is just some of the make stuff. Actually, that's not what I wanna check out. What I wanna check out is config.h. And this has some color options.  I prefer a dark background with light text. So I am going to change some of the values here. So I've changed my background to this dark background. That's the same color as my terminal background and the bar. Also changed the foreground to a very light gray, almost white. So more appropriate colors for what I'm doing here. I'm gonna go ahead and write and quit. And now that I've changed that in the config.h, I'm gonna do a pseudo make install. Let's go ahead and actually install XMenu. Now once you have XMenu installed, the only thing you need to do from here on out is edit this file right here, the XMenu.sh. This is actually how you edit. And here is a sample menu. Now one thing to note with XMenu and this sample configuration file is there are no spaces in this configuration file. These are tabs. So that's very important. If you edit this in Vim, make sure you do not have expand tab set. Make sure you turn that off because expand tab of course is going to change all your tabs to spaces. And if you have spaces in this file, it will not work. They have to be actual tabs. So you have applications. So this is a category in the menu. And then you have a tab over and then image is the location of a ping on your system for a icon. So that's the location to an icon. And then after that, there is a tab. It looks like a single space. That's actually a tab. And after that, you have the name that's gonna appear in the menu system, web browser. That's gonna be the text after the icon. It's gonna say web browser. And then another tab. And then the command that when you click on that, it should run, which is Firefox. I hope that makes sense. So image, location of image, tab, and then the name that's gonna appear in the menu tab, and then the command that that should run. That is the format of that. And remember, they have to be tabs. And if I showed you this in action, let me quit out of Vim and I'm gonna run a dot slash and xmenu.sh. And here is the default. Well, it's not exactly the default because I changed the colors. By default, it should have been a dark text on a white background, but I kind of reversed it a little bit because I prefer a dark menu. But applications, you see, there's the location of that ping image. So that's the icon. Web browser is the text. And then if I click on web browser, it's gonna run the command Firefox. Image editor, of course, is gonna run GIMP. We have three different examples of terminals, Xterm, URXBT, and ST. And these were all hard-coded in the sample config. Oddly enough, I have all three terminals installed on my system. So if I clicked on Xterm, it would actually launch Xterm. So let me rerun Xmenu here. We also have shutdown and reboot in the sample config. Now, what I would do is I would spend a couple of hours.  So you're gonna have to go through and really spend some time adding some lines to that Xmenu shell script. But it's a one-time thing. Once you have it configured, you really shouldn't be spending much time configuring it after that very first time because after that, it's really minor changes. Maybe every now and then you'll install or remove a piece of software and need to go make a single line edit. But really most of the configuration that you're gonna do is all upfront. Earlier today, I played around with Xmenu a little bit and I created another kind of example config where I wanna demonstrate to you guys some of what is possible with Xmenu. So let me get back into the terminal and I'm gonna show you guys my kind of example of some of what you can do with Xmenu. So I created subcategories. The same kind of subcategories you would typically find in Linux menu systems. And so all I did was I basically copied the same thing over and over again. So I didn't take the time of going through and adding hundreds of different applications that I've got installed on the system. Basically the same three or four applications over and over again in this menu system. But you see, I created categories, accessories, games, graphics, internet, multimedia, office, programming system, the same kind of application categories you find typically in most Linux menu systems. And then after the applications category, I have a space. Now if you include a space in your config, Xmenu adds a horizontal rule, which is really neat and visually, it's a nice little break. And then I created a category of a potential category edit configs where I maybe could list config files that I edit all the time. I haven't actually done this though. Again, these are just example programs still here. I also created an example category here, take screenshots where if I wanted to, I could have different scrot commands. Like take a screenshot immediately, take a screenshot five seconds from now, take a screenshot of this particular section of my screen or take a screenshot of the entire screen. So you could really get creative. But really I wanted to show you guys how you could dynamically create some content. So this category is music player. And you will see instead of having a name, I have this variable now playing. Now the text for now playing, what is that? Well, that will be up here.  It's basically is taking what is playing currently in my dead beef music player. I'm piping it through SID. And it's gonna return the title of the track playing is what that's going to do. And track time is the duration of the track that is playing and playlist number is the number within the playlist. Again, I just kind of threw this menu here together. Again, it's not complete because the commands behind now playing is file roller, which is my archive manager. That's probably not what I want there. I want some kind of dead beef command, but I haven't bothered that. I also showed that if you wanted to, you could dynamically generate content by adding like my kernel here. You say I have dollar symbol my kernel. And all that's doing is taking a uname dash R and whatever my current kernel version is, it's going to output that into the X menu. So if I write and quit and let me run X menu again. So you will see now my X menu is down here and you see the kernel version is 5.4.53. That's the LTS kernel and my music player. You see the last thing I was playing in dead beef was King Diamond, his conspiracy album from 1989. I was listening to track two, sleepless nights. That particular track is five minutes and six seconds long and it's number one in the playlist. Now, if I change to a different track, let me launch dead beef. If I wanted to change to track three, I can't really play track three because I might get demonetized because I don't own the rights of course to King Diamond's music. And then I run X menu again. Now when I go to music player, you see track three lies and it's four minutes and 23 seconds long. So really the sky's the limit in what you can add to your X menu system. You can script this thing to output anything you want. A system monitoring information, if that's what you want to do, you could have it list virtual machines that you have installed on your system or all your current Steam games, your Steam library and whatever you can do with some simple shell scripting, you can have it output in that menu. Now, one of the things you're gonna wanna do with X menu is you want the ability to click on the desktop and bring up that menu. Kinda like with open box or flux box. You want the ability to either right click or left click on the desktop and bring up that menu. And the guy that created this program, X menu, he created a second program called X click route. But the problem with X click route is I couldn't get it to work. I tried. X click route has a package in the arch AUR. I installed it. I couldn't get it to work. And then I decided, well, maybe the AUR package is broken. So I just did a get clone and I built it from source. I still couldn't get it to work. The way X click route is supposed to work is it sets the ability for when you click on the root window, which is your monitor, the empty desktop, when you click on it, it should run some command. An example is this here, X click route dash L for left click should run X term and then and behind it to make it a background process. You should add that to either your X init RC or your X session file depending on how you start X. If you do a start X, you should put it in your X init. If you do a login manager like I do, you should put it in X session. I tried it in both. I tried it in dot profile. I never could get X click route to actually do anything. So I never could get it to launch a single program. I tried a multitude of different things with it. But honestly, for me, I'm not sure I would. I don't think I need the ability to click on the desktop to launch X menu because for me, most of the time when I launch a program, for example, if I'm in a tiling window manager, if I have a single program open, I don't have a desktop to click on anyway, right? So it doesn't make sense for that to be the only way to launch X menu, clicking on the desktop. That's not gonna work for most window manager, especially tiling window managers because you don't have any desktop to click on anyway. What I would do is I would add a key binding. So let me launch Emacs. And if I launch my herbs looked config and zoom in here. So you guys can see, but it doesn't matter what window manager you do this in, open up your window managers config file and add a key binding and have it run the path to that X menu.sh. Here in herbs lift, I key bind did control alt return to run X menu.sh. So let me do a control alt return. And you see the X menu appears where my cursor was. If my cursor was over here somewhere and I did control alt return, that's where the X menu would appear. So that's what I would do. I would set it to a key binding. If you really wanted something to click, it doesn't make sense to click the desktop. If you have a panel and you want something to click to bring up a menu, I would add an icon to your panel. And that's what I did here in Polybar, but you could do this in pretty much every panel is most of them have the ability for you to create some kind of custom quick launcher, whatever it is they call it. So I can just click the Polybar here in the icon in my Polybar or if I'm already on the keyboard a simple control alt return will bring up my X menu. That is a really neat menu application. Again, because it's window manager, agnostic, I could use that thing anywhere. I could use it in herbs lift, which I'm already using. I could put some kind of quick launcher in my XMO bar and XMO Ned to launch X menu. I could use it in Qtile. I could use it in DWM. I could use it in awesome. Although awesome already has a right click menu system similar to X menu, you wouldn't need to use it in awesome. But there's a lot of window managers, especially really minimal window managers that don't have any kind of built-in menu system. And X menu I think would be perfect for all of those. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few people. I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Heplo, Nate, Corbinian, Mitchell, Entry, UK, John, Arch 59, 30, Chris, Chuck, DJ, Donnie, Dylan, George, Lewis, I'm Repaul, Robert, Sean, Tobias, and Willie. They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. They are also the producers of this episode. I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because this channel is supported by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, you'll find DT over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.