Maarten Behr and his colleagues have built a pretty incredible platform for building smart forms and surveys that they call Tripetto. Originally released as an SDK for multiple development environments, Tripetto is now available as a standalone plugin for WordPress that lets users build logic heavy forms, surveys and a whole lot more with an easy to use visual editor.
Let’s begin with a little bit of background on yourself and your company. How did you get started and when did you become involved with WordPress?
Hi there, my name is Maarten Behr. I’m the platform lead at Tripetto.
Tripetto was found by Mark van den Brink and Martijn Wijtmans a few years ago. Tripetto offers solutions for creating and deploying logic-heavy forms and surveys, conversational landing pages, etc.; essentially non-AI solutions for automated personalized interactions. The solutions are mostly used by developers, particularly — but not exclusively — in health, startups, and academia.
I joined Tripetto a while ago pitching a POC implementation of the Tripetto SDK into WordPress. A few months of hard work later we have it published and are ready to rock!
The WordPress plugin seems separate from the regular Tripetto product? Is that correct and why did you want to go in that direction instead of just making some kind of wrapper that integrated with the WordPress interface?
Actually it’s not that different! The WordPress plugin is a great example of a successful integration of the Tripetto SDK. This means that every feature that goes into the Tripetto core flows directly into the WordPress plugin.
Unlike others, e.g. TypeForm, Tripetto is platform agnostic making the product extremely flexible. Forms and surveys capture valuable or even sensitive information. We strongly believe that this data is yours, so zero backdoors or connections to any services other than your own WordPress install. A dedicated integration also makes it possible to hook and extend better into WordPress.
What was the hardest part about developing the WordPress plugin version of Tripetto? Why was it so difficult to pull off?
Well actually the hardest part is not development itself, it’s all about getting the correct message out to potential users. Being this flexible it’s hard to focus on one target audience in the WordPress community.
Is there difficulty marketing Tripetto? It seems like you are targeting two audiences: developers with the main product and then a general crowd with the WordPress plugin. How has splitting your attention like that gone so far?
Getting traction with a new product is hard. To accommodate potential developers and businesses we’ve created quick start implementations for most popular frameworks like React, Angular and Vue together with
extensive documentation. This helps getting people up and running in a short amount of time. You are right about our split audiences but we have experienced that they compliment each other. Developers and end-users like WordPress admins have different views. Feedback from both is extremely useful!
Can you talk a little bit about your sandbox solution for demoing how Tripetto works?
We want people to try out the WP plugin without needing installment. We have set up a few demo forms that Sandbox users can review and modify through the WP admin.
We hope people get inspired by our demo’s and experience the ease of the visual editor. Everybody can sign up for free!
You have a limited free version of the plugin and then a premium release with a single site license. How did you come up with this plan?
As a WordPress user myself I always get frustrated by restrictions inside plugins. So we decided that we shouldn’t limit the features of the plugin if we want people to get excited about it. Therefore we’ve come up with a fair model by not restricting any of the functionalities in the free plugin for the first deployed form. As soon as people want more than one form with the premium features they can upgrade.
Is there anything about WordPress plugin development you wish you had known before you started this project?
WordPress includes several tweaked libraries and confusing functions that required some reading and debugging. It’s nice to see that the community is still growing and the WordPress core is evolving more and more!
What’s next for Tripetto and the WordPress plugin in terms of features and releases?
We want to become a leader in forms and surveys! Currently we work in weekly development sprints implementing new features and processing feedback. One feature we are really excited about is implementing ‘Action Blocks’.
By adding action blocks to forms users can create smart flowing conditional workflows that interact with other services. For WordPress in particular we foresee a deeper integration with its core enabling WordPress functionalities inside the Tripetto plugin such as user registration or blog post creation.
We encourage readers to check out the plugin (by installing or signing up for the Sandbox) and drop us a line if you have idea’s to make it even better. Cheers from Amsterdam!