The WP Minute+

Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the WP Minute. My name is Eric Karkvac and I'm your host. Today's guest is Danny Van Kooten. He's the founder of Ibera Code, which is a European software company. And you may know him from some very popular WordPress plugins such as MailChimp for WordPress and Koko Analytics. Danny, welcome to the WP Minute.

Danny Van Kooten (00:22)
Thank you, Eric. I'm happy to be here.

Eric Karkovack (00:25)
So I want to get into Koko Analytics. I kind of want to dive into that. But first, I read your bio. And we'll put a link to this in the show notes. you have a very unique story about how you started with creating WordPress plugins. Apparently, you were recovering from appendicitis. Is that right?

Danny Van Kooten (00:43)
Yeah, that's

right. I had this idea to create a WordPress plugin and I had it in my head for about five years, but never actually went for it because I was so busy working for clients and just making a living. But then I was on holiday in Vietnam and I was hospitalized with appendicitis. So I had like 10 days of bed rest and it was a great forced

rest which allowed me to start some long-term projects.

Eric Karkovack (01:10)
It's kind of amazing how something like that, I no one wants to get appendicitis, obviously, and especially not while you're visiting another country. I can only imagine how uncomfortable that must have been, but you turned it into something very positive. And I see that MailChimp for WordPress has over two million active installs, so congratulations on that. That's quite an accomplishment.

Danny Van Kooten (01:28)
Thank you. I've been very happy with the appendicitis just because of what came out of it. I just know for sure that otherwise I would never have taken the time because I've already been meaning to do it for five years and never went for it. So, and even the hospital, I had a great time. Everything went fine as soon as I knew what was actually going on with me. So yeah, I'm just very happy that it happened weirdly.

Eric Karkovack (01:55)
You never know when something like that is going to change your life for the better, right? Very, very different way to start getting into plugins. So mean, were you like freelancing before that? ⁓

Danny Van Kooten (02:05)
Yep,

I was freelancing and I think I've created a mailchimp and sign up form like over five times or maybe 10 times and I just have to keep doing the same thing. So I figured I should make a plugin for this. Never did it obviously until the hospital happened and I finally got around to it.

Eric Karkovack (02:23)
Well, I bet a lot of people are happy that you did that. I two million active installs is quite something. And then, I don't know, ⁓ if you want to go into the genesis of Koko Analytics, like how did you decide like that was, was that like your next project after MailChimp for WordPress took off?

Danny Van Kooten (02:40)
I've had a few plugins in between which did quite well but not on the scale of Mailchimp for WordPress but about maybe 50,000 users at most. One for pop-ups that I'm not so proud of anymore. One for contact forums.

But I think I did a toy project. I was trying to learn a new programming language back in 2016. And I used it to build an analytics product. And then two years later, think GDPR came into effect here in Europe. So the topic was quite hot. And I started Fetum Analytics. I'm not sure if you've heard of it.

It's quite popular nowadays, but I think we grew it to about 500 or maybe 1000 monthly users. But I became a new dad during his first year. And then during the second year, my second daughter was born and it was just very hard to struggle. So I got out of the project and it continued with another founder stepping into my place. So, and it's been doing very well after that as well. So.

It was ⁓ very, well, I've had some mixed feelings seeing it grow without me, obviously, but I couldn't let the topic go completely either. So that's where I started Koko Analytics, just focusing on WordPress users. And also, yeah, one thing that I really didn't enjoy back then with Fetum was keeping everything online for our customers. I had no experience with it and it was just

Eric Karkovack (03:59)
Yes, ⁓ go ahead, I'm sorry.

Danny Van Kooten (04:10)
Quite stressful, especially if you're not sleeping because of your children. So I figured if I build it on top of WordPress, I can piggyback on all the amazing WordPress hosting out there. And I don't have to deal with any hosting. I can just focus on the code for recording and showing the data.

Eric Karkovack (04:15)
yes, yes.

Yeah, that makes sense. mean, had, with previous products, you had a server, I assume then that tracked all of this for your clients. And if that went down, I can only imagine the stress that is caused by that.

Danny Van Kooten (04:43)
Yeah,

it was very stressful, especially, well, we had a lot of small clients, but as soon as we had a big client with millions of page views, everything had to change. And I just had to get behind the computer immediately to scale up the server. It was a manual thing back then, especially because we were growing at such a crazy pace that I couldn't do it correctly. In hindsight, I should have, but hey, you live, learn.

Eric Karkovack (05:08)
Well, yeah, this is all a learning experience. I think it seemed like a logical step to go to that next place, which is WordPress, which already is self-hosted. You don't have to worry about a server. You can focus on making the plugin simple to use, privacy friendly, which I think is a huge deal these days. mean, GDPR is all, you know.

is very much a concern even here in America. We have to comply with it if we're, you know, serving European customers. How did you decide on WordPress though? Like what drove you to that?

Danny Van Kooten (05:41)
Well, initially FATOM was an open source project, but after I left, I had no control over it, obviously, and they decided to turn it into a closed source product, which I think makes sense for them. But for me, the goal was never to make it a big commercial success, although it would be nice to make it sustainable. So I figured, how can I reach a large number of people?

and not have to deal with hosting people. Well, WordPress is obviously a huge part of the internet. There's a lot of amazing hosting setups out there. So, and I had a lot of experience building on top of WordPress. So for me, it was quite logical to build it on top of WordPress. And well, I obviously had to make some design choices as well because it's not that easy to store

years worth of analytics data into a WordPress database. But it happens that to be a great match with the privacy friendly aspect because if you're not storing all the visitor specific stuff, then you can also build quite a good product on top of a WordPress database.

Eric Karkovack (06:54)
Yeah, that is nice and it's portable as well. ⁓ You know, if we move your site to another host, we still have all our analytical data, which is a big deal. I think, you know, I've been on the web for many years and Google Analytics has always kind of been that standard, right, for analytics. People kind of expect it these days. And yet...

I don't know a single person who likes Google Analytics 4. Google's UI has become, at least in my opinion, very dense and very difficult to use. So when you're building out Koko Analytics, did you take a look at Google and kind of...

look at it and say, OK, this is where I need to improve on what Google does. This is where they fail, and maybe I can make a positive impact.

Danny Van Kooten (07:41)
Yeah,

well, be brutally honest, I didn't look at Google Analytics at all because even back in my freelancing days, my customers expected me to install Google Analytics on their site. But then when I came back to their sites months or years later, they never even looked at it even once. Or maybe they tried to, but they just couldn't find like, how can I just see?

the number of visitors because it's not on the front page of your analytics dashboard. It's buried three pages down or something like that. So I didn't really look at Google. just wanted one page that gave you an overview of what happened on your site. So no custom reports, no multi-leveled pages, just a single page showing visitors and sources.

Eric Karkovack (08:10)
Yes.

That makes sense, because I think the simplicity is what people are really after. We talk about Google Analytics, and you said as a freelancer, people want you to install it. then it's almost like an industry unto itself now that you have to be an expert at Google Analytics in order to set up the reports, in order to get the emails sent out, and just customize things to match what your clients are looking for.

CocoAnalytics is quite the opposite of that. You install it, you can see the stats right away. Our own Matt Medeiros did ⁓ a little video tour of it recently, which we'll put in the show notes, showing just basically you turn it on and it works. And of course, the pro version, you can create reports and things like that as well.

But there's still this expectation that Google is going to be what's used. What advice would you have for a freelancer or an agency whose client says, I really want Google Analytics, but as a freelancer, you're saying, well, I think Koko is probably the better option. What advice would you give to them?

Danny Van Kooten (09:35)
Well, yeah,

what I would really like people to do is like, maybe start out with something simple like Koko Analytics, because it covers a large number of use cases. Like if you just want to see what kind of traffic you're getting, whether it's increasing month over month and where it's coming from, which I think is covering 80 % of small business owners website or even private users.

I just want the default to be something simple, like as simple as it could be. And then over time, maybe your needs are becoming more advanced and you can always slap on something on top of Koko Analytics because it's so lightweight. It doesn't get in the way. doesn't take up any space and it's not slowing down your website. So it's easy to grow into more advanced users. And what we experienced with Koko is usually when

when the default is not enough, they want custom events anyway. And even with Google Analytics, you will have to set that up. And with Koko Analytics, you can now track any type of custom events as well. So even when your use case is more advanced, it can probably be done in a simpler way than you would have with Google Analytics.

Eric Karkovack (10:47)
Yeah, and the other part of that is that you don't have to worry about Google changing their platform or making it more difficult. ⁓ That's been a problem, too. I think just the switch from Google Analytics 3 to 4, ⁓ that was a hassle for a lot of ⁓ website owners and especially, I think, agencies that had a lot of having to go through that.

Danny Van Kooten (10:56)
Yep.

Yeah.

Eric Karkovack (11:13)
plug-in like Coco, you're just basically hitting the update button when a new version comes out and you know everything still works. Which I think is nice in an age where everything seems to be getting more complicated.

Danny Van Kooten (11:25)
It's a nice win. And one other thing that I remember from when I started Koko Analytics is I think back in 2016, the Google Analytics tracking script was like 48 kilobytes after compression and minification. That's a crazy amount of JavaScript for initiating, well, maybe one or two HTTP requests to actually log the visitor.

With Koko Analytics it's 500 bytes added to your pages and that's it.

Eric Karkovack (11:58)
Yeah, performance part of it is definitely important. mean, I could even recall, mean, and still see this with some sites I manage that even if you load up the browser console during analytics coming in, it litters your console with errors at times. It slows everything down. Sometimes you are waiting for the Google server to ⁓ respond. so that kind of, you know, it's one of those, why is my website slow type of things? Well, analytics

can definitely do that anytime you're making a third party call like that. with Coco everything it really is just on your site. It's not making third party calls, right?

Danny Van Kooten (12:36)
Yep.

And most likely there's already a connection open that can be reused for a login revisit. So yeah, it's really, I have a hard time believing it could be any faster than this.

Eric Karkovack (12:48)
Well, I noticed also that you went on to a standalone version for folks that aren't using WordPress. How is that going so far?

Danny Van Kooten (12:58)
wow. I'm surprised you found it because I've not been putting it out there as much because I think the relationship between the standalone version and CocoAnalyx can be a little weird, but I'm using it myself and I know of a couple of people who are self hosting it and it's quite useful as well because you can host a single instance and you can use it to track multiple websites. So...

For instance, if you have a couple of WordPress sites, but also a couple of static websites or anything like that, you can use a similar looking interface for both of these sites. So I'm not sure if I'm going to make it like it's public, it's out there, it's open source. People can use it, but it does require some...

Yeah, well some more advanced setup in terms of deploying it to a server that you can actually use it on. It's definitely not as easy to use as Koko Analytics, the WordPress plugin, but it can be used and it's really nice if you have non-Werplus websites, I think.

Eric Karkovack (14:02)
That's neat. It's nice to have the familiar interface. I mean, I can see like an agency that has a server that maybe wants to set something like that up to track all of their clients in one go of it. But I thought that was an interesting side project. So I have to ask about AI because everything's AI now. So your product is very simple. It's very straightforward.

but we're also like in this age where everything is getting AI integrations. I have to ask, do you see any sort of AI integration coming to Coco? And maybe it's going the opposite way might actually be better. But what do you say about that?

Danny Van Kooten (14:44)
Yeah,

well, if I'm, if I have to be honest, personally, I'm getting quite fed up with everything turning into AI or for Koko Analytics. I'm not sure I see a use case except for maybe the surrounding products like the documentation that you can search or that you can use an AI chatbot to summarize it for you or to help you write.

code snippets to track custom events or something like that. So I can definitely see some use cases for it, but in the product itself, maybe to forecast projected visitor data, but I'm not sure. Personally, I would rather keep it clear of any AI.

Eric Karkovack (15:26)
Honestly, I'm happy to hear you say that. I think we've...

Danny Van Kooten (15:28)
really?

Eric Karkovack (15:30)
put it into so many places where it's not really that useful. It's just more of a race to say, I've added AI to this. OK. Does it make it my job any easier? Does it give me information that I can't get by just looking at the screen? Some of that stuff is just more of a marketing hype to me than it is useful for the user. So I think.

Danny Van Kooten (15:51)
I think so. And to

give an example, like we're using Help Scouts to talk to our users. And like a year ago, they started pushing us to start using AI to talk to our users. And they also started pushing this to my team. And I told them, like, don't click it, please don't use it. I want us to talk to our users ourselves and learn from them and use it to make the product better.

I don't want to save any time on it because it's fine. Like I like talking to users. like learning from our users and I definitely don't want to hand it over to a computer. my users probably gets maybe a faster answer, but also a less accurate answer. So if they want to use AI to learn something about cocoa analytics, they can of course do so. But if they start emailing us, I want them to.

be actually emailing with us like a human and not the AI.

Eric Karkovack (16:42)
Yeah, brings up a good point about just being able to learn from your users, right? mean, how many, I'm just curious, what kind of things have you added to Koko just based on user request or maybe you saw like a use case that you hadn't thought of before?

Danny Van Kooten (16:58)
Well, a lot of things, like most things are actually coming from users because my own use case is quite limited. I don't really look at analytics data all that much. most of the product as it is right now is what I learned from users. Like they're using it in such a way. They want to aggregate referrers on a host name basis. They care about...

which specific Google domain someone came from. They don't care about the specific Pinterest, or someone is coming from because Pinterest is one of the last few domains out there, which is actually sharing the full referrer information. Just general stuff like that. But also which types of custom events are most users tracking and maybe we should make it a built-in event, stuff like that.

Eric Karkovack (17:45)
Yeah, something I hadn't considered with AI, and we're using AI for support and all these other things, you are kind of disconnecting yourself from the people who are using your product, right? So you're kind of in a vacuum building features, and yet you release them to users, and they're kind of wondering, what is this for? Who is this for? you might, it's a missed opportunity as a product maker.

Danny Van Kooten (18:04)
Yeah.

I think so, like I talk to AI a lot and I enjoy it, but one thing I really miss from my freelancing days is that I ran into a lot of problems that I could then use to scratch my own itch and maybe turn into a product because it's been my dream to build products ever since I started programming. But the ideas are a lot harder to come by now that I'm disconnected from building websites every single day.

Eric Karkovack (18:34)
Yeah, and really the users are the only way to kind of get into that, right? I mean, to see what people are facing and where you can take things. That leads me to what's next for you? Is there anything new coming to Koko or any of your other products we should be looking out for?

Danny Van Kooten (18:54)
I'm focusing on Koko Analytics right now. And I'm also still involved with Mailchimp for WordPress, which is still like our largest product by far. But Koko has been growing really well and I hope one day that it can match the success of Mailchimp for WordPress. We recently added Geolocation. Not because, again, not because I care for it, but because a lot of our users actually needed it.

And we're also adding more advanced tracking of like what type of device or screen or browser is viewing this specific website, because a lot of people are using that to base their design decisions on. So that's one thing that's coming. And we're also working on adding tracking UTM parameters by default.

Eric Karkovack (19:40)
So with something like, I'm just curious, something like browser and device tracking, how do you do that in a way that's privacy friendly?

Danny Van Kooten (19:49)
I think the important part is to not track anything down to the version number or have to be quite generic in a way. So maybe just the most popular operating systems and if it's a very specific operating system then maybe bucket it into a more generic like a name instead of...

Well, if I had a visitor and I see in my analytics that it's using Linux Mint and it's been viewing five pages, then I know for sure it's the same visitor because no one uses that on my site. So I think it's important to bucket things so everything becomes slightly more generic, but you can still use it for, well, it's still a lot more info than not knowing anything about the operating system.

Eric Karkovack (20:40)
Exactly. mean, I think we're in a time now too where all the browsers are automatically updated. I I started in this industry a long time ago when, you know, a couple of versions of Internet Explorer came out a year and you had to manually update and not everyone did and they were still using an old version and all that. So I think the version numbers probably aren't as important now, I think, as they were, you know, 15, 20 years ago when we only had a few browsers that you had to really work for. So.

Danny Van Kooten (21:08)
Yeah, think

standardization of browsers has also been improving a lot since Internet Explorer 6.

Eric Karkovack (21:14)
Yeah, thankfully, yeah. I can't remember the last time I had to look at just a specific browser and say, man, this just doesn't work. Things generally do work across browsers these days, which is thankful for web designers and site owners too. So anything else coming down the line that we should look for?

Danny Van Kooten (21:31)
Well, we are doing our own anti-spam protection lately. And it's funny because we have been suffering from a lot of bot signups, which would just go through our purchase flow and then get stuck on the final step where you're making a payment. And we've been getting very good at stopping it. One funny example is that they're all using the same user agent for every couple of weeks. So...

We've been logging that extensively and we're building up quite a nice database on user bots and the types of methods they use. So I've been thinking of maybe building something and offering it to the general public. So maybe I'm doing something like that. So you can protect your site from bot signups or common form spam without requiring a third party.

I think that would be nice but don't pin me down on it please.

Eric Karkovack (22:24)
Well, I could tell you there's definitely a need for it. yeah, privacy-focused, not using a third party would also be a huge bonus for a lot of people because we have Cloud Flares turnstile. We have reCAPTCHA from Google. But both of those are third party solutions. So having something that you can host on your own site and maintain the privacy aspect of it, I think, would be awesome. So definitely let us know if you go ahead with that because we'd love to talk to you about it.

Danny Van Kooten (22:49)
I

I will, thank you.

Eric Karkovack (22:52)
Well, Danny, I want to say thank you for being on the WP minute. And where can folks find you and connect with you online?

Danny Van Kooten (23:00)
I'm on Blue Sky since a couple of weeks. I've not been as good in checking it like daily, but I'm getting there. So people can search for Danny van Kooten on Blue Sky. And if they do, please send me a... What do you call it on Blue Sky? ⁓

Eric Karkovack (23:17)
I think it's just a chat.

Danny Van Kooten (23:18)
Okay, chat with me there.

Eric Karkovack (23:20)
Awesome. Well, thank you again for being on. And everyone, thank you for ⁓ for joining us here on the WPMinute today. Be sure to check us out at the WPMinute.com slash subscribe. There you can receive our newsletter, get information on new episodes and also become a member of our community. Thanks for being with us and we'll see you next time.

Danny Van Kooten (23:40)
Thanks Eric, thanks for having me.

Eric Karkovack (23:42)
Thank you.