Meet Jack
Hey there. My name is Jack Arturo, and I’ve been working in web development since I was 12 years old. Over two-thirds of my life at this point 😅.
I got started working in WordPress development in 2010, and fully switched from client work to plugin development in 2015 when I founded Very Good Plugins, which is our parent company name.
What inspired you to create WP Fusion?
When I got started in WordPress development I was doing a lot of work with clients that used Infusionsoft (now called Keap) for their email marketing. At the time there weren’t a lot of great ways to get customer data from WordPress to Infusionsoft (for example to send an email when someone passes a course).
I was spending a lot of time implementing the same solutions for different clients and I realized there might be the potential for a product there. Ten years later we’re still in business and still going strong. It’s been an incredible journey.
How does WP Fusion differentiate itself from other similar plugins?
There are two other plugin categories similar to WP Fusion. One is the one-off connector type plugin. Many companies sell these as paid add-ons to their core products. For example if you’re using WPForms you might buy their WPForms + ActiveCampaign add-on to send your form submissions to ActiveCampaign.
This works well for a single integration, but if you’re running a ecommerce or membership site connected to ActiveCampaign, you could have 5+ connector plugins, all by different developers, with no awareness of each other, and varying levels of code quality. Plus the support teams at plugin companies are not ActiveCampain experts— they can’t help you set up automations, run reports in AC on WordPress data, etc.
The second is the “automator”-type plugin category. These work like Zapier, or Make.com, but run as plugins in your WordPres site, so you don’t have the typical mostly fees associated with SaaS variants.
In the beginning they mostly automated actions between plugins (i.e. Buy Product A -> Enroll in Course A) but over time they’ve added more integrations with outside email services. These work well, but it’s still a very “If this happens, do that” level of integration. It’s not generally an ongoing or two-way synchronization with your CRM.
WP Fusion is designed for people who are making heavy use of their CRM or email marketing system (some of our most popular are ActiveCampaign, Keap, and HighLevel), and want the tightest possible integration with their WordPress site.
All of our functionality is contained in a single plugin, and many things are pre-configured out of the box. For example all you need to do is install WP Fusion on your WordPress site and connect it to ActiveCampaign, and your customers, products, and sales data will begin syncing automatically, without having to set up triggers for each event.
As well, because we’re CRM experts (WP Fusion supports over 60 of them), customers love that they have a single point of contact for anything related to their marketing automation in WordPress. In many cases, we are also certified partners with the CRM companies, so we can step in and get priority support for you in the rare cases of technical errors on the CRM side.WP Fusion isn’t for everybody. If you just need to send form submissions to your email list, there are certainly simpler (and cheaper) options. But we’ve created a comfortable niche among power users looking for the tightest possible integration between WordPress and CRMs or email marketing tools.
What are the key features that users love about WP Fusion?
Our support gets particular praise. I have stayed personally involved in support and development, even up until now, and I believe no problem should go unsolved. Complex integrations involving multiple plugins and API calls can often be difficult to troubleshoot. Customers trust that with us they’ll get a fast reply, and if something requires a fix on our end, we can usually have it released within the next week.
Marketing agencies also love working with WP Fusion because it supports all the most popular plugins (over 150) and CRMs (60+). Each client site is different, and without WP Fusion they would need to go hunting for new integration plugins for every project. With WP Fusion they can learn a single tool that is adaptable to all their clients.
How does WP Fusion handle large-scale websites with complex automation needs?
As a developer first (and reluctant business manager 😅), I always think about performance when adding features. We run WP Fusion on all of our websites, and are constantly testing it for any areas we could improve.
Some specific examples include the ability to export hundreds of thousands of records from WordPress to the CRM using an export tool that’s designed to run in the background at low resource usage. I can think of one client who exported 600,000+ orders to Keap. It took a few days to finish, but every order was synced, and the site didn’t experience any visible slowdown.
WP Fusion’s logging system also records everything that is happening, which helps to track down issues in complex automations. For example, a single action might update a CRM contact record, apply a tag, enroll the user in a course, and apply a discount to their cart. This is all logged into an interactive logs table, where users can see every action, what triggered it, and if there were any errors.
Can you explain the tagging system in WP Fusion and its use cases?
Absolutely. Almost every platform we support has some way of segmenting contacts. Often that’s called “tags”, but it could be “lists”, “groups”, or “segments”. WP Fusion can apply tags based on hundreds of possible triggers (page views, product purchases, quiz attempts, etc.), and these tags can trigger automations in the connected CRM.
But the tags can also be used in WordPress. WP Fusion has a comprehensive tag-based access system that lets you personalize just about anything on your site using the user’s CRM tags.
You can unlock pages, trigger popups, apply discounts, trigger course enrollments, or even change your site’s CSS— all using tags. This lets you use WP Fusion’s triggers combined with automations in your connected CRM to create a highly personalized and engaging experience that’s unique to each user.
How do you see AI impacting the SaaS industry in the next few years?
The biggest change for us has been AI-assisted coding. I would estimate that probably 85%+ of our code is now AI generated. Because we support so many platforms and integrations, we’d get many feature requests that might only benefit a handful of customers, and it was hard to find time to work on these niche requests.
Now with AI, if a customer needs something (even as an extra code snippet they add to their site), we can help them with that in just a few minutes. It’s helping to reinforce the image of WP Fusion as a plugin that can integrate practically anything between your WordPress site and CRM.
In the next few years— I think AI agents, which are just in their infancy, are going to become hugely influential.
I can plan a decent holiday itinerary on ChatGPT, but when agents are able to make bookings, follow up to confirm appointments or pick out a list of holiday rentals based on my personal preferences, it’s going to be a huge game changer. Since the technology is still brand new I expect we’ll see a lot of SaaS companies launching around agents in the near future.
I am working on launching a SaaS myself as a side project, called EchoDash. It uses AI to monitor events from various apps you might use online (WordPress of course, but also Stripe, Calendly, your CRM, or anything that can send a webhook), and then summarizes your data into a real-time activity feed with charts, alerts, and notifications.
Even a year ago this wouldn’t be technically possible, so I’m excited to feel like I’m working at the cutting edge of a new technology.
What advice would you give to someone building their first SaaS product?
I think everyone says this but it’s true— build something for a niche audience, in an area you know well, and ideally one where you have some established expertise.
The big universal products like project management, CRMs, scheduling, and messaging, have already been done well, and a new SaaS in those broad areas needs deep pockets to compete.
Not to say that you can’t build a scheduling app! But I’d be thinking about a scheduling app for landscapers, or recruiters— something where you can create features specific to your niche that aren’t being done by the big players.
I still consider WP Fusion a very niche product. We’re only powering about 40,000 websites, but it’s enough to build a successful business, and we’ve mostly avoided competition by being the best option for the small segment of WordPress users who can’t live without the level of integration we provide.
What has been the biggest learning experience for you in the SaaS space?
No one can do everything as well as you can, but you can’t do everything yourself.
For many years I handled all aspects of WP Fusion personally— support, development, and marketing. It was a one-person show, and it was exhausting.
Someone once told me that if you hire someone and they can only do the role 80% as well as you could, then take that as a win. 80% of “perfect” is perfectly fine! And now you no longer have those responsibilities.
Once I started accepting that and bringing in more people to help, the business grew faster, the quality of the product went up, and I had more time to focus on the things I enjoy. It’s something I wish I’d realized much sooner.
Did you enjoy our interview? Do you have anything to say to our community?
Yes! Thank you for the opportunity! Sometimes I can get stuck in full-speed-ahead mode, and it’s refreshing to sit down for an hour to look back and reflect 🙂
You can find out more about WP Fusion at https://wpfusion.com/ and check out my new (beta) SaaS at https://echodash.com/. Cheers!
