Thank you.
Hi everyone.
Thanks for being here.
It's actually, uh, pretty amazingthat there's more than three
people here, considering there'slike a big AI talk next door.
Um, so I feel honored andblessed that you're here today.
We're doing, uh, what we have kind oflabeled a masterclass because it's,
uh, a whole bunch of things thatwe've learned over a period of time.
Uh, through our WP Product Talk podcast.
If you haven't heard of the WP ProductTalk podcast, go to WP Product Talk dot
com and you can learn all the thingswe're talking about right now just by
listening to, I don't know, hundreds ofhours of interviews that might be cool.
Um, but we get to condenseit for you here today.
Um, a little bit of the format thatwe're doing is we're, we have broken
this up into four different pieces, uh,focused on different aspects of what
some of the top product companies doto have success in their businesses.
And we're gonna end each ofthose sections, uh, with, uh,
about a 10 to 15 minute QA time.
So if you see right in the middlehere, there's two microphones,
uh, one in the very far backand one up here in the middle.
So as we're talking in the session andyou have a thought that it doesn't have
to be a question, it could be sharingyour own experience in 30 seconds or
less, or, you know, 60 seconds or less.
Um, and, or, uh, just generalcommentary or definitely a question.
Uh, just start lining up at themicrophone so you can ask your question.
Um, at the end of that section, uh,we're gonna also be showcasing, uh,
some of the people that we're, that wehave case studies of in the presentation
are here in this room with us today.
They have been our guests on thepodcast before, and so when we say, uh,
talking about something like Ws Forms,uh, mark is right here and he'll be
able to answer your question as well.
So, jam packed.
Lots of fun.
Um, yeah, that's it, uh, for now.
Oh yeah, this one.
So when we started looking at, um,how to showcase the top product
companies and how we can learn fromthem, we came up with four ingredients
for a successful product business.
Uh, so first we're gonna talk abouthow to choose a winning product idea.
Uh, we're gonna go into marketing,which I know is a big pain
point for a lot of people.
How to market and grow your producteffectively, learning from your customers
and using that to create the product thatpeople want and want to buy from you.
And finally, we're going to talk aboutdata and how to use evidence to inform
your business development and growthand work in an evidence-based way.
Yeah, and for more of, uh, thein-depth advice on all of these
things, like I mentioned, it's allon uh, WP Product Talk dot com.
Um, and we aren't paid.
This isn't a paid podcast.
Uh, we do this in our spare time.
We are business owners or former businessowners, um, and we are volunteering
our time to do this podcast whereit's not sponsored, there's no ads,
um, it's just free for the community.
Um, so go there and check things out.
In each section that we do, we're gonnabe doing real world case studies, um, and
we're gonna talk about why these thingswork, um, and how you can replicate
it yourself in your own business.
Uh, and then at the end there'sthe discussion of each section.
There's the discussion in q anda. And if you don't line up to
ask questions, I'll like have todo an awkward dance to fill time.
So nobody wants that.
So come prepared with yourquestions and answers.
Um.
So our first section ischoosing a winning product idea.
And now if you've already got products,this section is still relevant to
you because what it's about is chis thinking about different types
of products and how that affectshow you approach your business.
Uh, so even if you've got a product,think about which of the categories
we're going to talk about it fits into.
Um, I do often say that the mostimportant thing is how you execute
your idea, but actually greatexecution can't save a bad idea.
It does still need to be a goodidea for a product, and it's
not always easy to find one.
The WordPress market is crowded.
There's over 64,000plugins, over 20,000 themes.
Um, people often say it'ssaturated, which I don't believe,
and I'll tell you why in a minute.
Uh, so choosing the right idea willgive you a competitive headstart
and maximize your chances of successwhen you execute it perfectly.
So we discovered three proven waysto find a product idea that can win.
And they are totally differentideas of types of products.
So you need to choose one thatrealistically you can bring to
success based on your skillsyou interests, and the resources
that you have available to you.
So it's not one size fits all, whichis why we should all think about
all these categories and how weare gonna succeed in one of them.
Not all.
So the first idea is creating a brand newcategory of products that doesn't exist.
And then another one is filling a gap inthe market, which people know they want.
And finally, you can innovate in amarket which is already crowded, and
there are ways to still find successin an existing competitive area.
And you can see from these logosthat we're going to be covering
various products which fitinto the different categories.
So first up, we want to highlighta use case with um, uh, a company
and product, uh, called aam.
We have veto peck right down here.
He's gonna be able to answerquestions, uh, later if you have them.
Uh, this one is.
What we have called creatingthe new category idea.
And honestly, I'm curious tohear if Vito thinks he actually
created a new category or not.
I feel like he kind of created a newcategory, uh, especially at the time that
he launched, but you could also call itthe Blue Ocean Strategy, essentially.
Um, he went out into the field.
Uh, actually a really good precedentto think about this is, is Slack.
I often compare, uh, Vito'sapproach to this, uh, to Slack.
Slack identified a problem, uh, whichwas that, uh, nobody likes using email.
So let's just not use email anymore.
And they created it on an alternative.
But then you have to educatepeople on why e You don't have to
educate 'em on why email sucks.
Uh, they all know that, but youhave to educate them on why your
solution answers that pain point.
Uh, and, and what Veto did with, uh,originally WP feedback was saying, we
all are doing this type of work on ourwebsites where we are giving feedback
and then having to go over here andwork with this team over here about
the design and work with this team,about the layout and the web dev.
What if we actually had a productthat helped to actually centralize
that and make it a lot easierand as accelerate your workflows,
uh, we all have that pain point.
We didn't know that there was a tool thatwould help us to solve that pain point.
Um, so in that case, what you getto do, you get to do things when you
go to market and that other types ofcategories of products don't get to do.
You don't have to fight overthe same crowded keywords.
Like if you want to try to, uh, compete inWordPress, SEO, that's super hard to do.
Um, but if you're saying, uh, WordPressfeedback tool or something like
that, that is a lot less crowded,um, in the space, you get to fight in
there, you get to own that category.
You're kind of a little bit likefirst to market because you're
kind of creating that market.
Um, so you get to own thatcategory before anybody else.
Um, uh, AAMS, uh, well, WP Feedback andAams, uh, early success was really great.
They had a big pre-launch campaignthat they did, and Veto's been very
public about, uh, their early success.
Showing that they drove ahundred K in revenue within
their, uh, first, uh, launch.
Um, other really smart things he did,he was immediately we'll talk about,
uh, listening to customer feedback.
I mean, as a feedback tool that'sreally important, but we'll, we'll
talk about that a little bit later.
But by listening to his audiencein the very early stages of the
pre-launch and the post-launch campaign,they pivoted in a relatively short
amount of time to not be a pluginbase, but to be more of a SaaS.
Um, that's also a, a, a reallygreat take, um, to think about, um,
and to, to emulate based on, uh,your, your category in particular.
Um, a couple key takeaways here.
Uh, this one works really, reallywell when you are, um, what I
would call a marketing founder.
I, I always think of founders as every,every founder has different strengths.
I mean, maybe there's such a thingas a unicorn founder who really is
a amazing marketer and developerand customer experience person.
Uh, those are really, reallyextremely rare, but everyone has
a, a specific really good strength.
Um, and in this case, this one worksreally, really well when you're a
strong, uh, marketing founder, uh,because it depends a hundred percent.
Uh, your success depends on yourability to get the message out
there to as many people as possible.
There are plugins even today that winmore or less by just being present on
the wordpress.org plugin directory.
They're just like, if youbuild it, they will come.
Right?
This is not the case with this category.
You're gonna have to hit the pavement.
You're gonna have to go out thereand make your name loud and known.
I met Vito the first time at a Wordcamp, um, because he was out there, uh,
hitting the pavement, trying to make sureeverybody understood what WP feedback was.
Um, you'll need to educatethe market as well.
You're not just saying,Hey, I have a tool.
Um, they're gonna be like,why do I need your tool?
You're gonna have to know how to convincepeople that they need that, that tool.
Not just explain what the features are,but explain to them how your tool, um,
uh, directly addresses their pain points.
Um, and that's, uh, uh, that's amarketing, um, and aspect for sure.
Um, and the best thing though aboutthis is you don't have to fight
for the same pie as everybody else.
You get to make a new one.
Um, I love that, uh, opportunitythat this category has overall.
Um, and, uh, but you gottahave the right tool set.
You have to have the rightstrategy in order to make it work.
So, as Matt said this, that previousstrategy was good for strong marketers,
and I believe that a lot of foundersget it wrong and try to create
categories of products that peopledon't already know they need when
they're not marketing experts like Vito.
So our second approach is to fill agap in the market, which I think is a
more realistic option for many foundersbecause they're building products that
people are actively searching for.
So somebody might go onto Googleor AI and type a particular,
how do I do this in WordPress?
And hopefully your productwill appear in the results.
That's very different to having to run ageneral campaign to convince people of the
need for your product in the first place.
So that means it's a completelydifferent type of marketing,
which we'll discuss more later.
Your product needs to appear wherecustomers are already looking for
it, and that way you benefit fromexisting demand and you don't have
to do the education side of things.
Um, and that does change over time.
So keep looking for gaps overtime because, uh, for example,
AI has created new gaps.
It's a new technology, which becameavailable just a few years ago,
and that means that there wassuddenly gaps for products, which
couldn't have existed before.
Um, I'm not saying just do somethingfor the sake of it because something
new has come in, but that is anopportunity to look for gaps, for real
pain points, which can now be solvedthat maybe couldn't be solved before.
So you don't just needto invent something new.
You just need to servean existing need better.
It's very different.
So we've got sort of a few case studieshere, and I've structured them into
big problem gaps and add-on gaps.
So the big problem gaps, you are verylucky if you can find one of these,
but if you can't, that's great.
So when Yos, SEO and A CF were firstlaunched, there were massive pain points.
There wasn't a good wayto do SEO in WordPress.
There wasn't a good way for developers inparticular to be adding custom content to
a WordPress site, custom fields and so on.
And so Yost and Advanced CustomFields identified those gaps and built
really high quality products thatwould fill them and meet that need.
So when people were looking, theywere there and they dominated that.
I know they're competitive areasnow, but I'm thinking about
when they were first launched.
And on a smaller scale, you can alsomeet smaller gaps in the market.
So, for example, uh, my company Barn two,we tend to add, uh, provide plugins that
add features to WooCommerce in particular.
So for example, uh, WooCommerceitself has some product filters
built in and they're quite basicbecause that's the core product.
And um, but some stores, particularlythose with larger numbers of products
or particular products, might want moreadvanced features or different styles of
features, different filters or differentlogic of when the filters will appear.
So we built a product filterplugin, which builds on what
was available in WooCommerce.
And even though that's really quitea niche thing, because WooCommerce is
absolutely huge with a massive user base,there still can be a big market for that.
And similarly GravityKit, uh, that isa company that provides add-ons for
Gravity Form, which is another hugeecosystem you can build on top of.
For example, their Gravity Viewplugin allows you to display gravity
forms, entries in on the front endof a website, which isn't something
which gravity forms are planningto put into their core product.
So how do you find the gap?
And this is what peopleask me all the time.
They say the market is completelysaturated in WordPress.
There are no new ideas.
It's all been done before,and I don't agree with that.
It is harder than it was 10 years ago.
But if you were close enough toWordPress and the work you're doing,
particularly specific angles withinWordPress, then there are still gaps.
So one place to look is yourclient work, if you're currently
doing some sort of client work.
So what, when have you really struggledto find a plugin to meet a client's needs
or a particular type of theme to meet therequirements for a particular project?
Has that happened to you more than once?
Have you built any custom pluginsfor clients that you think might
have a more general interest ifyou release that as a product?
What about your own pain points?
So for example, let's go back to Terin andVeto was doing client work at the time and
he knew from his own work was a nightmare.
It was for clients to have to sendemails with their feedback or have
Google Docs where things would get lost.
So it was scratching his own itchin thinking of the idea of Asim.
If you already have some WordPressproducts, then it's very likely
that your customers are goingto give you ideas for new ones.
And they'll probably word itas something like a feature
request for your main product.
Um, but it, you don't haveto interpret it like that.
So at band two, we've probablygot three or four plugins that the
customer made as a feature request.
But then when we thought about it, wedecided, no, this is a standalone plugin.
The product filters plugin I mentioneda minute ago is a good example of that.
So we had a product table plugin, whichlists products in a quick order form and
that had some basic filters built in.
And people were saying, wewant more advanced fee fee
filters for our product tables.
And we thought, well, yes, butthese more advanced filters would be
relevant on many sites, not just onesthat use our product table plugin.
So we release the standaloneproduct filter plugin, which
integrates with our table plugin.
So even if you're already aproduct company, you might be
getting these insights where ifyou think a bit creatively there's
opportunities for new products.
And finally you can do some researchoutside of your own experience.
So you can look at online reviews ofother products and WordPress itself,
for example, the support forums.
Uh, what are people regularlyasking that isn't possible.
You can even use AI to helpyou with this research.
And lots of products have featurerequest boards as well that you can
look at, and that has pain points in it.
Um, we are looking places like Reddit,for example, and various forums.
This is our, uh, our lastapproach in this section.
So again, if you have questions orcomments or hopes and dreams and
aspirations about anything whatsoever,um, start lining up at the mic.
Like I said, vetoes down here.
Mark is right here.
Uh, they'd love to help you, uh, fillin any gaps in what we're talking about.
Uh, we have our own thoughts andcomments, but um, it's a great
opportunity to hear from them.
Uh, this last one is about innovatingin and already competitive markets.
Um, and, uh, in particular,mark and Ws form has done this.
I, uh, you know, if Mark would'vecome, come to me right before he
was launching WS form and said,should I build a form plugin?
I would be like, why in theworld would you do that?
Um, that it, it wasalready very, very full.
It feels very full now.
Um, don't let Mark hear you, but like,honestly, I think somebody else would
still come in and innovate in this space.
Uh, there's lots of ways to do forms.
If you think of forms as simple,you're missing the markets.
Um, have you ever filled out as aparent, a school registration form?
I mean, that's a form, you know, uh,people have to build those things.
Um, if we can make it easierfor them, that would be great.
Um, but it is a very,uh, uh, crowded market.
Um.
What Mark did is he saw that there, thereare a lot of forms out there and they're
all catering to folks, um, more or less,who don't have a lot of tech savvy skills.
They, they try to go that route more.
Um, and again, I I, I do wannasay we did not vet our opinions
of Mark and his and his product.
This is our take on what he's doing.
He can clarify later.
Um, but, uh, he won a lot ofdev respect by having a very dev
oriented, uh, perspective on,uh, how he built out WS forms.
Uh, I love actually that there is away that you can actually toggle the
experience, um, where it can be very,very dev uh, oriented and you can even
expand and see what's going on in the.
Uh, inspector as well.
Um, and, uh, but you can also reduceit down and have a lot more simplified
experience with the builder as well.
Uh, a really smart way to approach themarket when there's things like gravity
forms or contact form seven that have avery different approach to things that
are more catered towards an end user.
Um, he also noticed that, um,you know, at Word camps and in
the space, uh, the Gravity forms,folks don't show up as much.
Um, or contact Form seven folks.
They don't have a large presencein the WordPress community.
Um, uh, at these types of things.
Mark started showing up everywhere.
I don't think I've been to a Word camp ina few years where Mark hasn't been there.
Um, so I think that's a reallyunique way to get in there.
He also has been out on the, on thescene, uh, helping out with, uh,
podcasts and being on there a lot.
Uh, also sponsorships and events.
Um, he's really been trying to, toreally get his, um, presence known
as far as he can in the community.
Um, he also took a very differentapproach, uh, to finding how to get
into the market share, competingon, uh, specific types of keywords,
uh, and really focusing on hiswebsite and really smart ways.
Um, Mark's also pretty much solofounder, really working on it,
um, by himself, by and large.
Um, and, uh, you know, when you,uh, fill out a support ticket,
it's highly likely it's gonnabe Mark who answers that ticket.
Uh, when you put in a feature request,most likely he's the one who's going to
build it, um, when you are gonna filea better business bureau complaint.
I'm just kidding.
Um, but all of those things reallyland directly on Mark, which is also
kind of unique in the space as well.
Um, a couple things that I wouldtake away from here is, uh, with,
with, uh, the Ws Forms example.
Um.
Uh, when there is a crowded market,it's crowded in a particular way.
Uh, there's probably most likely alikely an underserved area of that
crowded market that you can focus on.
Uh, I wouldn't necessarily callthat a niche, but it's more of
like an angle within the market.
Um, and that is a way tobe competitive in there.
And it's not just a matter of lookingat like their feature table and finding
the features that they don't have.
I feel like that's kind of a losingstrategy, but it's more about the whole
positioning of what you offer that'sunique from the positioning of the other
things that are out there in the market.
Um, and then you really have to tailoryour product to fit that specifically,
um, and be able to add those typesof features that really enhance your.
Your angle, um, that you're, thatyou're working on, um, and, uh, then
really position yourself as an expert.
Um, that's, uh, something that wedon't cover really dedicated here,
but your reputation and the way thatyou're known in this space is really
significant and lifts everythingyou do in your product business.
Uh, I mean, we'll talk about, give alittle bit later, but a lot of what
I did at GiveWP is position myselfas a nonprofit fundraising leader.
Mark has done the same thing in many ways,talking about forms and best practices
and accessibility and development.
Um, and really showing that he puts allof that insight into his product so that,
not, not that he just uses it to build theproduct, but that you get to get benefits
in the product from his experience.
Um, I think that all of those thingsreally matter a lot, um, and, uh,
really sets you up, uh, in a waythat, uh, can be a distinguisher.
Um, just keep in mind, uh, youcan look at a crowded market and
think, well, why would I enter that?
But the truth is it'scrowded for a reason.
Um, there's a lot ofopportunity in a crowded market.
There's a lot of reasonswhy people need those tools.
And, uh, one thing I like to sayto folks all the time is like.
Yes, give is, uh, one of the, isthe most significant WordPress
plugin for donations in the space.
But there are roughly 5 million nonprofitwebsites in the US alone, and it's
growing all the time, and we have noteven scratched the surface of that.
So just because we're dominantright now doesn't mean we're
gonna be dominant tomorrow.
Uh, there's lots of opportunity even ina perceived, uh, very crowded market.
I see.
No, you're gonna make me dance folks.
I see nobody at the microphone.
Um, oh, so this is our time,Vito's here, Mark's here.
Uh, comments, questions, thoughts.
Maybe if you, if you're uncomfortable,you could just like, shout
from your seat if you'd like.
Uh, but this is supposed to be workshoporiented, so, um, now's your time.
Nice.
I'll bite.
Yeah.
How's it going?
Uh, uh, so, sorry, I haven'treally thought this out.
Um, but when you're talking aboutproductizing one of my questions
or, or one of the things that comesto mind is how you deal or approach
people, um, who want help, who wantsupport, especially unpaid support or
unpaid, you know, whatever it might,you know, no free lunch, so to speak.
So I'm curious if you or anybodyelse has thoughts about how
you approach that problem, howyou communicate to those folks.
Like, Hey, listen, this is a,you know, this is a paid thing.
This costs money, support costs money.
I don't do this for free.
Um, just how do you navigate those?
How do you think about that?
Kind of a vague question.
It's a good one.
We are gonna talk about support a littlebit later, but not from that angle.
Um, I'd love to hear your take two.
Um, yeah.
I feel you are the best person becauseGive has a significant free plugin.
Yeah, yeah.
Um.
I'll, what I'll tell you is I think ofthe free, the free plugin is very, um,
uh, feature rich, uh, and people canstart fundraising right away with it.
Um, and that's all there for sure.
But one way that we think about our freeplugin offerings is, do you know what
the other thing that you actually do,do for free is you probably blog for
free and people are reading your blog,um, and they're not paying you for that.
You probably are maybespending money on ads.
Um, and so that's not evensomething you do for free.
You're spending money on that areaand people are coming through, um,
and they're doing that for free.
There is lots of activity thatyou do to get folks into your
funnel in one way or another.
And I am not saying that a freeplugin, especially on.org, is
only a funnel that is actuallyagainst WordPress, uh, policies.
Um, but your free plugin is a funnel, uh,and you have to think about it that way.
Uh, and so you are goingto invest in a funnel.
And I will say, just from myexperience, the free plugin is the
most qualified plug, uh, funnel thatyou will have in any of the channels.
So do I spend a lot of my freetime, uh, focusing on free support?
A hundred percent I do, andI don't regret it in any way.
Great.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, mark.
Um, actually, yeah, if you could, if youcould Mark and Vito, maybe if you hang
out back there too, that'd be great.
Um, yeah, I, I have a freeversion of my plugin as well.
One of the things that we do is inensure that any, uh, support for
that free plugin goes through thesupport forum on wordpress.org.
Yeah.
Um, and one of the reasons for that isit is actually a factor that improves
your ranking in the plugin directory.
Yeah.
So the more of that free support youcan get pushed through on the, the
plugin, uh, support forum, the better.
And it really is actuallyquite a big factor.
Um, I can find myself jumping for acertain keyword from, say, 18 to nine just
by getting one support ticket answered.
Yep.
So doing that quickly and efficientlyis, is a good way to improve your
ranking on the plugin Director.
A hundred percent.
I've definitely had conversationswith several folks who say, Hey,
I've optimized my README for myplugin over and over again, and I'm
just not going up over these otherplugins that have like a hundred
active installs and I've got 5,000.
This doesn't make any sense.
And I say, oh, but you've solvedzero out of 25 support tickets.
Uh, and I've literally seen them.
Answer all the support ticketsand the next day they're
up above the other plugin.
Um, and the truth is, you can seethe algorithm, the search algorithm,
wordpress.org is open source itself.
Um, you could see the way that theplugin directory is, uh, prioritizes,
uh, results, um, by and large, not,not a hundred percent of it, but
about 90% of it you can see, and youcould see that support, uh, answers
is, is high on that list for sure.
Joel, good to see you, man.
Good to see you.
Um, probably a question for Katie.
Um, you mentioned about buildingplugins that are add-ons to other
plugins that are made by other people.
Have you ever had the experience wherethat, um, you've got a successful plugin,
but then those features get absorbed,uh, you know, made into the core plugin
by, you know, a different, differentcompany and how you deal with that?
I haven't significantly had that happenyet, but it is on the horizon because
WooCommerce recently announced a newpolicy called More in Core, where they're
specifically adding more features.
So it is quite possiblethat that will happen.
I think the trick is to make surethere are enough features in your
plugin that would never go into core.
So for example, maybe they will,I have a product options plugin,
which adds various type of extraadd-on options to product pages.
Um, maybe they will put color swatchessay, which is also a feature of my plugin
in, but they're probably not going to add.
Uh, file upload fields andtext fields and image previews.
So you can put a logo ona t-shirt and it appears.
I can't see that ever going into core.
So you need to make sure yourproduct has enough features
that it will still be ahead.
And yes, your market would reduce ifthey put those color swatches into
core, but at least there would stillbe some market for your products.
And the other thing thatworks for me personally is
diversifying across many products.
So we have 19 WordPress plugins atthe moment, and if one plugin had a
hit to its sales through that platformrisk that you are referring to, it
wouldn't be as much of a disaster asif that was our only plugin where.
That would be a risk.
But that does apply, I would say, topretty much all WordPress plugins.
It's not just those add-onones because WordPress can
put features in core as well.
We are seeing that a lot on the horizon.
For example, the upcomingtranslation project to make
WordPress core multilingual,that's going to have an impact.
You've got the whole page builder thingand the block editor, um, they're still
surviving because their page buildershave features that maybe the block editor
doesn't and doesn't even intend to.
So you have to think about all of thosefactors and you can still be successful.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Um, I think we need to move.
Yeah.
We are a bit over time.
Yep.
So let's carry on.
But thank you both to Markand to Vito for being here.
Appreciate your time and, uh, um,we're gonna head to the next section.
Next one is, um, marketyour product effectively.
So, um, in the course of WP Product Talkand talking with people at work camps
and everything, um, in, in the WordPressspace very, very, very often, um, we
tend to have a lot of dev founders.
Um, that's why I highlighted earlierthat, that I find Vito vetoes is a
little bit of a unicorn, I have to say.
But, um, uh, he is tends to bea marketing founder, and that's
a little bit of an exception.
There's so, so many dev foundersand the achilles heel of a
dev founder is marketing.
Uh, it's just not their concern.
It's not their passion.
Uh, sometimes they thinkit's kind of gross.
Um, and, uh, and, and that meansthat they're really bad at it.
Um, and you don't survive.
You don't succeed unlessyou figure out how to be.
Uh, at least passable, butideally a pretty good marketer.
Um, so we have two very differentapproaches, uh, and, but the very,
very, the same core principlesacross both of these, um, two, um,
different examples that we have.
Um, this is what I was justtalking about actually.
Um, oh, actually this isa really important part.
Marketing by itself is not somethingthat you just do and then move on.
And that happens a lotwith dev founders as well.
Uh, they're like, okay, wellI'm going to do a bunch of
marketing, and then they do it.
They see some ROI immediately, theygo off and start building again.
Uh, they lose focus and then ofcourse, everything dies down again.
And then it becomes this kindof feast and famine roller.
Roller coaster marketing is just adaily practice that you have to be doing
all the time in one form or another.
Uh, if you're not a good marketer,hopefully you can scale your product very
quickly so that you hire a marketer, uh,so that this doesn't suffer in any way.
Um, but.
All of that is gonna help in, in thelong run, in terms of how you adapt to
things that are happening all the time.
Your marketing has to adapt as well.
You have to be able toshift at a moment's notice.
AI is definitely incorporatedall kinds of different challenges
in the marketing space for sure.
But SEO is still a big driver.
I mean, you could say what you wantabout uh, AI summaries and whatnot,
but I'm looking at my clicks and we'restill getting plenty of organic traffic.
Um, and that's gonna bethe case for a long time.
Um, these are things that aren'tgonna go away and you need to be
able to adjust and adapt as it goes.
So we are gonna look at, uh, themarketing of two very different companies.
Uh, we start with my own company, barn twoplugins, where, like I said, we provide
very specific plugins that add specificfeatures to WordPress or WooCommerce.
And so.
It wouldn't be particularly efficientfor me to run a campaign to say, make
ban to a household name, given thatit's only people with very particular
problems for their websites or theirclients' websites that need our products.
So what I want to do is bethere when people are actively
searching for something thatmy products are a solution to.
And, uh, that's where potential customersare searching for exact solutions.
In this example, we've got, somebody mighthave searched Google or asked AI for how
to build a WordPress document library.
So we have lots of tutorials onour blog about how to do that.
With our plugin, we have a YouTubechannel where we have similar content.
YouTube's the world's secondbiggest search engine, so it's
important to be on there as well.
And then the other bit of thatscreenshot is a perplexity result where
I asked perplexity ai, what's the bestWordPress document, library plugin?
And luckily it recommended my plug.
So where hopefully whenever someone issearching for how to build a document
library, they're going to find my plugin.
And that is much more cost effective thanif I was just say, putting adverts on
the London Underground about WordPressdocument library, where a teeny proportion
of people would actually want it andit would cost huge amounts of money.
So it's a very, um, specific typeof marketing and this gives us
consistent inbound sales, uh, withoutneeding a huge general audience.
So why this works, it meets customersat their exact moment of need.
It doesn't matter too much ifthey've heard of us before, although
if they have, that's a good thingbecause they will have that trust
and they'll be more likely to buy.
It solves a clear defined problem soour marketing can be clear and defined.
We are producing content around specifickeywords or topic clusters, for example.
Over time that builds long-termauthority in the niche, hopefully
for real people, but also for, um,Google, it is seeing that we have
a lot of topics, a lot of contentabout that topic and related topics.
So they're more likely to be featuringus at the top of the search engines.
Same applies to AI, of course,and that compounds over time.
When you start, it might be quitehard, uh, because you don't have loads
of content and you don't have loadsof people linking to you and writing
about your product in that topic.
But the more you do that, the more itincreases over time so that you can
be there when people are searching.
Our next case study is, uh,Elementor, and, uh, Gabby is here
from Elementor, um, wave to everybody.
Um, and she's can help answersome questions as well.
Um, uh, Elementor is a great casestudy for, for this in particular
in terms of marketing, when I thinkthrough the WordPress space, in terms
of who's really crushing it in termsof marketing, I think of Elementor
first and foremost, above all others.
Uh, they are everywhere.
They, they really spread their, uh,presence as far as they possibly
can across multi multiple channels.
If I'm on YouTube, um, and I'm gonnasee an ad, it's often an Elementor ad.
Uh, if I'm on Facebook, I'm gonna seean ad. If I'm, uh, in, in different
places, I, I, I run into them.
If I'm at a Word camp,they're saying hi to me.
Like I, I go so many differentplaces and, and they're there.
They really make sure to, to, to spreadthemselves as far as they possibly can.
It's a very similar strategy to whatI had had at Give for a long time.
I always called it.
Success by a thousand cuts.
Um, I will try to really do all thethings as much as I possibly can,
as far as my capacity will allow me.
Um, of course when you're ateam the size of elementary, you
have a lot more capacity for alot more of those success cuts.
Um, but, uh, you yourselfcan grow into that as well.
Um, they also are tiring a very wideaudience in a very competitive space.
Um, I, I mean, I don't know if youall, uh, how many of you have been in
the WordPress space for a long time?
I remember a day whenthere was no Elementor.
Um, and I remember how quicklythey, uh, rose into prominence.
Uh, and it, it, it's reallyquite remarkable the way that
they were able to achieve that.
They did a lot of really strongorganic content marketing.
They had a big focus onthat in the beginning.
Uh, and that really launched them there.
Their product, of course, issomething that leads in, in,
in a lot of different ways.
Um, but as they grew and evolved, you justsee them spreading into all the, all the
different channels really, uh, quickly.
Um, they also have grown a lot in theirapproach, um, to, uh, collaborating
a, uh, with the plugin space.
Uh, they actually have a reallygreat builtin marketplace
in, in the product itself.
And, uh, if you notice this week they areannouncing and launching their, uh, MCP,
which is, uh, uh, they call it Angie.
It's, uh, uh, built into the, theplatform in order for folks to be
able to leverage AI and Elementor.
Uh, and they're doing that incollaboration with plugin authors, like
the folks that I work with at Stellar.
Um, and I think that's a, a highlyeffective strategy for sure.
And, and that to me, that even thoughthat's, uh, some folks would say
that's business partnerships, whichit is, it's also a marketing tool.
Um.
They also are very quick to adaptto, to trends, uh, like the one
that I was just talking about.
Um, and, uh, they also, uh, led in manyways that really visual first, uh, builder
in, uh, in so many ways why somethinglike this works in my mind is just the,
like I said, the omnipresence effect.
Um, and it's not somethingthat when you're just first
starting, that's easy to, to do.
Um, but it, but it, itcan definitely be done.
Um, trying to really try to be in as manyof the different channels where you, when,
where you know your customers are at.
You don't, of course, like Katiesaid, her example is great about,
uh, uh, you know, paid advertisingat in, in a Subway or whatnot.
Uh, you know that your customersmight be passing through there, but
they, their attention's not there.
Uh, but they are on YouTube for sure.
They are in different, likeReddit, uh, threads and forums.
Um, wherever you feel like yourcustomer base might be, try to
be there in one form or another.
Some of it can be paid, some of it canbe just your time that you spend there.
Um, I got a lot of early successwith Give in Facebook groups.
That was really helpfulfor me in particular.
Um, it, it also works becausethey have really strong brand
recognition, uh, and they're very,very consistent about their brand.
Uh, and that that one is really.
Important and can be done, uh, for everysingle person who's just starting out.
Uh, I've seen some really interestingbrands crop up over the years, um,
uh, that, uh, in the way in whichfolks are really trying to hone
it in and make sure it's alwaysthe same everywhere they see it.
Um, uh, actually one of myfavorite ones is actually iconic.
WP uh, James is also over here.
We're gonna talk about James later.
Um, but, uh, iconic wp, the iconthat it has, feels very iconic.
Uh, it's very simple, veryplain, and it's easy to use that
in so many different places.
The elementary, uh, logo andbrand is very, very similar.
They keep it really clean, reallyorganized, and, and it's very consistent.
Uh, but I, it's also flexible,like the way that they have these,
these pink shirts this week.
Um, it's not always their dominant color,but they do use it in different ways.
Um, I think it's a very flexible and, andgreat way to, to present the, the brand.
Um, they also have a lot of education.
They do a lot of tutorials.
Um, they're doing a lot of reallypositive things in the community.
Um, and of course they're promotingtheir product all the time.
I'm trying to power throughjust a little bit so we can
catch up and be on time, but.
Key takeaways.
So yeah, bringing togetherthose very different companies
and how to market them.
The important thing is to mix andmatch the key marketing channels,
and we'll go through a few of those.
Um, so you can do search drivencontent tutorials, SEO, YouTube, you
can engage with the community, findwhere your customers are talking.
That might be quite general, like, um,people talking about WordPress in general.
Or it might be really specific things likeI have some tools where I automatically
monitor mentions of things that might be agood opportunity to recommend my plugins,
and then I jump into that conversation.
You can do influencer partnercollaborations, things like
email marketing, paid ads.
All sorts of things.
There's all these differenttypes of marketing channel, but
you don't have to do them all.
You need to think about what yourskills are, what type of product you're
selling as we looked at earlier, andmix and match them in order to play
to your own strength and resources.
And so for example, at Barn two, we dothings like the search driven content.
We need to be there whenthe customer's looking.
Whereas as a much larger company witha much more general interest product,
Elementis spreads across multiplechannels so that they can dominate that
awareness even in a competitive space
q and a time, uh, we're a little bitbehind so we got about five minutes.
Gabby, if you don't mind headingto towards the mic, if anyone has
questions for, uh, Katie on Barntwo stuff, or Gabby on elementary
stuff, we'd love to help you out.
It looks like we got one lining up.
Hi, this is, uh, for you Katie.
Uh, I, I, I just checked tosee if I had one of your, uh,
you know, the articles open.
Uh, I'm just currently in abrowser and I don't have like
700, you know, tabs open and I do.
So I, uh, and I've seen your articles allover the place, so I know your company.
How much time and effort have youput into making those articles?
How many do you have?
I mean, what, what, what's, what is thatyour, you know, primary form of marketing?
I mean, that, that's how I know about.
Yeah, that is our primaryform of marketing.
We've been doing these articles since2016 when we started creating plugins,
and sometimes it annoys me because IGoogle how to do something in WooCommerce
and one of my article comes up and Iknow that the answer's not in there.
So yeah.
So we've covered most of therelevant and surrounding topics.
Um, and yeah, we spenda lot of time on that.
We produce, I think it's onlyfour a month at the moment.
Sometimes it's more, sometimesit's less, but we also do a lot of
work to continue optimizing exist.
Articles we have, we do eight of thosea month where we do an in-depth analysis
on how the article's performing.
The big thing at the moment is how toreoptimize for AI overviews, and we are
really early days in that because peopledon't know exactly how AI is making
those decisions on what to recommend.
But we work with a marketing agency calledEllipsis who specialize in WordPress,
and they are doing some really cuttingedge work on optimizing content for ai.
Actually, we've got a WooCom, uh, WP,sorry, product talk, um, episode about
that in a few weeks with someone fromEllipsis about how to optimize for ai.
So at Barn two, we are going througha lot of our old content and thinking,
is it being recommended by ai?
And if not, why not?
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Gabby, if you have any other, uh, thoughtsor feedback or, uh, anything to fill in
the gaps on stuff that we recommended andsaid about marketing, that'd be great.
Yeah.
Maybe not to fill in any gaps, butjust to strengthen your message
about SEO YouTube content tutorials.
These are great also when you havelarger budgets because they actually
reduce the amount you're gonna spendon paid ads because you become more
aware, um, people are more aware toyour product and when they search
for you, they will find your content.
Um, so that's really great.
That's also really greatin the, in the age of ai.
So try to think when you're creatingcontent, what type of questions are people
going to ask an AI engine, because that'sgonna help you rank for those questions
terms, um, when people look that up.
Nice.
Excellent.
You know, this, this is areally important subject.
We're a little bit behind, but Vito,do you mind if I put you on the spot?
You also have tons ofinsight on marketing.
Um, can you fill in anygaps from your perspective?
I, you have several different,uh, marketing avenues that
we didn't touch on, I know.
Um, but, um, you have anythoughts or feedback on, uh,
best advice for these folks?
So, first of all, I really like the,um, the mention that you, that you
added about, uh, the omnipresence Yeah.
And how that, it's potentially difficultto do when you're first starting off.
But that was actually justour strategy on day one to.
To manufacture this omnipresence.
And, and you know, if you think aboutthis, like the, um, like if you're
Coca-Cola, let's say, yeah, it'svery hard to create omnipresence
because the tam is, or the marketis so vast that it's very hard to be
everywhere for ev all of these people.
But because in most of our cases,the niche is pretty, um, pretty
refined and pretty defined.
Uh, so it allows, uh, it allowsus with smaller budgets to still
create this omnipresence as longas you're thinking about this
from a multi-channel perspective.
Yeah.
Um, you wanna, you wanna have the, youwanna be on the podcast, you wanna be.
Uh, on the, on the decks.
Yeah.
Uh, you know, you want to be on YouTube,uh, and, and you also wanna have the SEO
kind of content being pumped out on socialmedia, uh, but then supported by ads,
or even mostly supported by remarketing.
So once someone gets caught in yourweb, then they start seeing you
everywhere, uh, wherever they go.
And, um, yeah.
And I think that that was a verypowerful thing for us because we, we
were completely brand new to the space.
Even though I had an agency,it wasn't, uh, we, we didn't.
Market anything to the WordPressspace before, uh, we released
the WP feedback, uh, at the time.
So we still try to maintain thatkind of perspective and look
into those pockets of people withsm uh, with our smaller budget.
How can we target a smaller pocket andmake sure that they see us for, for, in
a very intense way, for a short periodof time, uh, uh, so that you become
part of the, the back of the head whenthe decision, uh, needs to happen.
Yep.
Excellent.
Appreciate that.
I think I'll just giveone last, uh, summary.
Um.
Don't underestimate the amount of workthat is needed to do effective marketing.
Um, there's kind a lot of folks will belike, oh, well I already wrote about that.
Oh, I already emailed my folks about that.
Uh, oh, I'm sure everybody's sick ofhearing me say X, Y, z. You know what?
90% of them didn't even know you saidX, Y, Z. Uh, there is not a ceiling
in my mind of how many times youcan say whatever you need to say.
There's not a ceiling, thereis a floor, and you're on it
most of the time, honestly.
Um, so if you're worried aboutlike, no, I shouldn't bug my,
my people again, I shouldn't saythis thing for the third time.
They haven't even seen it thefirst, second, or third time.
Say it 10 times and maybethey'll see it once.
Um, don't, don't ever un underestimatethe, uh, impact it does to say these
things over and over and over again.
I know we are over time, but I, uh, thisis I think, our most significant subject.
Uh, yeah.
Yeah, I just wanted to addto that, um, I've worked, uh,
I'm a video content creator.
Yeah.
I work with, uh, WP Rocket and I'vebeen privileged to meet with, uh,
Sam from, uh, Bon through plugins.
Yeah.
Who does their video content.
And I think it's even more so moreimportant, uh, investing in marketing,
especially from a video standpoint.
Uh, because what Sam introducedme to in fact, was that search
is search is changing, right?
And we know that with AI and everything,and there are opportunities now even
within these platforms to have yourvideos previewed on these platforms.
So you could go to chat, GPT, you searchfor something and then a video shows up.
And so there's a little checkboxthat you can take inside of YouTube,
uh, settings to enable, um, indexingfor chat, GPT and any other LMM.
Interesting.
So, you know, that's anotherway just to broaden horizons
and reachability for marketing.
And, you know, most times people are like,why do we, why should we invest in video?
It takes a long time to scale it,but we are seeing it more and more,
um, um, implemented in systems.
So, you know, just, uh,something for people to consider.
Awesome.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate that Nathan.
Hey, um, I just wanted to kindof tack on to your last point
actually and provide a quick tip.
I'm a product marketer at Stellar,specifically for the events calendar.
Um, you mentioned, you know, someonemight not have heard your message and
you know, you, you have to repeat thatmessage again or, or whatever, but,
uh, I feel like one of the easiestways to keep that top of mind is.
Create a list of all the points thatyou want to make sure that you're
hitting over and over and over again.
And then as you're optimizing yourcontent, um, or updating it for SEO or
creating a new thing or creating a landingpage, like every time you're creating a
piece of content, like go through thatbullet point list and go like, what of
these things that I want every customerto know is applicable in this context?
And make sure that that's included.
And it's just an easy way tokeep your messaging consistent.
Nice.
Um, without having to like, try tothink of it off the top of your head.
So love it.
Just a quick little, I love little tips.
That's perfect.
All right.
We are a little bit behind, so we're gonnapower through, but, uh, next section.
Okay.
So next we're gonna talk about learningfrom your customers, uh, which is all
about, um, knowing what they want,um, both when you first build it and
as an ongoing process so that you cancreate a product that they want to buy.
I'm gonna mix it up againand stand this time.
So, uh, first one is,uh, GiveWP StellarWP.
This is my meat and potatoes.
This is, uh, where I cut my teethin, uh, WordPress in general.
Uh, it's my passion subject.
Um, I love, uh, customerexperience as a whole.
Um, I think when I first came intothe WordPress scene, I was learning
how to do technical support.
I looked around me and saw allthe things that you should not
be doing in technical support.
Uh, and I was like, there is a void oftop quality, effective, uh, technical
support and the WordPress scene thathas grown and evolved a ton over time.
Uh, but, um, overall, um, I, I tried toreally pour a lot of my thoughts, um, and
perspectives and, and principles into, uh,the GiveWP Support Manual, which now is
essentially the StellarWP support manual.
And, um, we don't have a link andthat's fine, but if you've just
searched GiveWP Support Manual,you'll find it online and you.
For it for yourself anduse it in your own company.
I get people telling me all the timethat that's exactly what they did.
Uh, I think Vito has done it himself.
Um, and it's, uh, for me it's,uh, it's, it's the, the way to go.
But support in general, it, youknow, it starts very reactive.
Um, but we are, uh, tryingto do an all in one support.
A lot of folks will be like, you needto define the scope of your support.
And, and like, this is, theseare the things that we support.
Uh, that makes a lot of sense whenyou're a SaaS, but when you are a
distributed plugin in the cowboywild west of a WordPress distributed
environment, you can't do that.
If somebody is not having successin their WordPress website and
your plugin is related to thatlack of success in any way.
You need to think about what a resolutionlooks like in the whole scope of
their w WordPress website, not onlyin terms of your narrow feature set.
Um, the, the classic example is thatevery single plugin that has something
front facing is highly dependenton a theme in one way or another.
Uh, and how it's gonna lookor what the layout looks like,
or the colors or whatnot.
If somebody installs your pluginhas something front facing and
the theme is messing up the wayit works, yeah, you might say,
well, go talk to the theme people.
Well, that's friction that you'readding to that situation, and it's
not gonna end well for that customer.
You're not providing them with success.
You have to think holistic.
You have to try to never turn folksaway who come into your inbox.
Um, another one we focus on, um, really,uh, in a dedicated way is I have what
we call reactive support, which is ofcourse, that we're sitting there waiting
for folks to come in with their problems.
We also have a littlebit of proactive support.
We have a customer success team.
That, um, is out there seeing whenwe have new customers and we have
automations that cast a wide net thatsay, I see that you just got onboarded.
I'd love to talk with you and helpyou have success with our product.
Uh, we cast a wide net with automations,but people can reply individually and then
they're talking with our team immediately.
Um, and that just touch of being ableto try to help them on their initial
purchase, uh, changes things a ton.
It, it can be the difference maker betweena refund and a long lifetime customer.
Um.
We also focus on onboarding alot and focusing on retention.
We have a lot of automations that, thatrevolve around when their subscription
is coming up so that we can check inand say, Hey, uh, you not only do are
we going to charge your card again soon,but we would love to make sure that
you're actually still having success.
Um, and again, that's one of mybig principles is trying to use
automations to cast a wide net, butmake sure that those automations are
not, there's nothing that's automatedthat's actually going to result in a,
in a major resolution for the user.
But you cast a wide net with automationsand then when they do an action, they're
immediately connected with a human.
Um, that's kind of the differentiator,um, for, for, for me, um, because you're
not, of course, you're not gonna geteverybody who gets those automations to be
responding, but when they do respond, whatshould happen next is a human interaction.
Um.
What doing, uh, these typesof principles and practices?
Uh, I have seen it not only onGive, I took a lot of what I learned
on Give and I started applying itacross all of our stellar brands.
And over the last couple years,um, I ha a lot of our stellar folks
are here, and you can ask themyourselves what they have seen.
We've increased our, our renewal ratesfrom 68 up to 80% or more sometimes.
Uh, and we also are, are really workinghard on our refund rate, uh, across
different stellar brands refund rates.
Uh, were sometimes between seven and 9%.
Uh, right now we're averaging arounda little bit over 5% across the board.
That's what I call money on thetable that your support team
really should be responsiblefor in a lot of different ways.
Um, and what's been really useful for meis just being able to see that applied
not only in my, uh, individual businesstest case, but having the opportunity
to work across all the stellar brands.
It's been a really, uh, excellentexperience for me personally.
Um, the result, the results show forthemselves, like I was saying, we've
definitely helped, uh, reduce churn.
We have, uh, our proactivesupport increases.
Um, uh, it definitely increases renewals.
It, it, it, we also do a lot with upsells.
Essentially we have dedicated pathwayswhere, uh, in technical support, if
somebody says, oh, I see you have oneadd-on, you know that you can actually
do a lot more if you, uh, if you upgradeto a plan, uh, we send them to a, a
custom landing page where they will seetheir individual purchase and a discount
code applied to upgrade to the plan.
Um, so, and support doesn'thave to sell them on it.
Support just has to givethem that opportunity.
And then they go to the landing pagewhere they can decide for themselves.
And of course, the discount codeis there to help them upgrade.
Um, all these things are,are, are really beneficial.
The other one that we're working on allthe time is we are, uh, omnipresent,
uh, in our support perspective whenit comes to reputation management.
Um, we are encouraging reviews on.org.
We're encouraging reviews on Trustpilot.
We're encouraging reviews on G two.
Um, trying to encourage tohave those things out anywhere
we can possibly have it.
And we're monitoring what happens there.
If we get one star reviews, we'reout there responding to them
with action points and empathy.
Uh, if we get five star reviews,we're celebrating them, telling
them we'd love to do a case study.
Uh, all of that is built into our,our customer experience department.
I found really great success with it.
It's not something thatI did from day one.
Uh, it's definitely somethingI did around year eight.
Uh, so it's somethingthat grows and evolves.
But, uh, it's, uh, a vision that I loveto share to inspire people that your
support team is also, even though it's acost of goods sold, as they will say in
the business, it's also a revenue driveror a revenue saver in one way or another.
Um, that's the my perspective there.
Um, last one.
Um, most actionable things that Ialways recommend is to be in the
data when it comes to support.
Um, I know that my people are happy.
Uh, my customers are happy.
Uh, when our support team isdoing things, uh, the right way.
Uh, what is the right way that we respondto people quickly do, we don't go back
and forth with a hundred replies at all,and that we resolve their situation in
as short amount of time as possible.
If those three things are flyingacross all of my agents all the time,
I know that my customers are happy.
Um, do I really, really, really know?
They're happy.
Yes, because we also do CSAT surveys, um,and I can monitor like, oh, I see that
our, those three metrics are, are, arewaning a little bit in one way or another.
Well guess what else is waning?
The CSAT scores are also waning.
Um, so we know how to, to dialthose things in so that, uh, if we
do see dips or whatnot, or like if,if unfortunately a bug goes, gets
shipped in the product, we'll see anincrease in support tickets, of course.
Uh, but if we can tacklethose quickly, hopefully it
doesn't negatively impact csat.
Um, but we'll know for certain that it,that something is either, um, related
to a bug or it's related to maybe alack of education on the support side.
Um, we are are able to monitor thosethings in a way that that matters.
Um, multi-channel support, um,is something that we're working
on as well in terms of beingavailable both in live chat.
Um, I still don't overallrecommend, uh, having technical
support, uh, be on social media.
Uh, that's a little bit ofa, uh, of a mixed message.
Some folks really emphasize that a lot.
I find it not to be particularlyuseful or beneficial.
Um, I would much rather acknowledge,uh, something on social and point
them into the right channel towhere they can get the best help.
Especially with WordPress products alittle bit different with SaaS, but
especially with WordPress products.
Um, channeling them tothe right direction.
Um.
Tracking key supportmetrics, as I mentioned.
And then, uh, the way that we are ableto scale, I've actually written about
this in a couple different places, butI have a capacity sheet that I track
all of our numbers every single weekthat talks about how many, um, new
tickets we got, um, and what is our,our ratio of new sales to new tickets.
Um, because that helps me a lot tofigure out if it's a, if it's a product
problem or a support problem, uh,what our response time is, what our
handle time is, um, how many peoplewe have per week, go, uh, working.
Um, and then it has a calculationto say essentially, what
is our capacity right now?
What at what capacity are we operating?
I've used this over thelast 10 years in support.
It worked at GiveWP, it worked in all ofour other, uh, stellar products as well.
In order for me to be able to say withauthority that I have the exact right
number of support agents to answer theamount of tickets that we have right now.
Um, I don't have a link up here, butif you are interested, I'm happy to
share a sample capacity report with you.
Um, and um, last one is proactivelychecking in before renewals.
This is our customersuccess team as I mentioned.
Um, this one is superimportant, super valuable.
Uh, you all, most likely have thoseemails where you say, Hey, heads
up we're gonna charge you card.
Nobody likes those emails.
They're thankful for them, but they'relike, oh crap, here comes that renewal.
Make that into an opportunity point.
Instead, make that an invitationto say, we'd love to help
you in any way whatsoever.
Uh, you don't have to lead with,Hey, we're gonna take money from you.
You can lead with, how are you doing?
Are you having successwith our, uh, product?
Do you have any questions?
We're here to help you.
By the way.
There's, here's the date we'regonna charge your card again.
Um, I find a lot more success withthat type of messaging, and you get
a lot more replies in the inbox.
I, I am the kind of person who says ifthe inbox is empty, there's a problem.
Uh, the inbox should be full.
There should be people who want totalk to us, who have input, who have
feedback, and we want to help them.
Okay, so, um, the other bit wewanted to talk about regarding
customers is how to grow specificallyby understanding your users.
And we're going to useWooCommerce as our case study.
And we have James from Wu here.
So you may have noticed over the lastprobably two years that WooCommerce
has become a lot more available andopen in asking the WordPress community
what they want from WooCommerceand how it can improve, and they're
doing that in various different ways.
If you go on to woocommerce.com, thenWooCommerce itself and each of their
extensions has a feature request section.
There's a link to it on all the differentproduct pages where you can post your
feature requests, vote for things thatother people have wanted, and just
generally interact with them in orderto tell them how you want it to improve.
And on a more personal scale, you'vegot people like James that's are
regularly tweeting and using socialto consult with people about, um,
what they want to see in WooCommerce.
It might be general things like thistweet about if you could change one
thing in WooCommerce, what would it be?
And often it's really specificthings as well, like, um, how
would you like the order managementflow in WooCommerce to change?
And then there are interesting discussionsof which they're part so that they
can use that to plan their roadmap.
And I, a really good example of this isthat last year, I think it was at WordCamp
Europe in to Reno, um, WooCommercemet with some accessibility people who
told them, woo is not currently goingto meet the new European accessibility
Acts, and you need to make changesto WooCommerce in order to do that.
And they did.
As a result of that feedback from amember of the community, they took on
a big project to make it accessible,which has now been implemented.
And on that note, uh, when you listen toyour customers, you have to implement,
you don't have to implement everything.
And I would never implement somethingbased on one customer, but where
you're getting a clear message frommultiple people, then it needs to
be implemented in order to have anyimpact on the success of your product.
So why it works well, um, all ofthis builds trust and loyalty.
Customers like to feel listened to andmore specifically, analytics and data
shows what users do, but the conversationswith the customers reveals why.
This is similar to what Matt was sayingabout support, that they have metrics
and they have actual customer surveys.
And when you get feedback fromyour customers, often it's
things you didn't even know wasa problem with your products.
Mm-hmm.
Um, UX is a good one that youmight not know that customers
are confused by something.
I had that recently in our documentlibrary plugin where somebody, uh, sent
me a really useful report, which said thatthe place where you upload a document is
just not where they expected it to be.
Uh, we've gone too close to nativeWordPress and by using the post editor,
and as a result, the most important thingabout adding a document wasn't the MO
in the most prominent place on the page.
So we did some, um, redesign work onthat and put it first and foremost
because that was the most importantfield, even if that's not what
WordPress might natively have done.
And by prioritizing whatmatters most to your customers.
You're gonna get stronger adoption ofthat product, which means more people
trying it in the first place, andalso better retention so that people
keep using it for the long term andrecommending it to people as well.
So how can we put this intoaction in our own products?
Well, you can schedule regularuser interviews or surveys.
There are paid tools like usertesting.comto do that, but I find it better
sometimes just to do that informally,um, with your own customers.
You can monitor spaces and forumsonline to see what feature requests and
pain points people are talking about.
Like, um, you might find thatpeople are discussing your products
somewhere like Reddit or in aFacebook, WordPress related group.
And so you want to see what people aremoaning about and get in there, make
them happy, and think about whetherto improve your product as a result.
And support is your best friend interms of learning from your customers
because they are actively telling you.
And at Barn two, we have avery wide approach to how
we define a feature request.
So my support team are all trainedthat a feature request is not just
a customer asking for a feature.
It is anything that the customerwants, which the product doesn't
do that it could potentially do.
So even if they never tell the customerthat they're tracking this pain point as
a feature request, they are logging it inthe background so that I can then access
that data, see how many customers havetold us that they struggled with this and
make priority decisions on our roadmap.
So, but all of this feedback together,you use it to validate the priorities.
And again, don't just do what onecustomer says, actually use data.
And on our feature request,it is just a Google sheet.
Uh, but we have various metrics thatwe use, like where we score each.
Feature based on how difficult itwould be to develop the impact on
the sales and renewals, and alsohow many people have requested it.
And so when I am planning new featuresand improvements, I go through
that and it, it calculates a score.
And so I use that not to make my decision,but to guide my decision and prioritize.
And finally on this, you need to tellyour customers when you have made
changes, um, that they've requested.
We do that on an individual level.
So when we do something that was on ourfeature request list, we, uh, someone
in my support team individually emailsevery customer that requested it to tell
them, thank you, we have now done this.
And they really appreciate that.
In addition, we tell them via our emailsand things, and if it was something as a
result of a public discussion on Twitteror Reddit or whatever, then we will then
report, again, thanking the communitymore widely, and that shows people that
they're being listened to and that itwas worth telling you what they wanted.
Nice.
So, questions, comments, we have,uh, we're a little bit tied on
time, but James Kemp is here.
Um, if you have questions aboutWooCommerce, I'm here if you
have questions about GIV andmy take on support, go for it.
Yeah.
I'm just curious about the, oh my God.
Um, I'm just curious about the overlapbetween content marketing and support.
Mm-hmm.
How, how much of a resourcedo you use your, how much of
a resource is your content?
In dealing with support, it's a good one.
Um, there is some overlap for sure.
The biggest area in which, andnot everybody operates this way.
There could be a lot of things, butpersonally I make sure that our support
team are the people, is the team andthe people that are responsible for
writing all of our online documentation.
And online documentation is, uh, somethingthat I think every single product should
have, um, for a lot of different reasons.
One, of course, it's great for users, uh,but it's also amazing for, for, uh, our
organic search and also for AI search.
Um, so the, I make the support team doit because I need them to be the experts
on the product as much as possible.
And truthfully, the marketing teamsometimes definitely has opinions about
the content that we write, um, anddefinitely have, has ways that we can
optimize it better, especially when itcomes to titles and headings and whatnot.
Um, I am more than happyto get that feedback.
It's more like we're gonna write andwe're gonna get it out there, and
the marketing can come in and have alight touch to fix it up afterwards.
Uh, it optimizes the marketing team'stime, uh, uh, to do it that way.
Um, and we're getting stuffout in, in, in enough time.
But the new, most recentnew, uh, benefit that it has.
Is that your online documentation is anamazing source for your own AI chat bots.
If you want to, uh, instead of doing,uh, documentation search, um, like
I, I've analyzed my documentationsearch for years and years and years.
People don't go to onlinedocumentation by choice.
They usually go to it out of frustration.
Um, but uh, then they'll write in a angrysupport ticket, how can I do X, Y, and Z?
Um, and you're tempted to say,well, if you would just read
our docs, it's right here.
Right?
Uh, that to me is actuallya product problem.
They should know how to do that.
If you have to document it,that's a product problem.
But, um, what the great thingabout AI chatbots is that they
don't feel like they're goingto docs to get their answers.
They feel like they're having aconversation to get their answers.
Uh, but all it is is essentiallya bot that's telling them exactly
what the online docs are saying.
Um, so there is a lot of, uh, overlapthere in terms of, it's, it's this form
of content and that form of content.
There is ways that we shouldoptimize it for search in particular.
Um, but I think the more ownershipthe support team can have over online
documentation, the better it is foryour whole team and your products.
It's, it's a good question.
James, do you have any additionalthoughts or comments about, uh,
public feedback and polling?
Oh, definitely.
Come as well.
Yeah, you'll need to head back there.
Maybe you go after, uh, this gentleman.
Go ahead.
Yeah, so my question is related to, uh,onboarding process, how we can create the
wow onboarding process for the WordPress?
For WordPress in general or for a product?
For a product, for a product onboarding.
Do you have a take on that?
Yeah, so onboarding, the first mostimportant thing is the product itself.
Like Matt said, if they needdocumentation, there's a
problem with the product.
So the onboarding is that experienceof when you install it, what happened.
That's really tricky inWordPress in particular because
you activate a plugin and.
You're still on the plugins page,that's not particularly helpful.
So, um, we have set up wizards,which auto open, um, and you can
close if you want, but, uh, andwe are quite careful with that.
If it's say, a bulk activation,we won't do that because that
would be really annoying.
So we try to only open our setupwizards when it's appropriate,
but that guides them through.
Um, the final page of the setupwizard has some options, like
what do you want to do now?
Do you want to add a document?
Do you want to see allthe settings or something?
So the first part of onboardingis the product itself.
Uh, but we also have email onboardingflows, which sends a series of emails
that hopefully sensible intervalsinitially with things like a video
tutorial on how to set up the products.
And, uh, then over time it just givesyou more tips on, did you know about this
feature that you're maybe not using yet?
Yeah, I actually have a recent articleon my, on my personal blog, um, Matt
Cromwell dot com that talks about, um.
Uh, time to va, time to first value.
Um, and that to me is a big driverin the way I think about onboarding.
Um, onboarding is kind of a broaderone, but, uh, the idea with time to
first value is how long does it take theuser to go from activating your plugin?
To having their first success withwhatever feature you're offering.
Uh, that to me is probably the mosteffective onboarding that you can
do without a wizard or anything, isjust being able to help them to just
have that first moment of success.
And we have technical folks who can getthere really, really quickly, um, because
they understand the whole landscape.
You have other folks whocan't get there as quickly.
And that's where I think email onboardingis really useful is to, is to follow up
with an email and be like, I can helpyou get there quick if you'd like, but
having that focus on having them havethe first initial success, whatever your
product might be as quickly as possible,that's the focus in my, in my take.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Yeah.
And one another questionfor the support metrics.
What top three support metricswill be more helpful for
to better customer service?
Yeah, the, um, the time to first response,uh, is one of the most valuable ones.
Um, the handle time, which ishow long does it take us to, uh,
to actually resolve a, a ticket?
And then just, uh, uh, closureshow many times, how are we closing
all the tickets, uh, that arecoming in a, a week over week.
Uh, those ones are the core basic ones.
I have a bunch of other ones as well.
Uh, and like I said, I have, I have asheet that will explain some of those,
but if we are getting to things as quicklyas possible, uh, and we're doing it in
as few uh, replies as possible and doingthat over the shortest period of time as
possible, then that really guarantees,um, a lot more, uh, customer satisfaction.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yep.
James, couple takes.
Hello?
Yeah.
Um, I wanted to lean into the support sideof things 'cause I think that has kind of.
Uh, led how I do my role now.
So my role is product, uh, management atWooCommerce, and prior to that I had my
own company, which is now part of Stellar.
Um, and one of the things thatwe always focused on was just
being really good at support.
Um, and you touched on it earlierabout the.org forums, uh, how it
helps the rankings, but I think justhaving, um, replies to even negative
reviews on there helps, uh, otherpeople that come in and they're
looking for trust in a, in a product.
Absolutely.
And to see that, you know, you areactive, you respond to those issues.
Um, and I, I, I think that's areally good use case for negative
reviews is, is to do that.
Uh, one of the things we do atAutomatic and, and Woo Commerce is,
uh, every person works in support.
Uh, I think it's for a week.
So you, you just purelyfocus on support for a week.
Um, and yeah, it's, it's an awesome wayto kind of hear this feedback directly,
especially in a product position.
Um, but I, I do it actively juston Twitter, and I think it's just
important to understand and hearhow people are using the product.
Love it.
So I just wanted to leaninto that support angle.
As a, that's a great avenue.
A hundred percent.
I, I tell my folks all the time whenthose negative reviews come in, we
prepare and we do a bit of a postmorteminternally and we draft, uh, our
response to the negative review.
Uh, we take that time diligently.
Um, and we always say, well, this, thisresponse that we're giving is not really
going towards the person, uh, who has,who gave the one star review because
we've basically already lost them.
But if somebody's really vetting ourproduct, they're gonna be looking at
the, the one star reviews and they'regonna see how we respond to them.
And if we are professional whilethe one star person is angry and
loud and pissed off and belligerent,um, that actually speaks volumes
for who we are and what we do.
So it's a great point, James.
Appreciate it.
We are rapidly running outof time for our last segment.
Um, but we're gonna talk real quickabout evidence-based business models.
Um, the first, uh, one that I wannabring up, uh, for in terms of the
way evidence-based stuff works isit's of course, uh, completely about,
um, the types of business analyticsthat you're collecting all the time.
Um, and there all of this has tocome together in the way in which
you're aligning the, how you doyour pricing with the value that
you're bringing to the customer.
Um, all of the ways in which youdo these things are, have to be
driven by analytics and data.
Uh, not necessarily go Google Analytics,but business analytics in general.
Um, and they should be guiding the waythat you think about all of these things.
So one company, um, that has donethis really well with pricing in
particular is paid memberships pro.
So they've done loads of experimentsaround pricing where they've
iterated their pricing over timeand measured the results before
and after to find the right fit.
Uh, their goal being to align ongoingvalue that they give from their
product, um, and get recurring revenue.
So they don't just careabout the initial sale.
They also care about renewals.
And in, um, sorry.
In this screenshot, um, you can see twothings that they've experimented on, which
I'm going to tell you the results of.
So they've got a free column,um, on the right there.
That's a, their free plugin.
They didn't have to include theirfree plugin on the pricing page.
It could have just been on wordpress.organd not even mentioned from their website.
And you'll also see that thefirst year it has a 50% discount.
So I'm gonna tell you why they do bothof those things on the next slide.
There we go.
All right.
So, uh, adding a free tier to thepricing page, they did this back in 2022.
Before that, they just had a smallor try things out for free link,
which link to their free products.
Um, quick aside on that is thatwhen you are linking to your free
plugin from your website, the bestpractice is to put that behind a form.
Don't just link to wordpress.org,but capture the customer's details
so that you can send them emails.
Um, so they added a proper columnfor their free pricing page and found
that it actually increased revenue.
Um, so before they had 6.6% signuprate and that is across free and
paid users from their pricing page.
And after they added a free column,the signup rate went to 13.6%.
And your initial reaction may be,well, so their free users, obviously
if you make the free plan more obvious,you'll get free users, but you're
not actually getting more revenue.
But what they discovered was thatthat doesn't matter because they
can convert their free users.
Paid memberships pro have various ways.
They do that through think the emails,through upsell links within the
product so that people who need the.
Premium only featurescan see them and upgrade.
And specifically they know from pastexperience that 5% of free users will
upgrade to paid within three months,um, as an average order value of $300.
Um, at that time, three years ago,paid memberships pro were making
30,000 a month, so that increased to31,400 as a result of getting more
free users to sign up on the pricingpage, who would then convert later?
Their other experiment was abouta 50% introductory offer where the
customer gets 50% discount in the firstyear and then renews at full price.
And they did this in an interestingway because they basically doubled
the price at the same time.
So on one of the plans we saw a minuteago, it was, I think, um, $300, the
renewal price and 150 in the first year.
But actually the product was 150previously and they doubled it to 300.
So the first year's cost never changed.
It just looks like a 50% discountbecause the renewal price had gone up.
So you can see from their paid orders,it didn't really affect conversions.
They got the same numberof initial signups.
So what's interestingrevenue wise is the renewals.
Um, so they only did this just overa year ago and we don't have a lot of
data, but so far they've actually seenan increase in their renewals, weirdly,
presumably because of other improvementsthey've made in their business.
So it was 50 to 60% renewal rateand, and currently it's 67%.
But even if renewals had massivelydropped by something like 40 to 50%,
they would still be more profitable asa result of this introductory discount
because of the double they would begetting when renewals did take place.
So it appears to have been a successfulexperiment for paid memberships
pro, which is really interesting.
And a few WordPress companies have donethis recently, and I've been watching
with interest to see what happens withtheir renewals in case we do it too.
So why it works Well, pricingpsychology is really complex and
you can't just guess, you can'teven just look at your competitors
and set the pricing accordingly.
There's so many factors in place.
So I'd say you need to experimentab test, change prices and measure
the results and that kind of thing.
And this balances, um, your initialsales against long term retention.
As we've seen with paid membershipspro, maybe you could take a hit at your
initial sales if you know that you'llget more renewals in the long term.
Um, it also, you can reducesignup friction by things like
offering introductory discounts.
If you know your product is stickyand people will keep using it, then
that's great and you can have thatconfidence to get that sign up and
you know that they will stay with you.
So what you can do to put all this intoaction is evolve your pricing model with
the value of your products, um, because.
If it's something like, uh, paidmemberships, uh, plugin, then people are
gonna get value forever or a donationplugin, like give or something like that.
They're not just gonna stop using it.
It's important to their business.
So experiment and measure and thinkcreatively about where you can add value.
Um, because wherever the customergets value from your product,
that's where you can charge.
So let's say you are doingan integration with A CRM.
Maybe you will charge by usage.
The number of contacts is avalue point for the customer.
So there's lots of different ways toprice, and you need to really think about
where that value from your product comes.
And also planning for the futureso that you get consistent revenue.
We are thinking here about thelifetime value of that customer,
not the initial purchase price.
And I've said be careful withLifetime because loads of people hate
lifetime licenses because of how theyused to be on Invato or whatever.
Like theme forest theme, $29,lifetime, not sustainable.
Uh, but you can get lifetime rights.
Um, at Bond two, we do lifetimepricing, but what we've done is we've
calculated that our average customerstays with us two and a half years.
So we charge lifetime based on at leastthree and a half times the annual cost
so that we know that we are gettingmore lifetime value from the customer.
Uh, we also measure what percentageof our revenue comes from lifetime
sales to ensure that we can keepgetting consistent renewal revenue and
not take too much of a hit on that.
So you can get lifetime,right if you do it properly.
And just keep reviewingand adjusting your pricing.
Um, you, it's not gonnabe the same forever.
And the more you learn, you can makebig differences without even having to
improve your marketing or your product.
Next one up.
Wanna talk a little bit aboutdata driven decision making?
Uh, and the case study we have inparticular here is a company called FIUs.
Uh, they're unfortunately notable to be here this time around.
Uh, but they are really unique in the,in the market because of the way in which
they provide, uh, software developers,plugin developers with the infrastructure
to not only, uh, sell their plugins,uh, to a WordPress audience, but also
to license them and to do renewals.
And they have a lot of dataanalytics built into their platform.
Uh, the benefit for FIUs in that caseis that they see a large swath of the
WordPress, uh, product space, and theyhave the data analytics to say, this is a
trend that's not just unique to a plugin.
It's a trend that's unique to a wholeswath of the WordPress plugin space.
Uh, it's, it's a really, uh,unique, uh, offering that they have.
Um, I know that a lot of folks whoare users of product of plugins
will see a FIUs, uh, experiencein the, in, in the product.
And sometimes there'smixed feelings about it.
Uh, but overall I've seen themactually lift, uh, new, uh, product
developers from, uh, zero to thousandsin a very short amount of time.
Uh, I think it's actually really useuseful, uh, product and, uh, and company.
Um, so they have, they also do a lot with,uh, and empowering you to be able to try
out lots of different pricing models.
You can do, uh, a free trial, um,with your products, uh, so that
people can have your plugin fora, a specific amount of time.
Um, and then their, their creditcard is charged later after usage.
Uh, or if they choose not to continue,uh, then the plugin doesn't work anymore.
That's a little bit controversialin the WordPress space,
being open source and all.
Uh, but in terms of a pricing model,it's, uh, it's really interesting to
experiment with those types of things.
Um, they also have, uh, the pricingtables built into the plugin, um,
uh, interface itself, uh, which hasa lot of, uh, interesting data behind
it as well, and best practices.
And they work with their, uh,product owners a lot to help, to
reduce churn as much as possible.
Um, why stuff like this works forthem is that, uh, you might have
a gut instinct, but it's not gonnabe sustainable in the long term.
All of us are are doing, uh,looking over our business and
having a lot of input, uh, acrossall the things that we're seeing.
And I think, you know, instinctsare useful and valuable and can help
guide us in the right direction.
But I always think of when it comes tome and my instincts, I kind of have a
trust but verify attitude about myself.
Um, I trust myself a lot, butI'm not gonna do anything that I
think is great until I validate,uh, that my instinct is right.
Uh, and that's definitely the, thetype of data that Freemiums helps,
uh, drive, uh, in those ways is reallyuseful, especially for new product
owners, because to have that kind ofinfrastructure to get that kind of
data, it's not easy to do from day one.
Um, I, I know for us, we neverused Freemiums personally.
We did it all ourselves.
It took years and years and yearsbefore we actually had enough data
to make some really smart data drivendecisions for some of the things
we did at GiveWP in particular.
Um, this type of thing helps toidentify patterns, uh, really
well, things that you might notever have thought about yourself.
I've heard lots of feedback fromfolks who, who said that I, I really
thought that everybody wanted thisone feature, but it turns out they
wanted something totally different.
After I started paying attention to,um, the, the feedback I was getting,
uh, or as soon as I started payingattention to the way that sales worked,
uh, in particular on our site, um,the, if you go and look at the GiveWP
pricing page right now, you'll seeit laid out in a very specific way.
This is like the 90th iterationof our PRI pricing page.
It's not the first time we've done this.
Uh, and all of it is, is allbased on different things that we
learned over a long period of time.
Experimenting with different things.
Um, and we only made changes whenwe felt like we had actual data.
Uh, at the time we were usingthings like Google Optimize,
rest in Peace, Google Optimize.
It was great while it was there.
Um, now we're fortunate.
We, uh, have a, a platform thatcalled VWO that we use regularly.
Uh, that's really powerful.
Um, uh, all of this stuff also informs,uh, both your short term tactics
and your long term strategy as well.
Sometimes you really need to pivotquickly if things are not going well.
Um, you need to be able to do that.
Um, but also looking at things, uh, in thelong term is super valuable and helpful.
I'll tell you personally, likea fail that I've had before.
Uh, we, uh, on, if you are familiarwith solid wp, uh, we early, when we
launched, uh, solid security, uh, we dida great integration with Patch Stack,
uh, to make sure that everybody who had.
Solid security.
We had, uh, virtual patchingavailable at all times.
Uh, patch stack we had through a kindof a flat rate, uh, offering, uh,
that they, that they offered to us.
Um, and so, but we were selling,uh, um, large license numbers.
Um, we had a lot of agencies thatwant solid security, so we would
sell like a hundred licensed deals,sometimes 500 licensed deals.
And so of course we wannaheavily discount them.
Um, and we were looking at those, um,those, uh, those sales, and we decided to
make sure to really discount it heavilyin order to make it more attractive.
Um, we did the math wrong.
We, because we forgot about the flatrate, uh, uh, patch stack charge.
Um, so when we launched itinitially, everyone was like, I
don't know how you afford this.
Uh, like, how can you do it?
We couldn't, we couldn'tsell it at that rate.
It wasn't possible.
Um, luckily we figured it out quicklyenough and we were able to adjust and
adapt quickly, um, and, and get it tobe more sustainable in the long term.
Um, but uh, those types ofthings only happen if you're
paying really close attention.
Uh, last couple things.
Actionable strategies you should bethinking about, um, uh, at Vva, uh,
is always open, always available.
He would love to talk with youhonestly, uh, if no matter what
stage of, uh, development you'rein with your product business.
Um, and, uh, you should reachout and talk to him for sure.
But, uh, he, uh, will alwaysencourage, and I always encourage
to track metrics that matter.
Your annual recurringrevenue is really important.
Uh, you should break it up into yourmonthly recurring revenue as well.
Or if you have monthly pricing,of course that matters more.
Um, your churn rate is something you haveto be paying attention to all the time.
Uh, your activation rate in termsof who is actually, um, uh, having
success with your product as muchas you can in terms of telemetry.
It gets a little bit touchy on that one.
Um, and then also your support volume.
The one that I mentioned earlier thatI find continually important is the
number of new sales I get compared tothe number of new support tickets I get.
Uh, and generally speaking, I find thatanywhere between the 40 to 50 range,
40 to 50% range is relatively healthy.
Um, but if that starts to creepup over 50%, meaning I start
having more tickets, that makesit more than 50% of my new sales.
Something is off,something's not quite right.
Uh, we're getting a lot more,uh, support tickets about,
uh, a problem in the product.
Um, uh, test and measure alwayscontinually, um, at all times.
It, it is similar to the marketing thing.
It's not something that youcan do, set it and forget it.
If you set and forget something, that'swhere you're supposed to be monitoring
when it comes to business analytics.
By the time you figure it out thatthere's a problem, you've lost
three months of data, or you've lostthree months of opportunity, uh, or
you've lost three months of revenue.
Um, so it is something thatneeds kind of continual, uh, um,
monitoring o over a period of time.
Um, as much as you can.
And in the, in the privacy orientedway, the best privacy oriented way that
you can try to think about how you canbuild telemetry into your products.
One of the easiest ways that,that I always encourage is making
sure that you have really useful,beneficial links in your plugin, um,
that are, that have UTMs on them.
Uh, UTMs can feel like a very old schoolSEO thing, but they're really one of the
most actionable things you could do interms of data collection to understand,
uh, patterns that your users are doing.
Um, and of course with noneof their personal information
in those UTMs whatsoever.
But just simply like, where are peopleclicking in my plugin and where, what
landing pages are they landing on?
And that will show whatinterest they have in general.
Um, that one continues to behighly informative for me overall.
Um, and then, um, with, um.
In order to talk with Vva.
He would love to reach out to you.
He'd love to chat with you at any time.
Uh, he can't be here today, but that'sa link that you can go to and book
time with Vva whenever you like.
Uh, cal.com/vva feldman.
Uh, and that's, that's open, uh, for,for folks to reach out to him too.
So,
so bringing together everything thatwe've learned then, so our final
takeaways are there is no single playbook.
It's more about understanding thetype of products that you've got
and what your strengths are, whatresources you have available, and
then you need to match that strategyto your strengths and your products.
Um, make deliberate choices basedon data, not just lucky guesses.
Um, instinct is important, butyou need the evidence as well, and
adapt and evolve your business.
Over time, things change, theecosystem changes, WordPress changes.
So keep your business relevantby being mindful of all of the
things that we've talked aboutand keep your product relevant.
That is, uh, theconclusion of what we got.
We actually do have about10 or 15 minutes, uh, still,
or maybe 10 or 12 minutes.
If you have questions or comments at, atall, I'd love for you to jump to the mic.
Uh, Katie and I both unfortunately dohave some lunch obligations, so we're
not gonna be able to hang out much.
Uh, StellarWP and Stellar sites ishere where we have a table and a
booth, uh, and later this afternoon.
I'm gonna be there all the time ifyou'd like to continue the conversation.
We're still around.
We got today and tomorrow.
We'd love to chat and talk at any time.
And we'd love you to show upon WP Product Talk dot com.
Uh, we are live, uh, more or lessevery Wednesday, uh, on YouTube.
And you can be there andyou can contribute to the
conversation in the comments.
Uh, I love it when folks arethere and asking questions.
We highlight them on the screen andsay, so-and-so's asking about this.
We answer them live.
Uh, it's a really fun,engaging conversation.
So, any other fast, uh, last comments,questions, hopes, dreams, aspirations.
Line up at the mic.
Otherwise, everybody's hungry.
Oh, we got one.
Nice.
Thank you for the greatpresentation, Katie and Matt.
Um, so we support a lot of product ownersin building their MVPs for their products.
Um, so I wanna ask, where does, uh, MVPor I would say version zero or version
0.1 stands in the success of product?
It's a tricky one, knowing when to launch.
Um, what is, uh, I I of, I kind of getthis wrong, but I dunno if my mind, I
tend to launch when I know there are alot more features that are needed, but
it does meet the needs of 80% of users.
So when I launch a new product, the refundrate is always higher for the first year,
say, uh, because there are features thatpeople, even if 20% of users want it.
So I don't know if I should be making iteven more perfect or launching when I do.
Um, there's definitely a balance tobe struck there, but I am very aware
that the refund rate tends to be higherbecause we need to add more features.
So there's no perfect answer.
It's more what do you want to do?
'cause by getting it out there,then you can get feedback.
Yeah, and that's useful too.
Some people handle this byhaving an introductory price.
They might even do an introductorylifetime offer or something like Leslie
Sim is about to do with her new eventsplugin at the moment, where by getting
those early adopters in, you can get they,you give them a cheaper price and tell
them it's new and get them on board withthat, and then they can really feel like
they're shaping the future of your productand they'll be more patient with you.
So that might be a good way around it.
Yeah, I personally do lean ongetting it out as soon as you can.
Um, if you have a strong ability to marketit really well, um, uh, I think that to
me is kind of the balance, is you getit out really, really quickly and push
it out to as many people as possiblein order to amplify feedback, because
the long-term success of the product isgoing to depend on the feedback a ton.
Um, so get it out with smaller featuresand that loud, uh, if you can't, if
you're not a big, strong marketer, um,then maybe you should wait a little
bit longer so it is a little bitmore full featured, um, and see how
that organic, uh, uh, growth happens.
Um, but there's kind of likea, what's the right, it's not
a Venn diagram, it's like a.
A graph that goes both ways ofterms of where the sweet spot is
of, uh, your ability to market it,um, versus the number of features
that it, that, that it has.
Um, so yeah, that's my take too.
Awesome.
Good question.
Cool folks.
Well, again, thank youso much for being here.
Obviously way more interestingthan an AI talk for sure.
Um, but uh, enjoy the rest of yourconference and thanks so much.