The Art & Science of "Premium" Experience level: Intermediate(+) Session Description: Lessons from the road making a successful & popular premium WordPress plugin. We will share the strategies we employed to be profitable and the mistakes we made while learning. The best advice I have: Be as agile with your business model as you are with your code. * The Product: Identifying a winner? * Bootstraping: How do I keep cost low? * Marketing: Sell your own or join a marketplace? * Freemium, Premium or Subscription: How do you price your product? * Roadmap: Which features do you build? * Support: How do you keep people happy? * Addons & APIs: How do you leverage success?

1. The Capitalist in The Co-Op
The Art & Science of Premium in the WordPress Open-Source Community
@justlikeair #wcsea

2. A WordPress PoweredPowered
WordPress Company
Hi, I’m Shane & I run a
company.

3. AN EVENTS
FRAMEWORK
TO HELP YOU
KICK ASS
(and a lot of awesome free plugins)

4. A COUPLE OF OUR FRIENDS (some people call them clients)
http://tri.be

5. WORDPRESS PREMIUM BUSINESS CALLS FOR
A NIMBLE APPROACH
1. The Wild West
2. The Marketplace Debate
3. Going Solo
4. Platforms & Solutions
5. Code Is Support
6. Conclusion

6. WELCOME TO THE WILDwest
Welcome to the wild WEST

7. Figure out
THE WHY
The ONLY reason to be in business is to have the life you
dream of. Make sure that you have a solid vision for where
you want to go. Then pick your business model.

8. Why Pay in a World of Free?
“
(Paraphrased)
I Would Pay Money
for A Plugin I
Could Trust.
Scott Berkun: “WordPress in 2020” (WordCamp SF 2010) from 27:00 – 32:00 http://bit.ly/berkun2020

9. COMMODITIZE YOUR BYPRODUCTS

10. WORDPRESS.ORG IS A GIFT
Test your Ideas & Build a Market for “FREE”

11. SHOTGUN
RIFLE

12. How I Made 80k With a Single Plugin
“
(Paraphrased)
With growing plugin popularity, one thing was
inevitable – increased support and feature
requests. This was just one out of 20 free plugins
I’d developed, so the amount of day-to-day work
responding to users was ridiculous, greatly
exceeding my free time.
Author: Vladimir Prelovac Date: March 8, 2012 http://bit.ly/80kplugin

13. ONE WORD
FREEMIUM
Adoption rates for FREE WordPress themes & products is
huge and when converted into paying customers seem to
outstrip club / private sales. (via presstrends.io)

14. Code Canyon
We Joined a Marketplace & ECP Became their #1 Grossing Plugin
You need recurring revenue
Fast. Easy. Powerful.

15. THE MARKETPLACE DEBATE
Welcome to the wild west

16. ADAVANTAGES OF A MARKETPLACE
• Drive customers & sales.
• Provide the e-commerce engine.
• Fastest way to get started.
• Low barrier to entry.
• Awesome venue for low cost / value products.
• Unified location for buyers.

17. TRADEOFFS OF A MARKETPLACE
• Lose a cut of traffic you personally drive.
• No control of the user relationship.
• Business model is often pre-defined.
• Lack of transparency into visitor stats.
• No support for licensed managed auto-upgrade.
• Expose your fans to your competitors.

18. Can You Make
REAL MONEY?

19. TheEnvato Marketplace
Envato Marketplaces
8,700 products. 45 with no sales
Pretty much everyone makes money
215 grossed $75,000+
50 passed $200,0000
12 broke $500,0000
2 new Millionaires

20. Revenue via Code Canyon 2010/2011
We released 5 Products on Code
Canyon about the same time and one
had a free .org version with a genuine
following. Guess which one?
According to PressTrends, the
most adopted premium themes
have free lite versions available.
WordPress.org drove 22.4% of all visitors to tri.be this month

21. GET ACCESS TO YOUR
USERS
* Validate legitimate buyers to control support costs.
* Gather genuine feedback to drive development.
* Selling to your raving fans requires find them.
Newsletter Signup | Support Forum Signup | Social Media

22. A Single Purchase Does Not Entitle A Lifetime of Servitude
FINDYou need recurring revenue
WAYS TO GET RECURRING REVENUE
TO: Code Canyon “Adios
Sydney, Australia Amigos”
(thanks for all the fish)

23. GOING SOLOto the wild west
Welcome & SELLING DIRECT

24. WHAT DO YOU NEED?
• Design and implement a store.
• Define the financial model.
• Member management and migrate user base.
• Integrate an auto-update engine into products.
• Integrate commerce with the support forum.
• Create an email list / newsletter.
• Develop affiliate support.

25. Plugin Update Engine (Darren Ethier)
pluginupdateseng.in/
Plugin Update Engine (Brandon Dove)
github.com/brandondove/plugin-update-engine
(I’ve heard of others but nothing I could hunt down)
Welcome to theSolutions
Auto-Update wild west

26. You Don’t Need A Traditional
MARKETING PLAN
When You Launch

27. Banner Ads: #FAIL Ads
YouMarketing Plan: Banner
need recurring revenue
The very best return we saw converted $350 of sales for $700 spent on ads.

28. ADWORDS
Have Not YET Converted Profitably
We focused on high volume (expensive) topic relevant
searches like “WordPress Events Calendar”. Definitely
worth experimenting more, so we are…

29. Niche recurringPages?Pages
Landing Landing
Marketing Plan: Niche revenue
You need
Create a host of very focused landing pages and point long-tail ad words.

30. DRIVE SALES WITH
AFFILIATES
So we heard from a lot of shops. We are almost
done setting up a private partner-only program.

31. A / needA/B Your Key Pages
B Test Testing revenue
You recurring
Did making the business license button GREEN increase higher value conversions?

32. Downloads VS Active Installs
The Events Calendar
212k 153rd
All in One Event Calendar 152k 195th
Event Espresso
50k 215th
Ajax Event Calendar
86k 341st
Calendar
307k 443rd
My Calendar
155k 1.3krd
WP Calendar
52k 1.7kth
Events Calendar
458k 4.3krd
Provided by PressTrends.IO
StudyMetrics revenue
Your Metrics
You need recurring
Good data is the difference between making a profit and massive failure.

33. FIND A Find a PROPOSITION BEYOND CODE
VALUE Value Proposition
People will steal your shit, and even resell it. And they can thanks to GPL.

34. Raising Our Base Prices
Had No Impact on Sales
From $30 > $40 > $50. We haven’t found our sweet spot yet?

35. Since 2.0, our PRO plugin revenue has come from:
66% Personal
22% Business
12% Developer
Create MultipleBuying Options
Buying Options
Create Multiple revenue
You need recurring
Help developers with a solution that allows them to easily use your product on many client sites.

36. GoingYou need recurringCall Financially
Solo Was the Right revenue
Going Indy Was the RIGHT Call Financially
Our biggest month at code canyon grossed us $4,795. Our biggest month indy was $21,390.

37. Welcome to & SOLUTIONS
PLATFORMS the wild west

38. Time to Go Beyond A Plugin / Theme
BUILD A PLATFORM
Extend functionality, reach & profits with add-ons.
Provide a way for people to contribute rather than compete.

39. Gravity Forms
Need need recurring Upgrade.
You More POWER? revenue

40. WooCommerce
WooCommerce Launched & It Is
You need recurring revenue
Kicking Ass Financially
(and you can share it with them)

41. Modern Tribe
So far
2 New Add-ons This Month = 148 Additional Orders
You need recurring revenue

42. LOOK FOR MULTIPLE STREAMSIncome
Multiple Streams of OF INCOME

43. We’ve made more $$ referring Eventbrite new customers than in
Eventbrite referral
plugin sales so far (launched May 2012). ONE e≠ort. TWO pay days!

44. Start Selling
SOLUTIONS
To Capitalize on Your Platform

45. Happy Tables
Theme Shop -> Niche SaaS
You need recurring revenue

46. ManageWP
Free You need recurring revenueSaaS
Repo >> Premium Plugins >> Utility

47. Keep Your Goals Clear
AND YOUR TACTICS NIMBLE
Be as agile with your business model as you are
with your code. After all, it is the Wild West. Use
metrics to drive decisions.

48. CODE IS SUPPORT
Welcome to the wild west

49. Long-Term Revenue is Driven by
SUPPORT

50. QUIT TRYING TO BUILD BADASS UNICORNS
Users Want Stability
Users want stability far more than they want the killer feature

51. How I usually feel when I
read other people’s code.

52. Great Support Starts with Great Code
• Document, document, document!
• Lots of people will read your code, please be organized
and indent.
• Unit tests are your friend.
• Separate branches for feature and bug releases.
• Plan hooks & filters early.
• Internationalize properly.
• Get your code reviewed for security vulnerabilities.
• Think backwards compatible.
• Run ALL the validators

53. SUPPORT WILL BE YOUR BIGGEST EXPENSE
40% of our costs this year came from talking to
customers & QA. That does not include a single bug
fix or line of code.
“Support takes up about 80-90% of my time and
that is with a second person helping” Brandon,
owner of Epic Era, one of Theme Forest’s Top
Sellers.

54. MakeMakeSupport Public & Searchable
Your Support Searchable
You need recurring revenue
It is a key marketing strategy & will save you a ton of time.

55. Use VIDEOUserecurring revenue
You need+ TEXT Documentation
Video + Text
Every shop I have talked to has specifically mentioned this!

56. Hey
Big
Buddy,
We
Hear
You.
That’s
frustra@ng.
We’ll
take
a
quick
look
at
your
site
in
the
morning
and
When
I
turn
on
your
get
you
an
answer
tomorrow
aDernoon.
plugin
my
sidebar
breaks?!?
Help!
SetYou need recurring revenue
Expectations & Reply Quickly
Use Video + Text

57. You Can BeSay your are You Can Be Right
Profitable or sorry
You need recurring revenue
Apologize when you screw up. And when they screw up. It can’t hurt and creates a ton of good will.

58. Be Transparent recurringLoyal Community
Be to Build a revenue
You need transparant
Make your customers see you as another human being on a mutual adventure.

59. Cultivate
YOUR BRAND
The experience that people have interacting with
your company goes far beyond your product and it
lasts a VERY LONG TIME. Make it a good one.

60. 6. CONCLUSION
MARKET
PATTERNS
COMMUNICATION

61. This is not a fad
WordPress runs14.7% of the top 1 Million
ranked sites & 49% of the top 100 blogs on the
Internet and shows no sign of slowing. This is a
huge market and it demands stability.

62. Jack be nimble
Who knows what will happen tomorrow to alter
the playing field. Expect change and you will be
pleasantly surprised.

63. Set them up to win
Provide the information, support and consistency your users
will need to succeed fabulously.

64. Act like a business
Plan Scope, Budget & Timeline

65. Use the community
The great power of open source is available to your business.

66. And in the famous words of Bobby McFerrin
Don’t Worry, Be Happy

67. Shane Pearlman, CEO Modern Tribe
@justlikeair shanepearlman.com

68. THANK YOU SO MUCH
Peter, Reid & Rob (Modern Tribe)"
Joachim Kudish (Automattic)"
JR Farr (Mojo themes)"
George Ortiz (Presstrends.io)"
Brandon Jones (Make Design)"
Dan Cameron (Group Buying Site)"
Daniel Dvorkin (WPML)"
Adii Pienaar (Woo Themes)"
Collis Ta’eed (Theme Forest / Code Canyon)