M Asif Rahman: Growing Big With WordPress Theme and Plugin Business

Today's session be more about like growing business in WordPress. Those are the companies I found and I'm running some of the companies that I invested. I actually started, I started when I was in university. Before actually go to university I started my company. So in past 14 years I worked very closely with WordPress at the same time I run a lot of different brands. And today's session like I'm going to talk about WordPress business at the same time. Like let's see like how many of you are already in WordPress business? So you are building something for WordPress or like maybe you're working for a client. How many of you are already in business? So as I'm going to talk about like how to grow a business in WordPress I could go into little more deep like how a lot of like big things works. Also I want to start with very basic. So any people who are maybe just developing in WordPress but not considering a business or something, we will share the details like how to grow more in your WordPress business. I have been to many webcams. I have been to like over 100 webcams already and those are the some that I attended or spoken. Yes, I have recently retired this year in the September 1st was actually my 34th birthday and that was actually a Hero Press article. We will ask interactive questions so whoever raised hand they will get like probably some swag. How many of you have known about Hero Press? There's no Hero Press. Correct. So Hero Press is a collective publication where people actually write their interesting stories about WordPress. So I published my Hero Press article back in 2017 that sharing my plan like how I want to retire by the age 34 and why I want you to retire. So if you like you could read the article. That's extremely long article. So you have read already. Okay, so that's almost like 10,000 word article. I will share a short link about like why I thought about FreeTag and how WordPress helped me to actually decide that kind of I would say like very drastic decision to recap in the middle of my career. So today we are going to talk about WordPress business. So as you have already answered in OnePlus business, we are mainly concentrating on like product business. So either like plugin or like theme and we are going to. We are not going to actually talk much about service business. So if you are actually building for your clients in today's session we are going to focus more on products. So as you have answered like many of you already started WordPress business already. So what did you have learned? Like was it easy? So please some of you if you could answer like who do you consider like any of you consider yourself like you are successful in WordPress business. Okay. You consider yourself are you in flirting business or cave. Okay, Any of you are doing in plugging business. Okay. So hopefully like interview session I will be able to add some of the information that we are doing for our own business and maybe you could relate to it. So those of you who are actually just getting introduced to WordPress or don't have much of the idea how WordPress works, WordPress is pretty large. I think a few months ago we have crossed like 33% of entire web dominance. So right now almost like over 33% of the entire web is actually building WordPress. And WooCommerce is very big. A lot of you already know if you consider like e commerce business only. WooCommerce powers 39% of the entire e commerce. So and obviously WooCommerce is also an open source platform and if you there's some data taken from build with that gives a lot of data like how websites are built with tools and it saves over 1.5 million ecommerce website are built using WooCommerce. So what is very big. And if you look at the our plugin growth there is some stat like how many plugins are submitted in.org year by year. You see like every year it always green. So if in 2014 if you had like 142, 342 new plugins it actually grew a lot higher in 2014. So this data a little bit like outdated up to like 2015. But I think like in past few years it even grew a lot more. So right now we are like gaining more users and more plugins are coming in. And those are the some of the data about CodeCanyon. Okay, so how many of you have any plugins or themes in CodeCanyon? So in code Canyon they have a review process when you submit a new plugin. So those are the some of the stats like how their business and number of WordPress plugin is growing. As if you see like this date is up to 2016, end of 2016. So people are submitting more and more plugins everywhere. That means the business is growing, successful business. Like if we today we want to actually talk more about like business, how people start a business and what works and what not. In WordPress those are like basic steps. Like you probably start as a solo developer, you try to actually build something. Then if you find some growth, you will scale, you expand and maybe you will become the market leader. That's the normal business cycle. Those are the some of the successful business in the. There are like hundreds of extremely successful in WordPress so that's some of the biggest name I think that most of the people already know Automatic, the company behind WordPress.com and also WP Rocket that's a caching plugin optimistor that lets you like opt in better. In Venom the company behind CodeCanyon used the HCP plugin Easy Digital number. Like if you want to sell something online that's completely digital that that could be your choice and I think one of the oldest theme business. Those are the some of the very notable parts inside WordPress ecosystem who are very successful in business. This is Pippin William, he's the co founder of Easy Digital Download. That is Sai Valky, he's behind Osmotic. That's also the company behind the Bookie, Beginner and Optimonster. That's Corey Miller, the person behind Items and this is Yost, the person behind Jost and SEO Guardian. There are business that is actually making over a million dollars per month. So there's a lot of money. Do you think it's easy? Absolutely not. Business is hard, it's always hard. Then how everything works like if you're into business, like I'm in business for almost 14, 15 years. The end of all the discussion is like business is hard. If business was easy, everybody could be in business. So it's not for everybody and it's not easy but at the same time obviously it's possible if you follow process. So let's dig deeper into business. So in WordPress we could divide the business in product and service and today we are going to talk more about product service. Business could be like web design, web customization, customer support. Maybe we are maintaining somebody's website or helping people set it up. Product in WordPress we could actually divide the product in two ways. WordPress theme and WordPress plugin. WordPress development supposed to be a service but somebody could actually sell it as a like development package as well. So it seems like they will probably just actually make some kind of website for you and there's a fixed price and they have a process to build it. So we are going to talk about also the pricing model and generally like in Inside WordPress I personally prefer the premium model. So you will have a free version that could be premium plugin and then you will have like premium products. So people will actually try it out. And the main benefit you will get like if you have a like free product is you get like access to the marketing. Because if you release your plugin in WordPress.org, you have like easy access to all the millions of users that is actually downloading from the dot org. And that also true for the theme as well. Let me share an interesting trend we are seeing right now in theme. If you look at the OG theme a lot of.org theme right now have a premium version that is not a theme. So a theme available.org but the premium version is a buy in. That's the newest trend. So the business trend changing a lot. Like if you look at like WP Astra or Ocean WP all of them they have a presence in dot org but the premium version is a plugin. So as WordPress right now push a lot about like using customizer and a lot of things need to be like follow a lot of standards so it's easier for them to actually create a boilerplate kind of theme and like add more functionalities through the body. And a common discussion we had a lot among like all our business like if you should go to SaaS or not to SaaS. The main benefit you will get if you create a SaaS business is like you could charge your client per month. So it's easier for you to calculate like your lifetime value, your monthly run rate. And there are a lot of discussions if WordPress business, those who are like GPL and like in open source, if they should actually go for SaaS and if the clients will like to pay or not. So we like to actually talk about those as well. So let's think about like how a WordPress business generally works. I would say like you start to solve a problem, then you have some idea, you build something by your own, you try it out in the market, you see like how it start grows and if stuff working then you actually execute and you try to grow more. So always it should be start from your intention to solve a problem. I generally don't see a business that is running for a long time that started purely to make money. It always has to be like solving a problem. If you look at all the successful business in WordPress it's not like they don't have a competitor, they have a strong competitor. The main reason they are still striving and they're doing really well is because they started to solve a problem and that was the unique problem to solve. So let's start with solving a problem not just to Earn money. It has to have the intention to actually go beyond the money money will come in if you're actually doing it for free. And as I explained, releasing it is free will give you a lot of more options to actually taste the market, get more feedback. And it is true that if you release a very good product in free and probabilistic people from some of the features, people could actually comment and people do a lot of things. But you will get access to millions of people who are already using WordPress. The four benefit of like releasing it into WordPress.org you will get a lot of feedbacks and reviews and then you could add more value. So instead of like start planning the premium from the beginning, I would suggest like build a complete product for free and have more plans. Like if people receive it well, then you will add more values in the premium and you will always keep building both the free and pro. Let me explain like how it works. Like if you plan a product thinking about like money and premium version at the beginning, maybe you will spin down some of the premium features in the free one. So when people are getting started, maybe you always thought about like people will pay you money. But you have to realize what is very large ecosystem, vast majority of the people is not going to upgrade ever. And so like if you do not give the full benefit of your own product to people, they will not care to actually use it. So let's build on top of the free version and as I said we have to try to grow our business instead of being able. So we should try to have the free version that is like to be properly used. At the same time the premium version should add value on top of that instead of like restricting people from a feature. And as I said let's build on people's feedback, what kind of feedback we receive and also how the ecosystem is actually missing the product overall. So let me give you some of the tips like how a business could be successful and what are the main tips. So my first tips will be you have to have a really good product description. It could start from.org description in the VP file. Then if you have a landing page in your website, have like proper descriptions with like a well elaborated how it works like how people are using it and some cases study if people are really revealing.org in the free version here and show people how your product works in general with some GIF or add video if it doesn't actually make your website very heavy. And the main reason a lot of WordPress business are successful is because of the support you need to give really good support that I would encys to give really good support to also your free user. In WordPress.org each and every product have a product forum as well. In that forum people could ask questions for free and they are your free user. But when you are building a product, you need to have some strategy how you could actually give support and how you could actually keep providing support ongoing. Some people start building a lot of product. Maybe instead of focusing on one product, then there's maybe 10 products and then it will become very hard for them to provide support. You will end up like having bad reviews, you will end up like people talking bad about your product and it will have really bad effects when people are searching about your product online. So have a strategy to provide support and also provide support to your free user as well. We find out like documentation is something that could actually reduce your pain from the growing user base. So if you have good documentation, you will have to actually deal with the customer support request. So try to build a very thorough documentation that that so people could actually discover like what kind of issues they're facing and they could solve their own problems. I would also suggest to have like a FAQ section in your documentation so the kind of support request you are getting in.org or in your support table. The common questions you should be like publishing in the FAQ so you do not have to actually deal with those. I know a lot of people do not want to check, actually search online or go to your like documentation. They want to actually just come into the chat or like issue a subject. So you answer them politely and you tell them like the question you answered is already documented in the documentation. So next time you have some questions, go to the documentation part and then you could always ask us questions. We will always provide support so that will create a good repo. And also I find that a lot of our traffic for our website actually comes from the documentation. So if the documentation is done well, it is actually elaborated. You will get really good traffic in the documentation as well. Some of the mistakes people make, I have seen like documentation and blogging is not the same. So if you have a writer, content writer that is used to writing blog and you ask them to actually write your documentation, that should be like different approach. So try to dig online to see like how the documentation and normal blog is different and do it properly so people will actually find that. Because in documentation you don't need to sell anything. People are already sold. So in the blog sometimes we build up the hype. We actually we have like one or two paragraphs that we actually describe how this is a good post or how he is going to solve in documentation. We came here to have a solution. So get right into the point and show the solution. And I personally like if I had any bit of success in WordPress business, I think that mainly because of content marketing, I was in content from very beginning. So how it could help you. So let's consider you have built a really good product and right now in 2018 it will be very hard for you to find a unique problem that nobody else has solved before. So you probably are building a problem that is actually being solved by few other people in a complex way. You are probably making the process similar or easier then how you let people know about the good solution. You have already released the plugini.org so people could discover but maybe people are not searching for that. So how do you promote so the promotion? You could do a lot of different things in the content blog. You could also use the social media and I think also in Malaysia the social media is very popular. But the way it works, the way we have seen is in intensive focus and have good strategies on the content. So you need to produce good content and have strategy to distribute the content. Because producing content and distributing content is like they should actually marry each other and they should actually go very well. So if, if you produce good content but you do not have a like distributed visual strategy, that's not going to help. So and I would also suggest to use the lead conversion. So if somebody is coming into your website, have some strategy to get at least 10 emails so you could call, make it back or maybe provide some report or something. So you could have their contacts and you could send them updates about your product or maybe if you build a new guideline or something you could always send us that as well. And I would like to use like modern tools for marketing. So instead of like doing all the scheduling or like if you're sharing in social media doing it manually, have like modern tools. There are a lot of modern tools available that you could actually utilize. Like maybe most of your audience are in tutor and you want to actually market your product properly in Twitter. So use some tools that actually give you more insight about your future user base and try to automate some of the process and experiment more and you need to have like more data. Most of the modern marketing tools will be rely more on big data and you need to actually like dig deeper and understand your strategy. And if you do not try. You better know like how you could actually do even better. Let me tell you like interesting example. Like how I find using data could be like very useful. I run one of the lifestyle magazine in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh it called Time. So our editor publish one recipe every day. So we thought like maybe publishing a recipe during the like lunchtime is good idea. So we thought like maybe we should publish the recipe in 2:30. Because in Bangladesh the general lunch time used to be. But like we started doing that. We started sharing those post through our social media in Facebook as well. So we have almost like 2.5 million fans in Facebook. But then we thought about experimenting. So we tried to do it in different time as well. We started doing like 2:30 or also we experimented on like 2:30, 1:30 and like 4. After testing and digging through the data we find out like people want to actually rewrite the recipe after they have taken the lunch already. Our calculation was maybe we should promote the article before the lunch. So maybe people will look at the recipe, they will feel the tracing and they will go to somewhere or ask their wife that will make something. But it's actually other alarm. They have already eaten now they want to actually look at the food and like maybe plan for something tomorrow. So if we have not experimented, I would have never thought it. Like people also look at the food picture after they have lunch already. So experiment more, look at the data. Maybe you will find something that you have not thought before. Those are some of the resources that all the WordPress business people. If you're involved in business, you should actually follow regularly. There are a lot of other product publications as well. They're all on the public. That makes few really good WordPress themes and plugins. But they write about their product and write about the WordPress business a lot. We also have premiums. They are a kind of solution. If you want to build on WordPress they will let you publish. You could actually charge your client. They have SDK so you do not have to use any other like E commerce or something. And they will also let you calculate the tax properly do the licensing and everything. Manage WP there is like ManageWP.com and ManageWP.org ManageWP.com is a like maintenance service. But ManageWP.com is one of the largest news source for WordPress and WPV is very. I think most of you will know already because they are running for almost nine years already. So now some of the things like I came to understand after running my business for over a decade so if your idea is working, if you are already earning some money, people generally try to build the company first. I would advise you to build your team first. If you have a good team, the company, the culture, the kind of things you want to build that will come forward already. So instead of like focusing on the company, like looking at the names or brands, trying to build a really solid team that will actually going to help you in long run. And business is a continuous process. So if you have, you're having like good sales, if you have like good market share right now, it doesn't mean that you are going to have this forever. So it's a continuous process. You always need to actually change the data, see how I recess more, how you could actually compare yourself with your partners, competitors and how you could actually really improve. If you do not follow the process, if you do not keep building on top of it, maybe you will not have the success you have right now. So it's a continuous process. And so some people try to claim like if you build a really good product or plug in things, if has like market size already, maybe you will sit back and earn money. There is actually nothing like you could actually really sit back and earn money. You will always have to actually keep working on top of it. Ultimately plugin business or clean business or mostly like anything you look into. WordPress is a long game because like if it takes three months to build a product, maybe it will take like three, four months to actually just wrap up the initial version and like get people's feedback and start the premium version. So ultimately it's a long game. If you think that you could build something in few months and make money out of it. Generally it's not going to work. So you have to have any strategy to have like a long plan, keep building on top of that. And so right now I will actually start the time for any questions. And if you have any questions, we have a mic.