ProfitPress

IconicWP, a WooCommerce plugin shop, started out selling on Envato but then transitioned to Freemius. After switching to Freemius they doubled their WordPress plugin revenue in under a year. Learn more about how they did it to see if you can apply these lessons to your business.

Katie Keith joins us to share the story of Barn2Media’s successful transition from designing WordPress websites to selling WordPress plugins.

This week’s guest is Garth Koyle from Event Espresso whose goal is to grow his business into a $100 million dollar revenue company. How do you do this I hear you ask? Well, let’s get some hot business and marketing tips from Garth.

With so many WordPress themes available on the market, it might sound crazy to even try and start a business selling your own. There are super-huge, multi-purpose themes selling $100k worth a week with option panels the size of their revenue charts, others with big passionate communities supporting them, and countless other shops just as successful in their own right. How can you compete?

To say the theme marketplace is undergoing a transition is probably an understatement. We’ve seen many shops sell or change focus over the past year. A few have maintained their place in the market or even grown some, but it’s not easy work.

Taking into consideration years prior to 2013 as a reference we can see that on average 50%-60% of “freemium” plugins have been updated in 2015 or 2016. This is a significant difference compared to the findings of previous analysis I did on the WordPress repository. The survival rate after 3 years for the average plugin in the repository is around 10%-20%. We are looking at a 200% improvement.

A few months ago, I decided to challenge our plugin’s pricing and try the “WordPress way” by removing the monthly subscription. Keeping only the annual and lifetime billing cycles. We ran this pricing experiment for one week and saw a drastic fall in new customers. “Drastic” is an understatement – we lost 54% in our customer acquisition rate.

If you want to thrive in the plugin development business, pricing must be at the forefront of your mind. Along with providing stellar plugin features, it is one of the most important aspects of creating a sustainable long-term business. Get it wrong and you’ll constantly be swimming against the tide.

Back in 2010, a developer could release a mass market WordPress theme or plugin and amass thousands of sales within a few months. In today’s market, that sort of success is exceedingly rare, and so, one of the most important decisions product developers must make is whether to go mass market or target a niche.

Is the WordPress plugin repository worth the hassle? If you’re a relatively experienced WordPress plugin developer, you’ve most likely already asked yourself this question – possibly more than once. If you’re a relatively new WordPress plugin developer, you’re probably asking yourself “Wait … why would I not want my plugin in the repository?!” Both questions are valid.

My perception of a lifetime license is very different than the lifetime license WP Rocket or many of the other WordPress plugin businesses are offering. I was actually very surprised, even in shock, learning how much money WordPress plugin developers are leaving on the table with their so-called, “lifetime license”.

I participated in the Prestige Conference in Las Vegas. It was a very memorable experience because I got to meet with businesses thought leaders in the WordPress ecosystem. One of the main panels that I was in, focused on the addressable market of WordPress. Questions like, “How big of an opportunity is WordPress?”, and “How much money can be made from the ecosystem?” were discussed in great length.

This is a deep dive into a very interesting success story with Freemius. You’ll see why it’s interesting in a few paragraphs. This time we are exploring a WordPress plugin called Pootle PageBuilder, talking to its founder & managing director – Jamie Marsland.

We speak with Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains, home of WP Migrate DB. Brad has been through the experience of launching the WP App Store, which included investment from Adii Pienaar at WooThemes and Carl Hancock at Gravity Forms. The WP App Store ultimately failed and Brad has lived to tell the tale.

Learn how Elementor grew their business within a saturated plugin marketplace and discuss what helped their product succeed – from to creating a fun company culture to nurturing their community.

In this post I share the email marketing automation technique we’ve come up with, using tools that are available for everyone. I’ll provide an inside look into our thought process of why we did it, how to set it up from A to Z, as well as try to answer the question – how has it been working for us?

Your plugin’s sales aren’t going to just skyrocket on their own, so as a company that’s focused on helping WordPress product developers explode their sales – we decided it was time to publish an action-oriented business book that focuses on the business and entrepreneurial side of developing and selling WordPress plugins.