The Exchanges

Q the headache, check out Delve at the link in the description or go to delve.co slash starter story. Thank you to Delve for sponsoring today's video. Let's get back to the story. Okay, cool. So number one source of traffic. That's cool. You do run 20 different products though. I'm curious if there's any strategy there in terms of having all these different products. How does this help you grow?

A It's really helpful having so many products, especially ones that are very closely related, because it means that we can cross promote them and get multiple sales from the same customer. And there are many ways that I would recommend doing that. We've got one plugin, And two plugin bundles. And this is a key part of how we benefit from having so many products. For each of our products, we have selected a closely related plugin that we try to upsell with it. We then do additional tasks such as after three days following the purchase, we send an email offering them 50% off their next plugin. On Black Friday, we have separate email campaigns for potential customers and existing customers. And for the existing customers, we will use language like discount off your next plugin. And I think the trick there is to target the customers and segment your list so that you are recommending very closely related products to the one that they're already using. And that maximizes the likelihood that they're going to buy. And then you can keep sending the message home, things like banners on your settings pages and constantly reminding them you have these complimentary products We should directly relevant to the one you're already using.

AI assessment note: “it means that we can cross promote them and get multiple sales from the same customer”

Q All right. Well, 20 apps, you run 20 different apps. That's crazy. Can you explain how this Even works. How do you run 20 apps? What kind of apps are these? And if you could pull up some of your revenue dashboards and show us would be awesome.

A Uh, 19 of our products are WordPress plugins. And the final one is our new Shopify app. Our plugins are fairly simple, which is how we can have so many. We've got one called Document Library Pro, um, which lets you add any kind of document library. And we've got lots for WooCommerce. They let you add product tables, product options. Protect areas of your store. They're typically, I would say, small to medium apps that let you add specific functionality to your WordPress website or WooCommerce store. So we have a choice of plans. We've got one site, five sites, or 20, where you either have an annual subscription or lifetime. This is our 20 25 revenue. You can see it's just over 1.7 million dollars. I know I said 1.8 million earlier. That's Because we have other revenue streams such as affiliate income, and we offer some development services. In terms of stats, our average monthly revenue is about a 150,000 dollars across all of our plugins. It's higher than that in busy months like November and lower in quiet months like December. Over the entire lifetime of the business, we've sold 9.8 million dollars worth of WordPress Plugins. Overall, we think that our plugins are used on over 90,000 sites. That's the premium plugins. And also we have free versions of some of our plugins. So that is the total number for paying customers. We have 17,000 on an active subscription. We do have m…

AI assessment note: “19 of our products are WordPress plugins... This is our 20 25 revenue.”

Q bit more. I'm excited to talk about how you grew these apps. And I'm sure you can have a lot of cool stuff to share there. But before we do, let's talk about ideas. Before you had 19 different ideas. How did you find the first plugin idea to start? How did you find WordPress as this opportunity? How did this whole thing get started? How'd you find the idea?

A Yeah, that's the thing. We never had 19 ideas. We did not sit down and think, let's build 19 WordPress plugins and then launch a Shopify app. It happened much more organic than that. Our first plugin idea actually came from online research. There used to be a website called the WooCommerce Ideas Forum, and we chose an idea that lots of people were voting for. So we built our first plugin, WooCommerce Protected Categories, that's dead simple. It just lets you protect access to categories in your online store. And then our second plugin was Posttable Pro, which lists any type of content from a WordPress site in a searchable Table. And we got that idea from a client project. We kept adding features and released it as a premium plugin. So once we've got those plugins out there, customers started sending us requests for new features in that plugin. And sometimes it was best to achieve that, not through a feature, but a completely different plugin. So I would say, get a product out there and then keep your ears open to get those ideas From your users, because that's when you have that information coming into you without even needing to ask for it. And if you're smart and you think creatively, that can lead to more ideas.

AI assessment note: “Our first plugin idea actually came from online research. There used to be a website”

Q let's switch topics a little bit to growth. You have 20 different plugins, uh, that are all serving different types of use cases and 20 different software businesses. That's a lot. For someone that has this sort of portfolio of startups, it's definitely a different way of approaching growth. Can you explain what the biggest needle mover was when Comes to growth. Where do most of your customers come from?

A Most of our customers have always come from organic search. When we first launched our initial plugin, which was WooCommerce protected categories, it was the only plugin that did that. That's why we built it because we found on a forum that there was a gap in the market. So, uh, as a marketer, I started publishing blog posts and tutorials about how to password protect categories in WooCommerce. And because it was unique, we got to the The top of Google straight away. And we got our first sales within a few days. Now I know it's not that easy to find a unique idea, particularly 10 years later, but that's what we did. And we've always been very good at producing genuinely helpful, unique content about a wide range of use cases relating to our plugins.

AI assessment note: “Most of our customers have always come from organic search.”