#198 – Muntasir Sakib on Bridging the Gap Between WordPress Plugin Development and Marketing Success

Transcript

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, build it and they might come, bridging the gap between WordPress plugin development and marketing success.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Muntasir Sakib. Muntasir, has been active in the WordPress space since 2018, working with well-known plugins and companies such as Tutor, LMS, Droip and more. He’s played a key role scaling products from their early days helping them achieve wider adoption.

He’s also been active in the WordPress community more broadly at events such as WordCamp Asia and Word Camp Sylhet.

The focus of today’s episode is a crucial, yet often overlooked topic, especially if you’re a plugin developer. It’s a chat about the moment when plugin development ends and the real success can begin. In a WordPress marketplace that’s more crowded and competitive than ever, simply build it and they will come, does not mean that users will. Muntasir wants to bust the myth by digging into why marketing is essential from day one, and not an afterthought left until launch day.

We start by learning about Muntasir’s journey through the WordPress ecosystem, and his approach to balancing development and marketing for plugins. He explains the key differences between marketing in the WordPress ecosystem versus the SaaS world. In WordPress, you don’t control the full stack and your users expect openness and interoperability, making community focus and support critical.

The discussion then turns to the practicalities of launching and growing a plugin. Why throwing new features at a product isn’t enough, and why listening to users and building community relationships is often more valuable than racing to add features no one has asked for.

We talk about the dos and don’ts gained from Muntasir’s experience, including the pitfalls of relying on lifetime deals for early revenue, and why a recurring revenue model is key for long-term sustainability.

We also talk through the role of community, partnerships, and events like WordCamps, not just as marketing opportunities, but as places to build the relationships and collaborations that can help plugins thrive.

if you’re a WordPress plugin developer wondering how to turn a finished product into real success, or you’re trying to figure out where marketing fits into your roadmap, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Muntasir Sakib.

I am joined on the podcast by Muntasir Sakib. Hello.

[00:03:47] Muntasir Sakib: Hello, Nathan. How are you doing?

[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Very nice to connect with you. We’ve had a long chat prior to hitting the record button. And we really touched on all sorts of things in life. But that’s not the purpose of the podcast today. We’re going to keep it firmly on the WordPress side of things, and particularly about marketing, I guess maybe a good way to sum it up, which is a topic that we don’t often get into.

Before we get into that, Muntasir, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just introducing yourself. Just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do. How come you’re connected to the WordPress community? Whatever you think fits the bill.

[00:04:18] Muntasir Sakib: Thank you, Nathan, for giving me the opportunity to talk about myself a bit, and it’s nice being with you here.

Well, I’m Muntasir, I’m Muntasir Sakib and I have been with WordPress since 2018. So you can say over half a decade. And throughout my career, I worked for some really, really amazing plugins and companies such as Tutor LMS, Droip, EasyCommerce, Core Designer, ThumbPress.

So when I joined JoomShaper, like premium, back in the days, I was talking about 2019, we had Tutor LMS and Tutor LMS had probably 15,000 or less active installations back in the time. And then within three and a half years, with the help of the amazing team we had back then, we all worked together day and night, and with our beautiful clients and customers all around the globe we achieved 100,000 plus active installations within three and a half years. And that was a phenomenal number to mention in the WordPress industry, in the WordPress ecosystem.

And then there’s Droip, the first ever true no-code website builder for WordPress, and that was born. It got a traction that we ever expected it to be that much. So we were overwhelmed about it as well.

And then during my tenure so far, I, along with my team, represented Tutor LMS and Droip at WordCamp Asia 2023, WordCamp Sylhet 2023 and some other WordPress meetups as well.

And why did we join WordCamps? That could be a question. It’s because we sponsored those events to show our gratitude to the WordPress community and the ecosystem. Because there’s a thing in WordPress, which we say Five for the Future, as per Matt. So every product companies and every business that do business in the WordPress industry should contribute in the WordPress ecosystem, contributes in the open source market so that it get better every day.

Because we are working in the ecosystem, we bring some real value for our clients. So what if our foundation is not strong enough to get those clients, to get those correct tractions? Because in the SaaS market nowadays, there are lots of, plethora of SaaS products, but we have to bring something together, stronger and better than SaaS, so that people believe in us and they come together to work with us and use our products.

[00:06:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. So you’ve been working with a variety of different clients in the WordPress space. And when I put out a message saying, I’d like to chat with a variety of people on this podcast, you reached out and you mentioned that you wanted to talk about essentially the gap where development finishes and success begins. Because I think it’s fair to say that if you were to rewind the clock, I don’t know, maybe 15 years or something like that, maybe 10 years, it was much more straightforward to build a product as a developer, put it out into the marketplace, and because you were potentially the prime mover, the first person to have such a thing, you might succeed just off the basis of build it and they will come. That old chestnut.

Whereas now the marketplace is much more mature, much more saturated. And so the idea of build it and they will come. Oh, really, I mean unless you are incredibly fortunate, or maybe you’ve already had some success and so have, I don’t know, your company has notoriety or what have you, that really isn’t the case anymore. When development finishes there needs to be this whole marketing piece that swings into action to alert the community.

So how would you differentiate between the plugin marketplace, in terms of marketing, and the SaaS marketplace? What makes those two things different?

[00:07:59] Muntasir Sakib: Well, that’s a pretty important question that we mostly overlook. Nathan, thank you for bringing that out. We need to be very specific. When it’s about WordPress product marketing, it’s more like ecosystem driven than SaaS. When we’re talking about SaaS, you control the entire environment, your onboarding journey, your analytics, your pricing model, your customer journey. Everything is under the one umbrella.

But when it’s about WordPress, then you are selling inside an open ecosystem where users make dozens of plugins together. So you cannot give your customer some boundaries that if you use my product or my plugin, you cannot use others. It doesn’t make any sense.

So they’re going to use as many plugins as they want to, and you have to be compatible with every one of those. So you don’t control hosting, themes, PHP versions or the user’s technical setup, all of which impact your product experience, right?

And in wp.org, wp.org acts as a distribution channel. So you need to think about it. It’s more of like app store, which influence reviews, support expectations, and growth. In most cases, all the products start from wp.org, which provides a free version of every plugin.

So the founders and the marketers mostly overlook the thing that free plugin often becomes your biggest acquisition engine. So your marketing depends heavily on the documentation, the on point documentation, and the onboarding journey inside your WordPress dashboard. Your operation, the smoother it is, the better it’ll be to get the traction of the pro customers and the continuous updates, and your community presence. If you have no community presence in the ecosystem in your WordPress community, then you are just gone.

[00:09:50] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so curious, when you sort of say it like that, the idea of logging into the WordPress backend, if you’re a plugin developer or a regular user of WordPress, you’ll be really familiar with this. If you go into a website, there’s often dozens of different things. And maybe a lot of them are kind of overlapping, so there might be things which integrate with other things. And as a plugin developer, that kind of overhead is something that you just don’t really need to worry about with SaaS, because you just build the thing, and you make sure that it works and everybody logs in, and it works because it’s yours and you control the infrastructure and the hardware that it’s on and the servers and all of that kind of stuff.

Whereas the WordPress thing, it’s just so much more complicated and you’ve really got to be thinking all the time about sticking to coding standards to make sure that at least you know your thing is doing it right. And if there’s a conflict and something breaks, well, you can be fairly sure that it wasn’t your fault, it might be somebody else’s fault. So it is much, much more complicated.

And then throw into it all of the other bits and pieces that you’ve just mentioned, community and all of that kind of stuff. I mean, it really is a very complicated picture, and I think getting more and more complicated year by year.

So have you, in your previous work, have you kind of identified this moment where the development cycle ends and the marketing cycle begins, if you like, but the plugin developer has basically made no preparation for the marketing piece? They’ve just built things and then have an expectation that, oh, it’ll just sell itself. Do you see that? Is that a real thing?

[00:11:22] Muntasir Sakib: Yeah, that’s definitely a real thing. And the thing is, I don’t give the blame to the developers actually, because they were supposed to build the product, they were supposed to follow the compliance issues, and they’re supposed to build fresh code so that the thing cannot break when people are using it massively.

But it’s mostly from our and from the marketers end that we need to tell them beforehand, like what to do and how can we get the KPIs? What are the things that we need to sell to our customers that going to help them to solve their problems?

Because the fun fact is, in most cases, when our founders or a developers is planning to build a product, a plugin, they were thinking from their end like, okay, fine, I want to build a product so that the product going to be that much good that everyone going to use it. But it’s not the case, because we have almost like 59,000 plugins right now in WordPress directory. So in every category, in every niche, there’s a plethora of products, plethora of competitors. So there were some big competitors and there are some upcoming competitors who are small.

So how they compete with someone who has already hundred thousand or a million of active installations, millions of happy users. We cannot compete them with just everything they have. Whether if we come with some specific niche, like some specific problems that they’re facing from our competitors, and we can add value to them, to our clients, they would be happy enough to try our product.

So you need to give something to the customers first so that they can rely on you. And if you have a good reputation beforehand, like if you are not new in this industry, you have some other plugins beforehand, and if have a good reputation and you are coming with another solution, they’re surely going to try it. And there’s the catch.

When people start using your product, they give you the feedback, and those feedbacks are gold mines. So you need to talk with your customers. You need to talk with the developers. You need to connect with them on regular basis. And that’s the job of us. That’s the real job of us, like the support system, the marketers, content creators. The documentations all need to come along and they need to figure out the problems, what they’re facing, and what the customers are asking for. What are the bugs they’re having? It can be a bug based on their environment, like everyone has their different environment, right?

But the thing is, when we speak to the customers, when we talk to them and when we try to figure out their issues and try to solve their problems, they’re going to do the best marketing you can ever imagine, the word of mouth. And WordPress is doing the exact same thing. WordPress is depending on word of mouth. Your 10 happy customers is way more important and valuable to you than a hundred thousand dollars.

[00:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: And I think that kind of speaks to what I would imagine, or at least what I would hope to be the case. When I look back at my time in WordPress and I go right back to the beginning of it, it felt like a really good, solid playground for hobbyists. There were an awful lot of people who were doing things for a hobby, and then now it’s become much more professional. In fact, when I joined the WordPress community, that whole thing was just beginning to open up. There were a few companies who were making a great deal of success for themselves, selling things into the marketplace, you know, they had a free version and a pro version. But it was still, it still felt like the beginning of that, the wild west of that.

And I think that still there’s a little bit of that hobbyist mentality still out there where, you know, you attend events, you hang out with like-minded people. You can see that this individual over here, they had success, I could do the same. But there’s that whole thing that you’ve got to have prior to building anything, and it sounds to me like you’re making a real difference between the marketing people and the development people.

And, okay, maybe you are this unique person that can do both. Maybe you are brilliant at developing and you are going to be an amazing marketer. I think it’s fair to say that most people are not that. They don’t have the time, they’ve got other things to do, their skillset is developing, their skillset is marketing, they’re kind of different entities.

But it feels like for many people, that realisation hasn’t been made yet, that you need to, before launching, so maybe even at the moment you think, I am going to build this thing, maybe that’s the moment where you think, okay, two thirds of my budget is going to go into development and one third into marketing, or 50 50 or 70 30, or whatever it may be. I think that’s what you’re saying is that you need to be thinking about this right from the beginning, not leaving it until the last minute if you want it to be a success.

[00:15:57] Muntasir Sakib: Exactly, exactly. You have to have a plan from day one when you started developing a product. How and where should I go? Who are my primary audiences? Whom to reach out. Which influencers should we work with? And when should I give them the beta version to test? I can give a beta version to like hundreds of peoples, who are willingly giving it a try. Tell us some beautiful insights, some valuable insights so that we can develop the product even more before going to the market. So that’s the thing.

In most cases, what developers are thinking, what mostly the founders who are mostly developers, they’re thinking like, well, I can develop the product like 80% and then for the rest 20%, we can start working with the marketing team. I can think of how to go to the market and how to have some early traction. Early traction is easy, but it’s not the kicker. Early traction is easy because if you have a freemium plan, you can definitely go for wp.org. There’s a free version so everyone can use it.

There’s a term, founder led marketing. So when you are a founder, yeah, you can just announce on your socials, like, yeah, I have a plugin. I developed it and I launched it on wp.org so you can try it. Everyone going to try it. No problem on that. But the thing is, there might be a hundred plus active installations on day one, but on day three it could go way below 10, 10 to 15.

So where are the rest of the people went? They just came here to try the product, you didn’t ask for anything. You didn’t know how to contact with them. You didn’t know how to collect the data, how to collect the information that you don’t have in your mind, in your head. What’s the fuss about? What’s the problem they’re having? So they didn’t even bother to share?

You need to ask first. Be the first person to ask the questions like, what are the problems you are having using my product? I eagerly want to know. I want to solve your problem. So when I am talking with each and every person, each and every client, as he’s valuable, we bring value to their life, they’re going to bring something for me too.

[00:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think the curious thing about a lot of the developers that I know who’ve brought a plugin to the market is that they’ve been focused a lot on the features. They’ve got this laundry list of features and they get really wrapped up in the features and they execute that, they build the features. And then maybe somewhere along the line they realise, oh, there’s this other feature that would be quite nice to have. Yeah, let’s do that. And then before you know it, the idea of launching the product just gets pushed back and back and back because, oh, there’s another feature and, oh, I’ve thought of another feature. And on it goes.

And the whole time you haven’t been doing exactly what you said, kind of trying to figure out how to build up an audience, trying to figure out how to get influencers involved, how to put it out on, in this case, wordpress.org or whatever it may be. And that whole puzzle, that whole jigsaw piece, inside that puzzle needs to be thought out, I think for many people, at a much earlier date.

I get quite a lot of email from people who would like to have some product or service distributed through something like a podcast. On some level, it’s amazing that the people would like me to help them, but also when you go to the property that they’ve got, you can see that the thing that they’ve built is amazing, but also the marketing side of things hasn’t really been taken care of. So the website is nowhere near the standard that the plugin is. Everything about it, you know, the documentation is nowhere near the standard that the plugin is and so on. So there’s this sort of real disconnect.

So do you have any like do’s and don’ts? Have you got any, like a list of things that you highly recommend people do if they want to market a plugin? But also some things which you think, actually no, stay away from that, that’s snake oil, people have tried that and it doesn’t seem to work. Any order of any of those things.

[00:19:35] Muntasir Sakib: Absolutely. If you’re talking about like developing features and releasing it every alternate week, these are the most common picture when we are thinking about WordPress ecosystem, or any other products. 80% people are doing that. But the problem occurs when, feature first development means you keep building what you want, not what your customers actually struggle with, right?

So when you release a product, you have the roadmap. You make it public. You show the customers like, well, these features are coming next, but people don’t bother about what features are coming next, they’re mostly bothered about what you have right now, and are those working properly or not? You might have, like when you were thinking of any e-commerce, you might have 20 or 30 payment gateway integrations with it. But I don’t need all the payment gateway integrations, right? I need specifically like one or two, like maybe I need PayPal integrations or Stripe integrations or Wise or some other integrations like Klarna.

The rest of the integrations you have are useless to me, so I don’t even bother whether they’re coming or not. I do bother about my product and I do bother about whether, as I am using your product, so even giving me the value of my requirements, like the PayPal is working fine, in the next update the PayPal is working still fine and it’s secured. When I click the update button, or if I enabled auto update, with an update the PayPal is not working. My business will go through the loss.

So it’s your responsibility to take care of my business because I’m using your product. So you have to make sure that every specific niche I am giving the solution for, are working properly after every updates and everything.

I often see companies who are trying to develop the update version, who are trying to give updates regular basis. They often consider giving it the quality assurance, the QA. The QA team mostly were doing nothing. They were just going through on the surface level. They bring the update, and then the people updated it, and the site crashed. And then they figured out, well, it might be your environment issues. It might be from your end because we are doing nothing. It’s working fine from our end. So let me see. Give me your backend credentials so that I can see what’s going on here. It’s a big no. It’s a big no for me. If you are talking about me, like it’s a big no. Why would I give my credentials to you? It’s your responsibility to take care of your product so that it’s working fine from my end.

These are the common things, and apart from that, when we are talking about feature first development, this leads to slower performance. The more the features, the slower the performance is, and it’s non-negotiable. The higher support workload and our roadmap, as I said, a roadmap that is reactive, not strategic. So strategic roadmap is important. Reactive roadmap means you are actually way far behind from your competitors. So many founders think that features is equal to value, but features are not equal to value. In reality, clarity, reliability, and use case fit, drive adoption and revenue.

[00:22:49] Nathan Wrigley: So the really interesting thing about this is that there’s really two completely different worlds in collision here. So if you are the developer, you are basically sat in a chair looking at a screen, wrangling code. And it’s this, you’ve got this small window on the universe. You’re just sort of staring into this thing. You’ve got complete control over it. And it’s clean and it’s, I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s all just right in front of you.

Whereas the other side, the marketing side is the exact opposite. It’s like, turn away from the computer and look at the entire planet. Every single human being in it, all of the messiness of that, trying to find them, trying to figure out how you’re going to talk with them, trying to figure out how you’re going to let them know that you exist. Trying to figure out how you’re going to let them know that your product is exactly what they need. Trying to figure out how to do the SEO piece, and we could go on and on.

There really are two very different universes colliding there. And I feel that in many cases, a really different personality type fits those things. Like, you know, the developer sitting in the chair concentrating on that code is a really different kind of personality type, if you know what I mean, than the person who can turn around, look at the world, cope with that messiness and figure all of that out. I’m not saying that they’re not possible by two people, I’m just saying they are very, very different things. One, much messier and harder to figure out than the other.

But from what you are saying as a developer, you have to do both. You have to turn around and look at the world in all of its messiness because your users are going to kind of, you know, they’re the people that are going to tell you whether or not what you’re building is a good thing or what they need.

[00:24:26] Muntasir Sakib: No, no, I think we got it wrong because I didn’t say that developers need to do both of the work, they need to code fresh and they need to look around all the users, what they’re saying and how their product is performing. It’s not their job.

We need to be very specific. If I’m a developer, my only responsibility should be to do fresh code and to make sure that my product is working fine on every environment. And it’s the marketer’s duty to talk to the customers, to talk to the world, and if as a founder, I don’t need to jeopardise my business, my company, then I need to align with everything, with every team possible. Like there’s sales team, there’s marketing team, there’s support team, content team, developer team.

The thing is, market research should be done by the marketers. Market research should be done, the customers should be talked with the marketers, with the salespeople. They need to come along with the ideas that, well, fine, these are the opportunities we have right now. So if we want to build a product, if we want to develop a product, we need to bring these three or four features before releasing the product in the market because these are the things people are having problem with. So I am giving you this list of features, or this list of things that you need to have in your product, and then it can go to the design team. The design team come up with a very beautiful design and then the developers start developing it.

And then we need to figure out the fact that, well, the product is almost 80% done, so we need to reach to the influencers, we need to reach to some YouTube influencers who have great audience so that they can use it. So we can give them the beta version. They can use it, they can bring some beautiful solutions, some beautiful suggestions to make the product even more mature before going to the market. And we can share the thought with the developers so that they can update accordingly.

[00:26:22] Nathan Wrigley: Right, I got it. Yeah, so I get the piece there. So really when I was talking about, you know, the developer facing one way and then facing the other way, the computer and the world, you are introducing then, in the middle, the developer turns around and instead of talking to the world, talks to the marketer.

And then the marketer absorbs those messages, whatever it is that the developer thinks, okay, it’s ready, it’s nearly ready, here’s the features. They communicate with the marketing people, the marketing people turn that into real world action. And then they themselves turn around and look at that bigger world and figure out how to do that.

I think the curious thing is, in our community, there’s so many of the solo developers who, when that thing that you’ve just suggested, gets suggested. That some of the budget goes to a marketer, it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, I can do it all. I’ll be fine, because we know it can work in some rare cases. But it’s not going to be as effective as getting somebody else on board.

But I think in our community, there is a, I don’t really know how to encapsulate this, but there’s a little bit of a divide between the marketing side of things, the sort of sponsorship side of things, the affiliate side of things, all of those bits, and the developers. And it’s not always an easy conversation to have.

I suppose, in the end it comes down to things like money and things like that, which our community is maybe not as comfortable talking about as other different communities.

So is there anything that you think is a bad idea? I remember in the show notes that you sent to me, there were a few things where you thought, for example, you mentioned things like the one-time revenue trap of lifetime deals and things like that. Do you want to mention some of the gotchas, some of the things in the past that you’ve thought, nope, don’t do that, that’s a bad idea?

[00:28:00] Muntasir Sakib: Yeah. You were talking about the solo developer. There are a lot of solo developers, I might say. I must say because they are a one person team, and every project they build, every line of code they write, it’s like their children. So it’s always normal to be biased to your product. Like, yes, my product is the best because I have developed it with all my passion, with all my hard work. Why aren’t people using it?

And you might have a tight budget because when you are solo developer, the budget’s going to be tight. So you might not have that much money to spend on marketing before going to the market. And that’s fine. Welcome the community because the WordPress community is so helpful that even if you go to the community people and you tell them like, well, I am working on a product all by myself, and I want someone to come up with me and test the product and give me some valuable insights about what I can do better, before going to the market. And they’re always helpful. There are like hundreds and thousands of people who can help you, making your product even better by testing your beta versions, by testing your RC versions.

The thing is you have to be vocal. You have to talk to the poeple. You have to ask for help because you are helpless, you are working day and night on your product, and you cannot let people know, you cannot talk to people. You are very shy to ask for help, to ask for a hand. So how do I know that you are building a very beautiful product? I am here to help you, you just need to ask me. You want to give it a try? Sure thing. I will definitely give it a try and have some suggestions for you if you may allow me. That’s it.

And about the question is one time revenue, you think? Yeah. And whether it’s a trap or not. It’s a trap. It’s a trap. Nathan, I can say to you, like many WordPress founders rely on lifetime deals, one time license and large seasonal discounts. I mean Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the year end sales. Might going to create some cash upfront, but that doesn’t bring sustainability.

Sustainability is something way more different than cashflow. Because sustainability comes with recurring revenue. Your support is recurring, but if you have only lifetime deals, then your revenue is not. So how can you go along with your support team year after year, when you are running just once from a customer?

Because once a customer has got something lifetime from your end, you have to give him support. You have to provide him top-notch support for the rest of your lives, for the rest of products life. And then every year, fixed cost goes up. Teams, servers, your support team will go along. Your team will be bigger than the last year, along with your product. So your fixed cost will always go up. And lifetime buyers often create the highest support load while paying the least.

So you have to have that in your mind that when I am working for a easy traction and I am giving them the lifetime deals, and I want to onboard thousands of customers, lifetime customers, you need to think that you need to give them support, you need to develop the product for these thousand customers who will not ever going to pay a single penny to you anymore. So this is a big burden for you.

So real WordPress companies that scale, focus on renewals, annual plans, and clear upgrade perks. So here are the things, you might have like three to four pricing plans for one site, for ten sites and for unlimited sites. And I bought the one site license. And then I fell in love with your product, and I want to upgrade to ten site plans. So there should be a very, like one click upgradation plan, upgradation system where I can just go from one site to ten sites. And if you can’t give me that opportunity, and if you going to tell me like, okay, fine, buy the ten site license, give me the one site license key, and I’m going to dispatch that. I’m going to deactivate that and activate your license manually, that doesn’t make sense because that’s a hassle to me. I’m your customer, so you need to give me the smoother way. This is the thing.

[00:32:09] Nathan Wrigley: When you’ve been working for some of the, I don’t know, agencies or companies where there’s obviously a marketing team which has been a part of the success. Do you know roughly, I mean, maybe it’s just a ballpark figure, do you know roughly how much of the wider team so, you know, think of Company X, which is a development company, but they’ve got in-house marketing as well. Do you know how much of the company, in terms of personnel or revenue, is given over to marketing as opposed to everything else? So, you know, is it typically like in the sort of 20%, 30%, 50%? What’s your rough estimate for those?

[00:32:43] Muntasir Sakib: My rough estimate is your marketing budget should always be at least 30% of your total estimation cost. Because marketers need to talk to people, they need to reach out to the people, and they need to collaborate with most of the influencers who going to work for you, and you have to give them the honorarium to do the work for you.

So if the budget is not standard enough, then they have the boundaries to not do their works. So you need to give them the free hand, explore the sides to work with the other WordPress companies, to collaborate with better partners, to collaborate with other companies and to onboard their clients as well, so that your client base will increase day by day.

[00:33:24] Nathan Wrigley: And in the old way, when I was talking about sort of 15 years ago, it felt like most things were driven by interaction with the WordPress community. Do you think that’s still like a viable way of doing things or, you know, in the case of, I don’t know, let’s say that you’ve got an LMS plugin or something like that. Your market really isn’t other WordPressers, your market is the entire world, you know, educators and what have you.

So do you put much stock in sort of turning up to events, and sponsoring WordPress stuff, or do you sort of advise, focusing on your customers? I’m just trying to figure out where the community bit might fit into all that.

[00:33:59] Muntasir Sakib: Well, the thing is, let’s talk about the sponsorship first because in WordCamps you need to be sponsored under your product. If we are talking about any LMS plugin that we have. We want to let the WordPress community know that, yeah, we exist and we sponsor to this event. And the most important thing is only in the WordCamps or the WordPress meetups you’re going to get along with other companies in person, so that you can connect with them, you can talk to them. You can figure out an opportunity to work with other companies. If I am an LMS company, I have an LMS plugin, my customer’s going to need some hosting plan. They might need some security plugins. They might need some SEO plugins.

[00:34:39] Nathan Wrigley: It’s more of a sort of partnership opportunity.

[00:34:42] Muntasir Sakib: Exactly.

[00:34:42] Nathan Wrigley: Figuring out who, in some curious case that you may not yet have imagined, how you could collaborate in the future. So like you said, you know, hosting or whatever it may be, or maybe there’s a form plugin out there, which you kind of get the intuition that, oh, we could use bits of your form to onboard people to our platform, or whatever it may be. So it’s very much not about marketing to the end user. It’s more about figuring out partnerships and things like that. But also being a good custodian of an open source project, I guess, as well.

[00:35:11] Muntasir Sakib: Of course, yeah. That’s true. Because in every other companies who are doing great in WordPress ecosystem, they have a very strong relationship with the other companies. They have the mutual connections with all the people, with all the companies their customers might going to need. And the partnerships, affiliates are the best way to do the marketing to grow, to scale your product in WordPress market. Because as I said at first, word of mouth is something that brings the most valuable customers in your back.

[00:35:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, you only have to look on Facebook and LinkedIn and things like that to realise that there’s a lot of people in the WordPress community who attend these events and hang out with other people at these events and make great friendships and partnerships and those kind of things. I presume they’re doing it because, A, it’s fun, but also there’s a real value to it, you know? I know all these people and so I know where to go when I’ve got a particular problem, or I just have an intuition that I want to spin my company off in a slightly different direction. I’ve now got some people that I know, some contacts that I’ve already made who might be able to help me with that.

Okay. What about the, sort of last one, and it’s actually alluding to your, one of the questions that you wrote here. Is there anything about the sort of psychology of this, the sort of mindset? Because I think with the best will in the world, a lot of people in our space, they kind of see marketing as a bit of a, an icky thing. Something that they really don’t feel comfortable doing.

Is there any kind of psychology here that you could recommend or some kind of mind shift that somebody like me, for example, who is terrible at marketing, that I might be able to undergo, some magic wand that you can wave to help me out?

[00:36:41] Muntasir Sakib: We all are learners. We learn every day. I’m still a learner, and most of the world famous marketers are learners, even the passionate developers. You still learn how to develop well, how to write fresh code in even a better way.

But the most important thing is there are some mindset differences. There are someone who is a builder, and there are someone who is a business owner. So the thin line between builders and business owners are builders think about features. They think about features, what to come along with next, what to give to our customers, whether they like it or not. But founders think, I build outcomes and value. I bring value to the customers.

Another mindset, if we talk about like the short term revenue and the long-term sustainability. So when we are selling lifetime deals, one time license, that’s the short term revenue that give me an early traction, a good traction within a few months. But it’ll never going to be sustainable. If you want to be sustainable, you need to have a recurring plan, you need to have recurring customers, you need to onboard more customers, but your recurring customers should be like around 70 to 80% or even more than that, so that you can sustain all along.

Then if I’m talking about another mindset that it can be the focus on the product versus focus on the user. Failing founders, like those who cannot scale, they think that what feature should we add next? But the scaling founders, if you talk to them, they’re going to think where my users are getting stuck, so I need to solve the problem first. I need to bring value to their life so that they come along with me. They’re going to be my best audience and they’re going to do the marketing for me.

[00:38:24] Nathan Wrigley: This stuff is so intuitive to you because obviously it’s something that you’ve spent a long time thinking about. I’ve got to say, for me, a lot of this stuff is kind of intuitive, but not at the same time. I’m definitely more on the kind of builder side than on the marketing side. I don’t know what it is about marketing, I just struggle to do those kind of things.

And you’ve written a lot of your thoughts up in three articles, which you’ve published on LinkedIn. I don’t know if they’ve been published elsewhere, but they’re definitely on LinkedIn. And they describe all of the different scenarios of, you know, what founders need to do, how plugins can have success, where the community lies, how you can get yourself involved in different things. But also quite a lot of work you’ve put into what not to do. So example, lifetime deals, which you don’t think are a particularly great idea.

I’m going to link to all of those different bits and pieces in the show notes so that people can go and read those, and then hopefully having been armed with all of that knowledge, they’ll understand better what it is that we’ve been talking about.

Where do we find you, Muntasir? Where do we go online? Apart from LinkedIn, obviously, where could we find you?

[00:39:28] Muntasir Sakib: I’m always available on Facebook, on Twitter. And I am always available on LinkedIn as well. These are the platforms you are going to find me.

[00:39:36] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I will link to the LinkedIn posts and I will endeavor to dig out your Twitter handle as well. So hopefully people can find you and if they’ve got questions, you are open to suggestions.

So thank you so much for chatting to me today. A subject of great interest to me because, well, as I said, there’s just great interest for me. I won’t say more than that. But thank you very much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:39:56] Muntasir Sakib: Thank you, Nathan. Thank you for talking to me. And it’s great talking to you and sharing my knowledge and expertise with you.

So on the podcast today we have Muntasir Sakib.

Muntasir has been active in the WordPress space since 2018, working with well-known plugins and companies such as Tutor LMS, Droip and more. He’s played a key role scaling products from their early days, helping them achieve wider adoption. He’s also been active in the WordPress community more broadly at events such as WordCamp Asia and WordCamp Sylhet.

The focus of today’s episode is a crucial yet often overlooked topic, especially if you’re a plugin developer. It’s a chat about the moment when plugin development ends and real success can begin. In a WordPress marketplace that’s more crowded and competitive than ever, simply ‘build it and they will come’ does not mean users will. Muntasir wants to bust the myth by digging into why marketing is essential from day one, and not an afterthought left until launch day.

We start by learning about Muntasir’s journey through the WordPress ecosystem, and his approach to balancing development and marketing for plugins. He explains the key differences between marketing in the WordPress ecosystem versus the SaaS world. In WordPress, you don’t control the full stack and your users expect openness and interoperability, making community focus and support critical.

The discussion then turns to the practicalities of launching and growing a plugin. Why throwing new features at a product isn’t enough, and why listening to users and building community relationships is often more valuable than racing to add features no one has asked for.

We talk about the do’s and don’ts gained from Muntasir’s experience, including the pitfalls of relying on lifetime deals for early revenue, and why a recurring revenue model is key for long-term sustainability.

We also talk through the role of community, partnerships, and events like WordCamps, not just as marketing opportunities, but as places to build the relationships and collaborations that can help plugins thrive.

If you’re a WordPress plugin developer wondering how to turn a finished product into a real success, or you’re trying to figure out where marketing fits into your roadmap, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Project / Events which Muntasir has been involved with:

Tutor LMS

Droip

EasyCommerce

ThumbPress

JoomShaper

WordCamp Asia 2023

WordCamp Sylhet 2023

Three of Muntasir’s articles on LinkedIn:

Why Marketing Is Still the Missing Piece for Most WordPress Product Companies

The Hidden Cost of Lifetime Deals: What Plugin Owners Don’t Realize Until It’s Too Late

After 5 Years and 10+ Plugins: Here’s Why Most WordPress Products Fail to Scale