#132 – Katie Keith & Matt Cromwell on Making a Success of Your WordPress Product

Transcript

[00:00:00] 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, making a success of your WordPress product in an increasingly competitive landscape.

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 Katie Keith and Matt Cromwell.

Katie is the founder and CEO at Barn2 plugins, and Matt is co-founder of GiveWP and Senior Director of Customer Experience at StellarWP. They have been running the WP Product Talk podcast together since early 2023, where they interview WordPress product owners to get the inside scoop on running a successful business in the WordPress ecosystem. And they’ve collated much of what they’ve learned on the show to create the ultimate blueprint on how to build a successful WordPress product, which they reveal during their WordCamp Europe presentation.

We talk about the world of WordPress product development and marketing. This touches upon topics such as enhancing the WordPress admin interface with additional features that feel like a natural extension, and finding success through organic content and a consistent user focused YouTube strategy.

We also explore important marketing strategies within the WordPress community, emphasizing the value of identifying gaps in the market and leveraging event attendance for growth.

Katie gives her thoughts on the power of explainer videos focused on solving user problems, and how Google and YouTube work hand in hand to surface relevant content.

Matt discusses the challenges of pricing products correctly, setting expectations, and offering strategic discounts without de-valuing their worth, focusing on the importance of listening to customer feedback to prioritize future product development.

They both provide practical advice on creating a user-friendly product that feels like a part of WordPress.

Towards the end of our talk, Katie and Matt get into the value of transparency and the human touch in business. The significance of an up-to-date about us page and their approach to face-to-face customer interactions.

If you’re a WordPress product developer, or just interested in the intricate world of WordPress business, 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 Katie Keith and Matt Cromwell.

I am joined on the podcast by Katie Keith and Matt Cromwell. How are you both doing?

[00:03:43] Matt Cromwell: Doing really well.

[00:03:44] Katie Keith: Good thanks.

[00:03:45] Nathan Wrigley: We’re in Turin, we’re at WordCamp Europe 2024. We’re up in the media room, and we’re going to talk today about the presentation that these fine people did yesterday. But before we get into that, do you just want to introduce yourself? Let’s take Katie first.

[00:03:57] Katie Keith: I’m Katie Keith, co-founder and CEO at Barn2 Plugins.

[00:04:02] Matt Cromwell: And I’m Matt Cromwell, co-founder of GiveWP and Senior Director of Customer Experience at StellarWP.

[00:04:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so tell us about your presentation. Normally when I do these conversations, I have a script. I write down the questions because I know what the person has been talking about, but yours, I didn’t know, so it’s going to be very much a conversation. First of all, just tell us what the title was and what it was about.

[00:04:24] Matt Cromwell: We interviewed 50 plus WordPress product owners, and this is what we learned. And the whole idea was that, we’ve been talking to a lot of product owners, and there’s actually a lot of things they say that are very similar in terms of best practices and how to do things. And we talked about this in the presentation, that we wanted to democratise business insights for everyone. Rather than just only talking about it in hallway tracks, we wanted to be able to have a lot more people hear it and join the conversation, and that’s what the whole purpose of WP Product Talk is.

[00:04:57] Nathan Wrigley: So what is WP Product Talk?

[00:04:59] Matt Cromwell: WP Product Talk is a weekly podcast, occasionally weekly podcast. We’re on a break right now. Where we bring on a guest to speak about their expertise, or something they’re really passionate about, in terms of building a product business.

And we have co-hosts. We always tell them it’s a conversation, not an interview. So we have our own insights and experiences that we bring to the fore as well. We have four co-hosts, myself, Katie and Amber Hinds from Equalize Digital, and Zach Katz from Gravity Kit.

[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: But they’re all product owners. Everybody that comes on your show is a product owner, and you just get into a conversation, see where that leads you. And you’ve gained some insights over the last, what, 50 did you say, episodes?

[00:05:40] Matt Cromwell: Now it’s like 65 episodes, but they’re almost always product owners. Occasionally they are an expert in a specific field, where we ask them to come and talk about their expertise because it’s hyper relevant to product owners. So everything we talk about is directed at product owners.

[00:05:56] Nathan Wrigley: So you’ve assembled some of the top tips, some of the advice that you got from these product owners. And you went and stood on stage, and apparently there were some technical gremlins, which can’t be particularly nice, but that’s what you did. You stood on stage and distilled your learnings over the last 65 episodes, so we’re going to get into that. What did you talk about on stage?

[00:06:14] Katie Keith: So we went through all of the previous episodes and picked out the best advice from all of them, which we divided into four categories.

The four categories were product development, marketing, customer experience, and business. And in each of those, we chose about three previous guests who have been on the podcast to talk about those topics.

We thought we’d take a new format, which was Matt’s idea for the talk, which we haven’t seen at previous WordCamps, which is where, instead of just hearing from Matt and myself as the speakers, we included audio from the previous podcast episodes. So each section had an audio from somebody like people from Ellipsis who specialise in marketing, or people from particular product companies, and so on. So you got to hear from all of these experts, as well as Matt and myself.

[00:07:07] Nathan Wrigley: How did it go down? Was it well received, well attended?

[00:07:10] Matt Cromwell: We were really happy. It was actually a totally packed house.

[00:07:13] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[00:07:14] Matt Cromwell: We were on track three, which we wish we would’ve been informed that it wasn’t going to be live streamed. We would’ve live streamed it from WP Product Talk if we knew that. The people seemed to be really receptive. We got a lot of positive feedback. There were definitely some technical hiccups, but we were able to grace our way through it more or less. I just make fun of myself the whole time, and people feel better.

[00:07:34] Nathan Wrigley: The technical hiccups weren’t that the audio didn’t play, was it?

[00:07:37] Matt Cromwell: The audio was just challenging. There was this whole issue of, it didn’t auto play the audio like it was supposed to. They had to click on it manually. It was a mess. We had to telepathically communicate with IT about what was going on, and it took about five slides ish until we had a good rhythm.

[00:07:55] Nathan Wrigley: So, okay, you’ve distilled it all down, you’ve talked to different people, you’ve put them on slides, and you’ve shown these people’s wisdom to the audience. Let’s hear it. What kernels of wisdom did you draw, and what were the bits that made it into the presentation?

[00:08:07] Katie Keith: Well, the first section was about product development, and we focused a lot on how to design an intuitive product, ideally inspired by WordPress itself. Because if you use a lot of themes or plugins, you’ll see some integrate beautifully with WordPress, and others really look stuck on, and have reinvented the wheel, so it feels like it’s not WordPress at all.

So we’ve advised people to make it feel like it’s part of WordPress, and particularly like the block editor, so that when somebody lands on your product for the first time, it already feels familiar to them. And ideally they can get up and running without even having to read the documentation or anything.

We included a screenshot from GiveWP in that section, where their create a donation form looks like the block editor, so that people can just get started with it, without even having to learn or read the documentation.

[00:09:00] Nathan Wrigley: So the idea being that if you are, I guess, if you’re new to WordPress, you can just drop right into whatever that experience is, where you just, I don’t know, installed a plugin, or something like that. And you’re not trying to learn, okay, here’s a new color palette. I don’t know what that button does. I don’t know where this goes. Why is it in a different font? Just keep it WordPress, keep it simple, that kind of thing.

[00:09:18] Katie Keith: Exactly, yeah. That way people will be much more successful.

We also gave other pieces of advice, such as maybe adding some kind of a onboarding or setup wizard to take people through the key features of the product when they first install it, to make it even easier for them.

[00:09:34] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting because some of the biggest plugins out there don’t follow that advice, do they? I mean, I’m sure that you can name a dozen or more plugins where you install it and you are hijacked. So I guess for some people it works. For other people, it doesn’t. But the advice, if you’re starting out, at least the advice that you’ve just given is, go with WordPress, keep it simple, don’t overcomplicate. You don’t need to waste your time and effort making a unique UI that doesn’t need to be there.

[00:09:59] Matt Cromwell: I think one way we said it was to enhance, not replace the admin. There’s definitely ways in which you can do additional things in your settings page, or in any configuration, or in Gutenberg itself that isn’t exactly what WordPress is all the time, but it should look like a natural extension of it. So enhance, don’t replace.

And we gave a couple pretty good examples. Kadence does a good job as well. When you’re in the customizer, they actually have this custom footer area that helps you to customise your footer, ideally. And it looks and feels a lot like an extension of the customizer, even though it’s not native to the customizer at at all.

[00:10:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so mimicking the WordPress UI as well. Okay, that’s interesting. Okay, so that’s a good piece of advice. Where do we go next?

[00:10:41] Matt Cromwell: The next category after that was marketing. And in marketing in particular, we covered several different kind of subtopics. We talked about community a bit, we talked about how you optimise which channel you might use. Alex Denning was in there, Kathy Zant was in there as well.

I think some of the biggest things that we talked about were just being able to identify where you’re winning in marketing, and to double down on that, and to also take your community around your product really seriously.

[00:11:10] Nathan Wrigley: Do either of you have products outside of WordPress? No, shaking head, no. Okay, so given that you’ve both got products inside a WordPress, how hard is it to market to the WordPress crowd? I get this intuition that the people that use WordPress, and especially people that attend events like this, have a different approach. Their relationship to being marketed toward is very different. I feel that we don’t like being marketed at as a community. Do you think my intuitions are wrong there?

[00:11:38] Matt Cromwell: Yes and no. Me personally, I have observed that, when I go to WordCamps, people have that sentiment. They’re often highly opinionated about what plugins should or shouldn’t do in the admin. And most often that’s because they are building websites for their clients, and they don’t want to hand over a website to the client that looks like a bunch of spam in the admin area. So I understand where they’re coming from, but I don’t believe that the WordPress community represents the 90% of customers out there that are purchasing our products.

[00:12:09] Nathan Wrigley: I also feel that, if we were to rewind the clock, oh, I don’t know, let’s say 10 years or something like that, I feel launching a product in the WordPress space would’ve been a lot more straightforward. You know, what have we got now? 60,000 plus plugins in the repository. Countless, I have no idea how many commercial plugins there are out there. There’s probably 10 or 15 different form solutions. If you want to create custom post types, there’s bunches of those.

Do you think it is harder now to market into the community? You’ve both got products with a history, you’ve kind of crossed that bridge already. So you’ve struggled through that and come through the other side. But if you’re just beginning your journey with a product in the WordPress space, I’m imagining it’s harder now than it ever has been.

[00:12:48] Katie Keith: Yeah, when I first started selling products, we found ideas which didn’t already exist. I could just write one blog post about this topic and it would go straight to the top of Google, because nobody else had ever written about that, there were no products doing that. And as the ecosystem has grown, that has obviously become more difficult.

But I believe there are still gaps in the market where you can do that. You just have to be really, really in there with WordPress, WooCommerce, whatever you’re specialising in, in order to find those gaps. So I’m still aware of gaps in WooCommerce in particular, where you could launch a product and nobody else has ever written about it.

An example of a new product I released only a couple of years ago was WooCommerce discontinued products. Nobody had ever written about that because there was no products that allowed you to discontinue your products.

So things like that, they’re often quite small ideas, but if you’re just starting out then, if you’re not like a funded startup, and you’re bootstrapping, then maybe you want a fairly small plugin, which you can hopefully start getting sales, get some experience.

So I’d say keep your eyes open, and try to find something that is unique and it is still possible, although I accept it’s not as easy as it used to be.

[00:14:03] Nathan Wrigley: What do you use as your primary marketing channels, plural? What is there out there? You know, you could use Google ads, you could use Facebook ads, you could use an email list, you could go on podcasts, or start your own podcast. What are you doing that you found has worked?

[00:14:17] Katie Keith: The best marketing channel for me has always been organic content on our own website. So that’s generally quite specific things that people are searching for, about how to achieve certain goals using our plugins.

And our second main marketing channel is YouTube, which we also covered in the marketing section of our presentation yesterday. Because YouTube’s actually the second largest search engine in the world. We did a quote from Jamie Marsland, who’s a big YouTube influencer, as well as a WordPress product owner at the moment. In which he said, you need to have a consistent YouTube strategy and stick to it. And I think that’s really important, because you can’t just stick the odd video on YouTube and expect to get sales from it. Because YouTube is all about building a following. And also learning how to do it in a way that appeals to people psychologically, with things like effective thumbnails, and titles that make people click. So if you’re going to do YouTube, do it properly as Jamie suggested, but the rewards can be there.

[00:15:19] Nathan Wrigley: What do you do? Like explainer videos about the product, or just more general WordPressy content.

[00:15:24] Katie Keith: Most of our YouTube content is explainer tutorials about our products, although we are always experimenting with how to build our following more widely. So we do have some videos, for example, we don’t have any translation plugins at Barn2, but we did a best translations plugin YouTube video recently, which is currently one of our top 10 videos in terms of views.

[00:15:47] Nathan Wrigley: Do the explainer videos actually cause conversions? Because you’d imagine that if you were looking at an explainer video, you’ve already bought the product, and you’re just trying to figure out how something works. But I guess maybe not, maybe you are just exploring, and just seeing what the product can do with the intention of buying it. So if you did go down that road, and just do explainer content, that could still be effective as a marketing tool, which is kind of interesting.

[00:16:07] Katie Keith: The best way to do explainer content on YouTube is to put the user’s problem first, not the product. So, say we have a WooCommerce product table plugin, but the tutorial shouldn’t be called How to Use the WooCommerce Product Table Plugin. It should be about how to create a searchable one page order form in WooCommerce or something. So if somebody’s looking, they’re searching for something about creating a product order form, then they will find this and our product is the solution.

[00:16:39] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, my use of YouTube always seems to give me the same content. If I watch, I don’t know, I watch a lot of music videos, so I get lots of music videos. So I would have to use the Google search engine in order to find a YouTube video. But I guess, if you are, I don’t know, constantly searching for WordPress content, it may surface your YouTube marketing videos as well.

[00:17:01] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, for sure. I mean, Google definitely operates that way. It’s definitely watching you wherever it possibly can, and it will elevate the relevant content. The reason YouTube is the second biggest search engine is specifically because of the way in which it compliments and mimics the Google search engine itself. Even if you’re searching on Facebook sometimes for something, you’ll end up finding interesting new recommendations in your YouTube feed because of your traffic in Facebook.

[00:17:29] Nathan Wrigley: What do you think about the state of building a product in the WordPress space now? As I said a minute ago, if you rewind the clock 10 years, I feel it was much more of a build it and they will come kind of thing, because you were quite likely the first person to come up with it.

I know now that that’s no longer the case. Marketing, it can’t be a sort of afterthought. If you’re going to be building a product, if you’re a developer, you have to have that as a plan from the outset. So it’s not build it, then think about marketing. It’s more, build it at the same time as trying to figure out the marketing, because it probably won’t succeed.

I mean, you might get lucky, right? I mean, there’s always that, but typically I would imagine now, because we’ve got this fairly saturated marketplace, you’ve got to put marketing front and center.

[00:18:10] Matt Cromwell: I have mixed responses to that sentiment from my personal experiences. One is that, being the old man in the room, I’m like, it wasn’t easy back in my day kids. Yes, I get it, I get the whole idea that it was easier back then. And sure, for sure, but we would not have had success without really strong marketing. We would not have had success without constantly iterating on the product all the time. And none of those things have changed. All of that is still ground zero for how to be a product owner.

But the saturated market is a big aspect for sure. But we are seeing, of course, new opportunities like, at the moment, no one has really nailed exactly how we want to leverage AI and WordPress particularly well. And so there’s lots of opportunity there. It’s a little bit of a gold rush. You’re seeing a whole bunch of products being shipped to .org that all are AI related. Are any of them any good? They’re fine, I guess. Are any of them knocking it out of the park? Not necessarily, so far. Somebody is yet to really solve that new problem, or offer that new feature in a way that is really compelling.

But I can tell you that, from my observations of .org all the time, people are shipping AI products all the time right now. And so the one who really nails it correctly, and markets it correctly is the one that’s going to start rising up to the top. So just as much as there’s a saturation of market, there’s also these new opening types of features that are coming along the way as well.

I mean, truthfully, even when we shipped GiveWP, everyone said, I would never do a CRM in WordPress, it’s just not made for a CRM. Which I thought at the time was craziness, but it was a very developery conversation. There’s several very popular CRMs in WordPress now that are doing really well. Groundhogg is great. Fluent CRM is doing well. These are new emerging markets. So as much as I understand the sentiment, you have to have a little bit closer look at the market to recognise that there’s emerging markets, and there’s also new ways to do things, and there’s always a combination of having really excellent marketing along the side as well.

[00:20:17] Nathan Wrigley: You can answer this question in a whole multitude of ways, but I’ll just put it out there and you can tell me what you think. Do you see events like this, the attendance of events like this, is that a useful marketing thing? I mean, obviously you can pay, have a sponsor booth, you’ve kind of nailed your flag to the mast a bit there. You know, you’re obviously here to sponsor. You said you, Katie I’m looking at at the moment, Katie said she’s not got a sponsor booth this time. But, is it a useful thing to attend WordPress meetups, WordCamps? Is that a useful part of the marketing jigsaw puzzle?

[00:20:46] Matt Cromwell: I’ll answer first and just say that, GiveWP was built on the backs of meetups and WordCamps. It was fundamental to our growth. How do we measure that ROI? I don’t know. There’s lots of different ways over the years that I tried to, you know, I don’t like the salesy approach to it, but I can say that, because we were present at WordCamps, and people met us, there were times when six or seven months later after a WordCamp, I would have somebody personally email me and say, hey, I just bought GiveWP yesterday, and I met you at a WordCamp. That’s anecdotal for the most part, it’s not like huge data, but I really do assume that it was part of our continual growth, is how we invested in WordCamps.

Things have changed a bit. I mean, COVID changed everything for sure, and events are a bit different nowadays. And, is our target audience attending Workcamp EU? Less so. There are definitely agencies here, and agencies have a huge influence over what products their clients choose for their websites. So that’s always useful for sure.

But generally speaking, the ROI that Stellar thinks of when we come to events like this, is how we are going to meet new partners, how we’re going to talk to up and coming developers who we might want to hire, how we can learn more from other companies who are doing similar things to us. It’s more of an industry event for us more. But the more local, boots on the ground, WordCamps are, I feel have really good ROI for products in particular, because they are a lot more affordable, and they’re a lot more localised.

[00:22:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I hear the same story all the time, that measuring of the ROI from an event like this is nigh on impossible, but there’s something there. I mean, if there wasn’t, you wouldn’t have as many people attending on behalf of their companies, I wouldn’t have thought.

[00:22:28] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. I had a really great conversation with Omnisend. I won’t say anything that I believe they wouldn’t want me to say, but they have been investing in Shopify a lot, and they’re now also investing in WordPress right now. And they just told me a little bit about the differences between how they approach those two communities.

They said that Shopify is very much sale oriented, and ROI driven, and revenue driven, and numbers driven, and the WordPress community is more of a community, and you have to come in open-minded, and open-handed, and make relationships. They saw that as a real clear, stark difference between the two. But it was clear also that, from what they were telling me, they see it as a valuable investment.

[00:23:07] Nathan Wrigley: What was the next thing on the list that you said in your presentation?

[00:23:11] Katie Keith: The third of the four categories we covered was customer experience, and particularly listening to your customers in a way that would directly allow you to make improvements to your product.

And we started that section by talking about the experience of customers before they even buy your product. We focused on InstaWP because, since that was launched, a lot of WordPress product owners have been creating admin demos, where people can test drive the plugin in a pre-setup test site, which expires after a few hours or days, so they can see if they like it before they buy.

So we included a quote from Vikas, the founder of InstaWP, with some tips about how to make the most of that. And we followed that up with our own tips, which included things like planning the demo from the user’s perspective, thinking what page should the InstaWP demo open on, because it could be a page in the front end, or the back end.

And when I’ve been doing those projects myself at Barn2 with our own plugins, it’s actually quite interesting thinking, what is the most intuitive page to land somebody on, if they’re put on this site for the first time, where you’ve already set up your product? And generally that’s a backend page, but it does require a bit of thought.

And we also showed a screenshot of some admin tours in our plugin demos, and The Events Calendar have a nice banner, which explains what to do and sources of support, and so on. So it’s all about thinking about the user’s experience, when they use your product in this demo environment.

The final thing we did on that was to give some tips about actually how to close the sale, because if somebody likes the product that they’re test driving, obviously you want to make it really easy for them to purchase it. So we showed a screenshot of one of our Barn2 demos, which has a banner across the top, which has a link to the support page on our website in case someone’s a bit stuck, and also a link to buy the plugin if they like it.

And in addition to that, we add everybody to Mailchimp so that they get a particular sequence of emails for that demo, which initially tells them how to use it and get set up. When the demo expires, it emails them again saying, now buy the plugin, with the obvious links.

And then if they don’t buy it, we continue to send emails, giving them reasons to buy it. For example, that might include screenshots and case studies of other websites already using the plugin. So you get a kind of FOMO, fear of missing out effect that other people are successfully using this product, so you should be too.

[00:25:42] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Anything to add?

[00:25:44] Matt Cromwell: The customer experience one is one of my favorite ones. We talked a lot also about face-to-face interactions, establishing relationship with our users as much as possible. And the extreme ROI that that brings in terms of valuable product insight, and even competitor insight, why people leave, why people stay, why people refund. All of those things show up when you have a stronger relationship with your customers, and investing in that time in a serious way.

For that one we quoted Amanda Gorman from StellarWP, and she really said, no matter what the size of business, investing in relationships in your customers is always a good idea.

We also quoted Miriam Schwab about how she receives a lot of insight and feedback from her customers through support in particular. I really love the way she said, I like to get away from the feeling, like the feeling that I get 10 tickets a day about this subject, or the feeling that everybody’s asking about this new feature, and instead really having to go through data, and tagging things correctly.

I really like the way in which she said that tags shouldn’t just be about like feature request, feature request, whatever, here’s a bug or whatnot. She said, you can also say, this is a usability issue. And she highlighted how somebody says, I just can’t figure out where to back up my site, for example. It’s not that the feature doesn’t exist, it’s not that it’s broken, it’s just that they can’t figure out where that’s at. And that’s a usability issue. I thought that was a really unique approach to tagging feedback, in a way that would be really actionable for the product team.

[00:27:11] Nathan Wrigley: How do you both, in your own businesses, how do you decide what to build next? I mean, presumably there must be some intuition on your own part. You must be thinking, okay, this would be a nice feature to add in. But then also, there must be channels, whether it’s people writing you an email, or support requests, you know, we’ve got 50 support requests about this exact thing, we must build that. Where do you get your intuitions about what comes next, and is it often driven by, I mean, do you listen to your customers in that sense?

[00:27:36] Matt Cromwell: I personally am extremely biased. I really believe that products are always best when they are customer centric. If you’re not listening to your customers, you’re missing out on future sales, like bar none, absolutely.

And what was fascinating, as I was putting together all the audio clips for the whole presentation, there were a lot of presentations, regardless of the topic, where they specifically mentioned, you can’t really do development without listening to your customer, or you can’t do marketing without listening to your customer, or you can’t do good business without listening to your customer.

It came up over and over again in a lot of different contexts. We have a system internally at Stellar, we use a couple different feedback boards, one is Canny, another one is featureOS, and we are logging customer feedback every single day, all the time. It’s a responsibility of the support team, or responsibility of the customer success team.

And then the customers have the ability to vote up certain features and whatnot. And we track what has the most votes, and that is not necessarily to say that the thing that has the most votes is the most urgent feature, but it is something that has a high priority because of the volume of customer feedback.

[00:28:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Katie, anything to add?

[00:28:44] Katie Keith: At Barn2 we use a formula to help us decide what new features to develop, and that’s based on the amount of demand, like Matt mentioned. And in addition, it has a factor based on the impact that we think it would have on sales, and also the difficulty to implement it. And we have a formula which brings together the score in those three categories to create an overall score.

And so then we kind of sort in descending order, when we are looking at new features to add, and use that to guide us. Of course, some feature requests aren’t relevant to the scope of the product, so you have to know what the purpose of your product is, and be firm on that sometimes and think. Maybe sometimes customers are asking for a particular feature that doesn’t fit within the scope, but they can achieve it by using a plugin from another company with your plugin, for example. So in that case, we might do some collaboration with that company to cross promote our products or something like that, instead of adding it as a feature.

[00:29:44] Nathan Wrigley: Most WordPress companies, I think, are following a subscription model now where, you know, you pay one year, and then you pay the next year, and there may be a discount or something like that. But I’m guessing it’s harder to get the customer on board than it is to retain them.

So a lot of the effort will go into getting them that first time, and then hopefully, you know, with the discount, or just loyalty, or good support, or whatever it may be, you can keep them, I don’t know, 3, 4, 5, 6 years, whatever that may be.

[00:30:11] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, that was actually our last topic, which we kind of put under the category of business, experimentation with pricing models in particular. Mark Westguard talked about it specifically, that picking the right pricing model for your product is a really important idea. In WordPress, people do tend to go with annual renewals, but there have been others who have tried different things in different ways. There are even monthly payments that some folks have done. There are lifetime subscriptions as well.

And I will say, I’ve gone on a bit of a journey on that conversation, in the sense that I was always extremely anti that lifetime is never useful or beneficial. But there have been some folks who have said that, under certain circumstances, it makes a lot of sense.

For example, we all know that a customer has a certain lifetime, and a lifetime value. If you can get that entire lifetime value upfront, it actually is an interesting model overall. But I still would say, if that’s the case, I would love to give them a five year license upfront instead of a lifetime one, because I’m always thinking of the cost of support over a course of a lifetime, which is a long time.

[00:31:14] Nathan Wrigley: Never is a lifetime, you know, five years or something like that seems to be about the right idea. But then you’ve got things like Black Friday to throw into the mix with the pricing. And it always seems to me that, I don’t know if it’s the same for you, but do you tend to empty your wallet at Black Friday, and buy all the things at Black Friday? And then I think there’s quite a bit of waiting until next year comes around, and buy the exact same product again on the Black Friday deal time. Do you have any of that?

[00:31:38] Matt Cromwell: People definitely know when to look out for deals, and sales and whatnot. If anybody’s paying attention to Stellar, you know that July is a really important month at StellarWP. But other than that, business in general doesn’t work that way. You don’t only launch things in November, or you don’t only launch things in July. So the large majority of sales that come into any common business happens outside of those gigantic big sales.

And honestly, sometimes extreme discounting can also bring in a bunch of extreme customer problems, new customer problems. Folks who really only want to buy when you’re selling it at the bottom barrel price. They also tend to sometimes be the type of customer you don’t actually want to deal with a lot.

So there is a balance you have to look for to be able to price your products correctly, and to discount them correctly, and set expectations correctly so that you’re still showing the value of what people are getting, and not devaluing your product.

In the episode with Mark, everyone should listen to that episode, it was a really good episode actually, he talks a bit about that as well, so did James from Ellipsis. He talked quite a bit about pricing as well, which was a really good one that we didn’t get to get to in the presentation because of technical difficulties.

[00:32:49] Nathan Wrigley: Do you discount upon renewal? There’s quite a few plugins that I, every year I buy it again, and again. And there is something about that, I don’t know, 30, 40%, which kind of draws me in. I have everything set in a calendar so I know when things are going to renew, and I always go in and see what the offer is going to be, and that sometimes swings me from, I’m going to discontinue using that right into, okay, I’ll pay it. Do you do any of that, either of you?

[00:33:13] Matt Cromwell: We don’t discount at renewal, but we will do strategic renewal discounts. So, we’ll send out early renewal emails if we can get folks to renew their subscription earlier at a discounted rate, that actually can be pretty beneficial to their lifetime value, or to their ability to continue to renew over time.

We also will try to time early renewal discounts around when we know we’re having a sale, because we do have that issue where, you’re putting your product on extreme sale, and customers who are like, I’ve been spending money with you for three years and you’re not giving me a discount, well, we’ll give them a discount as a early renewal one, in order to prevent that type of feedback.

And that also helps prevent those who are try to be really savvy and get around the system by canceling their subscription early, or asking for a refund early and then buying again at the new, because that’s not a great customer experience for them because they’re getting a new license key, they got to go swipe out their license keys everywhere. We don’t want people to have to do that. So trying to get them a new, nice, easy path is the way we try to go. We do that by email segmentation for the most part, but if folks reach out early as well over email, we’ll reach out to them and help them out.

[00:34:25] Nathan Wrigley: There are some companies, not just in the WordPress space, but out there, who constantly seem to be having a sale, and the whole product always seems to be at 30% off. And I always have the intuition, what’s the real price? What is the actual real price? And that’s kind of an interesting thing as well.

The other thing that I just want to ask, do you feel that WordPress is a more expensive place to be than it used to be, say 10 years ago? It feels like we have an ecosystem where, I don’t know, maybe things floated around the $47 for one year mark, where now it might be more like $197 or $397. I think it’s a more expensive place to be. I think everybody who’s got a business in the WordPress space would feel that’s justified. But, have you got any thoughts on that? Has it become more expensive?

[00:35:05] Katie Keith: Yeah, I agree that, generally, it has become more expensive because 10 years ago there was, the predominant business model was set by companies like Envato with Theme Forest, and Code Canyon, and so on. In which they had a very low price for lifetime update. And for a while it was even lifetime support, although they changed that a few years ago.

And that created a expectation more widely throughout the industry, that plugins would just have a low lifetime value. And that has given lifetime pricing a bad name. Like Matt mentioned a minute ago, there can be a good business reason to do lifetime, but people are often really absolutely against that because they remember those days. And I think a lot of people that will have bought products on one of the Envato marketplaces like Theme Forest, will have seen a theme be discontinued, and they’re stuck with it. And it breaks the whole website after a WordPress update or something, and they have to either change themes, or hire a developer to fix it.

It’s a really big problem because those were not sustainable business models, and these theme authors, and plugin authors couldn’t afford to be providing lifetime support for that tiny one off cost. So that’s why they discontinued those products. And so that’s very different to the companies that offer Lifetime now for maybe four times the annual cost. So yeah, it’s got more expensive, but you can trust the companies you’re buying from more.

[00:36:29] Matt Cromwell: I’d also say that, running a business that develops products for WordPress has gotten more expensive over the years as well, because WordPress itself has actually evolved in ways that, developmentally, it’s more challenging to develop with WordPress than it was before. Requires a lot more different types of code knowledge than it ever did before. And the industry in general, around really good, experienced PHP developers, MySQL developers, Javascript developers, React developers, of which you need your WordPress developer to be all of those things, has just really become more and more expensive.

Besides the fact that, as a whole, which I’m really happy about this, even though it sounds like a big problem. In support, when people reach out for a support, a technical support issue, they really are hoping and expecting that you can help them regardless of whether your plugin had to do anything with the problem or not. And I think that’s actually a good thing, but that means that all your support technicians have to be highly technical, highly capable. You really can’t get away with like a tier one, entry level triage type of support as well anymore. It really demands a bit more expertise than previously. And those things cost money, and it’s not sustainable to continue to basically run product on the cheap, and then expect really high end results either.

[00:37:50] Nathan Wrigley: Whenever I come across a brand new product in the WordPress space that I’ve never heard of before, which is usually several times a week actually, it really is huge the amount of new things out there. I have this journey and my mouse goes, you know, I’ve landed on the homepage, I then end up on the pricing page almost immediately, I’ve just quick scroll through the homepage. And then the one that I’m really interested in is the About Us page. That’s where I spend most of my time. Because, given the capacity to, I don’t know, poorly code something, you’re going to spend some money, it’s going to go into your website, then there may be a refund or what have you, but there’s a lot of trust going on there.

That’s where I want to know who you are. I want to know what your heritage is, what other things that you’ve got. So if I had had a product, and you had asked me on your podcast, that would’ve been my one, is get your About Us page straightened out, and make sure that the human side of you comes out. You’re not just this great big entity. I think the WordPress space is drawn towards individuals, it’s kind of probably why we turn up to events like this. So anyway, that’s my little piece of wisdom at the end.

[00:38:52] Matt Cromwell: It’s a really good point. I have a small little blog series I do personally called Shiny New Plugins, where I audit the newest free plugins on .org, and I just highlight ones that look really interesting to me. And I will say that I try to figure out who’s behind the plugin.

And recently there was one that was launched named PersonalizeWP, and I was like, this looks really interesting. And I checked it out, and it was backed by an agency, and Paul Halfpenny is one of the authors there, and I met him and I was like, this looks really legit. So just the fact that his agency was behind it, and that they’re really putting time and energy into it, it spoke a lot for the brand.

I also saw one called UiChemy, which is kind of a weird name, but they’re sponsors are here at WordCamp EU right now. They did a whole Figma to WordPress export plugin, which is really interesting. But the personal touch, the fact that there’s actual people, and an actual company behind a product makes a big difference.

[00:39:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So the short circuit for that is that you’ve already been in business for 10 years. That is an immediate win for me because I can see that, oh, you’ve stuck around, you’ve got 10 years under your belt. But obviously most companies that are starting haven’t been around for 10 years, but there are still ways of doing it. Make yourself human, turn up to events, portray yourself in a positive way. And there’s definitely times when I’ve been to plugin sites, and the About Us page has been the thing which has made me close the browser and move on.

[00:40:11] Katie Keith: Yeah, the about page is more important than it used to be as well for other reasons, because Google’s doing a lot of updates at the moment, which add the credibility of the site as a big factor for rankings. And that involves, Google needs to know who’s behind the site as well, and that it’s credible, and that you are linking to other places linked from.

Maybe if you’ve got your team on there, then it would be good to have links to your socials, so that they can see that you are real people with a significant following. So whatever you’ve got that could add credibility, it’s worth having that on your about page, and also elsewhere.

So for this reason, at Barn2, we’ve been doing a lot of work on that. They call it EEAT, and I’ve forgotten what that stands for, but it’s to do with the trust factors on your website. So we are redesigning our about page to add a lot more of that.

Things like Trustpilot reviews, and testimonials from customers, and also links to media coverage that we’ve had, so that Google and real people can see that the people running the company are active in the wider media. And even things like this podcast here, for example, might go on our about page, so that people can see our work within the community. And that will impress both search engines and real users.

[00:41:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting, because if I’m buying clothes, or paperclips, or dog food, or whatever it might be, I couldn’t care less who makes it. Honestly, the bottom line is, can it get to me tomorrow, and how much does it cost? But I really do care about who’s building the thing in WordPress, and I would imagine that’s quite important, so there we go.

I think we’ve probably used up enough of your time, we’re on the 45 minute mark. Just before we go, where can we find you? Drop a URL, a Twitter handle, whatever works for you.

[00:41:55] Katie Keith: So you can find all the previous episodes of the podcast and subscribe for the future at wpproducttalk.com. To find out more about me individually, you can find me on Twitter at Katie Keith Barn2, or my company website is barn2.com.

[00:42:12] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, wppropducttalk.com is a great spot, and we are investing in that website a lot, which is a lot of fun actually. And I’m on Twitter at Learn with Matt C, and I also blog semi-regularly at mattcromwell.com. And of course, I want everybody to check out all the awesome things we’re doing at stellarwp.com.

[00:42:31] Nathan Wrigley: Nicely done. Thank you very much. I’ll put all of the links in the show notes, so if you head over to wptavern.com/podcast, search for the episode with Katie and Matt’s name in it, and you’ll be able to find everything there. So Katie Keith, Matt Cromwell, thank you so much for chatting to me today. That was fun.

[00:42:45] Matt Cromwell: Thanks.

On the podcast today we have Katie Keith & Matt Cromwell.

Katie is the founder and CEO at Barn2 Plugins, and Matt is co-founder of GiveWP and Senior Director of Customer Experience at StellarWP. They have been running the WP Product Talk podcast together since early 2023, where they interview WordPress product owners to get the inside scoop on running a successful business in the WordPress ecosystem, and they’ve collating much of what they’ve learned on the show to create the ultimate blueprint on how to build a successful WordPress product, which they revealed during their WordCamp Europe presentation.

We talk about the world of WordPress product development and marketing. This touches upon topics such as enhancing the WordPress admin interface with additional features that feel like a natural extension, and finding success through organic content and a consistent, user-focused, YouTube strategy.

We also explore important marketing strategies within the WordPress community, emphasising the value of identifying gaps in the market and leveraging event attendance for growth. Katie gives her thoughts on the power of explainer videos focused on solving user problems, and how Google and YouTube work hand-in-hand to surface relevant content.

Matt discusses the challenges of pricing products correctly, setting expectations, and offering strategic discounts without devaluing their worth, focussing on the importance of listening to customer feedback to prioritise future product development. They both provide practical advice on creating a user-friendly product that feels like a part of WordPress.

Towards the end of our talk, Katie and Matt get into the value of transparency and the human touch in business, the significance of an up to date “About Us” page, and their approach to face-to-face customer interactions.

If you’re a WordPress product developer or just interested in the intricate world of WordPress business, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Slides from the WCEU presentation discusses in the episode

Katie and Matt’s presentation WordPress.tv

WP Product Talk podcast

GiveWP

Barn2

StellarWP

Kadence

Groundhogg

Fluent CRM

Omnisend

InstaWP

The Events Calendar

Canny

featureOS

Matt’s Shiny New Plugins blog

PersonalizeWP

UiChemy

Katie’s X

Matt’s X

Matt’s website